At the end of a private vault tour at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., Austin Tichenor responded to a question posed by his wife about the greatest treasure he could ever find.
“A manuscript written by Shakespeare in his own hands,” he replied.
That inspiration led him, along with Reed Martin, to create Shakespeare’s “Long Lost First Play,” which is coming to Genesee Theatre April 28.
Martin and Tichenor – writers, performers and managing partners for the Reduced Shakespeare Company – devised “this huge mélange of almost every character and every famous speech from Shakespeare, mashed together in a new, but familiar story line,” Tichenor said.
They crafted a plot in which Puck and Ariel (two famous Shakespeare characters from different plays) have a merry war and their rivalry leads to chaos, which brings Hamlet together with Lady Macbeth, and the three weird sisters, who end up being King Lear’s daughters, and so on.
Tichenor and Martin like to tell the tale that they themselves discovered this long lost play beneath some bones in a hole in the ground in England. The original play would have run 100 hours, so they reduced it to 90 minutes.
Tichenor, a Glencoe resident, said the comedic play works on two levels: Shakespeare lovers will get every inside joke. Plus, those who grew up having to read Shakespeare in high school and not necessarily liking it, but nonetheless having characters like Romeo and Juliet permanently etched in their heads, will find the play “funny.”
Tichenor, Martin and actor Teddy Spencer will perform the play at Genesee where the audience will hear references to the “Ides of February,” which came before the “Ides of March,” and the “edible complex,” a play on the Oedipus complex.
They’ll hear snappy lines such as, “Oh, that this too, too salad fresh were a tuna melt.”
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“We each play 12 or 13 characters – there are over 50 characters in the show,” Tichenor said. “We have a crack backstage team helping us get in and out of the characters. That’s also the fun of it. In the play, the audience witnesses a celebration of the magic of theater. You get bedazzled by the speed and the pace of what’s going on.”
The Reduced Shakespeare Company was founded in 1981. Martin joined in1989 and Tichenor in 1992. Today, they co-manage the company that includes a cast of actors and a stage crew that travels around the world performing comedic plays redux style – for example, “The Complete History of America (abridged),” and “The Bible: The Complete Word of God (abridged).”
They’ve performed at the White House, the Kennedy Center, the Lincoln Center and in London’s West end, as well as other well-known stages.
Tichenor and Martin met while studying drama at the University of California at Berkeley. They then got masters of fine arts degrees, Martin in acting and Tichenor in directing.
They studied Shakespeare as part of their curriculum. Tichenor performed in several Shakespearean plays including “Hamlet,” in which he portrayed Claudius.
At one of his first jobs as associate director of the American Stage Festival, Tichenor was asked to create six to eight pieces for young audiences.
“So I started adapting Shakespeare plays – 45 to 50 minutes of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream,'” and others.
“I got my start reducing Shakespeare there. Children’s theater was a fantastic training ground.” If you can get an audience of 500 kids to shut up and listen, then you can probably do the same for adults, he said.
Writing the Long Lost First Play of Shakespeare involved what Tichenor called, “a lot of spit balling ideas. We’d say, wouldn’t it be funny if we did this? There was definitely trial and error. I wrote a 15-page story line about what happened to a character. We read it out loud and we all agreed – yeah, nobody cares, so we cut it.
“We wanted to tell a story that made sense. We also wanted it to be funny,” he said.
He said it’s more difficult to write and perform a good comedy than it is to be a brain surgeon.
In a comedy, you get “gasps and laughs,” along with “moments of poignancy,” he said.
Long Lost First Play premiered at the Folger Shakespeare Theatre last year with excellent reviews. Two different casts are touring in the U.S. and in Europe.
Tichenor is celebrating his 25th year with the Reduced Shakespeare Company. “It’s the best theater job in the world,” he said. “I’m acting, directing, writing. I’m also casting. I’m also marketing. I get to do so many things. I’ve gotten to travel all over the world. I wouldn’t still be doing this if it wasn’t working. “
Sheryl DeVore is a freelance reporter for the News-Sun.
William Shakespeare’s ‘Long Lost First Play’
When: 7:30 p.m., April 28
Where: Genesee Theatre, 203 N. Genesee St., Waukegan
Tickets: $19-$32.50
Information: 847-263-6300; www.geneseetheatre.com