(2001) All of the Bard's plays are presented in 90 minutes by The Reduced Shakespeare Company, a three-man comedy troupe - Adam Long, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichener. While I majored in English in college, I am not married to the language since I have a bachelor's degree; literature remains my long-time mistress.

With a life nearly as obscure and controversial as that of Jesus, William Shakespeare wrote plays and poetry that are truly divine, which when placed beside the Bible make the holy book appear merely inspired. In the introduction we are informed that oxygen masks will drop down from the ceiling in the event of a loss of cabin pressure and that Shakespeare (1564-1616) has had an enormous influence on our consciousness and culture such that a copy of his plays should be "in every hotel room in the world." Silly Willy shakes pears from his pear tree: there are no lemons among these leaves. From note cards Adam Long recites a biography that confuses Shakespeare with Adolph Hitler, who committed suicide in Berlin with his mistress Ava Peron.

"All the world's a stage …" beginning in Verona with Romeo and Juliet, who tells him "a nose would smell" just the same, but when it comes to taking drugs, "Just say no," after which he says, "Oh no!" They die, but we go on to Titus Andronicus offered as a cooking program, featuring human-head pie. Bone appétite!

Next comes Othello in rap by three racially challenged white boys.

To lighten up after all the tragedies, all sixteen formulaic comedies (plots stolen from various sources) are compressed into a single comedy, "Four Weddings and a Transvestite," with three sets of twin sisters (some of whom are shrews) and another three sets of twin brothers shipwrecked on an island with a creature in a cave: "One of the shrews is elected Senator of New York."

But the comedies aren't as funny as the tragedies: Macbeth involves lots of slap-shtick; Julius Caesar has unforgettable lines such as "Lend me your rears"; Antony and Cleopatra, a geopolitical romantic thriller, displays ugly wigs and vomiting upon the audience; and from the apocrypha (aka bad plays) we have Two Noble Kinsmen (not Chernobyl Kinsmen) and the tale of two more tragic lovers, Troilus and Cressida.

Then there are all of the histories - King John, King Richard II and III, King Henry IV, V, VI, and VIII (What happened to VII? Future generations may ask the same of Bush 43) - which are dispensed with in a game of football (King Lear gets penalized for having "a fictional character on the field"). Coriolanus is banned for obscene language ("anus").

The final play, Hamlet, full of "ideas and stuff," almost gets left out because Adam doesn't want to perform in it. While Austin chases after Adam, Reed plays the William Tell Overture on his throat and an accordion tune on an accordion, and eats fire.

Finally the trio gets into the greatest drama in the English language - aka "Omelet, the Cheese Danish" - in which Polonius spouts, "Neither a lend nor a borrower be" (which Ben Franklin later claimed for Poor Richard's Almanac; Hamlet announces, "I am but mad north northeast" (which was later made into a film by Alfred Hitchcock); and an over-rated speech is skipped because the audience can't give Austin silence for seriousness. Hamlet's mother appears as a queen in drag, and Ophelia ("Get thee to a nunnery") is plucked from the audience who participate as her id ("Maybe, maybe not"), ego ("Bob" running back-and-forth across the stage), and superego (something about being a feminist and wanting babies). The conclusion is faster and then in reverse. DNE EHT.

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Copyright © 2008 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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