With Shakespeare Kits, All the World’s a Stage

Carl Martin has scant patience for actors who strut and fret their hour upon the stage--even if they are performing Shakespeare.

For this high school drama teacher, Shakespeare’s plays are a rollicking good time. And everyone can join the fun with Martin’s boxed versions of Shakespeare, edited for living room performance and containing appropriate props such as plastic daggers, horns and small coffins.

“There are so many things you can’t get from a page that you can get from standing up and cracking jokes or flirting or doing a sword fight,” Martin says.

The Home Shakespeare Festival collection includes three plays so far: “Macbeth,” “The Merry Wives of Windsor” and “The Merchant of Venice.” Martin’s pared-down versions take 35 to 45 minutes to perform.

The boxed supplies, including 10 copies of the script and directorial notes, can be augmented with props made at home. For “Macbeth,” performed recently at a Raleigh bookstore, Martin hung a dagger from a pole and dangled it in front of Macbeth as he intoned, “Is that a dagger I see before me?”

The witches’ caldron? A brown paper bag with “caldron” written on the side. Macbeth’s severed head? A cabbage. The trees of Birnam Wood, advancing on Dunsinane castle? A droopy branch from a tree.

“The point is, you can do this at home,” he says.

He has sold about 225 games this year and has 500 more in his guest room where he assembles each box by hand. Barnes & Noble recently ordered 795 copies to test-market in New York City and Washington, D.C.

Martin, 32, began abridging Shakespeare in his first teaching job at an inner-city school in New Orleans. He wanted his students to enjoy Shakespeare the way actors enjoy the playwright--”You learn Shakespeare by playing Shakespeare.”

So he trimmed “Hamlet” and changed some of the language to suit the regional dialect. Friends started commissioning edited plays for their own amusement.

At a high school in Richmond, Va., in 1994, he trimmed the usual running time of “Merchant” from 2 1/2 hours to 45 minutes for a final acting class project. It was a rousing success, especially when Aragon pulled his fool’s head from a casket: It was a picture of Oliver North, then running for a U.S. Senate seat.

Through a mutual friend, financier Warren Buffett learned of the “Merchant” script and requested a copy: He was bound for China with a group that included Bill Gates, and each guest was responsible for an evening’s entertainment. Buffett wanted to play Shylock, the moneylender.

At the end of 1998, Martin was diagnosed with thyroid cancer. While recovering, he had the time to expand his “Merchant” project. He tightened it more, to 35 minutes, and dreamed up props to accompany the script. Last Christmas, he sold enough copies of “Merchant” to encourage him to take on the next two plays.

The boxes sell for $39 each, a price Martin expects will drop if they are mass-produced.

So far, his boxed plays have prompted no cries of outrage from Shakespeare devotees. One is even quite approving.

“At first I thought, this is insane, there’s no future in this,” says Jack O’Brien, artistic director at the Old Globe Theatre in San Diego, to whom Martin sent a mock-up boxed play for his opinion.

He changed his mind after examining the contents.

“He’s taken off a lot of the pretension and the sort of overwhelming responsibility of playing Shakespeare and made it sort of goofy and silly and charming,” O’Brien says.

“I don’t think this is a steady diet. But I’d bet anything it’s going to encourage people to take the plays at face value and not feel they’re graduate degrees every time you open one up.”

Martin’s descriptions of plays and characters show the fun he gets from Shakespeare. For example, his off-the-cuff summary of “The Merry Wives of Windsor”: “I’m drunk. I want to sleep with you. Oh, you tricked me.”

Or his reason for casting his editing eye upon “King Lear” next: He can include fake eyeballs for the eye-gouging.

And, by the way: “There’s some good poetry in there too.”

When 10 people show up at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh to take part in “Macbeth,” which has 19 characters, it’s no problem: The instructions show how to play multiple characters with as few as four actors “so you don’t have to read a love scene with yourself.”

Among his early warnings to the evening’s company: “No one is allowed to beg off because they’re not good at acting. . . . We’re not the Royal Shakespeare Company. We’re just some strangers at Quail Ridge Books.”

The two daggers are tossed in the middle of the floor since just about every character needs one at some point. “When you need to kill someone, just grab one,” Martin says.

Cues are missed, instructions ignored and one of the weird sisters sits down too soon, not realizing her scene continues on the next page. One dagger blade snaps off in the first sword fight. None of the miscues defuses the group’s enjoyment.

“I’m just into literature--and being a nut,” says Deanna Harris, a librarian who played Lady Macbeth.

“My plays are doable and fun,” Martin says. He believes they should “make the challenge seem inviting, the challenge of using words to seduce someone, to make someone laugh or explore the ethical nature of ‘Should I kill the king?’ ”

Home Shakespeare Festival:

https://www.homeshakespeare.com