One Author, One Afternoon, Thirty-One Plays

The sound on this video is erratic, what with it being shot on an open ferry deck and all…

Actor-director Jess Winfield came to New York City to promote his debut novel, My Name Is Will, but in addition to reading from his book, he drew upon his background as a founding member of the legendary Reduced Shakespeare Company and designed a marathon performance of thirty-one plays that started, as seen in the video above, with a distillation of sixteen comedies into a pastiche which he declaimed on a ferry from Manhattan to Brooklyn early Saturday afternoon. Once the boat arrived in Red Hook, Winfield and his audience wandered around the neighborhood, with the multi-site performance culminating in a hip-hop Othello, a 30-second Romeo & Juliet, and, finally, at Freebird Books, a one-minute Hamlet.

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