In its tenth season, the Alabama Shakespeare Festival (ASF) continues to thrive. This summer the company played in repertory Oh, Coward! (a musical-comedy revue featuring Noel Coward songs), Goldoni's The Servant of Two Masters, the Marowitz Hamlet, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, and Henry IV, Part One. I hope ASF can keep it up. This lively professional group has attracted audiences to Anniston from all over the Southeast. In an area more readily associated with the Talledega 500 and the Crimson Tide than with first-rate classical theatre, ASF is a phenomenon to be cherished. Yet with this season's considerably varied bill there was some unevenness in the Shakespeare productions I attended. First the experiment, the Marowitz Hamlet. This is a playing on Shakespeare's Hamlet, a crazy quilt of bits and pieces from the original rearranged by Charles Marowitz. Its premiere was at the Akademie der Kunst, Berlin, in 1965. The play was conceived, according to Marowitz, as a "collage form" in which actors had to "forgo all the conventional means by which they usually achieved their effects. Nothing could build, for instance, for longer than two or three minutes; no scene could develop to a logical conclusion because no scene ever concluded but was abruptly intersected by another, invariably with a different texture and from another part of the play. The sustenance of character became secondary to the transmutation of character as a result of jumps in time and location" (The Marowitz Shakespeare [New York: Drama Books, 1978], p. 12). The aim of the play was to catch "the multitude of nuances and insights" in Shakespeare's work without resort to the direct dramatizing of a story (p. 10). But the aim of the play was also to attack what in Marowitz's opinion the character Hamlet represents in life: "by assaulting the character of Hamlet, one was deriding the supreme prototype of the consciencestricken but paralyzed liberal: one of the most lethal and obnoxious characters in modern times" (p. 13). Fortunately the text of the piece itself is free from such outrageous question-begging, although it does insist and nag rather shrilly about certain exceptionable points-that everyone in the play is Hamlet's father, for example, or that Hamlet is a bad actor.