DON'T GET IN THE MIDDLE OF THIS. Instead, watch from the safety of audience seating! "Shakespeare Shorts" is a fast-paced comedic look at a bunch of Shakespeare's most famous works, and will be performed Aug. 8-9 at Regis High School. (Submitted photos)

If you've ever looked at a copy of "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare" and thought it looked too long to handle, then an upcoming play by local playwrights has you covered.

"Shakespeare Shorts," presented by the Community Theater at Regis group, brings a condensed, fast-paced and comedic look at an array of Shakespeare's most famous works. Playwrights Jim and Jane Jeffries have been writing a lineup of these truncated Shakespeare parodies since 2016, they shared.

What first began with adaptations of "MacBeth" and "Hamlet" has now expanded to include plays like "Much Ado About Nothing," "Twelfth Night," and more.

The performance by this community theater group will showcase 10 of these plays, with actors, crew, directors, etc. appearing in multiple works over the show.

Each show is roughly seven minutes long and truly cuts to the chase. "We cut right to  the important bits and skip all the 'boring' stuff like plot and character development," Jim said, with his tongue fully in his cheek.

HUZZAH!

The play will exaggerate elements of each play, with cultural references for the modern-day audience, he added.

"'Hamlet,' for example, has an astounding number of deaths, which we call attention to," Jeffries said. "In 'MacBeth' we make fun of the fact that you can't say the name in a theater. 'Much Ado About Nothing' becomes a high school teen gossip movie."

One of the works is also called "Manning of the Dude," an adaptation that plays with gendered elements of the original work of "Taming of the Shrew", recontextualizing the production for today's audiences.

Don't know your Mercutios from your MacDuffs? You won't have any trouble; the plays are written to be entertaining regardless of how much you know about The Bard.

There's a lot of physical comedy in the works as well, which Jeffires would hesitate to call "slapstick."

"There's no pie throwing," he said. Although if there was, I imagine it'd be in "Romeo & Juliet."

The Regis Community Theater will perform "Shakespeare Shorts" Aug. 8 and Aug. 9 at 7:30pm, and August 10 at 1:30pm, at Regis Catholic Schools Auditorium (2100 Fenwick Ave., Eau Claire). Entry is $10/person or free for those ages 5 and under.