The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Revised) (Again) (Adam Long, Daniel Singer, Jess Winfield)
Hey! This is an odd script to take a look at for a few reasons:
It’s fairly well-known, as far as contemporary works are concerned
I have a lot of experience with past versions of the show.
Unlike other plays I actually am directing and designing this show fairly soon, so this information and analysis isn’t just theoretical.
Of course The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is a frequently produced show for a reason: easy to sell tickets to, easy to get the audience onboard for, relatively small cast, although with deceptively high production needs (mostly props.)
For those who are unfamiliar, there’s a whole PBS filmed version of it to watch, it’s a franchise, and it’s a silly show born of Renfaire performances to do a fast, funny, physical version of the Shakespeare canon in two breezy acts.
Three actors hewing close to classic archetypes (pretentious academic, dumb fellow, common joe) band together to make Shakespeare relevant and fun! I’ve been watching this show and things from the company since I was in high school, so I was mostly looking at how things are on the page and the new revisions that 2022 brought.
Which were considerable, a number of bits have been updated, some material has been excised (notably the Othello rap,) and a lot of cheap pops have been put in to appeal to the sorts of folk we expect to populate an audience.
Overall the show moves just as fast and is (hopefully) just as funny as it ever was, but does require a lot of commitment from the actors to not pull punches with the cornier aspects of the show.
As a Designer
So the tricky thing here is I have to actually do this, and I have to do it in a particular place, with a particular budget, in a particular amount of time (not much, as it turns out.)
Luckily, the play has a low-budget schtick, unfortunately, low-budget takes a lot more to pull off than you may think.
After reading the script my original concept (of the actors literally putting everything up as they do the show) is unlikely to fly: there just isn’t the room. Because of the small cast I want to make sure to keep the stage small and accessible, so they can cross it more easily.
I’m toying with shadow puppets or projection being a big part of the show, but have to read it over again.
Suffice to say, even a small show takes an absurd amount of preparation.
As a Writer
Ever since I brazenly decided to keep trying to put on shows I find myself in a love/hate relationship with expectation. These guys started a whole show, with their own schtick, of reducing complicated literary concepts into comedies. I’m sure as writers they occasionally want to play with other ideas, but the market expects a particular thing from them.
More recently, the fellows behind Play That Goes Wrong have lodged themselves firmly in the same boat: they do shows that a variety of technical, literary, and acting failures. They do other things (Groan Ups being the one I’m most familiar with,) but they hardly get the same attention.
It’s not a thing I like, even as I can tell that it is very useful, and worse than that I can’t find the thing I’d make my own even if I wanted to.
Thinner Than Water (Melissa Ross)
I have a rule for myself: I don’t judge a playwright until I’ve read at least three of their works. It’s what let’s me confidently say that I think Adam Bock is a bad playwright, that Peter Sinn Nachtrieb is great, and that Sarah Ruhl (by and large) isn’t for me.
It also helps to avoid getting too excited by a play and crashing back down into Earth when the next thing you read by them isn’t nearly as affecting. That’s how I feel about Melissa Ross’ Thinner Than Water, a work that starts strangely, is built on an odd foundation, but does manage to find a great ending when all is said and done.
Thinner Than Water is about three half-siblings navigating their own bonds to each other. Looking back that’s what the play is about, but when I was in the middle of it I thought it was more about their shared father.
Picture from the NYTimes
This next statement is harsh, but it isn’t really meant in any particular bad way: this script does not use its characters efficiently. In most modern plays the characters are tightly pared down and frequently mix in interesting pairs. In this eight-person cast there are essentially three characters who only ever talk to one of the siblings, and there may as well be a fourth.
This led to an odd detachment as I read through the script: we took time to learn a little more about Gary, a little more about Renee, a little more about Cassie, but it didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, and that’s because it wasn’t: Ross isn’t here for the plot of taking care of their ailing father, she’s here to think about each of these three screw-ups individually.
Ultimately the play has a touching ending, one that isn’t neat, but is evocative. However, the play pales to Ross’ later work Nice Girl, and is a play I don’t think I’ll think about for too much longer.
