May the Bard be with you.
Allen Community College’s fearsome foursome of Evan Dye, Brigham Folk, Ainsley Weiss and Gabe Wight will bring audiences a full dose of William Shakespeare this weekend.
No, not a single play or sonnet
The whole shebang.
The Red Devil troupe headlines the ACC Theatre and Film Department’s production of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Again),” which runs Friday through Sunday at the Bowlus Fine Arts Center.
The premise is simple — and hilarious.
Weiss, Wight, Folk and Dye are tasked with bringing Shakespeare’s life’s work to the stage, and they have 97 minutes to do it. (Yes, the deadline is relevant.)
Their work starts, obviously, with one of Shakeseare’s signature pieces, “Romeo and Juliet.”
And sure enough, they whistle through the basics of the star-crossed couple’s tale, sprinkling the scripts with a multitude of current cultural nods.
And they do so impeccably, with one problem.
That quick rendition still takes 12 minutes.
Presenting all 37 plays would take hours.
Undaunted, the quartet takes an abundance of creative license as they summarize and combine similar plots, presenting his comedies, tragedies and histories into singular presentations, using a number of plot devices.
The combined histories, for example, are presented as a football game.
The actors also make note that the comedies can be combined as a single work because they often follow similar plotlines.
And just when it looks like the actors will be able to easily sprint through all of the bard’s work well before their deadline — heck, even before intermission — there comes the dreaded realization they’ve forgotten one.
