UF students Michael Ortiz and Diego Zozaya revised and personalized "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)," and the pair’s collaborative effort is premiering this weekend.
The Florida Players are presenting "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)" Friday at 7:30 p.m. in the Squitieri Studio Theatre in the Phillips Center, located at 3201 Hull Road.
Directors Ortiz and Zozaya were able to make the play their own by incorporating current events into the play and switching the cast from an all-male cast to an all-female cast.
The play follows three women attempting to put on a production that consists of every Shakespeare play in under 90 minutes. The time limit causes the characters to draw up peculiar ways of interpreting Shakespeare’s works, and the directors said they are all guaranteed to leave the audience laughing.
"They do a ton of crazy stuff from a Romeo and Juliet parody to Titus Andronicus as a cooking show to doing Othello as a rap," said 21-year-old Ortiz, co-director and UF acting junior.
The play also includes an interesting take on Shakespeare’s "Hamlet." The second act is devoted to the actresses playing out Hamlet several times, increasing in speeds with each time.
"It goes faster, and then it goes faster and then they do it again backwards," Ortiz said. "It’s pretty crazy."
Karen Marulanda, a 20-year-old UF acting junior, is one of the three actresses performing in the play. She plays both herself and several other Shakespearean characters. Having transferred to UF this semester, this will be her first time acting in Gainesville.
"I had previously seen a Florida Players show that left me in awe; their production of ‘Tragedy: A Tragedy’ really inspired me to join," Marulanda said. "I also already had a couple of friends who were involved and they encouraged me to audition."
Florida Players is a UF student-run theater company that allows students of all majors to explore the world of theater and showcase their work in doing so, according to the company’s website. Ortiz considers Florida Players a creative environment that provides a new outlet for people interested in theater.
"It’s a family," he said.
This is Florida Players’ first show of the 2015 fall season, but it wasn’t intended to be part of the season at all. A spot for another show had opened up, along with the opportunity for Ortiz to direct a show for the first time.
"The artistic director approached me about directing the show and I said, ‘Yeah, let’s do it’ and then Diego and I talked about it and we were like, ‘Let’s do it together,’" Ortiz said.
It was also the first time directing for co-director Diego Zozaya, 19, a UF acting sophomore. Zozaya said directing this play was a formidable challenge but having Ortiz, one of his best friends, working with him helped make it a lot easier.
"We were going to collaborate on everything and make sure it wasn’t Michael’s vision or my vision but our vision together," Zozaya said.
Since it was the first time for both directors, they experienced first-hand that unlike what most people think, directing isn’t just telling people what to do.
"There are other things you don’t expect, you know like having to figure out with the set designer what dimensions work and working with the light designer on what lights work and what lights don’t," Zozaya said.
Ortiz agrees.
"We’ve had to assemble a stage management team, a team of designers; we’ve had to rewrite certain parts to get them updated and catered so it applies to women and not men; and we’ve just been helping our actresses out throughout the creative process as well."
The show captivates the audience not only with its interaction and improvisation but with switching the traditional all-male cast to an all-female one. For Ortiz, making the cast all-female gives a new spin to the play and tests the concept that only males can do comedy.
"I feel like the show kind of takes that idea, turns it backwards, and it really shows how great and how funny women can really be," Ortiz said.
Zozaya also really enjoyed working with the actresses.
"Working with the ladies was a blessing because they brought so much that we could work with, and it just made our jobs easier," he said.
The team has spent six weeks rehearsing the production, and the actresses have been able to practice interacting and improvising with all those who have been sitting in on their rehearsals, according to Marulanda.
"I love all of the improvisation and audience interaction elements of our show," Marulanda said. "It was challenging at first to really differentiate each character and I had a lot of fun discovering how each character speaks and carries themselves."
The directors also think the audience will be able to enjoy themselves when watching the show just as they have enjoyed themselves working on it.
For Ortiz, it’s also a learning experience. He feels that by watching the play the audience will get to learn how greatly influential classical theatre is and how it transcends time and is still relevant today.
"I feel like a couple times people tend to learn when they don’t think they’re actually learning," Ortiz said.
The directors urge the audience to come prepared to laugh and get up on stage, but most importantly to attend the show. As Ortiz put it, it’s three women putting on every Shakespearean show in 90 minutes. It sounds impossible but Ortiz insists that no one would want to miss this.
"Seeing is believing," he said.
