Scotch 'n' Soda, CMU's student run theatre group, has a tradition of hosting special performances during Homecoming Weekend. If I were to state that this year's homecoming play was a serious, perceptive adaptation of the entirety of William Shakespeare's work, I would be utterly off the mark. The play that I watched on Friday, the 26^th of November, was an uproarious parody of all of Shakespeare's works (plays, poems, and all) condensed into a few hours.

This brilliant play was conceived, and first enacted, by the Reduced Shakespeare Company. SnS' adaptation of this play was directed by Shaun Swanson, a Sophomore Physics and Mechanical Engineering major, and was on the whole smoothly executed. For the most part, I was laughing myself hoarse with the rest of the audience; however, there were times during the lengthyplay when the jokes became forced and the play almost descended into mediocrity.

One of the most noticeable aspects of the play was that the entire SnS crew (not just the three actors) was involved in demolishing the fourth wall. The fourth wall is the name given to the imaginary barrier between the actors and the audience, which usually prevents the actors from directly addressing the audience. Audience participation was a huge part of the performance. In one scene, the actors coerced an audience member to play the part of Ophelia, Hamlet's love interest, and then had the rest of us enact the parts of her ego, super-ego and id. Needless to say we were all thoroughly entertained.

It would be negligent of me not to mention the actors in this high-energy routine. The three actors (just three!), who played characters ranging from Titus Andronicus to the ghost of Hamlet's father, were Julie Brown, a Senior English major, Stephen Chan, a Freshman Business major and Joshua Patent, a Freshman in the Science and Humanities Scholars program. It's often been said that humor is the hardest form of creativity to get across to the audience, but these three performers were able to accomplish just that.

The production did have some flaws. The scene when two of the actors ran away leaving the third to entertain the audience was boring. The mannerisms and actions of the lone actor in this scene were very clichéd and provided the dullest point in an otherwise excellent performance. These sorts of troughs in the continuity of the play (far and few as they were) could have been edited to shorten the running time, which would have made this review seem less like a review and more like a fan boy prattling on about his favorite play of all time. Having thus been inducted into the humorous world of SnS productions, I'm looking forward to more of the same next year.

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