Playwright: Jess Winfield, Daniel Singer & Adam Long
At: A Crew Of Patches at the Mercury Theater, 3745 N. Southport Ave.
Phone: ( 773 ) 325-1700; $28.50
Runs through: Jan. 29
If all the parodies, spoofs, take-offs, puns, malapropisms, giggles and general ridicule perpetrated on The Bard of Avon by bored inductees of actors' workshops, mad-dog rehearsals and classics seminars were collected in one exhaustive anthology, it would probably sound like this. The comedies condensed into one convoluted scenario, the history plays presented as a football game, a cooking-show Titus Andronicus ( pronounced 'tight-ass androgynous' ) , Macbeth with Scottish burrs and glottal stops, Tybalt as a video-game samurai, Claudius as Darth Vader, The Player King as Kermit the Frog, David Letterman's 'nuts' gag, Mel Brooks' 'whip out' gag, a scholarly study entitled 'I Love My Willy', and an audience participation exercise designed to bring Ophelia to vocal abreaxis—collaborative playwrights Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield leave nothing out.
The irony of this catalogue is that the speed required to sell the stupid jokes—you don't want to think TOO long about 'But soft! What wind through yonder window breaks?'—likewise blurs the smart moments ( the characterizations adopted by actors representing the stressed and unstressed beats in iambic pentameter, for example ) . A vintage showbill displayed in the bowels of the Mercury theatre clocks a long-ago production of our play at under 90 minutes, but this rendering by A Crew Of Patches needs a full 2-1/2 hours to reach the finish line. One suspects that the authors might have added material since their play's 1987 premiere, but the time has certainly come to subtract shtick no longer original—the fast-rewind Hamlet, maybe, or the body-orchestra Rap Othello.
The three actors who play all the roles ( assisted by a put-upon Utility Girl assistant and a tech-booth manager literally willing to die for his art ) project a faux-ingenuousness that keeps their material from becoming offensive or annoying ( though Benjamin Montague—yes, that's his real name—should find more voices for his female personae than a single shrill falsetto ) . And the sumptuous quarters make for a more visual exhibition than its 2003 incarnation at City Lit. But playgoers looking for an alternative to having Shakespeare IMPOSED upon them deserve an experience less encumbered by textual clutter.