Rife with clever combinations of rhetorical raunch and humor — from puns on the word “prick” to the collision of modern terms like “shithead” with iambic pentameter — this spring’s undergraduate theater production, “Beard of Avon”, hits a high in the field of low comedy as it explores the debate over William Shakespeare’s beginnings.
To the question of Shakespearian authorship, playwright Amy Freed develops an ambiguous answer. She reduces Shakespeare the “Bard of Avon” to Will Shackspur, a balding, barely literate country simpleton. She paints him as a stage-struck — and thus, willing — “beard” or front man for any number of prominent, well-educated nobles who have creative ambition, but not the class to display their output with their own names attached. Even the Virgin Queen herself has a pet project with “The Taming of the Shrew.” But despite his many demotions, Freed leaves this lesser Shackspur an inspired flair for poetry (he invents Juliet, but not Mercutio, for example) creating the warmth of Shakespeare’s plays, but not the wit.
In UCSD’s rendition, Earl Warren College senior Dylan Seaton is our gifted bumpkin. His parleys with Thurgood Marshall College senior Allison Dana provide a particularly comedic depiction of the bickering between Shackspur and his nagging manipulator of a wife, Anne Hathaway. John Muir College sophmore Brian Kelly, who plays Edward de Vere, the sexually voracious 17th Earl of Oxford and main brain behind the collected works, is also amusing, as his arched brow and haughty poses capture a well-suited, artsy arrogance. Supporting performances, however, are sometimes stilted — subtle Elizabethan accents and the proper inflection are enough to bring the flavor of the times and the point of the lines across, but not to make the audience feel them.
Pre-Shakespeare, a play was judged by the amount of rotten vegetation hurled at its stage. After, and partly because of Shakespeare, we have progressed to judgment based on intellectual dialogue — not only about the content of plays, or even the way one is staged or the quality of its actors, but also about subjects as far removed from the theater-going experience as the origins of their authors. Freed seems to say, “let’s get back to the basics and shamelessly entertain.” Sure, the bard may, in fact, be beard; Shakespeare may, in fact, be Shackspur and art may be artifice. But who really cares about the facts? Despite its subject matter, this production is more about laughing than thinking.
“Beard of Avon” will play Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. in the Potiker Theatre. Tickets for UCSD students are $10 and can be purchased at the theatre’s box office or by calling (858) 534-4574. For more information go to http://www-theatre.ucsd.edu/onstage/thebeardofavon.
