Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival

William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) The articles in this study guide are not meant to mirror or interpret any productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to bean educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the plays (in any production at any theatre) a bit more thoroughly. Therefore the stories of the plays and the interpretative articles (and even characters, at times) may differ dramatically from what is ultimately produced on the Festival’s stages. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, communications director and editor; Phil Hermansen, art director. Copyright © 2017, Utah Shakespeare Festival. Please feel free to download and print The Study Guide, as long as you do not remove any identifying mark of the Utah Shakespeare Festival.

For more information about Festival education programs: Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street Cedar City, Utah 84720 435-586-7880 www.bard.org.

Cover photo: Riley Shanahan (left) as Riley and Luke Striffler as Luke in the Utah Shakespeare Festival’s 2017 pro- duction of ’s Long Lost First Play (abridged). William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)

Contents Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play A Reduced Shakespeare Company Strikes Again 8

Utah Shakespearean Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis: William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)

An ancient manuscript is discovered in a treasure-filled parking lot in Leicester, England (next to a pile of bones that didn’t look that important). It turns out to be the long lost first play written by a seventeen-year-old Shakespeare and includes his most famous characters and most familiar speeches. Three friends attempt to abridge this ridiculously long story and assume all the roles in this madcap crazy mash-up, led by Puck and , sworn fairy enemies.

4 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters: William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged)

Austin: A pompous intellectual Reed: An enthusiastic tough guy Teddy: An innocent man-child

Playing, in order of appearance:

Chorus Pompey Antipholus Cardenio Dromio of Syracuse Pericles Puck King Lear Oberon Holofernes Marina Ariel Bear Hamlet Cleopatra Lady Macbeth Richard II Dauphin Kate Mistress Quickly Sir John Falstaff Goneril Proteus Regan Valentine Henry IV Juliet Henry V Richard III Henry VIII Beatrice Malvoliago 1st Witch Petruchio 2nd Witch 3rd Witch Julius Caesar Bottom Timon of Athens Viola Dromio of Ephesus Cesario

and William Shakespeare

Utah Shakespearean Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwright: William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) By Lisa Larsen For a pair who has made their name writing “abridged” versions of some of the most clas- sic works in the world, the list of accolades garnered by Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor runs pretty long. Take for example, Martin’s litany of professional performance venues including London’s West End, Kennedy Center, Lincoln Center Theatre, Pittsburgh Public Theater, La Jolla Playhouse, the White House, Madison Square Garden and eleven foreign countries, just to name a few. But his claims to fame don’t end there. Martin toured for two years as a clown/ assistant ringmaster with Ringling Brothers/Barnum & Bailey Circus and has done voice work with the animated feature Balto. Meanwhile Tichenor cut his performing teeth on a “boldly conceived kindergarten puppet show.” His resume has since grown to include more puppetry, writing more than twenty plays and musicals for young audiences, television performances on 24, Alias, Felicity, Ally McBeal, and The Practice, as well as creating colorful characters for the “Complete (abridged)” shows he also co-wrote. In 1993, Tichenor joined forces with Martin at the Reduced Shakespeare Company where Martin had been working since 1989. Together the two of them have been capitalizing on their ability to “reduce,” “condense,” and “abridge” a wide range of unwieldy topics—like the Bible and Shakespeare’s complete works—into humorous, digestible portions that delight audi- ences around the globe. Both Martin and Tichenor graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, with Martin receiving an MFA in acting from the University of California San Diego and Tichenor receiving an MFA in directing from Boston University. Tichenor is a former adjunct faculty member at Plymouth State College and Rivier University in New Hampshire, while Martin is an adjunct faculty member at Napa Valley College and Sonoma State Junior College, lead- ing lectures and master classes at the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, New Zealand National School of the Arts, and more. Their most recent collaboration, William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) opened to rave reviews in 2016 and tells the “not-quite-factual (well, not at all factual) story of an ancient manuscript purported to be the first play written by William Shakespeare,” accord- ing to press materials on the Utah Shakespeare Festival website. Even their promotion of the play in written interviews as well as portrayed on YouTube, illustrate Martin and Tichenor’s talent for storytelling, humor, quick-witted word play, and puns. “‘Long Lost’ is definitely a bit of fan fiction—our fantasy of what a seventeen-year-old Shakespeare might write about and what kind of interactions between characters we’d like to see,” Tichenor said in an interview with American Theatre. “Like Shakespeare and his sources, we’ve taken what was useful to us from the canon and changed what suited us.”

