It’s one thing to shorten Shakespeare’s four-hour Hamlet to a length more manageable by today’s groundlings. The working-over given the Bard in The Complete Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged), playing through Aug. 31 at New Village Arts Theatre, is something else. Rob Salas directs this theatrical roast of the greatest dramatist in the English language, written by the Reduced Shakespeare Company’s Adam Long, Daniel Singer and Jess Borgeson.

The company’s usual summer “free Shakespeare in the park” show ran into funding difficulties, so the decision was made to keep it light and give summer patrons a look at this show in NVA’s newish indoor digs.

Tim Parker narrates the goofy proceedings, introducing “Shakespeare scholar” Adam Brick with biographical notes badly (but hilariously) cribbed from Wikipedia. Joshua Everett Johnson is the third member of the trio.

In order to get 37 plays into a 90-minute show, most of the plays are, to put it mildly, truncated. In fact, the 16 comedies are compressed into one sentence: The Comedy of Two Well-Measured Gentlemen Lost in the Merry Wives of Venice on a Midsummer’s Twelfth Night in Winter (or, The Love Boat Goes to Verona).

Where else will you see Titus Andronicus as a cooking show and the history plays as a football game (with all of Will’s kings as players)? Or see an audience member recruited to play Ophelia?

Speaking of Ophelia, it’s the tragedies most people think of when the Bard is mentioned, so the concentration is there. Lest you start to hyperventilate at the thought of Shakespearean tragedy, relax, breathe deeply and know that this is high energy but hardly highbrow entertainment. “We’ve found that the comedies aren’t half as funny as the tragedies,” they tell us, and performed this way, they’re right. Outlandish costumes, goofy props, crazy narration and audience interaction combine to make this a great summer outing.

A longer reduction of Romeo and Juliet includes lines like this (don’t blame this on the Bard): “Now in a scene of timeless romance/he’ll try to get in Juliet’s pants.”

Hamlet is treated as an audience-participation piece, Ophelia dragged out of a seat and taught to scream while seatmates are divided into a three-part chorus, one shouting: “Cut the crap, Hamlet! My biological clock is ticking, and I want babies now!”

I warned you: highbrow it ain’t.

Brick and Parker have a great time with their roles, but it’s Johnson you’ll remember, because he gets to play the women: Juliet, with enormous fake breasts, long stringy blonde hair and tennis shoes, Gertrude with red wig and metallic Madonna tits, cigarette dangling from her mouth. He also gets to shift gears and do a serious (and lovely) reading of Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man” speech.

This is Shakespeare for people who think they hate Shakespeare – or for those who love him and will catch all the references. Either way, The Complete Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) is a winner. Hurry, there are only a few performances left.

The Complete Works of Wllm Shkspr (Abridged) plays through Aug. 31 at New Village Arts Theatre. Shows Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. For pay-what-you-can tickets, call 760-433-3245 or visit www.newvillagearts.org.

It’s easy to get lost when your moorings aren’t solid. Jonathan Waxman (Anthony Crane), a good Jewish boy from Brooklyn, has lost his parents, dumped his girlfriend and sold out his ideals on the way to superstardom in the art world. Now, at the tender age of 32, he has guilt – and a waiting list of buyers for pieces not yet painted (hence the play’s title).

On the way to his first European show in London – a retrospective, no less – he stops by an out-of-the-way farmhouse to visit former girlfriend Patricia (Kelly McAndrew) and her taciturn archeologist husband Nick (Ron Choularton).

It isn’t clear to Patricia why he’s come (nor to us, why she has acquiesced). The wounds of that long-ago walkout have never healed, but she has literally moved on, her marriage of convenience serving to bring a measure of contentment if not the youthful passion she and Jonathan once shared.

Old wounds are reopened and new psychic gashes made, especially by Nick, who has had enough difficulty dealing with his largely sexless marriage. Nick lashes out in the only way he can, insulting the modern art which has made the unwelcome visitor rich.

Playwright Donald Margulies examines the nature of art, ambition, identity and loss in The Old Globe Theatre’s production of Sight Unseen, playing through Sept. 7 on the arena stage at San Diego Museum of Art’s Copley Auditorium. Esther Emery directs.

This is a tightly coiled trio, self-protective and longing, each circling the others in a psychic pas de trois as fascinating as it is difficult to watch.

Sight Unseen unwinds in fractured time, between Patricia’s college years as life model for Jonathan, their breakup on the day of Jonathan’s mother’s funeral and the present. With each scene, psychological layers are peeled back a little more. Finally, the coup de grâce: German journalist Grete (Katie Fabel) questions Jonathan’s integrity and he pulls out the Jewish card to accuse her of anti-Semitism.

