Last night, The Reduced Shakespeare Company performed “The Complete History of America (abridged): Special Election Edition” for Hillsdale’s campus. The Collegian sat down with Reed Martin, performer, writer, and managing partner of the Reduced Shakespeare Company. The group, which also includes managing partner Austin Tichenor and performer Dominic Conti, has performed in the White House and London’s West End, and the Kennedy Center, and has made TV appearances on PBS and BBC.
Your plays appear to be very off-the-cuff — is there a lot of improvisation, or is it mostly scripted?
We want it to look like we’re flying by the seat of our pants. The whole thing is scripted. That being said, we do design certain parts of the show with room for improvisation. In the show, in the second act, we take actual questions from actual audience members, so that’s improvised. But in most of our shows, there are a number of things that go wrong, but they’re planned to go wrong. We hope the audience really thinks they’re going wrong.
When you’re writing and producing plays, do you ever find it stressful trying to be funny?
I guess the stressful part is that it’s how we make a living. I think Austin and I both come from funny families, so being funny is fun — but you’re not doing it for fun, you’re doing it for a living. That part is stressful. I was newly married when we wrote “The History of America.” I read the script to my wife, and she didn’t laugh once. She would nod, and then she would shake her head, and then she’d nod, and then she’d shake her head. When we got to the end I said, “You didn’t laugh once,” and she said, “Well, it felt like I was listening to the mortgage.” So the nod meant, “Yes, that’s funny,” and shaking the head, “Nah, I don’t know.”
If Shakespeare saw your abridged version of his complete works, what do you think he’d say?
We think he would approve. He was a popular entertainer in his day — over the years he’s sort of evolved into high culture — but when he did his shows, everybody from the high to the low would come and see his show, and love it. The audience was right there in front of the actors, and the actors would acknowledge that, and Shakespeare wrote stuff where they would interact, so the fact that we’re interacting with the audience…I think he would take us out for a drink afterward. We actually perform in England a lot, so we went to visit Stratford-upon-Avon. We went to visit his grave, and we put our ear to the ground and did not hear any seismic activity, so we’re pretty sure he was not rolling over in his grave.
Do you have any authors or playwrights or comedians that you draw inspiration from?
Yes, too many to list, but I’ll rattle off a few: Monty Python, Saturday Night Live, Second City, classic “Looney Toons” cartoons, the Marx Brothers, Laurel and Hardy, Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, a lot of the standups from when Austin and I were kids — the Smothers Brothers, George Carlin, Cheech and Chong.
How did you come to be a part of the Reduced Shakespeare Company?
I was ready to leave the circus, and Daniel Singer, the founder, had gotten an offer to go be an artist for Disney, for their theme parks. So Jess, one of our co-founders, said, “I know a guy who studied serious Shakespeare in graduate school and has also studied clowning,” and it seemed like the perfect combination. He called me, and that’s how I got started in 1989. It barely became a full-time job a year later. So I guess like a lot of good things, it was done for the love of it for about 10 years.
Would you consider yourself an avid Shakespeare fan?
Yeah. I love Shakespeare. One of my goals is to be in or see live the whole Shakespearean canon. I’m about two-thirds of the way through. So yes.
