Bard to the bone

NewGate squishes Shakespeare

by Bill Rodriguez

THE COMPLEAT WRKS OF WLLM SHKSPR (ABRIDGED). By the Reduced Shakespeare Company. Directed by Joe Mecca. With Brien Lang, F. William Oakes, Michael Heckler. At NewGate Theatre through May 21.

The poor old Bard. The genius part is easy to see, especially in retrospect. But the other stuff has always been ripe for ribbing. Enough blood in the practice plays to make Sam Peckinpah queasy. Plagiarizing from the Holinshed Chronicles as baldly as a clueless schoolboy. And Willy, Willy, Willy -- those clowns, they're about as funny as Queen Betty on a bad hair day. What were you thinking?

So The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) is a natural. Created by the Reduced Shakespeare Company in the 1980s at California Renaissance fairs, the spoof is getting a no-groans-barred rendition at NewGate Theatre, directed by Joe Mecca.

The idea is to sample all 37 of the plays, with the sonnets thrown in for color -- sort of like a sophomore survey course that admits such attempts are ridiculous. And it's all done by three guys who don't mind looking silly as they blur about in sneakers. It's also constantly updated, with references to Regis Philbin and making sure we don't confuse courtly love with Courtney Love.

Brien Lang, taking a break from his grown-up role as artistic director of NewGate, plays the MC of the three-person carnival, and he does so with glib charm throughout. Michael Heckler is the dim naïf, playing all the female parts and panicking when the thespian challenges get too hard. And F. William Oakes is the pompous presence without whom no Shakespeare production would feel complete, waxing eloquent, or at least verbose, at the drop of a prithee.

None of this is trenchant commentary on the playwright's writerly foibles or even rises to the antic ferocity of Monty Python's similar lampoon. But it is all good, bawdy, bardly, and sometimes bloody fun. The gory Titus Andronicus is done as a cooking show, with the head of a "nice, fresh rapist" done to a turn and served to his mother. (Hey, blame Will.) With the observation that all of the Bard's comedies derive from three or four jokes/plot-devices, all 16 are reduced to one involving the mistaken identities of two pair of opposite sex sextuplets.

The history plays are equally boring and derivative? OK, condense them into one played with the excitement of a football game, a crown being passed from one regal aspirant to the next. ("And the quarterback hands off to the hunchback.") In one inspired bit, Othello is done by the trio as a rap song in which, referring to Desdemona, the moor is asked, "She was good, she was clean, she was virginal, too/So why'd you have to go and make her face turn blue?"

The entire second act is given over to Hamlet, the one play they'd forgotten to mention. (Beforehand, while Oakes is retrieving Heckler from an escape attempt to T.F. Green at intermission, Lang condenses the 100-plus sonnets into a baritone love song crooned in the style of Barry White.) Oakes has his best stretch here, gliding about with a cigar like Groucho Marx in a red nose, as Hamlet feigns if not madness at least silliness. By this act, Heckler has loosened up and gives us an Ophelia who isn't forced to be funny and therefore is very much so.

The audience also gets called into the act. Not only is a woman lugged up to be a stand-in for Ophelia, but the rest of us are divided into three parts, for a kind of psychological chorus, shouting instructions to Ophelia from her id, ego, and superego. By the time the bodies are strewn at the final curtain, the trio of actors has been pumped up enough to run through the whole play again, faster. And then do it again in a minute. And then do it backwards.

As you can see, pains are taken to try to cure you of Shakespeare as much as condense him. My personal theory is that The Compleat Wrks was originally commissioned by the estate of Christopher Marlowe. In any case, this NewGate mini-troupe takes what could have been just a lame series of frat pledge skits and turns them into a perfectly ridiculous series of frat pledge skits. The Bard might have started out glowering at these upstarts, but I can't imagine him not letting at least a chortle slip out now and then.