Nevada Shakespeare Festival’s Matthew Morgan and his collaborators serve up the Bard one shot at a time

“One man in his time plays many parts.”

That’s from act 2, scene 7 of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It. It also neatly describes professional actor, director and clown Matthew Morgan, who has been on Vegas’ stages pretty much constantly since moving here roughly eight years ago. Morgan has appeared in Strip shows like Absinthe and Opium, but if you’re truly fortunate, you’ve seen him in the independent productions he’s created with his wife and artistic collaborator Heidi Brucker Morgan—among them 2019’s Weekly Best of Vegas winner The Princess Wendy Late Night Tease Room and the ongoing Shotspeare (shotspeare.com).

A raucous take on the Bard that requires the players to pound shots and follow the edicts of a gameshow-like “Wheel of Soliloquy,” Shotspeare delivers Shakespeare’s works through a filter of bizarre, slapstick and often raunchy humor, while still earnestly celebrating their artistry. In fact, the Morgans love Shakespeare to the point that they co-founded, with collaborators including the City of Henderson and producing director Michael Rice, the nonprofit Nevada Shakespeare Festival (nevadashakespearefestival.com). Morgan, the NSF’s artistic director, granted the Weekly an audience to talk art and ale.

How did Shotspeare come to be?

Shotspeare does Othello

It came from the idea of doing Shakespeare in a bar, like a band’s set: “I want to do a whole play in 45 minutes like a band would do, and then the next band can come on. We’ll do a drinking game, and it’ll be just chaos for 45 minutes with some Shakespeare.” We premiered in Los Angeles in late 2010, early ’11, with a local group of collaborators and people I’d worked with for a long time.

After the first show, we were like, “Oh, this is special.” The value of the characters became more important as the play went on. The drunker we got, the more we were like, “Don’t improvise.” All we had was to fall back on was the language, which is incredible source material. …It’s just so rich. It’s deep. It’s poetic. It’s lovely.

Come for the comedy; stay for the prose.

That’s the hook. Initially, the game was “how much alcohol can we all consume and still do the play?” The answer is, we can consume a lot of alcohol and still do it. But it’s all a ruse. … I want to do Shakespeare for people who don’t like it, would never pay to see it, don’t understand it and don’t care. That’s who I want my audience to be. The hook of the drinking and all the nonsense and chicanery is just a guise to get the audience to pay attention [to] the story, the relationships, the characters, all that stuff. That’s the rich goods of Shakespeare.

And that motivated you to found the Nevada Shakespeare Festival?

Yeah, I saw an opening. I read an article a number of years ago, pre-COVID, that talked about the Utah Shakespeare Festival and that 25,000 people drive from Las Vegas to Cedar City, Utah every summer to [attend]. And I was like, “Well, okay, let me have half of those people.” There’s a market here.

Then there’s youth engagement—students and kids. Shakespeare is more of a dying breed than some other theater art forms, because it’s a classic and, you know, classics can seem boring. I feel like there’s a great opportunity to introduce young people to it, to say that it doesn’t have to be boring at all. And guess what? You can cut it, change it, adapt it, swap genders and do anything you want to it.

Speaking of, I heard a bustling rumor that the NSF is working on a slightly remixed Titus Andronicus.

We’re in rehearsals now. The show runs March 28 to April 6 in Cornerstone Park, in a big circus tent. It’s sort of a “grindhouse” adaptation of the play, half slasher and half revenge thriller. I’m really leaning into that aesthetic, because it’s a heavy play. I don’t know how familiar you are with it, but it’s pretty gory. It was one of Shakespeare’s most produced plays during his lifetime because it was so intense. So, it’s got that sort of shock value: “How do you sell tickets to our movie theater that’s dying because people are moving out to the suburbs?” So that’s the take, a sort of ‘70s/80s corporate cocaine kind of play [laughs]. … There’s lots of heads and hands cut off, tongues cut out and all kinds of gory stuff.

Whoa!

We definitely have a disclaimer. I was at a high school the other day talking to the drama teacher and I was like, “Oh yeah, we have this program. We’ll get you guys in there ... Maybe just the seniors.”

But we’ve said this about all of Shakespeare’s plays: they are for everyone. Some of them deal with more grown-up subject matter than others. My seven-year-old will be there; he’s pretty open to it. We leave it open to the families to decide what they want to do. This one will definitely be one for the books. We ha

For photos and more details visit LasVegasWeekly.com