Kellams: Tuesday night at 7 p.m., the Reduced Shakespeare Company is back at Walton Arts Center. This group has made audiences around the world laugh with shows like The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), The Complete History of America (abridged), and The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged).
The idea: merge highbrow, middlebrow, lowbrow, slapstick, puns, and everything else into a less than two-hour romp inspired by a really big subject. Tuesday night, their show All the Great Books (abridged) will cover the literary canon in a tight 98 minutes.
These are their words: “We’ll have a little Dickens, a short Longfellow, a reduced Proust and tiny Tennyson.” They combine The Iliad and The Odyssey into something called “The Idioddity.”
Reed Martin is co-writer and co-director of the show. He says the first part of putting together a show like All the Great Books (abridged) is deciding which books to include.
Martin: We did a lot of research. Okay, well, what are considered the top 100 books of Western lit? And then what of those? What do we think most people are familiar with? What do they have to study in school? What were they sick of? Let’s make fun of that.
Also, Austin Tichenor, my co-writer and co-director—what do he and I have ideas for, for scenes and sketches that seem funny? So we kind of whittle it down that way. And then we always workshop our shows because sometimes we think something’s a joke and it turns out just to be a sentence.
Yes, the audience is our third collaborator. They are kind of binary. They either laugh or they don’t. And that’s very helpful.
Kellams: Well, what about books that we all are aware of? Maybe we’ve tried to read and we didn’t get past page 10. I’m thinking Ulysses. I mean, are there jokes we can make if we haven’t actually gotten too far into the book?
Martin: Yes. Like Ulysses. That’s kind of the joke. One of the things—Ulysses, yes, it’s known for being impossible to read, right? And we cop to that in the show as we’re performing it. A lot of it’s sort of stream-of-consciousness inner monologue, you know, what are these characters thinking? And so as we perform it, the audience starts to hear our inner monologue. And one of the things we’re thinking is, “I wonder if they figured out that I haven’t read this book.”
Kellams: I’m curious, have you read Ulysses?
Martin: No.
Kellams: Good.
Martin: We did. I read the CliffsNotes.
Kellams: Even those were tough.
Martin: That was tough.
Kellams: And there are some books, of course, that people, you know, it’s either life-changing or very serious subjects. Yet I imagine you can find that almost anything, in the right way, with the right turn of phrase, with the right piece of attention, can be funny.
Martin: Honestly, the more serious it is, the easier it is to make fun of. Our first show with the Reduced Shakespeare Company was The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged). And our version of Hamlet is much funnier than our version of Comedy of Errors, because people are—it’s so serious, it doesn’t take much to tweak it to get a laugh. So yes, the serious parts are much funnier than the funny parts.
Kellams: So I understand that as performers or writers, there is a challenge in what if this doesn’t land? You don’t get a laugh. I’ve seen performances by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, and an equally big challenge is when we’re laughing so hard we miss a line or two.
Martin: Well, what we say is we slow down for the good ones. So we want the laugh as much as the audience wants the laugh. So I would say if you missed a joke, it probably wasn’t a very good one and we wanted to keep moving.
Kellams: I heard an old vaudeville axiom that was “be rehearsed, make it look spontaneous.” Is that some of the spirit here?
Martin: You know what? That’s very astute. Thank you. Yes.
Ideally, it looks like we’re making up most of it on the spot. And that’s good acting, whether it’s comedy or not, is to make it look like it’s just occurring to you and you’re doing it for the first time. And people say, “Gosh, how do you do that? You’ve done the show a thousand times in 12 different countries.”
But it’s fun, right? It’s fun to do it. And it’s also instant gratification. If you do it right, people will laugh. And if it doesn’t seem spontaneous, they’re not going to laugh as much. But that’s absolutely the trick.
And there’s also stuff that, in quotes, goes wrong every single performance. And people go, “Oh, it was so funny when you forgot your lines there.”
“Thank you. I don’t think I’ll burst your bubble, but that was all scripted.”
Kellams: It’s been at least 20 years since I’ve seen The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), but it seems to me there was at some point a tiny Godzilla that was part of a joke. Maybe I’m misremembering. Maybe I’m wrong. But what I love about your productions is the surprise, the pop culture surprises that seemingly come out of nowhere but connect or are a callback.
Martin: Yep. And that’s part of the fun: absurdity, right? People love to be surprised. The Godzilla—we do a performance art interpretive dance version of Troilus and Cressida. And for some reason, yes, the mechanical Godzilla appears. But it ties into the performance art, and it’s just so unexpected. Yeah, and that’s the fun part to discover. Rehearsal or performance, you know, some of the funniest stuff is something actually goes wrong, you know, early-on in some performance, and we sort of talk about it afterwards and said, “Well, can we make that look like it’s really going wrong every show?”
There’s a moment like that in All the Great Books where Don Quixote gets tossed a mop to be his steed. And one time the dresser, instead of throwing it into the doorway onto the stage, just threw it across the doorway. And so it didn’t end up on stage. It just flew across the door and off stage, and the audience roared. And then the dresser had to cross the doorway and get it, and then cross the doorway and bring it back. And then they stuck their hand out the door and handed it to Don Quixote. And it was so hilarious. We’ve kept it ever since.
Kellams: What is the feeling when something lands for the first time and it’s uproarious laughter? What is that like?
Martin: It’s the best, you know. That’s why we get into it.
Austin and I own Reduced Shakespeare Company. We’re the co-writers. We’re the co-directors. All of that stuff is kind of long-term, deeper satisfaction. But to perform it, that instant gratification of performing it, it just feels really good.
You know, in the world today, honestly, people could use a good laugh, a couple of hours of just, you know, smart, funny distraction. After 9/11, we took out The Complete History of America (abridged). We took it to Arizona, and we were going, oh, is it too soon to be doing this? And so many people came up to us and said, “Thank you. We needed a laugh. We needed a break from all of this.”
My father was a doctor, you know. Comedy isn’t brain surgery, but I think it makes people feel better.
Kellams: Reed Martin is co-writer and co-director of the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s All the Great Books (abridged). It’ll be on stage at Walton Arts Center Tuesday night at 7 p.m., as part of the venue’s 10x10 Series.
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