On Stage: Performing Arts at our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle

Hartwick Thespians To Perform Complete Works of Shakespeare

“If you like Shakespeare, you’ll like this show. If you hate Shakespeare, you’ll love this show!”—The Today Show

The Today Show was referring to a production of “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),” a play our community will be able to see performed April 10-13 at Hartwick College, directed by Marc Shaw and performed by a small but mighty group of Hartwick staff and students. I got to see a rehearsal still four weeks shy of production, and it was already thoroughly engaging to watch.

Originally created for and performed at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 1987, “The Complete Works” has been updated multiple times by its authors—Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield—most recently in 2023. The three actors in the play promise the audience at the beginning to cover all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in under two hours. [For the scholars in the audience, there are 37 plays that are universally accepted as written by Shakespeare. Many claim there are 38 or 39. Given possible collaborations with other playwrights and the fact that he wrote in the years between, roughly, 1580-1613, records aren’t entirely clear.]

To understand the absurdity of the promise the troupe of three makes to cover all of Shakespeare’s plays, consider the stats that literary wonks have made so readily available. It takes roughly one hour to perform 1,000 lines of a Shakespeare play. The average number of lines in a Shakespeare play ranges from 2,752 lines, if you use the Cambridge edition of his works, to 2,864 lines for the Globe edition. Which means any one play, on average, takes between two hours and 45 minutes to two hours and 52 minutes. Since you asked, the shortest of Shakespeare’s plays is “The Comedy of Errors,” which comes in between 1,750–1,777 lines, and the longest is “Hamlet,” at over 4,000 lines, because Hamlet himself has almost as many lines as there are in the entirety of “The Comedy of Errors.” I could go on for a long time on all the stats available regarding Shakespeare’s writings, as the main job of some literary wonks (also known as nerds) seems to be to generate an infinite number of pie charts, bar graphs, scattergrams, etc. to explain in scientific terms the beauty of Shakespeare’s body of work. But I think the point is clear; covering 37 Shakespeare plays in less than two hours is a ridiculously ambitious project.

Taking on this ridiculously ambitious project at Hartwick College are: Marc Shaw, the director and Hartwick theater faculty member; Hannah Gilliand, the stage manager and a Hartwick freshman studying criminal justice and political science; Max Jackson, Shakespearean scholar and a Hartwick junior studying music education; Vaughn Wagnecz, the host and a Hartwick sophomore studying history; and Jackson Reddy, actor and Hartwick coordinator of global education. They are a high energy, funny group.

I started our group interview with what I thought was an obvious question—“What was the hardest part about doing this show? You and I, dear reader, have just seen the statistics, so we already have the answer, right? Which goes to show what literary wonks know.

“Doing some of the more physical bits justice [was hardest], because I feel like I’m a pretty competent speaker, but sometimes I sort of get caught up in my head while I’m speaking, then don’t do the funny gesture or remember to swing my sword or chuck the skull, et cetera,” Max shared.

“Going through every play, putting on different types of characters, breaking character to make a different character,” Vaughn asserted was most difficult, which came the closest to what I anticipated.

“I think the hardest part is that this play was written a while ago and it was written by three white men and, as smart and as progressive as they might think they are, they’re not entirely, so a lot of the jokes are dated. As a cast, that’s actually not the issue. The issue is whether or not we’re able to let the audience know that we know—we understand—that this is a dated joke, or we understand that this does not represent our opinions. That is the challenge. But they’ve made it very clear that this script is an outline and there is the opportunity to change it and make it our own. So the question is how we do it,” Jackson explained.

Jackson’s comment begins to point us toward one of the more interesting aspects of this play for the audience. The three actors on stage play themselves, as part of a performing troupe providing an abridgement of an enormous body of work, which means they are responsible for determining the important themes for each of the plays they present.

Hannah, the stage manager, went on to pick up another interesting aspect of this production: the staging. This show is being performed on a thrust stage, which means the stage comes out into the audience, rather than the audience sitting in front of it, as though on the other side of what is called in theater the invisible “fourth wall.”

“I think the hardest part, at least from an outsider perspective watching the show, is that we’re working on a thrust, so every single aspect of blocking has to be dynamic. It has to be fluid and you have to realize that at some point you will be out of sight for somebody. As someone who’s acted before, it’s difficult to face your audience, but you can’t really hide anything on a thrust—you can’t do anything out of character,” Hannah said.

As we turned toward why each of those present wanted to be involved in this production, the reasons were varied. One (Max) wanted to fit in one more thing to a busy schedule because, “What is junior year if not all of the things happening at once?”

I think Jackson falls into this same category, a person who likes an overstuffed schedule, as not only do they have a full-time position at Hartwick, they are also a yoga instructor and busy planning a yoga retreat during rehearsal breaks. Vaughn started to take theater classes in the fall and one of his professors, Barby Kahl, has become “a huge motivator” for him. “She was like, ‘You should really try out for this play… I would love to see you audition.”

Hannah explained that she had previously been in a Shakespeare production which had turned her off a bit, but that this script, while not a Shakespeare script, contained what she described as “… really sweet moments where you can see aspects of Shakespeare shine through with our three lovely actors applying their own exciting and thrilling interpretation.”

Marc, the director, picked up on the “sweet moments” theme.

“That’s a great description. Those moments are there…where we see Shakespeare shining through and we see the humanity. There are problems with this play,” Marc went on to say. “Even though it has been updated many times and they updated it again, there are still things we can work on as far as updating it and finding new angles. John Keats talks about Shakespeare, that Shakespeare has negative capability and that’s why Shakespeare has survived so long. And what it is, depending on the situation, Shakespeare has the ability to shape-shift to the era. …These characters so far have lived up to 400 years. What in there can we still mine?” Marc asked.

Max continued that theme of the universality of Shakespeare.

“Yeah, people have described ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ for example, as a timeless romance. And I think Shakespeare, across his 37 plays, managed to find some truly timeless sort of things to hit upon…Teenagers will always fall in love and they will always be really dramatic about it. Parents will always be like, “I don’t think she’s right for you… I don’t think he’s right for you.’ People will always have really sucky days where everything will go wrong and they will not want to cook. Which is not the point of ‘Titus Andronicus,’ but it is our interpretation of it,” Max explained.

Whether or not you’re having a sucky day, I hope you, too, will find the time to enjoy an evening of theater at Hartwick College to watch this show. And if you don’t feel like cooking, grab your meal out on the town, since it isn’t just those in New York City who can enjoy dinner and a show. You will be energized by this production, during which the actors break the fourth wall and bring the audience into the fun. And I’m pretty sure Vaughn wasn’t serious when he told me there is barfing involved…

You can watch “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged),directed by Marc Shaw and performed by Hartwick College students, from April 10-13 at 8 pm. in the Lab theatre in the basement of the Bresee building on the Hartwick campus. Tickets are $10.00 for the public and free with a Hartwick College ID card.

Up next: “Cabaret,” directed by Andrew Kahl and performed by SUNY Oneonta students, from April 24-27.

Rachel Frick Cardelle covers performing arts at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.