Shakespeare at UCLA is shaking things up this fall. Instead of featuring just one Shakespearean play, as the student group customarily does, it’s performing all 38 at once.
Premiering tonight in De Neve Auditorium, “The Complete Works of Shakespeare Abridged” (or “Th Cmplt Wrks f Shkspr,” as the show is more affectionately called), is a short comedy performance done by only three actors that condenses all of the Bard’s plays into an hour and a half.
“This (play) related to our group in a less heavy way,” said Haley Boyan, a fourth-year communication studies student and director of the “Complete Works.” “The humor of it appealed to me and the freshness. Not that Shakespeare’s stale, this is just different.”
Shakespeare at UCLA has existed for six years, but this play is the first one for which the group has had to obtain the rights for a show. But purchasing the rights turned out to be one of the lesser challenges in the play’s production.
The group received little funding and has suffered from a shortage of rehearsal space. In addition, the show was originally set to be performed at the end of seventh week, but the group was unable to secure a venue for the show until this week.
“(The venue) really caused all our other obstacles,” Boyan said. “It messed with the show date (and) rehearsal space. We couldn’t put in our funding proposals until we had a space and time for the show.”
Becca Blumer, a fourth-year anthropology student and the show’s producer, found the lack of funding made producing the show more difficult.
“We haven’t gotten anything,” Blumer said. “So getting around that’s been tough, just coordinating everything.”
The group has taken creative approaches, however, to work around these complications. The costumes are very minimalist, and the set is composed of two blocks, one large and one small, that have been with the group throughout their performances. The biggest challenge has been the mass number of props that the script calls for, and the group has secured these items everywhere from post-Halloween sales to the theater department’s prop shop.
“Shakespeare loves props,” Boyan said. “A lot of them are humorous. Mostly it was stuff that we could find from ourselves. We made a list and then we all went and found as much as we could and we rented or bought on a very low budget the rest of it.”
Not only has the group had to create the design for the show, but also due to the improvisational nature of the show, the actors have revamped the show’s comedy in order to make it more appealing to UCLA students.
“The beauty of the play itself is when we act it out, we’re not tied down to the script,” said Jason Climaco, a fourth-year communication studies student and one of the three actors in the show. “We’re invited and encouraged to improvise. If we think something’s funny, (we) go for it.”
In the show the actors break the fourth wall, the assumed divide between the audience and the actors, and in doing so, the show acquires an unpredictable nature, which Blumer said can be both entertaining and nerveracking as a producer.
“It’s really fun to watch them because they can change the show every night,” she said. “Sometimes they go a little too far, and it’s really funny in rehearsal but you’re like, “˜Oh, I really hope that doesn’t end up onstage. We’ll be in trouble.'”
And while Shakespeare’s language is almost sacrosanct, Climaco claims the play doesn’t aim to mock Shakespeare.
“It’s still staying true to the work of Shakespeare, but it’s just having fun with it,” he said. “They play around with the meter and the rhyme of the words but they don’t really change it.”
Climaco, who is performing in his first production with Shakespeare at UCLA, is excited by this chance, and he wishes there were more of such opportunities for non-theater students to participate in theater.
“When I first got to UCLA, I was really surprised that the opportunities for a non-major to participate in theater activities were really limited,” he said.
And while Shakespeare at UCLA was originally created as an outlet for non-theater students, this year both stage managers and one of the actors are theater students.
Alex Vlahov, a first-year theater student and one of the show’s actors, heard about the show from his friend, Matt Waters, who is also an actor in the show and a member of Shakespeare at UCLA. Vlahov got involved because of the lack of opportunities open to him in the theater department.
“There are no opportunities open in the theater department because you’re not allowed to audition for a show your first year,” Vlahov said.
Though the topic of Shakespeare can be daunting to some, as the plays are usually associated with the boredom of high school English class, Climaco says that he now values Shakespeare’s work as a result of working in the production.
“One of the objectives of this play is to get Shakespeare out to a wider audience so they’ll be able to understand it and relate to it more,” he said. “That’s actually what’s happened to me throughout the whole process. Instead of thinking of Shakespeare as some old, boring guy I had to study in English class, now I appreciate his work a lot more because I know what it’s all about.”
And Vlahov said that anybody can enjoy the show, even if they have the most limited knowledge of Shakespeare.
“Everybody knows that “˜Romeo and Juliet’ is a great romance, and everybody knows that “˜Hamlet’ is a great tragedy,” he said. “Just knowing basically that, you’ll have a fun time watching it.”