By James Bovard for The Wall Street Journal, 13 July 2015

In Act 5 of “Love’s Labor Lost,” one character scoffs at pedants: “They have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps.” The latest Shakespeare fashion, at least in the Washington area, is to invite people to a feast of language and serve nothing but grunts, grimaces and grins—with a few gyrations thrown in for dessert.

The Synetic Theater has harvested a bushel of Helen Hayes Awards (the local version of the Tony Awards) for its Silent Shakespeare shows in the past dozen years. The company (whose name blends “synthesis” and “kinetic”) is run by a husband-and-wife team who were raised in Soviet Georgia and pride themselves on making Shakespeare “very accessible.” Paata Tsikurishvili, described in a Synetic video as a “visionary director,” explains: “Why I do Shakespeare, like this with less text, is because we have that vocabulary to express without the words—like crying and laughing; I take it to the next level.”

Omitting words allows Synetic to finish Shakespeare plays in barely half the time they often require. The company has received numerous grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and its state affiliate, the Virginia Commission for the Arts. Synetic is known for high-energy performances relying on acrobatics, pantomime and special effects.

But flips and twists cannot suffice for nouns and verbs. John Dryden said of Shakespeare: “When he describes anything, you more than see it; you feel it too.” Shakespeare’s depictions often penetrate both the mind and the heart. The Washington Post whooped up one Synetic production: “You don’t understand this ‘Hamlet’—you feel it in your gut.” If viewers don’t understand the inner turmoil that propelled Hamlet, their takeaway will be little more than “helluva show!”

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