So I saw The Reduced Shakespeare Company -- "37 Plays in 97 Minutes!" -- at the Kennedy Center this weekend, as part of what my cousin and I were affectionately referring to as Gramfest 2001. Our 80-plus-year-old grandmother came to DC for the weekend... she is an amazing, fun, awesome lady, who thought this Reduced Shakespeare thing was the best thing she'd ever seen. And it was indeed pretty funny, although I was a little sad the three actors playing all the roles condensed all the comedies into a single two-minute gag (playing on the idea that all of Shakespeare's comedies follow the same formulaic conventions). I'm the most familiar with "The Tempest," probably, because in a puppetry class my senior year -- insert liberal arts education joke here -- we had to perform the first act with puppets, memorizing lines and everything. Luckily I got Caliban: relatively few lines, extremely cool puppet-making possibilities. Ironically enough, puppetry was one of the only college classes for which I received a grade, due to my literature/philosophy/history major's colloquium-style format that substituted feedback and criticism and conversation for meaningless letters and numbers. A noble goal, a sometimes-successful experiment.

Wait, there once was a point around here. If nothing else, I've learned the value of tangential extrapolation, no? And acquired a good vocabulary of meaningless words. :) Ah. Reduced Shakespeare. Was amusing. Here's my favorite quip -- it's really not going to ruin anything, but in case you think you'll see the show and are uptight about stuff like this, I'll write it in blue. Highlight it if you want to see it. Take It Easy is nothing if not accomodating, right?

After the first half of the show, one of the three guys announces, very pleased with himself, that they've been through all the plays and the show's over and everyone should go home. He runs out into the audience and grabs someone's program to look at the complete list of plays and make sure they did each one. When they reach "Hamlet," (most of the audience realized they had skipped that one, I think), the guy is all disappointed that they have to keep working, and protests by saying, "Wait, Shakespeare didn't come up with 'Hamlet,' Mel Gibson did!" Heh. It was great.