6 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 A Summary of the Play (abridged) Many a playwright and Shakespeare enthusiast has likely longed to discover the manu- script for the first play ever written by the Bard. Rather than waiting around for some- one to find such a treasure, however, Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor of the Reduced Shakespeare Company, decided to take matters into their own hands. Combining the flavor and flair they have become known for with successful proj- ects including The Complete Works of Shakespeare (abridged), The Complete History of America (abridged), The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged), and others, William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) condenses the poignant eloquence and winding soliloquies of each of Shakespeare’s plays into a ninety-minute pun-filled romp following the tale of a feud between Ariel from and Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Their rivalry creates supernatural chaos among characters from all of Shakespeare’s plays,” Tichenor said in an interview with the American Theatre. Characters include Hamlet, Lady Macbeth, Richard III, King Lear and his three daugh- ters, Viola from Twelfth Night, and many more. After opening to stellar reviews at the Folger Theatre in Washington, D.C., in 2016, “Long Lost” comes to the Utah Shakespeare Festival in a regional premier, taking advantage of the new Eileen and Allen Anes Studio Theatre to round out the 2017 Utah Shakespeare Festival season which will also feature Shakespeare in Love, Romeo and Juliet, Guys and Dolls, As You Like It, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Treasure , The Tavern, and How to Fight Loneliness. “This is a season with something for everybody, and one that propels us into the next stage of our development as a theatre company,” says Joshua Stavros, media and public rela- tions director for the Utah Shakespeare Festival. What audiences may or may not get from the “Long Lost” discovery is anything remotely factual or true to Shakespeare’s actual language. “At least 60 percent of the play is actual Shakespeare, sometimes repurposed and put into weird and interesting new contexts,” Tichenor said. “Most of the play is in actual verse, either Shakespeare’s or ours.” “I dare you to tell the difference,” Tichenor jokingly added. “No, it won’t be hard at all.” Whether you’re a Shakespeare scholar or experiencing the Bard for the first time, it likely won’t matter, the show promises to deliver on all fronts.

Utah Shakespearean Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 The Reduced Shakespeare Company Strikes Again with William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) By Kelli Allred, PhD The Reduced Shakespeare Company (RSC), whose gifted playwrights penned The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), have struck our collective funny bone again with a comedy that promises to challenge the wits of the best actors and the most devoted audiences Cedar City has ever seen. When archeologists unearthed the bones of King Richard III from beneath a parking lot in Leicester, England in 2012, the event triggered the imaginations of Reed Martin and Austin Tichenor of the RSC. The pair immediately determined to use this new-found trea- sure as fodder for an imaginary play that might have been buried alongside the king and unearthed at the same time. The playwrights’ outlandish assertions balloon as the twenty-first century duo claim that the new-found script was written by none other than the Bard himself. The actors have the audacity to gaze into the audience and attest that the script they are about to see—found buried with the bones of King Richard III—is Shakespeare’s first ever attempt at writing a play, which accounts for the appearance of so many familiar characters. When the lights come up on William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play, audiences will immediately recognize the opening lines of Twelfth Night and Henry V combined: “O, if a muse of fire be the food of love, let’s eat!” The rest of the play is comprised of plotlines, set- tings, characters, and dialog from all of Shakespeare’s plays. Using the Elizabethan tradition of men playing the female roles, a company of three male actors play all the characters—a Herculean feat. The stagehands act out an assortment of set pieces and props. (Yes, it’s hard to imagine, which is why you need to see the play!) Actor 1: “We can’t do this by ourselves!” Actor 2: “Of course, we can.” Actor 1: “No, we can’t. Look at the cast list. There’s 1,639 characters in here!” Actor 3: “The three of us can do that.” Actor 2: “Easily. Besides I’ve made some cuts. . . . This thing is over 100 hours long.” Rest assured that the play should run just under two hours with one intermission. Playwrights Martin and Tichenor have found a recipe for comedic success that includes liberal use of literary devices: irony, visual incongruity, verbal doublespeak, alliteration, allusion, fallacy, hyperbole, verbal irony, sarcasm, double entendre, euphemism, metaphor, and more. If you need to look these up, do it now (www.literarydevices.com); there’s a quiz coming up! The liberal use of literary devices guarantees the viewer/reader a sense of satisfaction: Ah, I got that! This intellectual gratification is precisely what language arts/literature teach- ers have been striving to instill in students for eons. Catching the allusions (Oh, I know what that line comes from!); spotting the anachronisms (Hey, wait. Those didn’t exist in Shakespeare’s time!); understanding the meanings behind the myriad malapropisms (Haha, he said that but meant to say this) are “the stuff [geniuses] are made of!” One critic said that “a lighter-than-normal dose of 16th century English and a generous mix of contemporary and local allusions take the edge off, making this production a sweeter deal for more diverse audiences” (Derek Schwabe, Maryland Theatre Guide, May 2016).

