Read On, Macduff

Dawn Akemi was bent on gluttony of Falstaffian proportions.

No, the lithe actress with the long brown hair wasn’t starving for a joint of venison and a tankard of ale, the sort of fare favored by Shakespeare’s fat knight. She had gone backstage at the MET Theatre in Hollywood because she craved more of the Bard’s words--more than any sane mortal would ever want to chew. She had not been this way 12 hours before.

That was Wednesday morning, when Akemi walked into the MET to help read “Henry V,” the opening salvo in Company’s Marathon, an unpretentious, grass-roots annual event in which actors and just plain Shakespeare buffs spend 85 consecutive hours reading all 37 plays nonstop. The unwritten premise is that Shakespeare is the choicest food of an actor’s love--so read on.

After her morning eye-opener with “Henry V,” Akemi--one of 175 people who had signed up for the marathon--returned in the afternoon to read various roles in “Henry VI, Part I” and Viola in “Twelfth Night.”

And here she was again in the dressing room--curtained off from a stage that was set up as a reading parlor with two large, comfy couches and several easy chairs--trying to talk the marathon’s guiding force, Gordy Hoffman, into letting her pull a 2 a.m. shift with “Pericles.” She already was signed up for “Cymbeline” around daybreak, which would take her total to five Shakespeare readings in 24 hours.

“Nobody’s more amazed than me. It’s freakish,” Akemi, who was a certified public accountant before catching the acting bug five years ago, said of her suddenly ravenous appetite for reading Shakespeare out loud.

Hoffman, half-supine on a wooden chair, his bare toes digging into a burnt-orange carpet, urged discretion as the better part of valor.

“You’re crazy, Dawn. Your body’s going to give out. Please go home, sleep in your bed, take a shower. You’ll be all excited to read Cymbeline at 7:15 a.m.”

But Hoffman’s a fine one to talk about moderation.

The 37-year-old playwright and screenwriter, whose younger brother is actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, doesn’t remember just how or when he dreamed up the idea of a Shakespeare marathon back in 1996. It probably came to him when he was driving a cab at all hours in Chicago while trying to make it as a writer-director.

This is a guy who didn’t bother to read any of the plays in his college Shakespeare course at Kansas University, cruising through on Cliffs Notes. But he later took up acting and writing, and during a summer acting program in England in 1995, he found himself performing one of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

“The language came up through my heart and I started to cry.” A Shakespeare buff was born. Now, Hoffman does not hold himself out as an expert, just an amateur, in the original Latin and French sense of “one who loves.”

Hoffman continued the marathon after moving to L.A. in 1997. In the city that conjures up stories for the modern masses, he thinks, there is some karmic, nurturing importance in ensuring that all of Shakespeare’s plays be heard at least once a year.

“Here,” he says, “is an untapped reservoir of language and story. Each year the marathon wakes me up and tells me, ‘Stop thinking about the spec script you’re trying to sell to the studios and think about what you’re doing.’ If there’s a town in America that should be reading Shakespeare every year, it would be this town.”

On Wednesday, Shakespeare’s language and stories stayed pretty much within the small circle of participants: the four to eight readers who tackled each play and a handful of early arrivals who were awaiting their shifts. Mark and Bobbie Greenfield sat in the front row and followed along in a paperback text while their 19-year-old daughter, Melissa, read Olivia in “Twelfth Night.”

Admission was free, but no other nonparticipating spectators showed up, except for two people Hoffman said had come in earlier in the day, nosed around a bit and left without hearing an entire play.

For now, just having enough readers to carry out the mission is an achievement.

One year, Hoffman found himself reading the marathon-closing “Henry VIII” alone and bleary-eyed in the middle of the night. He packed it in, got some sleep and returned to finish the play the next morning.

Another time, the marathon fell seven plays short of completion--the overnight shift had petered out, and Hoffman returned to the theater to find a lone actor snoring over “Coriolanus.”

In 1999, there was no marathon: Hoffman waited until December, only to have the theater he thought he had rented boot him out in favor of a more lucrative attraction.

But bigger plans are afoot. This is the second year at the MET, where the leaders are enthusiastic about the marathon. Next fall, says artistic director Allison Gammon, the MET plans to use Company’s Marathon (Hoffman directs and produces his own plays under the moniker Company Theater) as a kickoff for two full Shakespeare productions of its own: “Macbeth” and “King Lear.”

Hoffman is working on outreach to the L.A. theater community: He hopes to assign about 10 of the plays to individual theater companies next year, reserving the bulk, however, for Shakespeare lovers who want to come out of the woodwork, lured by the fliers, Internet presence and word-of- mouth Hoffman relied on to cast this year’s marathon.

By 2016--the 20th anniversary of Company’s Marathon and the 400th of Shakespeare’s death--Hoffman aims to have built a nonprofit juggernaut that will be able to celebrate by mounting full L.A. productions of all 37 plays over the course of nine months, including performances by some of the leading national and international Shakespeare companies.

Hoffman says this will mark Los Angeles as the Shakespeare capital of the world.

Right now, things are a bit more modest.

Jaisey Bates rang down “Henry VI, Part I,” with an improvised trumpet flourish--”duh-duh-duh-duhhh!”--then howled, “Wahoo! Yeah!”

Without missing a beat, Hoffman quickly ushered in the next crew of readers, who began “Twelfth Night” without missing a beat, allowing the marathon to roll on, continuous and uninterrupted.

“If music be the food of love,” went the first line, “play on.”

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Company’s Marathon’s Shakespeare marathon continues today through 10:18 p.m. at the MET Theatre, 1089 N. Oxford St., Hollywood.