Theatre in Review: Polishing Shakespeare (59E59)Brian Dykstra's cockeyed, often hilariously cankered view of the American theatre, begins with a modest proposal. Janet, a young playwright, is summoned to a not-for-profit theatre company where the artistic director, Ms. Branch, and Grant, a major donor, offer her a berth in a new program, rewriting the Shakespearean canon for contemporary audiences. To be sure, everyone is asking only for a few textual nips and tucks: "No dumbing down, of course," cautions Mrs. Branch. "More friendly is the thing," Grant says. There's nothing friendly about Polishing Shakespeare, which, deploying a thoroughly accessible modern verse style in, yes, iambic pentameter, harvests comic hay out of ossified institutions, craven administrators, bullying billionaires, and a theatrical culture engaged in a mad rush toward the lowest common denominator. Janet is properly horrified, but she might be aware that such a program exists in real life. It's called Play On Shakespeare, and it commissions writers to smooth over those complex Elizabethan locutions that might otherwise defeat those with short attention spans. (The two selections I've seen were as pointless as you might guess.) In any case, she goes on the offensive, insisting (to Mrs. Branch's affront) that Shakespeare's perfectly intelligible plays are, too often, victimized by concept-happy directors: "It's just that no one does/The plays. They do some version of the play," she notes, decrying such innovations as "Cymbeline atop a flying chair/Hermione trapeze-ing through the air." It's a lengthy, luscious takedown, and Kate Siahaan-Rigg, who plays Janet, does it full justice. Siahaan-Rigg, who, with this performance, becomes a name to watch, returns later with an equally caustic summation of the way theatres program their season. A woman of color like her "checks two boxes. An equaling/Somehow, to 16 more Caucasian males/With fully half the opportunities/Yet somehow in the press they call this 'balance.'/Some black, some Asian, women in the mix/An LGBTQ, two Latinx/16 white guys -- 16 everybody else." Clearly, Dykstra knows the territory, and he has more than a few notes for his colleagues. Fed up with all the nonsense being dished out, Janet accepts the commission -- she is, after all, mired in student debt and lacking in health insurance -- but nobody is prepared when she returns with a thoroughly reimagined, modern version of Henry VIII. Noting that Shakespeare and John Fletcher's historical potboiler was written out of necessity, not artistic inspiration, she packs her rewrite with savage portraits of the theatre company's board members, going so far as to name names. (One such passage, a brutally detailed account of an inveterate spritzer, is a malignant thing of beauty.) Is the script an act of career suicide? Or could it play into Grant's hands, aiding him in his takeover of the board? In addition to composing some of the most delectable rants to be heard in months, Dykstra deftly re-engineers this fraught triangle several times, arranging for each character to be cornered by the others as they battle for creative and administrative control. Margarett Perry's production is geared for maximum snap, thanks to actors who speak their speeches trippingly on the tongue. That would include Dykstra, the author, as Grant, one of those modern-day robber barons devoted to preaching the gospel of "disruption," which is another way of saying he enjoys spreading chaos. Kate Levy sparkles as Mrs. Branch, whether airily dismissing Janet's degrees from Notre Dame and Brown, turning apoplectic at the prospect of a mass donor revolt, or, turning bare-knuckled, threatening to claw back Janet's commission. Siahaan-Rigg is authoritative throughout. Such verbal facility is especially needed because Polishing Shakespeare doesn't put its best foot forward. The frantic, three-way exchange that opens the play could use a little sobering up, so drunk is it on its cleverness. For example, Ms. Branch notes, "Grant grants these grants to worthy/Deserving theatres who do great work...Work worthy of a grant that Grant might grant." (Is your head hurting yet?) A few minutes later, she refers to her benefactor as "our own God of Giving, Giant of/Generosity, The Big Bad Baron of/Benevolence, our Captain Copius/Th'Unquestioned Master of Magnanimous." (A little less alliteration, if you will.) A literary smuggler, the playwright keeps sneaking phrases like "To be or not to be" and "Aye, there's the rub" into the dialogue. He is bucking for an advanced degree in aggressive wordplay, and it isn't until Janet launches her salvo against the directorial profession that the fun kicks in. Also, Perry and her lighting designer, Tyler M. Perry, might do more to highlight the play's Pirandellian aspects, especially its tendency to move in and out of Janet's script. Still, we don't get satire with this vigor and malice every day, and one is grateful for such a remarkably stimulating entry in a summer theatre season usually full of fluff. Tyler Perry's office set is amusingly fitted out with Shakespeare references (book covers, coffee cups, planters, pencil holders, etc.) that neatly dovetail with the play's theme of commodification of the Bard. The costumes, by the collective known as MuMbles, are thoroughly accurate, especially Grant's trying-too-hard casual look. Ariana Cardoza's sound design includes a harpsichord theme that degenerates into hip-hop, a sign of the discord to come. Wearing his lighting designer hat, Perry devises amusing, between-scenes chases that highlight the set's built-in Wills. The lighting also features in the finale, which finds art and commerce still fighting for primacy at center stage. "There's danger in poetry," Grant says at one point, and that's certainly true here. Polishing Shakespeare (produced by Twilight Theatre Co. in association with Kitchen Theatre Company) isn't interested in mincing its words; its astringent humor provides a cool blast of reason in an oppressive heatwave. --David Barbour 
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