 "Photo: Derek Stout/The Daily Texan")
It seems odd to celebrate Shakespeare in conjunction with Halloween. Yet tonight and tomorrow, Austin Shakespeare will be putting on a production starring the eeriest characters of Shakespeare’s plays.
The venue’s location, The Curtain Theater on Coldwater Canyon, is much like a hidden treasure chest. The stage, a replica of the original Curtain Theatre used in Elizabethan times, is worth marveling at — it is a stage similar to one Shakespeare would have used.
The production, entitled “Spooky Shakespeare,” is a compilation of all of Shakespeare’s eeriest and most haunting scenes from many of his plays, including “Macbeth,” “Richard III,” “The Tempest,” “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Hamlet” and “The Merry Wives of Windsor.”
Several characters are related to Shakespeare’s fascination with fantasy, seen in his use of ghosts, monsters and fairies.
But, the play isn’t a collaboration of all of the characters into one large, chaotic production. In fact, each scene is central to the play it originally appeared in, and every scene differs from the one before. Even though they seem unrelated to each other, they share an eerie nature and are, at times, emotionally haunting.
“Every verse of Shakespeare has meaning,” said Christina Gutierrez, the dramaturg of the play and a UT doctoral student in performance as public practice. “If the [pronunciation of the] stress pattern or the iambic pentameter is off, it completely changes the meaning of the dialogue. So, it’s important to hit every line with clarity.”
Shakespeare wasn’t just a man who wrote about two households divided over a romance, Gutierrez said. In fact, his work can relate to every single human emotion, especially fear, thus making the Halloween production unexpectedly appropriate.
“Shakespeare is all about his stories,” she said. “He knows what makes us love, what makes us happy, but most importantly, [he knows] what scares us. [For example,] in ‘Richard III,’ Richard was England’s most unpopular king, and when he returned, he realized the majority of his nobles were against him. In the play, he gives a whole speech about death all tied to his fear of history and how he will deal with the weight of what history has placed upon him. All of it is tied to his inner fear.”
The Halloween production is the ideal escape away from the gaudy costumes of trick-or-treaters and a great retreat to an array of beautiful Elizabethan costume pieces. The cast does a wonderful job of transporting audiences into a sea of Shakespeare’s eeriest scenes.
At 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, in front of a stage covered in fake cobwebs and flameless burning candles, audiences can catch the show for $15 at The Curtain Theater on the shores of Lake Austin.
