Five members of a group known as The Improvised Shakespeare Company put together a show titled A Scarecrow for an excited crowd of Lakeland students, professors, and others in the Bradley Building on Feb. 2.
The award-winning group hails from Chicago and knows so much about Shakespeare’s well-known Elizabethan style that they literally improvise for their audiences.
Before their production for Lakeland began, a member of The Improvised Shakespeare team explained to the audience, “Everything you’ll see tonight is made up on the spot. If ever you are wondering where the story is going,” he grinned and finished, “so are we.”
The actor then asked the audience to provide the company with what would become the title of the evening’s production. Immediately, someone near the front shouted, “A Scarecrow!” and a play was born.
The players devised a plot about a corrupt scarecrow king named Richard who asks his stable boy, Jacob, for help wooing the beautiful Lady Anne. Lady Anne, who doesn’t want to marry Richard, switches places with her sister Mary. But upon her arrival at the castle, Mary falls in love with Jacob.
This type of love triangle is typical of Shakespeare’s plays, but it was a new experience for the audience to see Shakespeare’s age-old tactic being constructed on the spot by the actors.
The actors, who all had to double (or triple) their roles in order to represent all the characters, also gave the story some “Macbeth”-like elements by portraying Welsh woodsmen rebelling against the king, and later, ghosts threatening the king’s life.
The company also held the audience’s attention with pieces of modern culture, including an impromptu song that sounded suspiciously like it was inspired by Disney’s “The Lion King,” a brief allusion to “Inception” when the king had a dream within a dream, and numerous references to “The Wizard of Oz” that built off of the play’s given title.
“I totally knew where they were going with it when they said ‘golden brick,’” said Miranda Miller, a freshman music major who said she has a love for all things theatre and added that she was thrilled with the performance.
The production finished with thunderous applause. The audience was delighted with the company’s hilarious interpretation of Shakespeare.
“I haven’t laughed that hard in a long time,” said Miller.
Krissy Olson, another audience member, especially enjoyed the antics of several of the minor characters and thought the ending was “pretty funny.”
Though it wasn’t the most family-friendly of productions, it certainly was popular with Lakeland students who needed a Thursday night break from studying. There was some off-color humor here and there, such as when Jacob and Mary fell in love and the other actors pushed them into a very sexual situation, complete with improvised mood-setting vocals.
The production was filled with jokes of old and new inspirations. It took the classic elements of Shakespeare and made them more readily available for the contemporary mind to grasp by interspersing modern references.
For those that missed the one and only performance of “A Scarecrow,” there is more information about The Improvised Shakespeare Co. at www.improvisedshakespeare.com