Exhibitionism

The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)

What is chaos, anyway? A physicist might start by describing the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Guatemala as the cause of a tornado in Kansas. A classicist might tell the Greek myth of the shapeless, primordial world before creation. And a mother of toddlers might point to her living room.

So what do you get when you throw onstage three seasoned actors armed with some 60 props, dozens of costume pieces, and 10 wigs and tell them to perform all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays (plus the sonnets) in less than two hours? You guessed it: complete chaos.

Under director James Jackson Leach, Austin’s aptly named Chaotic Theatre Company brings to the stage the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s 1987 hit, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), a fast-paced, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants parody chock-full of laughs for the Shakespeare illiterate and bardolater alike. It’s as if the Three Stooges flipped through Shakespeare’s canon in about 12 minutes and spontaneously decided to do it all, making it up as they went along and ending in utter pandemonium.

Though this production features three talented and indefatigable actors who pressed on with enthusiasm despite a small and drowsy Sunday matinee turnout, they never seemed to connect with one another to create the jocular, informal, finish-one-another’s-sentences dynamic that the script demands. And though they maintained a frantic, high-octane pace, the show still lagged because the trio could barely keep up with an exorbitant flurry of props and costumes (most of which were left strewn across the stage) that detracted from the accuracy of their comic timing. They would have done better to forget the stuff and keep it simple.

In fact, for me, the best and most honest moment of the production occurred when, during their stab at Hamlet, performer Andy Black announced, “Well, there’s this one speech that goes: ‘I have of late, but wherefore I know not, lost all my mirth …'” and launched into the speech, with all the careful, cynical frustration of Hamlet played straight. Now, that’s not to say that I’m a Shakespeare purist; Dave Stone-Robb played a hilariously concise Polonius, and Craig Kanne as TV cooking host Titus Andronicus baked a mean pie. But overall, a play that should have been closer to improv in genre felt overly scripted, with a few too many flopped jokes in need of a rimshot.

Complete Works (Abridged) comes across as meticulously planned chaos, enhanced by Steven Shirey’s self-consciously melodramatic lighting design and Leach’s scrupulous direction and choreography. But despite the TLC that sustains this show, it falls short on creating a genuine sense of spontaneity. As the physicist would remark, Complete Works (Abridged) is a self-organized system: a manifestation of order out of seeming chaos.

This article appears in September 16 • 2011.