Adapting and condensing a historical theater epic down to fit into a tiny storefront theater space sounds like a fool's errand. But as regular Chicago theatergoers know, the Windy City's industrious theater artists can often surprise and delight in re-imagining great works on a drastically smaller scale.
Unfortunately, Skyline StageWorks' reduction of the Bard's work titled Shakespeare's Anthony and Cleopatra: UNDONE at The Side Project is not one of those happy occasions. UNDONE offers some interesting staging ideas now and then, but doesn't stand alone dramatically on its own merits.
Audiences who have never seen Anthony and Cleopatra or know much classical Hellenic history will likely feel out to sea with the major plot points in UNDONE. More experienced Shakespeare fans will also probably need to jog their memories of past and more complete productions of Anthony and Cleopatra to help piece together what's offered and what's missing in this intermission-free show.
UNDONE adapters Patricia Henritze and Shawna Tucker have structured their riff on Anthony and Cleopatra as a flashback and reduced their cast to just four actors. There's the title characters respectively played by British actor James Sparling as the breakaway Roman general and Shawna Tucker as the vivacious Egyptian queen, Drew Mierjeweski as the eventual Roman emperor Octavius ( later Augustus ) Caesar and Bill Gordon as a generalized "Player" to take on multiple roles of messengers, military colleagues and servants.
Perhaps what Henritze and Tucker were aiming for was to focus on the politics-versus-private conflicts of the powerful title lovers. But what comes across in UNDONE is a sketchy Cliff's Notes condensation of famous speeches and scenes from Shakespeare's original with glaringly low-budget production design elements.
Director John Arthur Lewis does introduce some creative touches to align with this small-scale and internalized approach. Lewis' ideas range from depicting a battle between Anthony and Octavius as a high-stakes card game to using a basketful of plastic toy soldiers to represent an army.
But more often than not, the lack of solid historical or dramatic context to the storyline in UNDONE does a disservice to the performances. The actors may know the logical progression of their characters' actions in the overall plot, but their impassioned performances don't always communicate what's actually going on. A few actors also could have been sharper on their memorization based upon the invited press performance.
While practically every Shakespeare play is performed nowadays in edited-down editions, Skyline StageWorks' UNDONE shows the unfortunate effects of when too much is taken away. What's left is most definitely Shakespeare undone.