It’s finally here. After two years of delay, “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare Abridged” is going to be performed on March 31, April 1, and April 2 in the new auditorium of Meridian High School.

To sum it up, this play is going to be a play within a play. The cast members will play themselves putting on all 37 works of William Shakespeare, the most famous of which include “Romeo and Juliet”, “Hamlet”, and “Macbeth”. 

All of Shakespeare’s plays are known for being long and emotional. Mr. Northrip, the director of the play and theater teacher at Meridian, took this as a challenge.

“The play is predicated on the premise that it’s possible to perform all 37 of Shakespeare’s plays in 90 minutes time. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen any Shakespeare plays, but not one of them clocks in at less than two hours,” says Mr. Northrip. “It’s a lot of material, so it gives the performers a lot of opportunity to have fun with the Shakespeare text as they compress what is a massive volume of work into a very small amount of time.”

By shortening all 37 of the plays rather than performing the whole of them, Mr. Northrip has allowed for the opportunity to change the plays and add a more modern twist. They have improved these plays to include more modern comedy without losing the late 16th and early 17th-century language.

“It is a comedy. It’s, I would say, a silly comedy. It has the sense of a street performance. It’s very fast-paced, high energy, off the wall, unexpected I would say,” says Mr. Northrip. “I’m sure Shakespeare understood that as time went by, different people would give his plays different flavors, as it were. I think he wrote some really great plays, and I think he wrote some really awful plays. He was not a perfect human being, but he gave us a lot of really great language, that’s for certain.”

With a cast of 30 students, Mr. Northrip has a lot on his hands, especially knowing that being asked to be goofy and childish is not always easy. 

“What makes the show really different from other shows is constantly asking kids to be more silly. High school kids often hesitate when it comes to being silly. They don’t want to look silly. Not all of them. Some of these kids just throw themselves in feet first but the request to just keep giving more of yourself, to not be afraid of how you look,” says Mr. Northrip.

Knowing this, Mr. Northrip starts all rehearsals with small activities to both get the creative juices flowing and get the students comfortable to perform.

“We start off every day with a little bit of improv, high energy. We throw a football around which I would say seems unusual for theater kids. Then the rest of it is like a lot of rehearsals: start sitting around a table where we just talk about the scene then we get to see it.” 

With only one week until March 31, this play is in the final stages of its completion and the cast is already buzzing for opening night. Let the shenanigans begin.