Such are the revelations waiting for students in The Complete History of America (abridged), which enters the last month of a long run at Casa Manana's Theater on the Square. Director Joel Ferrell brought the script of Reduced Shakespeare Company's three-man assault on the history of the United States--dating all the way from the naming of the continent by Amerigo Vespucci to Monica Lewinsky's service on the presidential staff--to Fort Worth after it played seemingly every other city on the planet: New York, Boston, London, Dublin, Montreal, and, of course, Washington, D.C.
Those performances were part of a tour by the founding members of Reduced Shakespeare Company--Adam Long, Reed Martin, and Austin Tichenor--who began writing and improving together back in the early '80s. The San Francisco-based performers are perhaps more famous for The Compleat William Shakespeare (abridged), a two-hour satirical jitterbug through the entire canon of Shakespeare's plays that has already been performed by several companies in the area. Instead of bringing Long, Reed, and Tichenor here for a handful of performances, Theater on the Square has enlisted a pool of six talented local actors to alternate evening performances of a multi-character show whose physicality and mnemonic demands are considerable.
Watching a Thursday-night performance of The Complete History of America (abridged) with a small but receptive audience, I was initially disappointed that only one member of the cast you see in this column's photograph took the stage (Chamblee Ferguson, in the center). Other projects have dispersed Jakie Cabe and Richard Frederick, whose comic work with Stage West and Theatre Three has charmed me before (yet both men are scheduled to return to the show before it closes). Ferguson remained for this production, and two other Equity actors, Jeff Wells and Michael Henry (who also serves as the show's stage manager), join him. Ferguson and Wells are Tasmanian devils, tornadoes of diverse accents and attitude, managing to be funny even when they flub the occasional line. Henry is less sure-footed during the show's first half, not terrible but not as forceful or expressive as Ferguson and Wells, but regains his balance for some very funny moments during the second act.
Scenic designer David Yates has created a marvelous human-scale diorama with Greek statuary on both ends; it leads into White House-type pillars trimmed on top in (of course) red, white, and blue, and in the background sits a giant copy of the Constitution. Against this backdrop enter Ferguson, Wells, and Henry playing an off-key, arrhythmic version of "The Star-Spangled Banner." What ensues is a loosely connected series of parodies, sketches, and burlesque comic episodes that wouldn't be nearly as funny without three men who perform with shameless (but disciplined) enthusiasm. That may sound like an obvious statement, but the Reduced Shakespeare guys have bequeathed to Casa's actors some pretty familiar material--fart jokes, TV-show parodies, flamboyant homosexual shtick, and a lampoon of politically correct "inclusive" phrasing in a new, inoffensive "America, the Beautiful." Their considerable talents remind us why we laughed at raging queens the first time around.
The playwrights' mission is spelled out from the very beginning, when one of the actors insists that "history is the study of emotionally potent oversimplifications," before our three historians launch into an anthem about the discovery of the New World set to the Gilligan's Island theme. From there, the show unwinds in chronological order, or whatever: George Washington puts out a call for his Minutemen ("As lovers," he insists, "they're not as bad as you might think") and winds up getting midgets because the townsfolk thought he was asking for Minutemen. The Civil War is staged as a slide show, except Michael Henry screws up the slide projector: The actors are forced to pose in ridiculously posed tableaux beneath a spotlight that turns on and off with a slide-show click.
From there, three soldiers escape World War I disguised as the Andrews Sisters, even though that musical group won't be popular until World War II ("The Germans don't know the difference"). Fast-forward through the 20th century: The 1950s are rendered as a Queen for a Day television game show, in which prizes are rewarded chronicling America's most important women--"all three of them." Vietnam becomes a Dr. Seussian acid trip, and the whole Cold War unfolds as a detective thriller that confuses Ethel Rosenberg with I Love Lucy's Ethel Mertz.
It's primarily the smart-ass charms of Ferguson, Wells, and Henry--as well as the relentless speed of the script, which doesn't allow the audience to linger over anything too long--that put over jokes this blessedly obvious. Perhaps this show's greatest asset is that it actually has the potential to offend the oversensitive lot with its jokes about Ronald Reagan's Alzheimer's decline, and a mincing police chief who makes constant ass references. It's nice to see the wealth spread around; everybody gets it in the end.
Obviously, The Complete History of America (abridged) doesn't care a whit about being politically correct, a dead-horse phrase flogged so relentlessly that it's now just a skeleton with brittle bones whiter than Vermont snow, or even politically incorrect. It's to the point now where knee-jerk humor attacking liberal sensitivity and semantics has almost become the kind of cultural fascism that was political correctness when it began trickling into the mainstream from colleges and universities. Critics such as Camille Paglia, who was cool when she published Sexual Personae, and Howard Stern have become shrill self-promoters who've proven unable to evolve from the reactionary positions on which their entire careers have been based. And so some ripe targets have been ignored on the political right, which also has blind spots the size of solar eclipses.
And The Complete History of America (abridged) seems to recognize that. I would be curious to have seen this show when it debuted back in 1993 at North Carolina State University and see how that version compared with 1998's. Maybe director Joel Ferrell and his actors have widened Reduced Shakespeare's shooting range to include conservative follies from homophobia in the military to blind patriotism that ignores our own totalitarian sins while attacking enemies from the Third Reich to the Soviet Union for the very same thing. Or maybe Long, Martin, and Tichenor have always been one step ahead of the anti-P.C. crowd, broadening the debate to recognize that the American right has walked in lockstep as militantly as the American left. In any case, everyone who gets in this show's way is trampled. And that is a very good thing.
The Complete History of America (abridged) runs through February 14. Call (817) 332-
