The tagline for Cuesta Drama’s latest production—“Shakespeare is gonna roll over in his grave”—is flat-out wrong, with apologies to Ben Abbott, the creator and director of A Mid-Semester Night’s Mashup.
If Shakespeare is looking down from on high (a more likely location than the nether regions underground, given his sublime poetry), he is most certainly rockin’ and rollin’—and dancin’ and singin’ and lip syncin’—in response to this hilariously original new show featuring characters who don’t exactly speak in iambic pentameter or follow the Bard’s plot lines to the letter.
Abbott is upfront about the fact that the words in this one-hour work aren’t all, or even mostly, his. “I provided the premise: What would happen if a group of college students who didn’t really know A Midsummer Night’s Dream had to put on a performance of it to save their grades?
“And then we played,” he continues, letting the 15 members of his troupe improvise. “I edited for clarity or pacing, but almost nothing beyond the premise came solely from me.”
And this group delivered, and continues to deliver during their indescribably hyperactive and enthusiastic performances this weekend and next, in the Harold J. Miossi CPAC Experimental Theatre at Cuesta College.
Working with a few chairs, a bench, minimal props, and some great, great technical support, this production is perfect for this “experimental” space. Ryan Flores designed the thrilling and evocative lighting effects that are particularly effective when the action takes place “in the woods,” and bree valle and Liliana Santibanez have outdone themselves in the costume department. Given the chance to go wild dressing cowboys, vampires, and drag queens, they must have cleaned out their costume closets (in a good way). Wig and makeup designer Emi Griffith cleverly and often outrageously brings out the creative contrasts between the college students and the Shakespeare characters into which they transform.
The cast is uniformly committed to this collaborative process, and it’s impossible to single out any one for higher praise than any other particularly when it comes to the comedy chops on display. Suffice it to say that the joy, the fervor, and the work that all 15 put into this show is evident in the audience’s reaction: laughter, grins, and applause throughout. Any one of the cast members could utter the words of one memorable character, who actually says it more than once: “Damn, I’m good!”
There’s a lot packed into these 65-or-so minutes, adding up in the end to a strange dichotomy: is it too short, or is it too long? The intertwining intrigues of Shakespeare’s play usually take more than two hours to play out, but a distillation that hits most of the plot points could conceivably be condensed even more to an hour or less. Abbott and his talented cast members have done an amazing job here, and this success suggests that a longer evening, perhaps showcasing not one but two such high caliber, one-hour “creative condensations,” should be on this playwright’s agenda in future?
Just a thought . . .