Drunk Shakespeare is accessible Shakespeare

On a Friday night during a long-awaited vacation in late May, I reached a mental state I can only describe as, “The most entertained I have ever been in my life.” This occurred at a small, traverse stage theater in Chicago tucked beneath the tracks of an L-Train and wedged between a Taco Bell and a Panda Express.

Even more unusual than the unassuming location was the occasion which brought me there: a Shakespeare play. Sort of.

More accurately, a performance by the cast of “Drunk Shakespeare,” a group of classically trained actors who give an abridged and heavily modernized rendition of one of The Bard’s works, in this case, Macbeth. Also, before the play starts, one of them takes four shots of hard liquor onstage to make things interesting, thus the titular “drunk.”

The show is exclusive to ages 21 and older, by the way. The audience gets a welcome shot of its own at the door.

The performance absolutely knocked my socks off, which was frankly surprising, because I’ve never liked Shakespeare at all.

I have the same ill-informed complaints every high school English teacher has heard a hundred times over. The phrasing is weird, the wording archaic, the historical context lost on me. On top of it all, I simply don’t get why sonnets are such a big deal. So while I recognize the cultural value these works have, that doesn’t mean I’ve ever understood or, by extension, appreciated the material.

These common complaints result from the time period the plays were written in, according to closest-available-Shakespeare-nerd Erin McCain, an English major at the University of Iowa who is also my twin sister.

“If you read enough Shakespeare, you’ll get to a point where you can kind of translate in your head what he’s saying, but if you’re like, a beginning reader … with no footnotes or anything, it doesn’t really make sense because it is kind of a different language,” she said. “When Shakespeare was writing, around the early 1600s, that’s kind of the beginning of modern English. It’s still using some of the linguistic patterns and grammar rules of old English.”

Still, you’ve got to hand it to the playwright. If one can understand what’s going on, the storytelling holds up.

Take the Porter from Macbeth, as an example. Immediately after Macbeth commits (his first) murder, we get a scene where this inebriated door attendant complains about having to answer some incessant knocking at the south gate. He compares his role to that of the gatekeeper in hell itself.

This is a 15-pound scene in a five-pound bag, juggling three important elements of the story simultaneously:

That’s an absolutely bonkers amount of weight to pull for one side character, in one scene, speaking 306 words divided between four lines. It takes a legitimate storytelling genius to pull off that kind of writing, and yet, it’s par for the course in Shakespearean plays according to people who understand them. Everything comes with layers upon layers of subtext that get deeper than most entertainment media can dream of.

However, as mentioned above, it can take weeks of classroom study, or in my case, a dozen Google searches and an interview with my sister, to really get the full weight of just this one scene.

Drunk Shakespeare circumvents the usual homework by redoing things.

The Porter walks onto stage, asking in a tone one might expect to hear at a frat party, “Is that pounding on the door or just this wicked hangover I’ve got?” before the knocking repeats, and he startles, saying something like: “Oh s---, it’s on the door. What the hell, it’s like 3 a.m.”

At the performance I attended, the Porter — played by Diego F. Salinas — then interrupts himself upon making eye contact with a front-row audience member (in this case my aunt) before jokingly but raunchily flirting with her for about three uninterrupted minutes. It’s worth noting that there’s a roughly 25-year age gap going on here, and that I have no idea whether this moment was semi-scripted or entirely improvised, nor do I know which option is funnier.

Is it a crude way to handle the scene? Perhaps. Does it lose some of the symbolic value of the original 307 words? Maybe. But it effectively gets the audience back on the page with a scene where everyone knows what’s going on, while defusing the tension after an earnest and well-performed scene of tension and anxiety between Macbeth and Lady Macbeth.

I laughed so hard my sides hurt.

Drunk Shakespeare features a whole bunch of these modernized interactions that keep the audience in the loop, and keep them laughing. Examples include a witches’ brew made of ingredients like Malört, rather than the original, “Eye of newt and toe of frog.”

Others still loop the audience in on subtext that even skilled readers of the text might miss. After the aforementioned witches tell Macbeth that he will be king, but also tell his pal Banquo that his son will be king, the two characters promise to sort out the implications later, but then they don’t. Instead, Macbeth tries to kill Banquo and his heir later in the play, out of paranoia.

Like an insightful note written in the margins of a rented textbook, Drunk Shakespeare draws that to the audience’s attention when it first comes up in Act I, with a stitch of plain language dialogue to the effect of:

“Man, that was a weird thing to say, maybe we should unpack that.”

“Nah, let’s do it later.”

“How about Act two?”

“I’m thinking Act three.”

“Sweet!” followed by a high-five and exit from the stage.

It’s hilarious, it coherently conveys the ideas of the original scene, and it shaves off time to fit the rest of the plot into 90 minutes. And the whole play is full of moments just like these, which I will not spoil for the sake of anyone thinking about a trip to Chicago in the near future.

In direct messages through social media a week after the show, Salinas said the synergy between intoxication and modernization was part of the design.

“Having a drunk actor onstage definitely helps make the text more accessible,” he said. “We take Shakespeare off the pedestal and return it to the people. Back in Shakespeare's day, theatre was seen as seedy, lowbrow entertainment. With a drunk actor, we're able to call attention to funny moments in the text that may usually go over people's heads.”

Through some stroke of genius, the performance still manages to feel like Shakespeare despite the liberties taken. This is because it makes no changes to those poetic moments that really need a solid delivery in iambic pentameter to hit home.

The opening scene of witches casting a spell (“Double, double toil and trouble,“ etc.) follows the original prose and immerses the audience as actors run around the room cackling and screaming. Lady Macbeth’s “Out, damned spot!” monologue is delivered in utter seriousness, conveying such anguish that I felt chills unlike anything I’ve felt at any live performance prior.

I truly cannot give this show enough praise. The acting was top-notch, the comedy out-of-this world, the drinks delicious. But what I appreciate most is that it made me understand and enjoy Shakespeare, something I’ve never done before.

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com