Masque defaces Shakespeare in a good way

By Drew Stephan
Collegian Staff
April 26, 2006

The guy sitting on my left enjoyed himself during The Masque’s production of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) on Saturday night. Well, I think he did. Actually, there was no way for me to tell, since he only laughed once. Maybe he was laughing on the inside, or he just likes smiling instead of laughing, and I couldn’t see him in the dark theater, or maybe he only came because he happened to be in the neighborhood.

The cast of Shakespeare Abridged treated its source material with utmost
reverence. Courtesy of Elisa Cannizzaro.

To be fair, he was a middle-aged guy with an umbrella that had a novelty oversized golf ball attached to the handle. So maybe Shakespeare wasn’t quite his speed. Perhaps we should look to another, more reliable, younger source.

On my right, my girlfriend simply couldn’t put the playbill down for the whole first act. That’s something to write home about it, isn’t it? The cast did a nice job writing its bios in the third person, and that’s a pretty tough thing to do, I reckon. So kudos to that, Masque.

But I kid, I kid. In all seriousness, The Masque did a terrific job with a very funny, very tough play. Written for performance by the oh-so-postmodern Reduced Shakespeare Company, the play is an absurd overview of the works of The Bard. Not only is the play very funny, but it also incorporates large chunks of actual Shakespearian dialogue – never an easy task to accomplish – and the cast pulled everything off with equal aplomb.

They say that comedy is the hardest genre to perform, but monologues from Hamlet ain’t far behind, especially when your buddies are telling you to shorten the play on stage left and Ophelia is busy throwing up silly string stage right.

The play is a marvelous concept: that all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays can be boiled down into a single hour-and-a-half theater “experience.” Starting with Romeo and Juliet and plowing through all the way to Hamlet, the play attempts to capture the essence of some of the greatest works in the English language in one manic burst.

While treating the significant tragedies at some length, the play moves beyond simple comedy and actually addresses a lot of critiques of Shakespeare’s works in an entertaining way, and this production does an excellent job accomplishing this harrowing task.

The idea is that many of the works were so derivative that they can be presented as single pieces: all the comedies used the same devices and can be lumped together into a single quickly narrated sequence, all the histories as a football game where the ball (the crown of England) is constantly fumbled and transferred.

The whole cast played themselves playing Shakespeare characters, and each played several roles. Seniors Anthony Chwastyk and Dino Dedic gave great performances in their last production. Chwastyk finally got to play the roles he was born to play as Ophelia and Juliet, while Dedic made a convincing Hamlet-with-a-speech-impediment and open-shirted Romeo.

Junior Amy Nickerson had a fun time getting stabbed behind a curtain and was terrific as the straight man throughout. Her deadpans and panicked looks provided an excellent foil to the rest of the general frivolity permeating the play. Freshman Pam Woodward shined through as a wholesome, fresh-faced talent.

Sophomore Mark Costello was terrific, delivering one of Hamlet’s more famous monologues (the “What a piece of work is man” one) on the pretense of them cutting it, and his delivery and comedic timing were nearly flawless.

For the college-aged audience and (supposedly) semi-educated students matriculating our fair university, Shakespeare was a fine choice for the final play of the year. The cast and crew did an excellent job, and much credit is due for delivering a fine performance all around on a very tough piece.

stephaa1@lasalle.edu