It's all in the words

William Shakespeare: coming to an answering machine near you. Throughout the past 400 years, thousands have adapted the literary master's work. But chances are Freestyle Shakespeare -- debuting at Jimmy Tingle's Off-Broadway in Davis Square -- is one-of-a-kind.

The Bard will barrel into the 21st century this weekend in a series of sketch comedy and solo pieces. The production is a next-generation take on scenes from Shakespeare, spiced with multimedia and personal tales linking the somewhat archaic language and work of Shakespeare to a new audience.

Freestyle Shakespeare is the brainchild of lawyer and storyteller Michael Anderson. Though an avid fan of Shakespeare, Anderson is admittedly not expert on the playwright's work, which perhaps contributes to his belief in the timelessness and universality of Shakespeare's writing. He explains that he "was not a literature major. I'm not even particularly someone into theatre. All I know is that Shakespeare stays with me. Something germinates out of the language that makes me want to talk about it."

For this project Anderson will collaborate with local storytellers, including Liz Appleby, Kevin Brooks, Libby Franck, David Ingle, Glenn Morrow, and Laura Packer. "Brother Blue" Dr. Hugh Morgan, the official storyteller of the city of Boston, will even make a cameo in a video clip featured in a skit likening Macbeth's "Tomorrow and Tomorrow" speech to the 1986 failure of the Red Sox at the World Series, and another sketch, titled "A Bloody Deed," explores the experience of performing the history Richard III alongside the tragedy of malfunctioning props.

The producers here seek to highlight the accessibility of Shakespeare to every audience, despite the scholarly categorizations placed on each play. Anderson says he wants to demonstrate the ultimate comedy inherent in all of the Bard's plays.

"You don't understand Shakespeare if you take the murder and tragedy at face value... Shakespeare intended to entertain his audience." He compares the violent scenes of Richard III as a precursor similar to the film Pulp Fiction, rather than The Godfather, as the classic botched mob hit.

Anderson considers his production to be "irreverent, but substantial," and believes that it makes the same point that Shakespeare originally intended: to encourage identification with his characters. Citing the monologues and soliloquies rampant in the Bard's work as attempts to connect with the audience through language and characterization rather than the plot, Anderson asserts that the words themselves often take control of the character, stating that "the real story is in the language."

The production reinterprets the traditional portrayals of the characters, as in a sketch featuring the witches from Macbeth as stage hands and their role in the theatre. Though he acknowledged that purists may not appreciate the humor, Anderson said "good Shakespeare is not just a museum piece about how [the production] would have looked at the Globe."

Libby Franck, local storyteller, will relate the parallels of on-stage and off-stage romantic liaisons during a college production of A Midsummer Night's Dream in "Three Weddings, No Funerals: A Comedy." The production will also feature a grammatical deconstruction of Sonnet 65, Romeo and Falstaff as drug addicts, and a reincarnation of the Bard himself in the first sketch.

Freestyle Shakespeare seeks to blur the line between Shakespeare in art and life. Focusing on the language and themes that are rampant today, the storytellers encourage the audience to love the words beyond their historical context, whether that may be in the theatre, in the classroom, or in the answering machine messages people may make. As Anderson jokingly remarked, "The language has a life of its own....It's all about failed communication."