Tomorrow I’ll post short reviews of two movies we recently enjoyed—and you might, too!—but today, for readers who live in the New York-New Jersey area, I’m recommending The Book of Will by Lauren Gunderson at the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, on stage now through July 28. The story is clever, the acting is superb, and it’s no surprise that it was beautifully directed by Bonnie J. Monte, STNJ’s former Artistic Director who clearly knows exactly what she’s doing. Don’t miss it!
The story is this: A few years after Shakespeare’s death, members of the King’s Players lament his loss as well as the fact that poorly trained actors are using bastardized scripts to produce inferior versions of their adored plays—Lear, Macbeth, As You Like It. They recite the names in a litany of despair. Burbage says, “Just because that little froth can hold a skull he thinks he can play Hamlet? My soul is written into that part, and I’ll play The Prince till I die, and after that? They better use my skull for Yorick so I can spend eternity silently judging all else.”
It occurs to one of them—Henry Condell (played by Michael Stewart Allen)—that they know the plays best and they should produce an “authoritative version.” His friend John Heminges (Anthony Marble) doesn’t underestimate the amount of work this will entail, but by scouring attics and drawers and lodgings of other Shakespeareans, one way or another, through one difficulty after another, they cobble together “The Book of Will.” That is, the First Folio.
They saved for us the Shakespeare we know to this very day. And the audience is rewarded with witty use of familiar text snippets woven throughout the script. They were heroes of the first water.
Brent Harris plays the very theatrical Richard Burbage and sly printer William Jaggard to perfection, though it’s Jaggard’s son Isaac (Isaac Hickox-Young) who repeatedly rescues the project. Pearce Bunting brings Will’s old enemy Ben Jonson to disreputable life, and three women—Amy Hutchins, Carolyne Leys, and Victoria Mack—soften the men’s sometimes disputatious tendencies, but are no softies themselves.
Every theatre-lover today owes them big time!
STNJ productions are hosted at Drew University in Madison, N.J. (easily reachable from NYC by train). For tickets, call the box office at 973-408-5600 or visit the Box Office online.