The Compleat Wrks of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) (1999)

Nick Koesters, Allen Branstein & self
(Beck Center for the Arts, 1999)

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) was either:

1. Written by people who love Shakespeare for people who hate Shakespeare.
2. Written by people who hate Shakespeare for people who love Shakespeare.
3. Written by comedians for an audience of absolutely no one.

The bane of critics everywhere and to the delight of audiences everywhere, this show has been produced constantly since first produced by the Reduced Shakespeare Company at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1987. The wife and I saw the original in 1997, near the end of its nine year run at the Criterion Theatre in London’s West End.

Classify this one as Shakespeare (not) On Stage, as not only does Shakespeare not appear, but the entire play ostensibly celebrates Shakespeare while simultaneously reinforcing those elements that everyone hates about Shakespeare.

It is also horribly dated, including gags that are casually sexist and outright racist, that is, unless you think the idea of three white guys deciding to interpret Othello as a rap song as “edgy.”

This month, I will appear for only the third time onstage at Beck Center, and each time in the Studio Theatre. Eric Schmiedl’s adaptation of King Lear opens May 31. Seven years ago, I played Chris in Eric Coble’s The Velocity of Autumn.

Twenty years ago, with Nick Koesters and Allen Branstein, we performed The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).

I was shocked when director Roger Truesdell asked me to consider the role, especially playing against two accomplished comedic actors. “But Roger,” I said. “I’m not funny.”

“Yes, you are,” Roger said. “You’re just afraid people might think you are.”

The one saving grace of Complete Works is the note on the front page which reads:

“... it’s also important to keep the show fresh and timely by updating the many topical references as events warrant.”

To put it another way, you are free to change the script to make it funny. As a result we felt entirely justified in not only changing the late-80s pop culture references to late-90s pop culture references, but also anything else that wasn’t funny.

What we couldn’t do was write a different play, so we still labored with the Titus Andronicus cooking show, including my lame impersonation of the then-87-year-old Julia Child (huh-larious) and the aforementioned “Othello Rap.” At least we could pretend to be appalled, like you do, and to change truly offensive verses like:

Now Othello loved Desi like Adonis Loved VENUS
And Desi loved Othello cuz he had a big … SWORD

Into:

AL: Desdemona, she was faithful, she was chastity tight
DAVID: She was the daughter of a duke
NICK: Yeah, she was totally white

My voice was more Ad Rock than Ice Cube.

We also had great fun tweaking other local companies. Our changes are in red.

AL: One popular trend is to take Shakespeare’s plays and transpose them into modern settings. We have seen evidence of this with Shakespeare’s plays set in such bizarre locations as the lunar landscape, Nazi concentration camps and even Akron.
DAVID: Akron?
NICK: Who does Shakespeare in Akron?

Later, I had a discursion regarding ‘The Apocrypha’ or those works whose authorship was once in dispute, referred to as “‘The Lesser Plays,’ or simply, ‘The Bad Plays.’ And yet, not all of The Apocrypha are completely without merit … except Edward III.”

Cleveland Shakespeare Festival had produced the only-recently canonized Edward III that past summer. One night a contingent from the company were in the audience and they booed my little joke.

“Oh,” I ad-libbed,” you’ve seen it.”

I went on to to describe what a fascinating play Troilus and Cressida is, but then bore the shit out of absolutely everyone in telling the story, which is coincidentally what I also did for Cleve Shakes audiences in 2018.

We changed scripted references about Rush Limbaugh, Newt Gingrich and Boris Yeltsin to Donald Trump, Rudolph Giuliani and Vladimir Putin, which are more relevant now than they were twenty years ago.

The inclusion of Putin was odd, though, because the run of the show ran over into the year 2000, and Vladimir Putin was only just inaugurated on January 1st of that year -- we changed the reference from Boris Yeltsin after the announcement.

No one knew anything about him, except the name, so I suggested we change Nick’s recitation on "Chernobyl Kinsman" (Two Noble Kinsman, get it?) to include this exchange:

NICK: Does it have Vladimir Putin in it?
DAVID: It doesn’t have anybody pootin’ in it, Nick.

He's a monster. We didn't know.

We threw in Ally McBeal jokes, Jar-Jar Binks jokes, references to The Blair Witch Project, and my personal favorite, when Nick’s Macduff emerged with "the usurper's cursed head,” he was, in fact, holding a replica of his own head, which was the same prop used when he played the lead in Macbeth at Beck Center the previous season.

It gets better. As prescribed in the stage directions, “(drop kicks the head into the audience)” -- but then Nick hollered, "GOOOOOAAAL!!!!" and ran in a tight circle, before sliding on his knees and ripping off his shirt to reveal a Brandi Chastain inspired black sports bra (Google Women’s World Cup 1999.)

