I have several theories about why All the Great Books (abridged) isn't as satisfying as other shows from the Reduced Shakespeare Company like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), The Complete History of America (abridged) and The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged). Here's a quick rundown on each.
Author Burnout. According to this theory, it was only inevitable that after writing inspired parodies of the Bard, the Bible and American History, the RSC's authors — in this case Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor — would lose some momentum. After all, Shakespeare unforgettably presented the histories as a messy game of touch football, Hamlet as drama therapy and a three-man rap version of Othello.
There's nothing like that in Great Books: rapid-fire enactments of War and Peace, Mickey Mouse ears on one of the Three Musketeers, and one-word wrap-ups of the classics feel tame after you've experienced Bible's Moses, like an ancient David Letterman, recounting the Top 10 Rejected Commandments.
Fortunately, Great Books does feature some special moments: the existential fraternity "Signa Phi Nothing," the Iliad's Paris as a Frenchman in a red beret and a Dating Game segment featuring Jane Austen, George Eliot and Virginia Woolf as hopeful bachelorettes. But there are also the meaningless instructions to the audience to sneeze whenever the word "Plato" is spoken and the unnecessary observation that the Divine Comedy isn't funny. Shakespeare, Bible and American History may have been hit-and-miss, but when they hit they were hilarious. All Great Books deserves, even at its best, is a knowing chuckle.
The Nervous Subconscious. This is the psychoanalytic approach, which says that stories from the Bible and American History (and maybe even Shakespeare) have a sacred status in our psyches, so sacred that any critique of them renders us deeply uncomfortable, that discomfort then leading to our nervous, booming laughter. When we see the Patriarch Abraham being dubbed "Sir Cumcision," or watch the fathers of our country getting high on "Monticello Gold" we're profoundly (though subconsciously) outraged and worried, and all that troubled mental energy breaks through the surface as unbounded mirth. But our relation to the classics of literature isn't as fundamental: We can watch the Great Books' actors parody Joyce's Ulysses, Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Thoreau's Walden without once feeling that anything personal has been referenced. A laugh without anxiety feels minor. And is.
Actor Incompatibility. The three actors who star in All the Great Books (abridged) — Drew DeCaro, Matthew McGee and T. Scott Wooten — are talented fellows, but there's not the least bit of chemistry among them in either act. This may seem to be what the script requires; after all, DeCaro is supposed to be a high school coach, McGee a literature professor and Wooten a student teacher, all called together to help us pass a remedial course in English. But they're too emblematic.
DeCaro, for example, is pure coach and nothing else: gruff, dictatorial, macho. McGee is a stereotypical academic: mild-mannered, Anglified, well-spoken, sincere. And Wooten, though less specific than the others, is exuberant, vulnerable and most prone to dress in drag. Can we be blamed if we never feel that these actors make a team? Director Karen Lamb keeps her comedy moving at a brisk pace, but she's ignored the minute-to-minute evolution of her three thespians' relationship. As a result, the onstage spectacle is always less riveting than it might be.
The Capacious Theater. American Stage is not a very large theater, but it's bigger than the Shimberg Playhouse of the Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center, where I saw the earlier RSC plays performed by Jobsite. This may not seem to matter much, but I'm convinced that the pressure-cooker feel of the smaller theater space made the antics of the Jobsite troupe come across as more spontaneous, more urgent and more personally daring.
The set for All the Great Books is supposed to be a high school auditorium, but in the American Stage version it's the exterior of a house (with bookshelves strangely arrayed outside), and there's seemingly all the room in the world for parodies of Little Women, War and Peace and Moby Dick. A smaller space might have forced the three actors to form something like a real relationship.
So finally: All the Great Books (abridged) is funny but not deep, inventive but not inspired, pleasant but far from riveting. If you love literature, you'll like it, but if you can't tell Silas Marner from Jude the Obscure, you'd better pass it up. In any case, you'll have a chance to reconsider it some months from now: It's on the Jobsite schedule to be produced next January in Tampa.
Remembering Dick Gilman. If you were reading the New York Times on Oct. 31, you saw that the critic Richard Gilman had died in Japan at age 83. According to the Times, "As a drama critic at Commonweal and later at Newsweek, he typically championed the iconoclastic and the cryptic: the directors Jerzy Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin and Peter Brook; the playwrights Harold Pinter and Peter Handke. And he constantly dismissed the more naturalistic, commercial fare found on Broadway. … Plays, he said, should be 'enactments of consciousness' that free the mind from traditional perceptions."
Dick Gilman was my teacher at Yale School of Drama from 1977 to 1980 and was the most inspirational teacher I ever had the pleasure of knowing. His Drama 47 class, devoted to showing and critiquing new works by playwriting students (of which I was one), was the focal point of our experience each week.
Gilman himself was the reason: Not only did he stand for the best in theater, the most ambitious and intrepid, but also he seemed to sum up, in his muscular, combative presence, an idea of great art as something worth fighting for. He was fast-talking, witty, good-humored and charismatic. He could be scathing when he wanted and compassionate, too. He expected us to know the entire history of dramatic literature, and because he expected it, we did our best to catch up. All of us wanted to win his approval. And occasionally we did.
I can still see him in front of 100 student playwrights, actors, directors and designers, holding us spellbound by the power of his intellect and the quickness of his wit. He stood for theater as an urgently necessary art form, not a distraction, not a pastime. Like any great teacher, he made us want more than we had. I'm still trying to navigate by the light of his beacon.
This article appears in Nov 8-14, 2006.