Back in Washington, The Shakespeare Theater Company's free production of Love's Labor's Lost in Rock Creek Park brilliantly illustrated how to make Shakespeare fun and relevant to young people's lives.
Director Stephen Fried, who took the production to Stratford Upon Avon last year, sets the play against palm trees and the strains of a sitar in 1960s India. A la the Beatles, three members of a famous rock band leave behind the trappings of their fame and seek enlightment with an Indian lord.
But when some pretty ladies zip into the neighborhood on brightly colored Vespas, the musicians and their guru find their oaths
"barren tasks, too hard to keep,
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep."
Not to see ladies, study, fast, not sleep."
None want the rest to know their vows are weak. They express their longings surreptitiously, dragging a drumset onstage and whipping out electric guitars for lovesick solos. But such secrets rarely keep, and the solos soon meld into a smashing, crashing rock performance.
If we treat Shakespeare's works as living, breathing creations that revel in the ridiculous, revile the low and honor the sublime in each of us -- no matter what our cultural tradition -- we meet the conditions behind his original appeal across the classes in Elizabethan England.
But if we present his plays as ossified, dusty tomes, our kids slip away from the lovely lilt of their language and deeper into the ignominious annals of staccato text messaging.
In Fried's world, when the guru and his erstwhile followers finally give up and decide to pursue their desired women, they dress as Russians in the same spirit as those Vassar kids.
What did a Russian in the 1960s look like, Fried asks?
An over-the-top sight gag.
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