Silicon Valley Shakespeare, which normally puts on its plays during the summer in an insect-infested amphitheater up in the mountains, did something different, in a small pre-fab hut in a city park that some other local company has set up as a 70-seat indoor playhouse.
The topic was "Greatest Hits from the 48-Hour Play Festival," and I gather that the rule of these festivals is that a general premise is chosen, and the playwrights and actors have 48 hours to write and perform a short play taking off from Shakespeare using that premise. This greatest hits included two plays from each of four premises. All the concepts were good, but whether the play worked depended on the quality of the writing, which varied greatly. The acting was mostly good, lively without being anxious, though a few of the actors were having trouble remembering their lines. This was the first of three performances.
The offerings were:
1. Epilogues to Shakespeare plays. (In both of these, all the characters were dead.)
A. Most of the characters from Hamlet work out their problems with each other in purgatory. Hamlet Sr. is pleased that his murder was avenged, but not at the number of other people Hamlet Jr. managed to off, directly or indirectly, in the process.
B. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern (more Tom Stoppard's than Shakespeare's) meet Richard III. He didn't seem at all like Shakespeare's character either, and I found most of the dialogue in this one merely incomprehensible.
2. Mash-ups of two Shakespeare plays. (Apparently 1B above didn't count.)
A. Lysander and Hermia have a marriage counseling session with Dr. Hamlet (Ph.D., Wittenberg). This was the funniest play of the set, due to the vast number of Hamlet's famous lines aptly salted in to the dialogue, revealing him prejudiced in favor of Lysander ("See, what a grace is seated on this brow") and against Hermia ("O most pernicious woman").
B. Viola and Friar Laurence pour out their troubles to a bartender (who turns out to be Shakespeare himself), who gives them lousy advice.
3. Shakespeare and cyber-technology.
A. Romeo and Juliet friend each other on Facebook the morning after the party. With both on stage at once reacting to each other's postings, and Mercutio and the Nurse along to kibitz, this was hilarious, and would doubtless seem even funnier if I knew anything about Bookface, as the Nurse keeps calling it.
B. Viola rescues Sebastian's Samsung Galaxy from the shipwreck, but the main point of this one is to short-circuit the play's plot and have Viola and Orsino acknowledge their love in a jiffy.
4. Shakespeare and sports.
A. King Lear rewritten as the retirement of a baseball manager. This was not improved by trying to stuff the entire plot of the play on a weak premise, though Lear's speech in the storm scene with baseball references added ("Blow, winds! Crack, bats!") was pretty funny.
B. All the characters in Hamlet place bets with a bartender (who again turns out to be Shakespeare himself) on a curling match between Hamlet's team and Claudius's. The bartender keeps making curling jokes which the other characters don't get, and I didn't get them either, because I didn't even know what curling is. (OK, I looked it up on Wikipedia when I got home.) From the brief part of the match that slips onstage, the game appears to be played with broomsticks and a Roomba.
With two genuinely funny plays and four more that were OK, this was almost worth the trouble of sitting through nearly two hours of. Highest marks in playwriting, then, to Doll Piccotto for Hamlet, marriage counselor, and to Melissa Jones for Romeo + Juliet + Facebook.
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