Varsity Review, October 23, 1997
Shakespeare for short attention spans
By: Stephen Thompson
"We don't have to do it justice, we just have to do it!"
That's the motto for the play The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), where three actors try to perform 37 plays, 156 sonnets and a couple poems in a mere 97 minutes. You're probably wondering right now, "How do they do it?" Well, just skip the boring parts and concentrate on the ranting, raving, sex and death, which, in Shakespeare's case, reduces each play to about 30 seconds.
This production is retribution for all those long and tedious hours you've spent in the past learning about those Shakespearean plays, full of archaic language and strange metaphors that made you wonder why God is forsaking you and forcing you to learn this crap. The Compleat Works would probably make your old high school teacher cry, though probably from laughter.
Absolutely hilarious from the moment Jonathan Goad steps on-stage to introduce the challenge at hand, The Compleat Works is a high-energy, non-stop play full of wit, humour, sarcasm and a few well-timed shots at the Bard himself. The play draws jokes not only from Shakespearean plays (as is expected), but surprisingly from the likes of The Simpsons, Beavis and Butthead, Psycho, Sling Blade and even Megacity politics.
The three actors, Goad, David Young and Frank Zotter each have distinct roles in the play, despite the fact that they are probably performing close to 20 characters each. At the onset, Young plays the narrator in Romeo and Juliet (which clocks in at around 10 minutes), Goad plays the love stricken Romeo and Zotter does an incredible job of transforming himself into Juliet. This trend continues throughout the play, with Goad primarily tackling the lead roles, Young taking on the supporting roles and Zotter playing the women "with bad wigs who throw-up in every play." What you end up with is three guys running around wearing tights, knee pads, Chuck Taylor hightops, Victorian shirts, wigs and multicoloured jock straps.
By now, you've gotten out your calculator and figured out that they have an average of about 3 minutes to perform each play and are wondering how they had time to perform Romeo and Juliet, hysterical balcony scene included, in 10 minutes. Well, they've combined a few plays. According to the actors, all of Shakespeare's 16 comedies are really just repeats of his first comedy. So, they combined them all into Cymbeline Taming Pericles the Merchant in the Tempest of Love As Much As You Like It For Nothing, which you can also refer to by its abridged title: The Love Boat Goes to Verona.
The same theory applies for their treatment all but one of the historical plays, which are performed as a football game wherein the penalty flags are thrown for fictional characters on the field. The exception is Titus Andronicus, which is transformed into a Julia Child cooking show and features lines like: "Now, when you've had a long day-your left hand chopped off, your sons murdered, your daughter raped, her tongue cut out, and both her hands chopped off-well, the last thing you want to do is cook."
This leaves us with the dramatic plays. Othello is cooked down to a rap called "The Menace of Venice" and Macbeth is performed with accents straight from those "But it's not oatmeal," commercials. The remaining 40 minutes of The Compleat Works is comprised of four interpretations of Hamlet.
The Hamlet performances are the climax of the play, where, in one hysterical version, the cast drags a female member from the audience on-stage to play Ophelia and manage to involve the entire audience by making them represent Ophelia's ego, superego and id. This part left me catching my breath and wiping my eyes from all the laughing I had done. Three other versions of Hamlet are performed, one of which consists of the most original lead into an intermission I have ever seen. Another version lasts an eye-blinking three seconds, while the other is performed entirely backwards.
Young describes The Compleat Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) as an "irreverent reverence for the text. It will encourage people to go out and read these plays, but it also takes a fresh look. Shakespeare was writing entertainment as well as great philosophy, and we're taking that point of view as well."
A light-hearted look at the Bard, The Compleat Works is a wonderful play to go see, if only to see Zotter's rendition of Ophelia as a Swede who can scream uninterrupted for two minutes while running back and forth across the stage.