THEATER REVIEW

"The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)"

7:30 p.m. Friday and Saturday; 3:30 p.m. Sunday

Kawananakoa Backstage Theatre

$15-$25

545-7170, www.hawaiireptheatre.org

The new production by Hawaii Repertory Theatre works best when we forget it's a stage play and begin to believe it's a spontaneous way of life for three actors. All good ensemble productions create a similar reality, but this one dissolves nearly all conventions.

"The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" bubbles over the stage, into the audience and beyond.

It has a script, reducing Shakespeare plays to snippets of comic parody, but the actors use their real names and — while they don't truly play themselves — develop a performance persona that is part improvisation and part rampant clowning around.

The mix also includes audience participation and local, topical references.

For instance, an actor who bolts from the theater in terror of playing "Hamlet" is later explained to have been found hiding out at the dock, waiting to board the Hawaii Superferry. "He didn't know . . ." is the melancholy comment.

In tone, the show still has the fresh, zany quality it surely enjoyed when Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield first produced it at the 1987 Edinburg Fringe Festival. It went on to a nine-year run in London and has had a couple of Hawai'i productions before this.

For Hawaii Repertory Theatre, the honors go to Jordan Savusa, R. Kevin Garcia Doyle, and Paul T. Mitri (who also directs). The trio definitely clicks, with Mitri as the lynchpin in a series of hysterical heroines in bad wigs who throw up into the audience.

(A full review of the production willl appear in The Honolulu Advertiser on April 1.)