8 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Who Wrote Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play? The Reduced Shakespeare Company came into their own in the 1980s after writing and performing the award-winning The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), which has been entertaining audiences from Broadway and London theatres to local and school plays. By setting the bar high, the playwrights push the limits of performing with “blind enthusiasm and boundless energy” and acting “genuinely surprised” and responding “honestly” to one another and to each new audience. The Notes to the actors suggest that they “keep the show fresh and timely by updating the many topical references,” and they caution the actors to “come up with your very own put-downs of annoying famous people where required” (The Complete Works of William Shakespeare [abridged], 1987.) The RSC—also the acronym for the Royal Shakespeare Company in London—has created a theatrical dynasty of “abridged” and “reduced” works: The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged); All the Great Books (abridged); The Complete History of Comedy (abridged); The Complete History of America (abridged); and several others. Can You Count the Plays? The first half of William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play ends when all 1,639 of his characters wash ashore on a wooded island, thanks to a tempest. The actors return from intermission and provide the audience with a re-cap of the first half of the production: “Among those now lost in this forest are a merchant from Venice, a Danish prince picked up from an English , the entire court of the King of Naples, seventeen different pairs of twins, and an Egyptian queen. You should see the asp on her! . . . We should also mention that King Lear has found his three daughters, a woman has disguised herself as a statue, Richard Duke of Gloucester has been crowned King Richard the Third, and the little wooden puppet Petruchio has been swallowed by a giant whale. . . . A soldier named Titus Andronicus is surviving in the woods by eating pies made out of his enemies, a young poet named Orlando is designing theme parks. . . . A woman named Rosalind has disguised her- self as a boy, while her friend Celia has disguised herself as a slightly different girl. Falstaff is still on the run with Dromio’s gold; Dromio is still on the run from Juliet; and skulking and scheming in the woods is the evil bitter Puritan lieutenant named Malvoliago.” Here is your assignment. Reread the paragraph above and find examples of the follow- ing literary devices: 1. Verbal doublespeak 2. Hyperbole 3. Malapropism 4. Euphemism 5. Visual incongruity 6. Anachronism One of the actors reveals that the play will take 400 minutes to perform, but another assures the audience that he has made cuts and will keep the audience informed about what has been cut; nevertheless, these two hours of theatrical whimsy will be chock full of come- dic antics dating back to ancient Greek comedy. Keep an eye out for • Ad lib and improvisation • References to current events • Quick-change artists • Versatility • Lightening-speed tempo

Utah Shakespearean Festival 9 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 • Breaking character and the fourth wall • Mocking the audience, the theatre, or the city • Props run by a team of stage hands • Puppets and masks used by zany actors • Sparse use of sets, lights and sound Physical comedy punctuates the play’s witty and imaginative dialogue. For example, the three witches from Macbeth become King Lear’s three daughters, chanting a mish- mash of their original witchy lines mingled with modern cultural references. How many different references can you find in this verse spoken by the witches/daughters? “We’ve hurt daddy’s feelings. What shall we Do? Witch, please. We’ll do whatever we have to. Dogs that bark and cats that mew We’ll get Lady Macbeth and Hamlet too Expecto Patronum and Allakazoo We’ll get her, my pretties – And her little dog too! Put ‘em together and whaddaya got? Bippity-boppity boo!” And, now, part two of your assignment: 7. Which line is chanted like a rap? 8. Which line is taken from Macbeth? 9. Where does J. K. Rowling fit into this dialogue? 10. Which terms come from a Disney film? 11. Where do you hear the Wicked Witch of the West? This is Shakespeare that even a disinterested teenager will be hard pressed to sleep through; moreover, this is a play that even the most reluctant reader may find to be an enjoyable, albeit challenging, read! Students of Shakespeare will be clambering for a copy of William Shakespeare’s Long Lost First Play (abridged) to use in acting classes, compe- titions, and auditions. Answers 1. “You should see the asp on her” 2. Different pairs of twins 3. Malvoliago: combination of two antagonists, Malvolio and Iago 4. Eating enemies vs cannibalism 5. Petruchio . . . whale 6. Orlando designing theme parks 7. “Witch, please” 8. “Dogs . . . mew” 9. “Expecto Patronum” 10. “Allakazoo, Put ‘em . . . boo!” 11. “We’ll get her . . . dog too!”

10 Utah Shakespearean Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880