Hot Wenches and Hard Whisks

"That which we call a hog would taste as sweet by any other name."

So there you have my evening: pig and Shakespeare.

Things got rolling at Six Burner where change is a-brewing.

Already the door in the back corner of the restaurant has been uncovered, thus providing natural light in a notoriously dark corner.

Booths will soon go missing, a banquette is coming and, best of all, a menu with more options for the wallet-challenged.

Until then, half-priced wine night will have to suffice and it did magnificently with $3.50 glasses of Gavi.

On top of that, I broke my no-cocktail rule and tried a cilantro gimlet with sugar/chile rims, a lovely warm weather refresher, the recipe for which the bartender had stolen from his favorite piano bar in the West Village.

I think I must have been crazed by all that sunlight pouring in the back door to drink something so uncharacteristic.

Deciding about what to eat was easy: house-made Cotechino pork sausage came with toothsome lentils and broccoli rabe; any bite which included all three was superb.

Then there was local asparagus ('tis the season) with escargot barigoule in a lemongrass sauce and a roasted garlic custard that got my vote for best savory pudding ever.

Can I put in my vote for more like it on menus?

While discussing Matt dressing up as Marilyn Monroe to sing happy birthday to a Ukrop (oh, it'll happen) and the difference between serving bar food and knowing good food, we looked up to discover it was Shakespeare time.

And not just any Shakespeare, but a Richmond Shakespeare Second Tuesday staged reading of "Shakespeare in the Trailer Park" at the Gottwald Theater.

Could there be a better use of my time after a meal of snails and Cotechino?

The play turned out to be a pastiche of "Hamlet" ("My father's spirit roams these trailer parks") "Macbeth," "Merchant of Venice," "Romeo and Juliet" and probably any number of others I wasn't able to catch in the fast-paced story.

The action took place in Frog Level and began with three witches stirring a pot of Brunswick stew made with road kill and magic mushrooms.

I may have found this even more hysterical than the rest of the audience since I have actually eaten Brunswick stew in Frog Level.

Mine had neither street scrapings nor hallucinogenic fungi, but I was told I could find a husband if I came back.

And for the record, I've also eaten a salt fish breakfast in Frog Level, but that's another story.

The story revolved around competing families of chefs versus bakers ("You fondle meat, I beat the batter") who lived in double wides ("Double wides are twice the trouble") in warring trailer parks (Montague Acres and Capulet Hills).

The dialog was cleverly written combining Shakespearean rhymes and language ("What light by yonder bug zapper breaks?") with modern references ("Forsooth, I am mellow").

The raunch factor was high ("I pray another part of thee is as hard as thy whisk"), frequent ("She's curdled my codpiece, the hot wench. Let's shack up") and non-stop ("It would have killed the mood if thee were butt ugly").

A pair of pink flamingos, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, were "trusty pink spies," moving side to side when they overheard some juicy tidbit.

The cast was completely on point, bringing the NASCAR-obsessed, incestuous characters to life as they battled over which trailer park would be the last one standing when the new Walmart got built.

As you might expect, there was something rotten in Frog Level.

Once Cheese MacBreath was sauced, it was up to his heir to  punish the murderer ("To sauce or not to sauce, that is the question").

When the guilty parties have been poisoned with tofu-laden barbecue sauce, the perp, Homeo MacBreath, awakens to find his beloved, the very hot Barbie-Q Bacon, dead by the dagger attachment on her Swiss Army knife.

His despair was evident. "No more shall I nail her."

If ever Shakespeare missed an opportunity to write a play, it was this one about tong-brandishing chefs, cold ones kept in the Kenmore, chefs who train at Blackensburg Culinary College, and spirits who roam the trailer parks to vindicate their untimely death.

The kind of trailer park trash who say of their own, "He swaggers a lot like a drunken sailor and eats us out of home and trailer."

Wisely, playwrights V. Mark Covington and Sharon Caccuabaudo (present in tonight's crowd) kept the trademark couplets so evocative of the Bard, even while having  the characters mock their own rhyming language.

"In the haze of last night's rum. something wicked this way comes."

Wickedly funny, well directed and engagingly performed, it was the kind of play that left my motor revving like a stock car, with a huge grin on my face and a desire for a good whisk.

Luckily, the play had advised me how to deal with that aftermath.

"Find someone who will lick the sauce."

You gotta love a staged reading where they say it all out loud.