Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Contemporary playwrights sometimes try their hand at writing in verse, and why not? Shakespeare and his contemporaries and artistic heirs did it. Molière did it. Even T.S. Eliot did it. But few modern scribes have matched the wit, depth, and élan Brian Dykstra summons up in his Polishing Shakespeare.
A true story inspired this tour de force of versified wit. Dykstra himself plays Grant, a dotcom billionaire who makes his much-needed financial support of a major regional theater contingent on its commissioning and producing dumbed-down “translations” of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. For Grant, “Clarity [is] desired over / Confusion so that there are clearer words / Put together more correctly, sounding / A little less like poetry.”
Artistic director Ms. Branch (Kate Levy) has somewhat reluctantly bought into the scheme, and they’re seeking to hire Janet (Kate Siahaan-Rigg), an up-and-coming and financially stressed playwright, as one of the translators.
A Witty Battle
The 90-minute one-act is rooted in a battle of wits, means, and consciences, all scripted in consistent (if sometimes loosely accented) iambic pentameter. The result is a zippy, funny, and ultimately dark comedy that requires close attention – and repays it handsomely.
Dykstra incorporates many Shakespearean devices throughout: asides; poetic commonplaces, like adding a syllable to complete the rhythm of a line (“The number is not yet determinèd”); a virtuosic soliloquy. The last comes from Janet and lays out some of the background: “‘Why Me,’ I’d contemplate. / The answer is they needed just one more. / Another me, another POC – / Playwright Of Color, hey, that’s me! Or one / More woman.”
As those lines suggest, Polishing Shakespeare concerns more than clever poesy and a cultural question about archaic language. Janet has the most bravura speeches, and Siahaan-Rigg more than once brings the house down with them. But the other two characters are no less well-developed. As the peppy humor gradually subsides in favor of darker themes, Levy reveals Ms. Branch as a tortured avatar for the 21st-century theater as a whole. And Grant deepens, from an obnoxious rich guy with an entitled attitude and an eccentric idea to a Trump-era tech-bro/tycoon with a chillingly sinister agenda, laid out in rhyme:
“If we can undo universal truths / And limit access, through padlocked tollbooths, / To wisdom, deep thinking, philosophy, / We feed a constant state of atrophy. / A yawning abyss that has to be filled / With more. More goods, more pills…”
Janet, meanwhile, describes the plight of the arts in the age of Citizens United: “If our obedience / Is bought and paid for, even only once, / Then corporate sponsors have staked out control, / Or access to it; Access to the soul / Of our expression…”
There’s more here too. Ms. Branch gets caught in a hilariously terrifying meta-theatrical loop. Janet and Grant undertake a ferocious quest to find the perfect way to address the theater’s Chairperson of the Board. We struggle, with Ms. Branch and Grant, to figure out which Shakespeare play the manuscript Janet delivers is supposed to be a “translation” of. Along the way, surprises and mini-reveals keep us gleefully off-balance.
The production boasts zesty direction by Margarett Perry, cogently effective lighting and sound, and sparkling performances from all three actors. Siahaan-Rigg especially impresses in a role any Shakespearean would be proud to have mastered and made vital. Polishing Shakespeare is a production of Twilight Theatre Co. in association with Kitchen Theatre Company. It runs through August 10, 2025 at 59e59 in NYC.
