Compleat vacuum

Shakespeare’s spinning in his grave

By Robert von Stein Redick

The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) runs through April 1 at the Portland Stage Company.
Call (207) 842-2924.

SHAKESPEARE AS IRON CHEF: Joseff Hanson, John Beale, and Ron Botting exert plenty of energy in The Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr (Abridged), at Portland Stage Company.

Now here’s a mess you don’t confront every day: a newspaper of peerless integrity (ours, of course) sponsoring a production by an accomplished theater company (Portland Stage) of a play that affects the paper’s critic rather like two hours of a dominatrix’s nails down a chalkboard. The play is such a silly, happy thing that even the presence of a Phoenix T-shirt on one of the actors is all part of the fun. So, of course, is this review. Nothing that follows should be considered serious, or to pertain to real theater, or to have any sober purpose at all. Agreed?

The play calls itself The Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr (Abridged), although “abridged” is the only accurate word, and it has met with consistent success from its northern California birthplace to New York and even England. It has been lauded as a wacky, high-spirited, thoroughly enjoyable romp through the Shakespeare canon. Objectively speaking, it is. Even the last adjective can be externally verified, as the audience fairly wept with laughter.

Popularity, of course, is not (objectively) a good thing. Silocone breast implants were popular; Amos and Andy was popular; Nixon won in a landslide. Brilliance and boorishness come out roughly equal in the court of public opinion, and there’s little debate about which one is an easier sell.

Which returns me to my subject matter. Picture, if you can, a talent show by three fraternity brothers at some college renowned for its beer intake. They do want to impress you, these guys. They’ve raided the drama department for props (bits of PSC’s Road to Mecca and Christmas Carol pop up like a kind of visual sampling) and heaped them behind a curtain. They’ve read the Classic Comics version of every major play, added their favorite pop-culture references and gross-out gags, and whipped this all into a parti-colored stew, the prize ingredient of which is their own cute clownishness.

At times they can be very cute indeed, as when Ophelia’s mad scene is re-imagined to Barry Manilow’s disco anthem “Copacabana,” or the bloody succession of kings in the history plays is depicted as a football game. Joseff Hanson, who plays Ophelia, Juliette, and most other female roles, has a definite flair for cross-dressing; his Cleopatra evokes those Wegman portraits of dolled-up Weimereiners. Hanson and buddies Ron Botting and John Beale deserve ringing hurrahs for their efforts. It’s hard to imagine a more physically exhausting play, as the fratboys race across the littered stage, now plunging into the audience (usually to vomit), now dueling with swords, now cavorting with dolls, rubber chickens, severed heads. It’s a little like watching three sailors trying to bail out a leaky ship with anything but a bucket.

It’s really no one’s fault: there’s simply no bucket to be found in this script. One can only say it so gently: Compleat Works is brainless. No deep — forget deep — no middling familiarity with the bard himself informs these riffs. Take, for example the dismissal of the whole body of Shakespeare’s comedies as dull copies of themselves: hard to square with the fact that playgoers worldwide (to say nothing of Hollywood) still find laughs, wonder, and magic in them four centuries after their debuts.

Not that I quibble with the actors’s claim that there’s more fun to be poked at the tragedies. Certainly there is: Hamlet’s groans and Romeo’s love-drenched eloquence are ripe for satire. And as Life of Brian established once and for all time, nothing is above ridicule. Now there’s a funny script: every bit as madcap as Compleat Works, but equipped with teeth also, which it sinks deep into our hang-ups about God and the holy land. It knows whereof it jeers.

But where Brian has teeth, Complete Wrks has only rubber chickens. The closest thing to true satire it attempts is aimed at the Shakespeare remakes themselves — those modern transpositions that make Hamlet a corporate rather than a royal princeling, or stages Julius Caesar in the slums of Chicago. Hence Titus Andronicus becomes a TV culinary show, in which the bloody murders are carried out by a macho cook. Yet one of the best (and almost, dare I say it, controversial) gags, the rap version of Othello, is completely omitted from this production.

However, even the most careful adherence to the script by Long, Singer, and Winfield would not contribute one jot to our understanding of the greatest playwright in the history of the language. Compleat Works isn’t about knowing Shakespeare; it’s about confirming the sleepy, comfortable idea that there’s no reason to know him, as one hoots at fart jokes and men in wigs.

Oh cursed spite, that ever I was born to set it right!

Just kidding, of course.

Robert von Stein Redick can be reached at robvsredick@earthlink.net.