The show is particularly well cast. Crane’s Jonathan is handsome, well spoken and defensive about his artistic (and romantic) sellout, his ambivalence and guilt brilliantly portrayed. McAndrew is excellent as the spurned Patricia, who feels herself better off without Jonathan, but clearly hasn’t closed the door on that relationship. Choularton, revisiting his 1993 portrayal of Nick, conveys volumes with a gesture or a hestitation, and seems to elevate the level of play whenever he’s onstage. And the scene between Jonathan and Grete is one of the best media-vs.-artist scenes in dramatic literature.

Winner of the 1992 Obie for best new American play and also nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, Sight Unseen is, as Jonathan puts it, about “the lengths people go to in order to feel something.”

You’ll find plenty of food for thought here. Plan to go somewhere and discuss this splendid production afterward.

The Old Globe Theatre’s production of Sight Unseen plays through Sept. 7 on the Arena Stage at Copley Auditorium, the San Diego Museum of Art. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday and Sunday at 7 p.m; Thursday through Saturday at 8 p.m. Matinees Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For tickets all 619-233-5623 or visit www.theoldglobe.org.

Somewhere in those awkward teen years, touch takes on a meaning it never had before, awakening something deep inside – and you know your life is changed forever.

If you’re one of the boys in Spring Awakening, that something will inspire dreams – wet and otherwise – and unexplained stirrings you are not equipped to cope with. Those hormonal teenage years, so full of confusion and promise, dangers and delights, are the subject of Spring Awakening, now in shakedown cruise through Aug. 31 at the Balboa Theatre before its national tour opening in San Francisco. Michael Mayer directs.

Based on Frank Wedekind’s 1891 German play Frühlings Erwachen (which was instantly labeled pornographic and banned), Spring Awakening takes the stories of those late 19th-century German kids, updates it with a pop-rock score, lots of neon lights and energetic choreography, and gives us the musical that won eight of the 11 Tonys (including best musical) for which it was nominated in 2007.

The show centers around three teens in small provincial German town in the 1890s. Melchior Gabor (Kyle Riabko) is the handsome rebel, forever reading, thinking and questioning the Latin master, getting away with it only because he’s the best student. His buddy Moritz Stiefel (Blake Bashoff), at the other end of the academic scale, struggles with Virgil and equations and tries desperately to measure up to his father’s goals for him. Moritz is haunted by erotic dreams he doesn’t understand (“Please God, give me consumption and take away these sticky dreams,” he pleads). Pretty Wendla Bergmann (Christy Altomare) begs her mother to tell her where babies come from (“I’m an aunt for the second time and I don’t even know how it happens,” she whines), but is brushed aside by an adult unable to talk about sex.

But Spring Awakening isn’t just about sex, masturbation and rock ‘n’ roll. Considered the precursor of German expressionism in drama, Wedekind’s teens live in a dark world which includes abuse, abortion and suicide.

His abhorrence of the repression of 19th century German society shows in his portrayal of the adult roles, all of them played by Henry Stram and Angela Reed. Whether teacher, parent or school official, all are caricatures of oppression. You’ll recognize a few from your own past.

Teens will love this show, with music by Duncan Sheik, book and lyrics by Steven Sater. Most of the songs are not earsplitting hard rock (the band consists of guitar, bass, drums, cello, violin, viola and keyboard) but softer, pop rock type ballads. The singers have been miked sufficiently but not too much (it’s amusing to see them pull hand mikes out of their school uniforms), so that most of the words are decipherable. For my money, the tunes begin to sound alike after a while, and the lyrics aren’t anything special, but I’m grateful for comprehensibility.

The piece that brings down the house is “Totally Fucked,” with which all of us can identify, but my favorite is “The Bitch of Living” that sums up mankind’s dilemma (“It’s the bitch of living/With nothing but your hand/Just the bitch of living/As someone you can’t stand”).

With the exception of Riabko and Bashoff, this is an all-new cast, and it’s a fine one. Riabko is gorgeous and talented, Bashoff fun and heartbreaking, with that electrified hair. Your heart will go out to Altomare’s Wendla, and Steffi D is alluring (especially to Moritz) as the free-spirited Ilse.

I question the placing of audience members on either side of the stage, a move apparently meant to draw the viewers in. To me it looked like a basketball game.

The excitement and terror of youth are on display in Spring Awakening. If that’s not something you care to relive, send your kids. They’ll love it.

Spring Awakening plays through Aug. 31 at the Balboa Theatre. Shows Tuesday and Wednesday at 7 p.m.; Thursday at 1 and 7:30 p.m.; Friday at 8 p.m.; Saturday at 2 and 8 p.m.; Sunday at 1 p.m. For tickets call 619-570-1100 or Ticketmaster at 619-220-TIXS.