They are three Shakespearean virtuosos who have had their own series on Britain’s BBC radio, have starred at the famed Edinburgh Festival and on London’s West End and currently are on stage here at the capital’s prestigious Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
But they’re not exactly what one would describe as classical actors. One of them, for example, likes to jump into audiences and pretend to vomit on people, especially during Juliet’s death scene (and he plays Juliet). Another is given to moments of swallowing fire. Two of the trio are graduates of Ringling Brothers, Barnum & Bailey Circus’ clown college, though two also went to Berkeley.
They do “Othello” as a piece of rap music. They do “Titus Andronicus” as a cooking show, complete with recipe for a tasty “Rapist’s Head.” They do, in fact, Shakespeare’s complete oeuvre-all 37 of the bard’s tragedies, histories and comedies, plus two sonnets-in a single 90-minute production, or if you will, riot.
They are the Reduced Shakespeare Company, founded in 1981 and still (almost constantly) kicking. They are gross, disgusting, vulgar, insane, outrageous and, yes, extremely funny.
“Just how deliberately dumb is the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which opened `The Complete Works of William Shakespeare’ . . . at the Kennedy Center?” wrote Washington Post critic Lloyd Rose. “Well, at one point, by a route too complicated to recount here-and anyway I’m not sure I understood it-the three actors who constitute the entire troupe had part of the audience yelling, `My biological clock is ticking and I want babies now!’ “
Actually, the complete line was, “Cut the crap, Hamlet. My biological clock is ticking and I want babies now!”
If the three evince a certain mixture of California looniness and Midwestern irreverence, there’s geographical reason for it. One of them, Matthew Croke, was born and grew up in the Chicago suburb of Niles. Another, Austin Tichenor, is from the San Francisco Bay area but now lives in Chicago. The third, Reed Martin, is from the Bay area and has “heard of Chicago.”
Croke may have overstayed his welcome in the Chicago area. His mother, at one point, urged him to run off and join the circus.
“My mom came home, and said, `Matt, they’re having clown college auditions over at De Paul University.’ I said, `Well, good luck, mom. If that’s what you want to do, more power to you.’ “
How does one-or even three-perform all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in 90 minutes? Well, through condensation and abridgement, of course, and by taking certain liberties.
All 16 of Shakespeare’s comedies, the company noted, have more or less the same plot, involving twins, mistaken identities, obligatory buffoons, wayward voyages, cross dressing, etc., so they do them all as a single piece-with a compound title nearly as long as the aggregate comedy.
Shakespeare’s histories put the trio in mind of sports contests-“Richard, three; Henry, five”-so they lumped them together as a single play, with crowns flying through the air like footballs and dialogue that runs to, “I divide my kingdom in three-Cordelia, you go long.”
“Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” are produced, if not to their full measure for measure, at least as separate entities. Croke, who does Juliet as well as all the other women’s parts in the show, performs the balcony scene sitting on Martin’s shoulders.
Did we mention the sneakers? They wear color coordinated sneakers with their doublet and hose. Such footwear helps with all the running and leaping about.
Interviewing the Reduced Shakespeare Company is rather like trying to count a boxful of crickets, but as best as can be determined, the troupe was formed in 1981 as an act in a Sonoma County, Calif., Renaissance Festival. There were five in the cast, originally, including an actual woman to do the women’s parts. Her name?
Martin: “It was Meryl something.”
Others: “Stripe? Strope? Streep? Streppen?”
Martin: “I don’t know. I don’t think she’s famous.”
Whoever she was, she broke her ankle, compelling the company to enlist a man, Adam Long, for the women’s parts. Long and the original members have moved on and been replaced by Martin, Croke and Tichenor.
The repertoire was confined to madcap reduced versions of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet” until 1987, when the company was invited to Scotland’s Edinburgh Festival, and it was decided to throw in all of Shakespeare’s other plays to make a full-scale production. The players thought Edinburgh would be their last gasp, but the show proved such a hit at the festival they kept on with it.
For years a part-time, pass-the-hat enterprise, the troupe went full time in 1990 and now tours this country and Britain eight or nine months of the year. It also went sort of big time, playing New York’s Lincoln Center and the A.R.T. Theatre in Cambridge, Mass.
“We played Elgin Community College and the College of DuPage, twice,” said Croke, who laments that they haven’t had any bookings in Chicago itself. “Not even the Annoyance Theatre.”
Their radio series on the BBC, in which they’ve done a Shakespearian play every week, has made them “famous in England.”
“We think they’re flattered that three stupid Americans would give this much attention to their national playwright,” said Tichenor. “We also think we play into their prejudice in that we do Shakespeare the way they think stupid Americans would do Shakespeare.”
In the 1970s, of course, English playwright Tom Stoppard created a “Hamlet” parody called “Dogg’s Hamlet,” with a 60-second reprise at the end. The Reduced Shakespeare Company does three “Hamlet” reprises at the end, including one that runs backward.
Tichenor noted that Gilbert and Sullivan did a reduced “Hamlet” long before Stoppard and that Shakespeare himself “ripped off” other people’s ideas.
Tichenor grew up in Piedmont, Calif., went to Berkeley with Martin, got a master’s degree in fine arts from Boston University and ran a theater in New Hampshire before moving to Chicago four years ago with his wife, Dee Ryan, who is in a Second City touring company.
Martin, whose wife, Jane, is the Reduced’s manager, comes from Sonoma, Calif. He left Berkeley, briefly, to become a professional minor league baseball umpire in the Pioneer League, which he found was not his calling.
“I heard `kill the umpire’ before the games even started,” he said.
After getting a master’s degree from the University of California in San Diego, Martin became an actor, moved to New York, hated New York and ran off to enroll in Ringling Brothers’ clown college and join the circus, where he met Croke.
Croke went to clown college at his mother’s suggestion right out of Niles’ Notre Dame High School. He did a year with Ringling Brothers, worked as a clown in Japan and Italy and studied for a year with Second City, in the same class with Tichenor’s wife. He was accepted by the De Paul University drama school but quit after six weeks to join the Reduced. When not on stage, he runs athletic programs for the Niles Park District.
Last year, the company debuted a new show that alternates with its Shakespearean routine, “The Complete History of America” in a single, 90-minute production. It espouses “the single-bullet theory of the entire history of America, including the (career) death of Anne Murray,” Martin said.
The “history” also discourses on why a country named after Amerigo Vespucci shouldn’t be called “Vespucciland” and fights World War I with water guns. Also included is the group’s own “culturally sensitive” national anthem, which the trio was invited to perform on the White House lawn July 4.
They’ve been extended at the Kennedy Center through July 24 and will tour England this fall. They would like to do more radio and TV, “and we think we can sustain a minor motion picture.” In the meantime, they’re working up a complete new parody-of the Bible.
Does this mean their abandoning the Bard?
Said Tichenor: “As long as Shakespeare keeps writing great plays, we’ll keep doing that show.”
