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When it comes to Fixing Shakespeare, it seems that the third time has been the charm. As staged in Austin last March, Fixing Troilus & Cressida serves as the latest—and so far greatest—installment in the Rude Mechs' ongoing project of rehabilitating Shakespeare's least-produced plays (the first two outings "fixed" King John in 2013 and Timon of Athens in 2016).
The Rude Mechs are a two-decade-old feminist theater collective housed deep in the heart of Texas who have carved out a niche for themselves in the American theatrical landscape by generating edgy, contemporary theater. Yet, despite their A Midsummer Night's Dream-inspired company name, the Mechs largely avoided reinforcing the ubiquity of Shakespeare's work until 2013, when their playwright-in-residence, Kirk Lynn, started translating lines from King John as a morning writing exercise. The one enduring constant through the series (and one of its greatest boons) has been Lynn, who has recomposed the texts for each entry in the Fixing Shakespeare series. Three plays on, he has refined his process of modernizing Shakespeare, as he explains in the program:
I translate [each play] line by line into contemporary English—including the cursing and vulgarity—cutting the number of characters down to about 10, gender screwing them toward parity, and editing the whole thing for joy with no fidelity to the original text. There is a sincere attempt to learn how Shakespeare composes, how his ideas advance, how his characters develop, how his beautiful ideas sit so nicely with his love of dick jokes.
Much like its source, Fixing Troilus & Cressida is still a play about the Trojan War. It traces the dramatic action of Shakespeare's three subplots through a set of symmetrically balanced scenes, vaulting back and forth over Troy's wall to follow the major characters in the warring factions of the Trojans and the Greeks. And like Shakespeare's work, the play also actively pivots halfway through from romance and occasional comedy to full-tilt tragedy. Unlike its source, however, that pivot here occurred after the Trojan prince Paris fired a t-shirt cannon at the audience, which showered those of us in attendance in clothing adorned with caricatures of his and Helen's faces accompanying the text "Paris loves Helen. Helen loves Paris....