26

WEDNESDAY

Reduced Shakespeare, Shenandoah Shakespeare Express—the world hardly needs another company that approaches an evening with the Bard as a kind of theatrical HurryDate. Now, nevertheless, comes the 90 Minute Shakespeare Company, a home-grown endeavor devoted to minimizing a canon with which it doesn’t seem entirely familiar. (How else to explain a press release that cites the troupe’s 2002 debut as Much A Do About Nothing?) I myself have nothing but compassion for people who believe that the plural of “purist” takes an apostrophe, so you’ll find no critical assessment of the group’s work here; prospective audiences will have to decide for themselves whether to support a theater that sees Shakespeare in his natural state as “three and a half hours of torture.” For their next trick, the 90 Minute nitwits are “pairing down the script” of Romeo and Juliet; confront director Shari Lewis (not, I trust, a ghost come from the grave) with a dictionary and a demand for at least the prescribed two hours’ traffic at 8 p.m. (see City List for other dates) at National Conservatory of Dramatic Arts’ Glaser-Luchs Studio Theatre, 1556 Wisconsin Ave. NW. Pay-what-you-can. (202) 333-2202. (Trey Graham)