Yes, It Can Be Done — in 96 Minutes

Sounds daunting: “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.” But, just add the word “Abridged,” and you are off to a rollicking, broad, slightly wicked and tremendously entertaining 90 or so minutes of hectic vaudeville. You don’t need to know a lot of Shakespeare to get it. But the goal of the three British actors from the Reduced Shakespeare Company who wrote “The Complete Works . . .” and performed it in London for seven years — Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Winfield — “is to get this book into every hotel room in the land.” I don’t suppose they mean North America. But don’t be surprised if you find yourself skimming through “Troilus and Cressida” in a motel room in rural Iowa, some day. Shakespeare Abridged is that good. 

But witty as it is, I’d say it was still pretty daring of The Goshen Players to put on this not very well known comedy about a famed but not very widely seen or read playwright. (Once, in an area audience, I heard a fellow suggest seeing a play at Shakespeare and Company in Lenox, MA. His date nixed the idea. “All they do is reruns,” I heard her say.) But there’s magic to the names Shakespeare and the Goshen Players, and it all comes together in this not very lavish production in Goshen’s Old Town Hall.

The play has no sets, just three actors and a great many props, such as Juliet’s hobby horse, which she rides more than she must for her own pleasure. Then there is a (brief) production of “Titus Andronicus,” subtitled “The Gory Gourmet,” with a TV chef wielding a cleaver in one hand and her bloody stump of what remains of the other.

There are storms, shipwrecks, devious relatives, monsters, romance, magical creatures, mistaken identities, swordplay, horseplay, corpses, several skulls, several poisonous elixirs, ghosts, forays into the audience, lots of familiar phrases, lots of leather jerkins and everyone wears high-top sneakers.

In short, it’s very entertaining. And that is because these actors, Kate Costello, Robert Neal Kwalick and Devon Richtmeyer, are absolutely right for this show.

When director Eric William Wilczak auditioned actors for the three roles (originally and traditionally played by three men), he looked for a sense of absurdity. One actor might have read a comedic monologue, and then Wilczac would have them read it as, say, a runway model.

“These three stood out,” Wilczek says. Two women and one man. “They have chutzpah.”

And they can think on their feet. During a dress rehearsal (with a large and very responsive audience), Kate (the players use their own names), as a ghost, was so smothered in white she lost her way on stage and Robert and Devon picked up on it and guided her off.

There is, of course, a grand finale to all this. “Hamlet.” Robert is reluctant to tear into this great play. “I can’t do it justice,” he says. “We don’t have to do it justice,” he is told. “We just have to do it.”  And so they do. The whole thing. In about four minutes. Faster the second time. And once backwards.

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged” runs at Goshen’s Old Town Hall on the rotary of routes 4 and 63, through May 7. For tickets and information, call 860-491-9988 or go to www.goshenplayers.org.