As They Like It

Whenever the slings and arrows of this outrageous modern life get him down, Garth Bishop takes comfort in the writings and wisdom of his old friend Bill.

As in Shakespeare.

For him, the works aren’t flowery passages and run-on soliloquies about kings, queens and countrymen who inhabited other lands centuries ago. They carry messages, hints about coping with people and events right here.

“These plays speak to me,” said the West Los Angeles book publisher, whose gray mop of hair makes him look more like a college professor discoursing on his beloved Shakespeare.

One night each month, Bishop and two dozen other faithful gather at a Culver City restaurant to have supper, indulge in a little wine and enter the Elizabethan world that Shakespeare so powerfully described.

For members of the Shakespeare Reading Club, the play is the thing.

In a city that gives the world $40-million movie blockbusters, where comic book characters rage and student reading scores plummet, these literary groupies find solace in some simpler, courtlier times.

They’re movie agents and schoolteachers, lawyers and bankers, psychologists and big-budget producers. They leave work early to reach the restaurant first so they’ll have first choice of parts to read.

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Before that, they’ll stand before the mirror at home and at once become Lady Macbeth or Othello, practicing the lines until the reading is graceful, true to the point.

“These plays are about human truths,” said Ellen Gameral of West Los Angeles, who works in a movie studio script library. “Each character personifies the daily stuff you see out in the world today. Whether it’s about greed or lust or ambition, these plays are extremely contemporary.”

Garth Bishop started the club two years ago on an impulse, believing that there were other people like him who “wanted to reread and relive the plays they haven’t seen since high school or college.”

At first, there were just a few friends. But then word began to spread. Bishop placed ads in a few local newspapers. Now, he says, the club numbers hundreds of members, about a score of whom show up at each reading.

There’s even a monthly newsletter, The Bard Times.

On Wednesday, the faithful gathered for an abridged reading of “Henry VI, Part I.” Set in 1422, the work--thought to be Shakespeare’s earliest historical play--deals with the English civil war under the reign of its young king after the death of his father, King Henry V.

Bishop says it’s somehow fitting that members, seated in a semicircle in a back room of the San Gennaro Cafe on Culver Boulevard, sip glasses of red wine as they read their parts.

In an aside Shakespeare might have appreciated, Bishop recalls the author’s famous insight about wine’s capacity to increase one’s desire for romance but lessen the ability.

Gameral says there are so many occasions in which she struggles for ways to describe a person or event in her personal life, only to fall back on the words of the old master. “Nine out of 10 times, he has written something that applies,” she said.

“Just the other day, I was describing a special woman friend of mine and found that Shakespeare did it better than I ever could in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ when he said of one of his characters: ‘Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety.’ ”

Eyes glued to the page, the group sat still for two straight hours Wednesday, engulfed in the passions of the Wars of the Roses. They spoke the lines of such characters as Gloucester and Winchester, Talbot and La Pucelle.

Some voices were meek and stumbled over the words. But others rang out clear and crisp, resonating as though spoken on the very battlefield itself.

Participants are required to read a selected play several times before its presentation to grasp content and form.

“I’ve read all these plays before,” said club member Patricia Pincus, a freelance writer from Beverly Hills. “But it’s a good discipline to know that I’m going to read one play each month. That way, I can plan things around it.”

Pincus has become addicted to Shakespeare’s “human psychology” and now wants to share it with her 9-year-old grandson: For his birthday, she bought him an abridged edition of several Shakespeare plays.

For Lawyer Byron Appleton of West Los Angeles, each play deals with a human frailty. With Othello, it’s jealousy. With Macbeth, it’s ambition. And for Hamlet, it’s sloth and indecision.

“These works aren’t square, they aren’t too scholarly,” he said. “They’ve attracted a bunch of friends who take pleasure in reading them aloud. To think that’s dull, well, that’s kind of sad.”

Jeanne Strauber, a sixth-grade math teacher from Tarzana, came to the Shakespeare reading for a singles column she writes for a local Jewish newspaper. “But I came back because I had a good time,” she said.

“At times the language gets a little flowery, but so what?”

Then she stopped and confided a little secret not lost on fellow group members: “I like reading the men’s parts better than the women’s.”

The readings have drawn Michelle McConnell to her father.

A year ago, they began attending the sessions together. Now the legal secretary says they have more to talk about than the mundane events of today.

“It’s fun to talk about great literature with your father,” she said. “Shakespeare has brought us closer together.”