Smashing in Spandex: Playing it Again at the Loeb Experimental

The premise behind The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged) is simple and stunning. A reduced cast, with reduced props, reduces the entire body of Shakespeare's work into a svelte two-hour fling whose high purpose is to reintroduce to Shakespearean Production the lost quality of side-splitting humor.

Though one would expect to find Monty Python at the bottom of such a concept, the writers of this ambitious parody were three Californians who had the idea while putting up skits at their local Renaissance Faire. They decided the idea was so brilliant that they wrote down the bare bones of the performance and took it on the road, producing it throughout the known world before retiring and turning the script over to those who need it most; namely, pre-midterm college students with a pent-up urge for nose-thumbing.

Though the script has been in existence for over fifteen years and has traveled several continents, it continues to have about it an air of freshly improvised parody. As with improv, the humor has an underdeveloped quality--potential jokes are left unexploited while the existent ones lack the sharpness of revision. Like the movie Wag the Dog, the premise of Compleat Works is loaded with humorous potential that remains largely unmined. Lines like "a nose by any other name would still smell" are funny but pale when compared to the sardonic text-twisting of Tom Stoppard's comparable Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead.

If the script itself falls short of supreme comic genius, the premise is redeemed in last weekend's production at the Loeb Ex. Actors Erik Amblad '99, Adam "Waka" Green '99 and Sabrina Howells (B.U.) recite the play's more lackluster puns with sarcasm, making a parody of the parody.

Abridged though it is, significant chunks of the play are lifted directly from the Bard himself, and it is in these lines of straight Shakespeare that the cast's comic engineering is most visible. Shakespeare is reinvented Amelia Bedelia-style with a suggestiveness that invites one to reconsider the comic potential inherent in even the most serious Shakespearean dialogues. Here all those idiosyncracies of Elizabethan English that we profess to understand in section are given a thorough airing. What does the guard mean with his "Stand and unfold yourself?" When did thumb-biting stop being synonymous with giving someone the birdie? Just as Hamlet uses the Death of Gonzago as a way to find his accusatory voice, this play allows Harvard students to flesh out those suspicions they'd always been too pretentious to discuss in the open. Who hasn't thought that the comedies would have been better off as a feature presentation rather than 15 episodes with indistinguishably silly plots? Are we really supposed to take Romeo and Juliet seriously?

Though the lack of plot continuity adds comic flair to the most serious interchanges, the text of The Compleat Wrks really isn't much different than what you'd find on 10 randomly selected pages of the Riverside Edition. With men playing women, pathetic melodrama, the overuse of gaudy props (i.e. silly string which makes several repeat appearances as a vomit substitute) one begins to wonder if this isn't Shakespeare as it was meant to be. A frequent object of ridicule throughout the show are Shakespeare companies that fret about making Shakespeare accessible to modern audiences. The show suggests that it is not Shakespeare, but the standard notions of how Shakespeare should be produced that are inaccessible. Men dressed as men, women as women, and the whole lot of them speaking lines too naturalistically for the humor to be understood--this is the vision of the Bard challenged by The Compleat Wrks.

Green and Howells are well picked challengers whose different comic sensibilities play well off one another in a multiplicity of dramatic situations. Amblad's strength is in the physical dimension of his caricature while Green's is more verbal and prop-oriented. Howells plays a great straight man whose misguided traditionalism is artfully thwarted by the other characters' antics. Though all of the parts they play are similarly ridiculous, the ability of the three actors to cover in one form or another the pantheon of Shakespearean roles without becoming excessively confused is no small feat. Amblad goes from flight attendant, to especially silly Romeo, to a Martha Stewart-esque "Titus Androgynous" running a cooking show with a revenge theme, where the main ingredient is the rapist. His approach to the reductionist difficulties of "head pie" has all the confidence and self-possession one would expect of the woman herself. Opposite him in this scene is Green, with a Muppet-like rendition of Lavinia, the tongueless assistant. The idea for the scenario is mediocre at best, but the caricatures by Amblad and Green in conjunction with the cheery daytime TV soundtrack definitely took the humor up a notch.

If Amblad's specialty is looking smashingly absurd in spandex, Green does beautifully in the muumuu/wig roles. His falsetto is worthy of John Klees in all its incarnations--whether doing tongues (as Lavinia), being clueless (Juliet) or portraying Gen X Ophelia drowning herself in a cup of water. When not occupied with his feminine side, Green breaks down the traditional audience/performer boundaries by involving everyone in a "workshoping Ophelia" wherein the crowd chants the various mantras of her id, ego and superego in preparation for her dramatic demise. If there is a prop to be used, Green's got it and is doing his damnedest to involve the audience members as well.

Howells' best is definitely saved for last. In order to play Hamlet backwards, forwards, and backwards and forwards again even faster, she takes more minor roles in the first act, saving up for the emotional drain of playing the Prince. When the time comes, she is ready. Her Hamlet is worthy of the real RSC, and is thus the perfect target for the ravages of the ridiculous minor characters. Shakespeare frequently exploited the humor in those who take themselves too seriously, and Howells had the difficult role of doing just this throughout the play.

With her baseline, and the other's baseness, this was a parody to lift any student's heart, delightful both in its irreverence to the canon and to the disregard it shows for the seriousness with which that canon is treated around these parts. In their overhaul of the Bard, the RSC may have come closer to the original Shakespearean experience than we usually get. On the outside chance that The Bard is turning in his grave, though, no one seems to feel too badly since he never seemed the type to lie flat and complacent in the first place. With any luck, he's rolling with laughter.