Abridged Shakespeare not short on laughs
by Alec ClaytonOriginally published in The News Tribune (Tacoma), January 9-15, 2004.
I would like to present a mental picture of what to expect at the Tacoma Little Theatre’s performance of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)."
Picture The Bard as interpreted by Monty Python, with a little help from an audience from "Rocky Horror Picture Show."
Created in the late 1980s by Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, TCWOWS(A) is a fast-paced, irreverent, and bawdy synopsis of 36 Shakespeare plays, complete with audience participation, and with all of The Bard’s sonnets thrown in for good measure.
During the London performance of the play, the company advertised as follows:
"Warning!: …(This show) is not recommended for people with heart ailments, bladder problems, inner-ear disorders and/or people inclined to motion sickness. The RSC cannot be held responsible for expectant mothers."
The same warning should have been posted in the lobby of the Tacoma Little Theatre. Literally. I have a heart condition, and at one point during the play I started experiencing chest pain and had to caution myself to quit laughing so hard.
Brett Carr directs the Tacoma production in his TLT directorial debut. The three-actor cast is made up of Roger Iverson, Jr., Brandon Ryan and Owen Severns, acting as themselves and as multiple Shakespearean characters.
Carr spent 10 years as a director, lighting designer and technical director with professional touring companies, and took a 20-year hiatus from the theatre before becoming TLT’s volunteer production manager, lighting designer, technical designer and set builder.
Iverson (Romeo and others) has performed in over 40 plays, musicals, and operas. His TLT shows include "Twelve Angry Men," "A Thousand Clowns," "Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat" and "Hayfever." Ryan (all of the women's roles and others) was last seen on the TLT stage as Arnold Epstein in "Biloxi Blues." Severns (Hamlet, and others) played Joseph Wykowski in "Biloxi Blues."
Before the play opens, Iverson welcomes the audience and presents an explanation of what is about to take place. He then segues into the play so smoothly that the audience is hard put to distinguish between play and announcements (although it becomes pretty clear what he is up to when he begins to abuse an actor planted in the audience). From there, the action escalates to a frantic pace filled with running around stage and out into the audience, with screaming, fighting, and lightning-quick transitions from character to character and from character to actors-as-themselves.
The play requires broad gestures and extreme physical action from actors, who prove to be up to the challenge. Especially Ryan, who shouts with a voice reminiscent of Bob Goldthwait and whose acrobatic leaps and falls mimic the jerky motions of a marionette on a string. In the role of Juliette, he leaps off stage, runs up the aisle, climbs a pipe against a wall with the quickness of Spider-Man, and then plasters himself against the wall in a fake swoon to begin the famous balcony scene.
Iverson’s characters are not as expansive in their physicality, but he puts a lot of energy into sword fights, even continuing to fight with dropped swords as if invisible hands are wielding them.
Severns plays semi-straight man to Ryan and Iverson in the early going but burst into comic antics when they roll all of the "kings" plays (King John and all of the Henrys) into one play that is presented as a football game. In the game, Severns runs in exaggerated slow motion and contorts his face with jaw-dropping expressions of agony that look almost as if his face is stretching beyond what is physically possible.
There were moments when dialogue was garbled and when comic shticks were drawn out too long, but such lapses simply provided a needed break from the incessant laughter.
© 2004 by Alec Clayton