July 2007
Satellite Theater
By Shamrock McShane

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged comes from the same fellas who wrote The Complete History of America Abridged. The thing is you can make fun of American history, but you can't make fun of Shakespeare. You can try, but you won't win.

It's like going out on the court and trying to make fun of the way Jordan played basketball.

The script, first performed in Aguora, California and then at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, has been around for twenty years. The current production includes a few updated topical references, but it's the same three–player tag team event.

The performance I saw was by the inventive cast of Bryant Smith, Matthew Lindsay, and Robert M Smith.

As a great conductor once said, "If you have Mozart to listen to, why would you need God?"

This may seem a little like playing Mozart with a kazoo. But it's much more than that. It's closer to the con Victor Borgia used to play in truly satirizing classical composers. The players are first rate, well–spoken, malleable, committed, and they have a good sense of comic timing.

The Black Box is a great space, evoking perhaps a sense of what the Blackfriars Theatre felt like. Blackfriars was the indoor space that Shakespeare and his players coveted and finally purchased. They wanted to play indoors, they wanted to play at night, they wanted control, power. They wanted to create.

How marvelously suited to Shakespeare, the lights towering thirty feet over head, a playing space stretching in all directions, modular seating, wraparound balcony. It can be fitted to another world.

The play doesn't really make fun of Shakespeare anyway. That's a mug's game. The play makes fun of people who take Shakespeare either too seriously or the wrong way.

Looking for the winners of the Shakespeare trivia contest? Someone who knows All's Well that Ends Well or King John? There is no lack of Shakespeare scholars on campus.

There will be lines of Shakespeare, and there will be lines of idiotic prattle.

When Shakespeare's lines finally arrive in full flood, you cannot help wondering, "Why not do Shakespeare?" And then, before you have even begun to formulate an answer: "Why ever do this play?"

It would be deucedly hard to do any of Shakespeare's plays with three players, but the Reduced Shakespeare Company was on to the right idea when they thought of doing just snippets of Shakespeare; it's a shame they had to muck it up with all the crap they put between.

All of this works with the absurdities of American history. American history is absurd. But Shakespeare is not absurd. Shakespeare is sublime.

Still if Shakespeare has in fact become the secular bible, an advanced mythology, then this can viewed as a kind of satyr play.

It was Hemingway who said after skewering Sherwood Anderson that you can't parody somebody unless you can write better than he can.

The costumes (D.K. Shaffer) and lights and sound (Mike McShane) join the cast as performers, albeit not characters — unlike a Shakespeare play, here there really are no characters, only lines. Joined to the inherent plotlessness of the enterprise, it plays best as a series of sketches.

The best moments the actors have are when they do not speak. For example, when Bryant Smith enters as a hyperbolically ancient Polonius at a halting gait. Next best is when they speak Shakespeare's lines.

When Matthew Lindsay deftly showcases "What a piece of work is man" from Hamlet, there is a collective sigh, as in "we knew that would work." Dramatic poetry, certainly Shakespeare's dramatic poetry, stands on its own. There's no need to do anything with it.

In the end, it has been the complete work of William Shakespeare, quite a lot of toil and trouble, and yet Shakespeare has completely eluded its grasp. We are left with no guy — no playwright, no poet, no life of the mind, no sense of stagecraft, except that given us by Director Kevin Marshall, adroitly pacing and staging the two hours traffic of the stage.

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield runs through August 12 at the Block Box Theatre in the McGuire Pavilion on the University of Florida campus.