Bite-Size Bard

Curtain up on McNugget Macbeth.

Showtime for Hamlet in a Hurry.

Opening night for King Lear Gets a Quickie.

"So I'm looking at the works of Shakespeare and started to do a mental exercise: What if this guy was one of my writing students and he brought me this script -- what would I tell him?" says Dan Decker, director of "A Taste of Shakespeare" at Springs Preserve, condensing the Bard's dramatic feasts into theatrical hors d'oeuvres for a holiday weekend-long Shakespearean sampler.

"Then I thought, 'Well, this character doesn't need to be here and this scene can go over there,' and I came up with this idea. We pick two characters and pull their scenes out from start to finish and clip them together. Once you smooth out the narrative, it's a one-act, two-person play with all the language of Shakespeare."

Sacrilegious acts against sacred texts? Chill, Bard-brain.

"The hardest part was working up the gall to actually put my hand in one of those scripts," Decker says. "It was like, 'You can't actually do that.' But I overcame all that."

Masterpieces in miniature: "Hamlet," "Macbeth," "King Lear," "As You Like It," "Romeo and Juliet" and "Much Ado About Nothing" are subjected to "The Biggest Loser" treatment, shedding pounds of dialogue, scenes and exposition and dieting down to skinny classics of 20 minutes apiece that will be performed continuously on twin outdoor stages by Dan Decker Theatricals. A fresh bite of the Bard is served every half hour for six hours daily over three days.

Staged amid Springs Preserve's sprawling nature backdrop, the festival is structured as a series of drop-in dramas as visitors are encouraged to bounce between shows, nosh on snacks and wander the grounds, with music-to-stroll-by provided by the Henderson Symphony Orchestra, Green Valley High School Orchestra and other local musicians.

"We thought this would be a good addition to our repertoire of cultural activities," says Jay Nichols, general curator of Springs Preserve. "It's a lot like Shakespeare in the Park might be at Central Park in New York City, a way for people to relax and enjoy themselves more than being in a crowded theater where you're tightly packed in shoulder to shoulder."

Think the mini-main attractions amount to "Shakespeare for Dummies"? The Bard for the AADD-afflicted (Audience Attention Deficit Disorder)?

"We're telling the stories the way a contemporary audience needs it to be told," Decker says. "Today's audiences do not have short attention spans, they just have a very fast ability to process things. If they don't get it at the speed they need, they disconnect. I've trimmed things down so that they come at you like a movie, really fast. You will understand everything, but the poetry is still in place, and you're following the spectacular story."

Reinterpreting Rom and Julie -- an abridged "Romeo and Juliet" deserves a tighter title -- the story of doomed love and warring families becomes a story of, well, doomed love.

"We've got their meeting at the masked ball, then right after they've had sex in Act II and put it together with the balcony scene to make one long, extended balcony scene -- you take away the characters that make it a bigger play," says Lysander Abadia, aka Romeo, referring to those Shakespearean bystanders, the assorted Montagues and Capulets. "Focused on the two characters, you really see the story through their courtship. What you receive is the purity of their love."

All unsullied by that downer of a denouement, the death scene. (Really --who's got time for dying when the clock's ticking so fast on living?) Freed from the final tragedy, Rom and Julie can now explore the lovebirds' loonier sides. Apparently, the quixotic couple are quite the cutups.

"There's really only the dying part we don't get to," says our microwavable Juliet -- just heat adolescent passion and serve! -- Louisa Lawson. "Maybe it'll make you hopeful that maybe they'll live." ... Yes, Juliet's joshin' ya.

"Everybody knows the ending, and it's terrible and dramatic, but when you take that away, the comedic aspects are there, and that's what we found most enjoyable to play. The first thing Lysander does is a physical comedy approach to the scene, and I think it will allow people to laugh."

Not everyone's got the Elizabethan giggles. Over at Macbeth's crib, it's a yuk-free zone. "You'll get the entire drift of 'Macbeth' in 20 minutes," Decker says. "You'll see (Lady Macbeth) convince him to kill the king, he kills the king, all of it. It's right in Macbeth's bedroom, the whole play. It's really watchable stuff."

Playing the vicious vixen who urges Macbeth to commit king-icide, Clare Jaget has no concerns about sketching an accelerated portrait of one of drama's least-ladylike ladies. "There's still enough to develop a complete character," Jaget says. "A lot of people have put off Shakespeare because they think it's too long or boring, but this is just blasting it. Nothing is lost."

Nor has anything apparently compromised her motivation, as Decker points out, discussing "A Taste of Shakespeare" over lunch with Jaget. "Every once in a while, she slips into character," he says, "and I have to take the knives away from her."

Should he fail, irony suggests she'll make very short work of him.

Contact reporter Steve Bornfeld at sbornfeld@ reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0256.