If you’ve ever been to a Renaissance Faire, you may have run into Dan Kostelec from Peckville.
He would have worn a doublet and frilly shirt and likely invited audience members to join him onstage — as characters, set pieces or even props — in send-ups of Shakespeare plays.
“If I’m doing ‘Twelfth Night’ or ‘The Tempest,’ they both have shipwrecks, so I might invite people to be the ships,” Kostelec said in a telephone interview. “If someone is wearing a scarf, I might say, ‘Oh, you can be the ocean waves.’
“They can be everything from the balcony in ‘Romeo & Juliet’ to the wall in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’ ”
That “Midsummer” wall with its famous chink, through which young lovers “Pyramus” and “Thisbe” communicate with each other, may well be the next opportunity local audience members have to portray part of a set.
Kostelec will present “Midsummer: A Gaye Olde Tyme (Almost A Musical)!” as part of the Scranton Fringe Festival. His performances are set for 6 p.m., Oct. 2 and Oct. 5, at the Strange Birds venue on Capouse Avenue.
The Scranton Fringe Festival kicks off Oct. 1 and features dozens of productions.
Describing his show as “fun for all ages,” Kostelec said he designed it to be accessible, “no matter how much you may have hated Shakespeare in school.”
“It’s entirely audience interactive,” said Kostelec, who created his Shakespeare Approves! comedy series 20 years ago to answer a challenge from Chuck Romito, a founder of the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire in Lancaster County.
If you’re familiar with Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” you’ll know why fairy wings and a donkey’s head are part of the costuming. You’ll likely see them before the show “reaches its ultimate, ridiculous conclusion,” Kostelec said, adding the show is “more than slightly absurd, and it moves at breakneck speed.”
When he’s not performing, Kostelec said, he will try to take in as many of the other Scranton Fringe Festival shows as he can.
“The Fringe Festival gives you the opportunity to try something new,” he said. “It lets the artists and audiences stretch their boundaries. A lot of amazing, long-running shows began as this kind of experimental theater, like ‘The Fantasticks,’ or ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged’, which started at a Renaissance Faire.”
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