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Shakespeare Festival kicks off with a 38-hour marathon
(by Kara Krekeler - June 09, 2010)
‘All the world’s a stage and all the men and women merely players.”
Shakespeare’s words — from As You Like It — have been drifting back and forth across my mind recently, thanks to a recent experiment by the Shakespeare Festival St. Louis. In the 38 hours leading up to the opening of the festival’s production of Hamlet in Forest Park, all 38 of the Bard’s plays were performed in some way, shape or form at a wide range of places throughout the metro area.
Held May 25 and 26, Shake 38 brought small groups of people to bookstores, parks, restaurants and even fitness centers to experience Shakespeare’s plays, every hour on the hour.
Shake 38 was the brainchild of Shakespeare Festival St. Louis Executive Director Rick Dildine, who said that he simply wanted to put Shakespeare in the hands of St. Louis.
“We straddle that line of being a theater organization and a civic organization,” Dildine said, adding that he didn’t want the Shakespeare Festival to produce or even monitor the plays so much as simply spark an idea for Shakespeare lovers.
When he first started planning the event in November, Dildine said he expected most of the plays to be performed by St. Louis’ rich theater community. And while a few theater companies did host performances, most of the plays were performed — or simply read aloud — by non-actors who love the plays. Theater groups “have their own plays” to produce, Dildine explained.
People joined up through social networking sites like Twitter and Facebook, creating their own groups and putting their own spin on the plays. For example, a group performing Two Noble Kinsmen in downtown’s Citygarden cut out everything except a subplot, while Subterranean Books’ performance of The Two Gentlemen of Verona focused on three acts instead of all five and featured costumes consisting of multiple hats and a dozen “Hello, my name is” stickers. Another group performed King Lear while eating dinner and having drinks at Dressel’s, redubbing the play “King Beer” for their purposes.
Dildine said that one of the weirdest places that Shakespeare was performed — and man, do I wish I had a time machine to go back and witness it firsthand — was at the St. Louis Fitness Center on Hampton. There, eight women from the Slightly Askew Theatre Ensemble performed Measure for Measure while exercising, switching machines as they switched scenes.
While Dildine said that he did notice a few Shakespeare diehards traveling from one venue to the next, following the schedule, I was only able to make it to a few productions, including those at Subterranean and Citygarden, as well as a very loose interpretation of Antony and Cleopatra at the Central West End’s new Vino Gallery — Vino’s production consisted of two toga-wearing actors arguing for a few minutes sandwiched by five minutes of plot summary and followed by a sampling of Italian wines.
I’m not a huge Shakespeare buff, but this wasn’t the first time I’d experienced quick and odd adaptations of the Bard’s plays. During a high school trip to Europe, I got to see the Reduced Shakespeare Company perform The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, which crammed all of Shakespeare’s plays into a single three-man production. The play was hilarious, although it definitely lacked plot development; to this day, I still have no idea what goes on in Shakespeare’s histories, which were presented as an American football game by the Reduced Shakespeare Company.
While not quite as funny as that play, Shake 38 definitely had the edge when it came to actually getting the gist of the plays across. I’d never read or seen any of the three plays I experienced during Shake 38, and while I still don’t think I could ace a test about the intricacies of the plots, I have a pretty good idea what happens in each of them. And, as someone who has to be in the right mood to wade through Shakespearean English, that hint of understanding goes a long way toward luring me into a theater — or Shakespeare Glen — to see them later on.
“All the world’s a stage…” With Shake 38, the Shakespeare Festival certainly took the Bard’s words to heart this year. Here’s hoping they try it again in the future. I’ve still got several plays to cross off my to-do list.
• Hamlet continues at Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park (near the Art Museum) through June 20.
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