Insights A Study Guide to the Utah Shakespeare Festival Shakespeare’s Worst! The articles in these study guides are not meant to mirror or interpret any particular productions at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. They are meant, instead, to be an educational jumping-off point to understanding and enjoying the play (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 from what is ultimately produced on stage. Also, some of these articles (especially the synopses) reveal the ending and other “surprises” in some plays. If you don’t want to know this information before seeing the plays, you may want to reconsider studying the information in this section. The Study Guide is published by the Utah Shakespeare Festival, 351 West Center Street; Cedar City, UT 84720. Bruce C. Lee, publications manager and editor; Clare Campbell, graphic artist. Copyright © 2020, 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 Art for Shakespeare’s Worst! by Cully Long. Shakespeare’s Worst! Contents Information on the Play Synopsis 4 Characters 5 About the Playwright 6 Scholarly Articles on the Play Two Gents, or Not Two Gents 8 Utah Shakespeare Festival 3 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Synopsis The actor playing Launce is bored and disgruntled about being a servant in Shakespeare’s supposedly worst play, Two Gentlemen of Verona. While the other actors play out the story of romance, betrayal, and mistaken identity between two sets of lovers, the actor playing Launce is all too happy to tell the audience exactly what he thinks about the story, his fellow actors, and life in general. 4 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Characters An Actor Playing Launce: Playing Proteus’s servant, this actor is not happy with his career or this play, and he lets the audience know it. An Actor Playing Proteus: Best friends with Valentine, Proteus loves Julia. An Actor Playing Valentine: Best friends with Proteus, Valentine falls in love with Silvia when he goes to Milan. An Actor Playing Speed: Valentine’s servant. An Actor Playing Julia: A lady, Julia is in love with Proteus. An Actor Playing Lucetta: Julia’s maid. An Actor Playing Silvia: Valentine’s love. An Actor Playing Duke: Silvia’s father. A Sock Puppet, Crab: Launce’s dog. Utah Shakespeare Festival 5 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 About the Playwrights: Mike Reiss and Nick Newlin By Lisa Larson While the idea of one of the nation’s renowned Shakespeare festivals producing a spoof entitled Shakespeare’s Worst! may seem a little outside the norm, anyone familiar with this side-splitting comedy and the playwrights behind it will likely be touting Shakespeare’s Worst! as one of this season’s best at the Utah Shakespeare Festival. Created by Peabody and four-time Emmy award winning writer for The Simpsons Mike Reiss, with co-author Nick Newlin, Shakespeare’s Worst portrays a quick-moving version of Two Gentlemen of Verona—with a twist. Capitalizing on some opinions that Two Gentlemen of Verona is the Bard’s worst play, Reiss and Newlin’s version features one actor who is aware of the production’s shortcomings and decides to helpfully point those things out to the audience throughout the show. “It’s fast, it’s funny, it’s educational,” Reiss said in an interview in 2017. His typical tongue-in-cheek humor is evident as he adds, “You can tell your friends, ‘Oh, I saw Shakespeare,’ not ‘I got drunk and saw a quick show.’” The run time for Shakespeare’s Worst! is quick by Shakespeare standards—only about seventy-five minutes. But it’s packed with all the humor one might expect from someone who made his career writing the scripts for America’s favorite cartoon family, The Simpsons. Mike Reiss Reiss’s involvement with Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and more may be among his most internationally acclaimed projects—but it certainly isn’t his only claim to fame. Early in his career, Reiss worked with Al Jean as a writer and producer on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson, ALF, Sledge Hammer, and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. Then in 1989 he and Jean took their talent to the animated world of Springfield, Illinois, writing the first thirteen episodes of the Fox Network series The Simpsons. “The Simpsons wouldn’t have been the Simpsons without (Reiss),” Sam Simon, co-developer of The Simpsons said in an interview in 2009. Eventually, after season four of the show, Reiss left to create The Critic, another animated project, this time about film critic Jay Sherman. During his career, Reiss has written jokes for Joan Rivers, Garry Shandling, Johnny Carson and Pope Francis. You can also see Reiss’s handiwork inside numerous film screenplays. He’s written jokes for the film Ice Age and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs, as well as Horton Hears A Who. Reiss has published several children’s books and he even co-authored his own memoir, Springfield Confidential: Jokes, Secrets and Outright Lies from a Lifetime Writing for The Simpsons. With all this television and book writing experience filling up his resume, Reiss eventually decided to turn his attention to the stage. Why? “Because after a point you get tired of earning money and having people see your work,” Reiss says, in a way that 6 Utah Shakespeare Festival 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 only he can, in a YouTube interview. Turning his talents to the stage seemed to Reiss like a natural fit. In some ways, he said he felt like he’d been “writing a play a day” when he was writing for TV, according to an A&E interview in 2013 discussing his play I’m Connecticut. In television, everyday “you write it and you watch it,” he said. “You get very good at assessing what will and won’t be funny, what a scene needs. Playwrights don’t (usually) have that advantage.” It’s an advantage that was once again put to great use when Reiss and his former college buddy Nick Newlin decided to collaborate to write a spoof on what some consider to be the worst play Shakespeare ever wrote. Joining Forces with Nick Newlin Adorned in a jester-style hat and equipped with a disarming, self-deprecating style, Nick Newlin recounts his relationship with Reiss in a 2017 promotional video for their joint project, Shakespeare’s Worst! “Mike Reiss and I went to college together many years ago. After college Mike became an Emmy award winning Simpsons comedy writer and I became a juggling jester at Renaissance fairs around the country,” he said. Newlin’s career eventually led to teaching Shakespeare at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC. As the author of a book series titled, 30 Minute Shakespeare, Newlin said his goal is to get kids up on their feet performing the work of the Bard in a fun and accessible way. Ultimately Newlin’s ability to make Shakespeare fun and Reiss’s ability to make fun of Shakespeare led to the perfect collaborative team. Although Reiss said his somewhat pedestrian research on the topic revealed at least eight contenders for the title of being the worst play Shakespeare ever wrote, Newlin felt strongly the top, or bottom, of that list is The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and ultimately Reiss agreed. “The end of the play is such a train wreck that in our show we have to play it three times in a row just to let it sink in,” Reiss said in a BBC interview in 2017. “That is why I picked it,” Newlin said in the same interview “One of the characters tries to go after his best friend’s girlfriend and then when she says no, he basically tries to attack her. Then the other best friend comes up and castigates him for it, but for some reason two seconds later the best friend whose girlfriend has been attacked is offering his girlfriend to his friend and they’ve made up in three seconds for no reason. It’s just not right.” The play itself, however, comes together in a way that is not only right, but hilarious. Shakespeare’s Worst! will take place as a full production inside the intimate Anes Studio Theatre at the Utah Shakespeare Festival Aug. 5 through Oct. 9. Utah Shakespeare Festival 7 351 West Center Street • Cedar City, Utah 84720 • 435-586-7880 Two Gents or Not Two Gents By David G Anderson Some may find it curious given the eponymous oeuvre of Shakespeare that Mike Reiss—long time writer on The Simpsons—and Nick Newlin would land on The Two Gentlemen of Verona as Shakespeare’s worst play. Granted there is that geographical incongruity of sailing by ship to and from inland cities, and unequivocally the most horrible ending in a Shakespearean play. It is as if Shakespeare looked down at his Rolex, noticed the time, and said, “Two and a half hours?” and hurriedly scribbled, “The End!” However, within the expansive cosmos of Shakespeare there are likelier candidates for “worst” like: Troilus and Cressida and Timon of Athens.