The script as written closes with a familiar theater cliché:

"If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends. If you didn't, tell your enemies."

By the second weekend we were sold-out in spite of receiving some scathing reviews from those aforementioned critics who simply hate the idea of this admittedly dumb little play.

AL: If you enjoyed the show, tell your friends.
DAVID: If you didn't ... you must write for the Free Times, man.

Exit, pursued by a laugh.

Beck Center for the Arts presents "King Lear" directed by Eric Schmiedl, May 31 - June 30, 2019

The Alchemist (2001)

I blame myself.

When the decision was made to produce Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, I was thinking that I would direct it. My wife's grandfather was an English professor at O.U. and one of his pets joys was the works of Jonson. After a shaky start I was growing to appreciate the old man, and his sense of humor (grandfather Calvin G., not Ben Jonson) and he was trying to make inroads to my affection by engaging me in conversation about classic works of drama. He had given me an one hundred year-old copy of this particular play and in reading it, I found the play utterly hilarious.

Me. I did. I had an idea of how to create a modern-dress version and that it would work. However, events came together in such a way that my wife and I were to expect our first child within a month of the opening. I was pretending to be the artistic director of a theater company, so I did what I thought anyone would do, I handed to project off to someone else.

When our child was stillborn, I lost all interest in everything, including and especially this project. I think I attended auditions, but maybe not, I have no memory of that. I attended production meetings, I approved of the design, loved the cast (it had a great cast) though I was not pleased with the length. It was going to be three acts, but so was Hamlet, two years earlier, you can do three acts if they are swift and exciting and compel people to see how it all turns out.

Attending the first dress rehearsal, I gave some basic notes to the director. There wasn't much I could do at that point. There was a lot of schtick which substituted for wit -- a bit about choosing a name for an apothecary's shop, which is funny out loud, became this elaborate gag that involved making rebuses which took away from the humor. However, the bit where they constructed a bong out of scientific tools was outright hilarious.


My one significant note involved volume. Everyone was yelling every single line. Every line had an exclamation point. I told the director to bring it down, it's unbearable. That was it, my signal contribution to Bad Epitaph's production of The Alchemist.

Thes note, however, was never shared with any single member of the company. Quite the opposite, in fact. On opening night the director gave the company this stunning, astonishing, jaw-dropping directive:

"Go twice as big as you have ever gone in your life."

The main character of Subtle was played by Nick Koesters. Our director told Nick Koesters to go twice as big as he had ever gone in his life. But it wasn't just Nick, Allen Branstein was given this note, too. "Twice as big."

As my man Bob Golthwait used to say, "Who gave the gun to the baby?"

Now, I am not going to suggest that opening night of Bad Epitaph Theater Company's production of The Alchemist was a howling, over-the-top crackfest. Heavens, no. Instead I will quote the critics:

"A disappointing torment of incoherent yelling." - James Damico

"It had audiences dropping like flies." - Keith Joseph

"I left after two hours." - Roy Berko

However, there was this generous observation from Linda Eisenstein in the Plain Dealer:

"Throughout the evening you can watch the alchemy of the comedy come and go as the revved up players slam about, chewing scenery, then suddenly snap into focus with an exquisitely choreographed bit of business."

I know she's referring to the bong.

If I were to isolate one major error in this production, it would be its length. The verse plays I have directed have succeeded or failed depending upon how much dedication I made to cutting the script, making sensible internal cuts to the verse line, and lots of them. The cast included some of my favorite people I have ever gotten to work with, the design was kooky and inspired, and many of the gags were truly hysterical. But in the desperate attempt to finish the piece in something close to three hours, they were going terribly fast, which contributed to be being terribly loud, and pushing very, very hard. Regardless of whatever else had been going on in my life prior to March 20, I should have cut the script myself.

To promote the show, we got airtime on the WKYC Channel 3 morning show. Most of these TV promotions feature the actors in the background, with the host and producer of whatever program is being featured chatting in the foreground, you barely hear the actors at all. We decided, therefore, to present some of the most visual scenes.

I blame myself.

UPDATE: Sending that video around the Facebook, several company members had the opportunity to comment upon how much worse the stage combat looks with a camera right in Nick's face.

Director Larry Nehring:

"If you show the faces in slapstick combat it looks serious. I remember wanting to grab the cameraman and pull him back to the audience POV. It's hard to answer a stupid question when your soul is yelling, 'stop saying its not funny when you aren't seeing it right!'"

Yes, it looks pretty ugly close-up. However, we did tell them that this scene was going to feature "stage combat" -- the host leads off the segment warning that a fight is about the happen. Then he suddenly gets the vapors and demands to know just what the hell is going on. That was awkward.

So, did it look more funny from the "audience point-of-view"? So glad you asked. Harris was in town for our son's memorial service, and he was on hand to record all of the recording. We dredge up odd bits of video, you decide: