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Hard.
Bard.
They go together, don't they? They rhyme, which Bill Shakespeare liked to do. And his arcane dialogue sends us scurrying for footnotes, if thou know'st what I'm parleying (and methinks thou dost).
But the words don't go together for Gene Kusterer, except in the phrase "Not So Hard Bard." That's the informal name of his series of adaptations of eight Shakespearean plays. His revision of "The Merry Wives of Windsor" hits the stage this week at Belmont Abbey College, where he was once a student, a monk and director of the Abbey Players.
"All eight are comedies," he says. "There's so much sacred territory in the tragedies. Hamlet's 'To be or not to be' - what can you do with that? The comedies have a lot of material that is lost on us, street language and references from his time."
Kusterer made his first adaptation ("A Midsummer Night's Dream") 25 years ago for Piedmont Middle School. When he went to teach at Providence High, he did "Twelfth Night." He soon had a hobby that may someday be a published series.
"I didn't want to cut parts of these plays because they were difficult," he says. "I thought that was a cop-out." Yet he kept target audiences in mind. He hasn't dumbed "Windsor" down or eliminated all double entendres, "but when it's being done at a Catholic school...I tried to elucidate and obfuscate a little at the same time."
He prepares by reading the original text, studying the footnotes and the book "A Shakespeare Glossary." Sometimes he has to sacrifice a pun to make humor more apparent. Sometimes, when he knows Shakespeare wanted to give a scene finality with a rhymed couplet, he makes sure that the couplet actually does rhyme.
"When you pull a couple of words out of blank verse, things start to unravel," says Kusterer. "Then you have to change whole blocks of it to keep the meter and rhyme.
"I've sometimes cooked and cooked it, and it got too long. As brevity is the soul of wit, I've realized I ruined the thing and worked to recover brevity.
"I get (off) on tangents, and I have taken liberties. But I have all the meaning right there."
