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Plenty of laughs, if it's attached to the works of William Shakespeare By BILL VARBLE Mail Tribune "The Beard of Avon" proposes that a stage-struck bumpkin named Will Shakspere left Stratford-Upon-Avon to become a minor actor in London and wound up as the beard, or front man, for the main author of the Shakespeare Canon, the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere. The fact that many people believe that's pretty much what actually happened never gets in the way of playwright Amy Freed's main goal, which is maximum fun with Shakespeare and Company. This is the authorship question as it might look directed by Mel Brooks and starring Monty Python. The production of Freed's witty farce that opened Friday night at Camelot Theatre, directed by Livia Genise, is brisk, bawdy, broad (props include a mechanical rat, an outsized codpiece and an actual slapstick) and very funny. Doggerel-spouting Will (Joe Charter), impressed by a hammy version of "Agrippina's Daughter" put on by a touring troupe of actors, leaves his shrewish wife, Anne (Judith Rosen), for the bright lights of London, where he's taken on as a "spear-shaker," or extra, by the troupe of Heminge (Charles Cherry) and Condel (Jack Seybold). He meets Oxford (Doug Warner), a jaded, bisexual wastrel who has a trunk of plays he's written but can't afford to have his name on, since pandering to the messy masses is beneath the station of high nobility. Despite Will's being an apparent simpleton — he suffers from "a most pernicious deficit of my attention's ordering" — the two hit it off. Oxford lends Will books to improve himself, and the student is soon adding a fillip here and there to the plays. Oxford sees that sometimes these aren't bad. He tells Will nonchalantly that it's OK to add "... a speech here, a soliloquy there ... some accidental insight into the soul of the common man ... ." Advertisement The enterprise is soon such a success that other secret scriveners among the aristocracy start showing up with their plays. Queen Elizabeth (the wry Diana Warner) herself even appears, having written a "Taming of the Shrew" that's in sore need of an ending (one branch of the Oxfordian heresy holds that the "Shakespeare project" involved numerous collaborators). Charter, a lawyer and justice of the peace in his day job, is an effective Will despite playing half his age. This is a farce, after all, and if we can have color-blind casting, why not age-blind? Playing the character as a frustrated nebbish (think the young Woody Allen), he handles the Elizabethan English with reasonable aplomb, and with his thinning hair and wisp of beard he even looks a bit like that Martin Droueshout portrait. Wearing outre makeup and a black wig that looks like more Louis XIII than Elizabethan England, Warner's Oxford is a hilarious caricature of the libertine aristocrat. We meet him in mid-dalliance with his paramour, young Henry Wriothesley (Brian O'Connor). Wriothesley is the man some Oxfordians, as those who believe Oxford was Shakespeare are called, believe was the "dark youth" of the sonnets. O'Connor is hilariously over the top. All this is great fun, with naughty lines, plenty of puns, fart jokes and even a slapstick, a double paddle that produces a loud whack when brought in contact with an actor's body. The actors speak verse, use snippets of famous lines from the plays and sonnets and even deconstruct their own lines as they wind up speaking in iambic pentameter. The more Shakespeare you know, the more you'll get out of all this. Dropped into the dialog are tongue-in-cheek references to "dull, stale, tired," (Hamlet), a "crimson river" ("Titus Andronicus"), cuckhold's horns (numerous comedies). There are nods to the musical "Oklahoma," the rocker Sting and the actor Mae West. No knowledge is required, though. Almost anybody will laugh at the notion that Oxford's plays, here the Shakespeare cannon, lacked "humanity." The plot recapitulates familiar Shakespeare themes. There's a bickering couple (Will and Anne as Beatrice and Benedick), a woman travelling disguised as a man (Rosalind, Viola, Portia), even a bed trick, or the surreptitious swapping of one woman for another. Shakespeare borrowed the bed trick for "All's Well That Ends Well" from Boccaccio and others. This time Will frolics with a tarted-up Anne he doesn't recognize. There is perhaps still another level to all this, a level in which Freed is musing on the vagaries of artistic creation, but she hasn't got much of anywhere to go with it, and it's never allowed to get in the way of the fun. The direction keeps things moving, the set's a corker, and the costumes are knockouts. The second act runs on a bit, which can be deadly in a comedy, but everybody is laughing so hard you barely notice. Reach reporter Bill Varble at 776-4478 or [email protected] . Mail Tribune Home | Local News | Sports | Business | Obituaries | Life | Opinion AP News | Archives | Site Map | Community | Classified Copyright © 1997-2006 Mail Tribune, Inc. All rights reserved. Privacy Policy | Terms & Conditions | Website Feedback online casinos news Home Security Systems California Casinos Men's Clothing Southern Oregon Loans --> GMAT Prep Fundraisers Send Flowers Entertainment Guide --> Casinos Canada Trunks, Footlocker Online Casino Reviews Advertisement s Advertisement