Eugene weekly., May 22, 2003, Page 30, Image 30

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BY BRIAN BOONE
Fools & Foolishness
Shakespeare’s canon at the Rep, UT ships out .
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n spite of numerous funny moments,
Willamette Repertory Theatre’s The
Complete Works of William Shakespeare
(Abridged), which opened last week at the
Hult, is ultimately a jumble of overlong
sketches that frantically grasps for the audi-
ence’s approval. The concept is playful:
Three actors (William Mark Hulings, Todd
William Denning and Quinn Mattfeld) per-
form all of the Bard’s plays in one evening in
order to make them more accessible to a na-
tion they assume lacks the intelligence to
comprehend Shakespeare. All but one play is
crammed into Act I. Act II consists solely of
Hamlet.
Act I’s vignettes include “Titus
Androgynous,” a cooking show with Martha
Stewart jabs, and a rapped version of Othello.
These sequences aim for freshness and irrev-
erence, but deliver unimaginative scenarios
and jokes even older than Shakespeare. Act
II’s Hamlet involves an audience participa-
tion foray into Ophelia’s psyche that’s almost
as tiresome as the Histories-as-Football-
Game montage.
But the show has merits. Scenes that work
include those that satirize Shakespeare, in-
cluding the lack of biographical information
on him — there’s a hilarious bit where
Mattfeld transposes Hitler’s life story for
Shakespeare’s — and a scene that points out
that Troilus and Cressida is a work so forget-
table that even a Shakespearean scholar has
never read it.
Director Kirk Boyd awkwardly peppers
the production with modern references to fur-
ther the production’s aching desire to please.
These include nods to Hannibal Lector, the
Atkins Diet and at least five jokes about cel-
lular phones. The political mentions are
vague shots at Republicans meant to garner
applause from the left-ish audience. One bit
depicts Julius Caesar as an idiotic man-child.
Don’t try so hard. Nobody misses the joke.
Though the actors radiate relentless en-
ergy and infectious enthusiasm, the perform-
ances run a bit on the hammy side. Still, the
cast clearly possesses a vast gift for improvi-
sation and is extremely comfortable on stage.
Complete Works runs through June 1.
U
niversity Theatre is set to finish its
93rd season with both an experi-
ment and a milestone. This Ship of
Fools, opening May 30, is a work devised by
theater students and faculty based on
Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, a 1492 New
World satire.
22 MAY 22, 2003
The play also marks University Theatre’s
1,000th production. This figure includes all
the shows the theater department has pro-
duced since its more or less current incarna-
tion with the founding of the Dramatic Club
in 1909.
Before Robinson Theatre opened in 1949,
plays were staged in Gerlinger Hall,
McArthur Court and a small theater built into
Johnson Hall in 1915.
WRT’s Complete Works
of William Shakespeare
(Abridged) runs
through June 1
at the Hult.
“Prior to 1909, theatricals were produced
by various organizations on campus as fund-
raisers for different projects,” says Joseph
Gilg, UT development director. “There are
records indicating that some of the early
shows actually raised money to pay off debts
incurred by the football team.”
Theater faculty realized that show num-
ber 1,000 was coming via the work of Horace
Robinson, a UO theater professor from 1933
to 1975. Robinson compiled records of every
show produced during his tenure, as well as
for all productions dating to 1877.
This Ship of Fools is the final show of the
Robinson (mainstage) season, following runs
of Chicago, Book of Days and The
Misanthrope. Though the devised work will
differ some from its source material,
Narrenschiff, the 1492 work, depicts a group
of ship-bound fools on a hopeless voyage to a
new place, a none-too-subtle dismissal of
Columbus’s recent New World voyage, im-
plying that the New World is not a solution to
humanity’s problems, merely a breeding
ground for more fools.
“It’s a surrealist vaudeville with text al-
most entirely drawn from or provoked by
Brant’s book, using only the resources our
company can bring, from cheerleading stunts
to playing the accordion or the trombone to
simple songs accompanied by ukulele,” says
director John Schmor, who recently helmed
Romeo and Juliet at Lord Leebrick Theatre
Company. “That Brant ended up shaping the
very loose narrative to include a ship voyage
to ‘the new world’ opened the text for us to
make contemporary references.”
This Ship of Fools opens May 30 at
Robinson Theatre. See calendar next week
for details.
ew