Third Best Sport (Eleanor and Leo Bayer)
I have a weakness for older, ignored work, especially comedies. It’s a kind of historical document where we get to see the values, assumptions, and everyday life of a past that too quickly becomes homogenous in our minds.
So when I found a random 50’s farce I’d never heard of, I was plenty excited to dig into it, and I found a play newly resonant with issues from today.
As an Audience
Third Best Sport explores the personal toll of the business boom of the 50’s. Newlyweds Helen and Doug are spending their honeymoon at a convention for Doug’s line of business (metalworking.) It’s been two weeks and big-city, free-thinking Helen isn’t fitting in with the other company wives in the company town in sleepy Indiana.
Over the course of the play, which involves such common tropes as missed identity, slips of speech, and too much alcohol, Helen grapples with the idea that she is expected to be a part of the company, whether on payroll or no, and her husband is expected to be on the clock 24/7.
It’s a side of the booming white-picket-fence 50’s we rarely get to see. Even in my favorite play, Maple and Vine, which concerns cosplaying the 50’s, we see the flipside of the social politics of the time, but not the corporate politics. The other wives are all too eager to help their husbands with anything they need, and no one sees anything wrong with putting all of their time and energy into helping the company’s bottom line.
Of course this play challenges that through a philosophy professor who isn’t supposed to be at the conference and Helen herself, and by the end of the play Helen is back in the good graces of Doug, and he has secured the big deal that he was after the whole time, but crucially, Helen does not entirely repair her image with the wives of the town, and Doug has intentionally and irreparably severed any social pleasantness with his boss (although his job itself is secure.)
It’s an interesting choice in what is otherwise a by-the-numbers farce to see the social cost of going against the grain, even if it’s the right thing to do.
As a Producer
Interesting concepts aside, does the play merit production in 2023, or do the jokes fall flat, or the social views fall too outside of what we’d consider appropriate today?
I’m happy to report that I found the play delightful from start to finish: the jokes are grounded in the views of the characters, so it doesn’t age as quickly as some other comedies do, and the business first culture does find an unfortunate home in our increasingly work-focused day to day lives here.
This is exactly the sort of show I think Pronoia would put on, especially if it was tightened up, and a few non-essential references had a bit more explanation to them.
As a Writer
As I said this is a pretty standard farce, there’s nothing too inventive or of special note, with the exception of the ending which I touched on.
To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday (Sarah Ruhl)
After viewing Asteroid City earlier this year I looked to see what other’s thought of it. While I love Wes Anderson and that he seems to have fully come into his own with French Dispatch, the tenor of at least a few reviews is “why is a man who is capable of stirring character pieces like Royal Tenenbaums or Life Aquatic, using his time to make strangely written, strangely acted, and strangely conceived movies like French Dispatch or Asteroid City?”
In the words of a gallerist from Anderson’s French Dispatch “He is capable of drawing this, but he thinks this is better.” Frequently we get upset at artists who once resonated with us deeply but seem unwilling or unable to do it again. But that’s not really the artist’s job (it might be commercially advantageous, but that’s a different concern.)
Anyhow, I feel the same way as those internet reviewers when it comes to the work of Sarah Ruhl. Most of the time I don’t like her plays, in fact most of the time I deeply dislike her plays, but every so often I love a play, and I almost always love her first acts, only to get disappointed when she abandons reality in the second.
Why can’t she write more Clean Houses? More The Oldest Boys? Why does she throw Stage Kiss away in the final ten pages, or do whatever it was she was doing in Dead Man’s Cellphone? I don’t know, but she likes her poetic truths, her breaks with the conventional, and I have to go into every play with the knowledge that she’ll likely break my heart all over again.
How does To Peter Pan on Her 70th Birthday fare? Read on and find out.
As an Audience Member
To Peter Pan follows five siblings as their father dies and each faces their own mortality. While there are ghosts (or a ghost) in the play, the majority of it is just a family talking to each other, relating to each other, being comfortable with each other, and grieving with each other.
