weekly_blog_post: The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridge)

So I went to The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged) at H.M. Comer the other evening. It was a performance put on by COE Does Art, a student organization sponsored by the College of Engineering.  The performance was put on by 3 students, Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield, who managed to have the entire audience roaring with laughter throughout the entire duration of the performance. They started off with Romeo and Juliet, and Adam, Daniel, and Jess attempted to play every single character in the play. As a result, what should have been a tragedy turned into a comedy. When they said the performance was an abridged version of Shakespeare’s works, they weren’t kidding. The entire performance was basically a fastforward version of all of Shakespeare’s plays, with all of his comedies combined into one single play, while Shakespeare’s historical plays were all combined into a football game. During intermission, the audience was invited to join in on an impromptu yoga session, before the actors wrapped up the evening with Hamlet. They went through Hamlet 3 times, each time faster than the last, ending the entire performance with an attempt of performing Hamlet backwards. The entire evening was hysterical. Adam, Daniel, and Jess definitely took some creative liberty for this performance (actually a lot of creative liberty), but it seemed to work. They did a great job on engaging the audience by getting them to participate in the performance. It was an odd performance, but I loved it all the same.