`WLLM SHKSPR': THE BARD IS REDUCED TO LAUGHTER (REVIEW)

Why it took so long -- 400 years -- for someone to base a comedy on the excerpted tragedies of William Shakespeare is a mystery. No matter. Anyone who attends the River City Players' production of "The Compleat Works of Willm Shkspr (abridged)" will be elated that the off-Broadway production has been transplanted to Cape Girardeau for the weekend.

This outrageous, bawdy and at times sublime burlesque is dragged bodily into The Raven coffee house's drawing room by the no-holds-barred performances of George Kralemann, Rob Felker and Nick Ryan.

This is World Wrestling Federation Shakespeare, Monty Python meets the Marx Brothers Shakespeare, witty, perverse, blasphemous and downright funny.

Audiences will be left gasping for air by the nonstop put-on of literature's most venerated writer. The better to laugh some more.

Despite its youth (two high school students and a twentysomething), or maybe because of it, the cast nails Shakespeare to The Raven's Beatle poster-covered walls.

Ryan's hysterical Ophelia is just as hysterically funny, and his falsetto turns as Desdemona and Juliet will leaven their tragedies in my mind forevermore.

Kralemann is a chameleon who can ooze evangelistic fervor one minute and Alistair Cookean sophistication the next.

Felker adroitly plays the foil to Ryan's looniness, explaining his absences and bewilderments to the audience as if he himself weren't just as peculiarly engaged.

You don't have to be familiar with Shakespeare's plays to find humor in "TCWWSa," but the joke of playing the bloody "Titus Andronicus" as a cooking show does resonate a bit more.

The histories are covered as a football game. "Cordelia, you go long."

The impenetrable Scottish accent is the joke in the "Macbeth" scene.

The comedies are quickly dispensed with by the observation that Shakespeare's tragedies are much funnier.

Ryan leads a rap "Othello," and refuses to do "dry, boring, vomitless Shakespeare."

"TCWWSa" in fact is a Shakespeare primer, albeit one in which the Bard's bio can get confused with Hitler's.

The players even invite a few members of the audience onstage so that their psychoanalytic points about certain characters will be better understood. To those adventurous few, we commend thee as well.