Main Street to present ‘The Book of Will’

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HOUSTON — If one walks into any bookshop, one is guaranteed to find two books — the Bible and The Complete Works of Shakespeare. However, the latter was never compiled during the Bard’s lifetime, and if not for his friends John Heminges and Henry Condell, the most celebrated playwright in the English language could have been lost to history.

How the collection came together is the subject of Lauren Gunderson’s play, “The Book of Will”, which opens Sept. 22 at Houston’s Main Street Theater.

Director Rebecca Greene Udden said the play highlights the importance of Heminges and Condell’s efforts to provide accurate versions of

Shakespeare’s work.

“I think the story is so wonderful — just the thought that there is a possibility we wouldn’t have had Shakespeare,” she said. “It’s a very real possibility that Shakespeare’s work would only have existed in corrupted versions of the folios that were printed.”

“The Book of Will” is a comedy and is written in contemporary language, Udden said. “It’s not written in Shakespearian high-blown language, so there’s nothing that will take people a while to get used to,” she said. “It is absolutely accessible to everybody, and I think it will really help illuminate a period of time that people may only know from one point of view, but it’s also very interesting to know how theater was produced back then.

“You’d do one show and then maybe you’d do it again in a week, or maybe it would be two months before you did it again and you had 20 minutes to get ready to go on. You learned your part and just did it. It’s just such a different way of work than we are used to, so I think that’s really fascinating for anybody who really loves the theater.”

Udden said that she hopes those who attend the play will develop a greater appreciation for Shakespeare’s work.

“A lot of people are put off by Shakespeare, but I think it helps to know that he wasn’t rushing his work,” she said. “He wasn’t sitting there thinking, ‘People are going to be studying this in high school 400 years from now.’ He was just writing to entertain and to express himself. I hope that even students who find themselves reluctant to study Shakespeare will understand what an extraordinary talent he was at the time, and the importance of how lucky we are to still have his work.”

One of the challenges Udden faced during the production is creating scene changes in a theater smaller than other places the play has been produced, she said.

“Playwrights write the plays with a proscenium theatre in mind, so they have quick scene changes where things appear and disappear,” she said. “We don’t work in that kind of theater, so we had to solve some of the scenic problems in different ways.

“There is sort of a dream sequence in which the bed disappears and, well, there is no place for the bed to disappear to in our theatre, so it’s just out there. In a proscenium theater you have a wagon that comes on and then rolls off, but in our theater, we have to have people come on stage to make the scenic changes, so it takes a few seconds longer and is not as seamless as you would see in a big proscenium theater.”

Main Street Theater was founded in 1975. The theater seats 99. It is located at 2540 Times Boulevard in Houston’s Rice Village.

Performances are Thursdays through Saturdays at 7:30p.m., and Sundays at 3 p.m. Tickets are $10 for students, and $36-$48 for non-students depending on date, section and availability.

All tickets are on sale via phone at 713-524-6706 or online at MainStreetTheater.com.

Story by Abigail Pennington, UP contributor