International School spoofs the old bard

This has been a difficult season for English-language theater in Panama. It’s not that it has been without its moments of excellence, but the little Ancon Theatre hadn’t been close to packed for a year or so and the Theatre Guild has been going through a transition period beset by misfortunes.

So leave it to the kids from the International School of Panama to keep the flame burning. Without much publicity outside the school, they packed the little playhouse. And not only that, they met the accepted standards and passed with flying colors.

The standards? William Shakespeare set those, way back when. (This reviewer has said before and still believes that Shakespeare’s contemporaries, the committee who wrote the King James Bible, were the ones who created the greatest and most influential work of English literature. However, that was only after the glovemaker’s son from Stratford-on-Avon raised his generation’s expectations to a level that has endured all these centuries.)

So did the ISP students do a top-notch Shakespearean performance? Yes and no.

“The Compleat Works of Wllm Shakspr (abridged)” is an outrageous spoof of the timeless classics with which anyone with much of an English-language education will be familiar. However, to pull it off the actors had to credibly perform shards of the old bard's work and integrate these pieces into that most difficult of things to do well, a comedy. And that they did.

The night’s best performances were by the leading lady, Mariana Velez, who was mainly cast in male roles (Hamlet, Henry IV) and by the leading man, Michael Smith, who spent most of the night in drag (Juliet, Cleopatra, Cressida, Ophelia). Between his zany antics Smith gave the occasional hint that he could perform “serious” Shakespeare very well. Velez left no doubt at all. Natural instincts may have something to do with this, but a great deal of the credit has to go to their teachers, director Jerry Duggan and assistant director Mary Richards.

Hmmmm --- a white rap version of Othello? A bilingual (Elizabethan English and Latin) rendition of Julius Caesar getting the big chop? Ophelia as a cross-dressing nutcase in a day-glow wig? Modern academia getting sent up with weird footnotes by Richard Ballard and Gabriela Arosemena? All in a night’s performance.

By the time you read this, the two-show run, which took place on May 21 and 22, will be over. However, if you are a regular fan of Panama’s little English-language theater scene the skills learned and standards met and set in this high school production will surely be reflected in adult performances to come.

arts

International School to the rescue