By BARBARA EBLING
BRANDON—Last weekend featured a hilarious final showcase of OVUHS Walking Stick Theatre’s senior actors and provided a glimpse into the wide range of theatrical chops of rising juniors and seniors. With Jordan Bertrand, Oliver Lavelle, and Ian Miner as the narrators throughout the show, the troupe performed a mash-up of Shakespeare’s 37 plays, with abundant liberties taken, in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) [Revised, Again]. Written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield, and revised many times since its creation in the 1980s, the play invites directors to amend the script to keep up with the present day, and actors to improvise and break the fourth wall that normally separates stage and audience.
To begin their accelerated Shakespearean canon, the players launched into Romeo and Juliet – giving a nod to the Shakespearean-era tradition of male actors performing both male and female roles. Romeo was played by Emil Dardozzi and Juliet by sophomore Jackson Rawls, to uproarious delight (the role of the Nurse was played by sophomore Xander Weiand, to similar effect). The balcony scene involved Rawls at the top of a human pyramid. In a theme that recurred throughout the evening (and for which the audience members seated in the first row were hopefully prepared), upon drinking a sleeping draught, Juliet (Rawls), repeatedly and loudly air-vomits all across the front row seats.
Next, Titus Andronicus, arguably Shakespeare’s least popular and most violent tragedy, was transformed into a cooking show, with senior Elyse Singh and sophomore Kristie Posner as avenging mother-daughter cooks. As daughter Lavinia (who has had her tongue cut out), Posner’s facial expressions and grunting were comedic brilliance.
When narrators Bertrand, Miner, and Lavelle came to the realization that to spend even 12 minutes on each play would take 6 hours, they decided to improvise and compress even further, combining 14 comedies into one giant Ur-comedy, on the basis that Shakespeare reused the same themes of mistaken identity, gender-bending, twins separated at birth, long-lost family reunited, etc. This required the full cast, including senior Raul Soto, and sophomores Harper Harrison-Burvick, Grace Lanpher, and Aila Malay (who, along with junior Chloe Mol, presage more great OV theater next year).
The 11 historical plays (the “Henrys,” the “Richards,” Pericles, and King John) were presented as an American football match, complete with sideline commentary by Posner, who announced that King Lear was eliminated due to a penalty for “fictional character.” The segment paid homage to Walking Stick’s award-winning festival production of Queens with cameos by King Henry VIII (Calvin Ladd) and Anne Boleyn (Sophie Moore).
Quick work was made of tragedies and Othello, Troilus and Cressida, Julius Caesar (by reducing the play to his death “Et tu, Brute?”), and Antony and Cleopatra. Senior Sophie Moore as Cleopatra suffered the fatal (and emetic) asp bite, which resulted in more violent illness on the first row of the audience.
The narrators then introduced Macbeth while grappling with the superstition of calling it “the Scottish play” rather than saying the name. The opening scene abbreviated the cauldron-stirring three witches to merely two, and then jumped to the final duel between Macbeth (Dardozzi speaking in an excellent and nearly incomprehensible Scottish accent) and Macduff (Posner with a lovely Irish one).
The first half ended when the narrators realized they’d neglected Shakespeare’s magnum opus, Hamlet, and two of the narrators departed the stage, leaving Bertrand alone with the unenviable task of killing time with jokes, softshoe, donning her trademark multicolored hat, and “dropping trou.”
The second half comprised a truncated but effective rendition of Hamlet, starring Lavelle as Hamlet, Moore as Ophelia, junior Chloe Mol as Queen Gertrude, Dardozzi as Claudius, and Singh as a hilarious arm-waving ghost of Hamlet’s father. The actors managed to make it both tragic and comic. Ian Miner and Oliver Lavelle delivered the “What a piece of work is a man” and “to be or not to be” soliloquies solemnly, followed by rapid-fire comedic deaths of Ophelia (Sophie Moore splashed water in her face to signify drowning), poisoning (more air-vomiting by Mol as the Queen), and stabbing/poisoning (Dardozzi, Lavelle). Flush with their success at completing all 37 plays, the actors decided to test how fast they could re-stage Hamlet: which at breakneck speed they managed in under one minute. Finally, they ran the play backwards, cautioning the audience to “listen for the demonic messages” (a well-timed “Paul is dead” from Chloe Mol), saying lines backwards, catching props that had previously been thrown, and vice-versa, and Moore spitting out water in her reverse-drowning.
In addition to finishing up the “Complete Works,” the final act showcased the breadth and depth of the graduating seniors’ acting talents and was a seemingly perfect choice by director Jeff Hull. After a challenging spring of one-acts and festival competitions, Walking Stick Players had the opportunity to have fun, let down their hair, don wigs, wear Crocs, drag teachers and students onstage, and engage in theatrical mayhem. It can’t be an easy production to put on, and OV’s players did a beautiful job of making the world their stage.