In the final movement (as this is a play with movements, not acts) the eldest daughter escapes back into her childhood memories of playing Peter Pan as a way to stay young and avoid death, even as her siblings face life head on.
It’s a great play. The break with reality that Ruhl frequently employs in her work is well setup and thoroughly justified, by both the themes and the background of the characters. When we transfer to the world of Peter Pan we are prepared and welcome it (or at least I did,) and it serves to underline the problems the characters are going through instead of being tangential.
This doesn’t reach the heights that Ruhl is capable of with me, but neither does it sink like I find her work so often doing.
As a Producer
Apart from the fact that the cast is older than our usual crop of actors I could easily see this being on the edge of a normal Pronoia production: it’s comedy tinged with sadness, it has strange leaps, and it deals with a small, but vitally important subject for the characters at hand.
As a Writer
I don’t know that there’s anything for me to take from this. The first two movements don’t overstay their welcome, but neither are they pushing plot details: indeed there really isn’t a ploy, the comedy is well grounded, but nothing I haven’t seen before.
If anything this play does show that well written words said by well chosen actors can create interest without the need for tension, mystery, and surprise, even if those are tools we ought to use frequently.
Her Requiem (Greg Pierce)
My reading lately has not been focused on plays (and also not the sort of plays that I’d write about here,) and there are far worse ones to return to than Greg Pierce’s Her Requiem. While I did not know him before reading this, I will certainly keep my eye out for other pieces.
In Her Requiem we follow Dean and Allison, the comfortable Vermont parents of Caitlin, a 17-year old delaying her senior year of high school so she can write a requiem. Dean is overjoyed at the novelness and excitement, whereas Allison is worried about whether they’re making too much room for this flight of fancy, as well as the influence her music teacher Thomas is having on Caitlin.
What starts as light fun evolves into something far more serious as relationships are tested and old wounds return to the surface.
As an Audience Member
One of the most wonderful things about this play is that it makes room for your own interpretation while challenging that act. As more and more (unseen) people flock to the Vermont homestead for a chance to be close to something newsworthy we directly and indirectly hear many interpretations of what Caitlin is trying to do, none of them from Caitlin herself (who appears very little.)
In a way it doesn’t matter what Caitlin means when she’s writing this, the audience will take what they need to, and that’s a mode of artistic criticism that I’m more comfortable with than in the past.
The play seems to suggest the dangers of living vicariously through someone else. Allison is constantly derided for her focus on the pragmatic and “moderate” even while it is made clear that she is the one who keeps the household moving forward. If Dean were responsible for keeping the family alive both he and the family would be much less happy. (Though Dean still does step up when he is called on to do it later in the play.
Pierce does a wonderful job of growing a pit in the reader’s stomach as we learn more and more about the history surrounding Caitlin’s project, and the lies various characters tell others.
Never fully tragic, never fully comedic, it tows a perfectly fine tonal line and fits within the mode of the type of plays I love the most: personal stakes stories that reveal character if not universal truths.
As a Designer
Pierce is a touch too dictatorial in his writing about what we should see, feel, or seek to make the audience experience for my taste, but what he writes sparks imagination.
While the vast majority of the play takes place in the living room and kitchen of the home, we do briefly see inside Caitlin’s room which made me excited about how to realize that on stage: build out a wall to the house then remove it to reveal what’s been there the whole time? Always see Caitlin working? How much of the growing commune do we get to see outside? I was excited by the scenic possibilities.
Since it is a play about a particular type of music the sound design is paramount, though ironically (given my employment at a classic music school) I’m not as familiar with requiems so I did not immediately alight with ideas for that.
As a Writer
As I said above this play fits within the sorts of plays I gravitate to when reading, though not necessarily when writing, but I think that’s an area of growth (not always going for cartoonish levels of comedy and unreality.)
Pierce often made the subtext overbearing when I thought it wasn’t necessary, but he has a wonderful hand with introducing just enough backstory to make things meaningful without making them outstay their welcome.
If I am unhappy with my writing style, and in some ways I am, I may start being a little less Nachtrieb and a little more Pierce over time.