If The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged), a hit on London's West End theater scene for the past several years, is like a blender—comically mixing up characters and moments from different Shakespeare plays—then Will Huddleston, the director of the Sunnyvale production of this Bard spoof, is the guy who keeps hitting "puree."

"There are scenes from Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and Julius Caesar. Plots from all Shakespeare comedies are mixed up," says Huddleston, whose production of Shakespeare (abridged) completes its run by Sunnyvale's California Theatre Center (CTC) on Sept. 27. Huddleston's cast of three actors must perform all of Shakespeare's works in less than two hours. They have to play all the roles, including the female ones—a nod to the days of Elizabethan theater, when female actors were barred from the stage, forcing the male actors to assume the female roles as well. Huddleston is the Bay Area stage actor/director/playwright who has served as CTC resident director since 1986.

Huddleston is also acting in CTC's summer productions of George Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man and the 19th-century English thriller Angel Street, in which he portrays villainous Mr. Manningham, who plots to drive his wife insane. Huddleston, who got bitten by the acting bug in high school, has had an affinity for Shakespeare ever since his early theater days. He studied theater at Texas Tech University and Southern Illinois University.

"I remember doing Shakespeare and Moliére the most," says Huddleston, recalling the first few plays in which he appeared. "The classics were the ones that were always the most fun because you had the most room to do stuff as an actor."

With Shakespeare (abridged), Huddleston is in his element. The play was created in 1981 by comedians Daniel Singer, Jess Borgeson and Adam Long, who formed the Reduced Shakespeare Company. They first tried out their speeded-up Shakespeare act on audiences at Renaissance fairs throughout California and then further developed their act into a successful full-length stage version.

Huddleston is a veteran of several West Coast Shakespeare festivals, including the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Ore. He has also written historical plays for younger theatergoers. One original play that Huddleston is especially proud of is A New Age Is Dawning, a piece about the ragtime era.

"I keep wanting to write the plays that Shakespeare didn't finish and that he would have written if he had lived for 200 years," says Huddleston, who wonders what it would have been like if the Bard had adapted Don Quixote and Gulliver's Travels.

Huddleston has appeared in the American Conservatory Theater (ACT) version of A Christmas Carol in San Francisco. He has frequently played Bob Cratchit to Raye Birk's Ebenezer Scrooge. In last year's staging, Huddleston assumed the role of Fezziwig, young Scrooge's cheery boss. He has also occasionally played Scrooge himself.

"I remember a critic said that I did just fine as Scrooge except that I was too young, which was the nicest criticism I ever got," Huddleston says. "A Christmas Carol is an important piece of work because of what it has to say about the human spirit and about winter. It just resonates very deeply."

Like the Dickens classic, Shakespeare has been subject to countless interpretations, ranging from the straightforward and unabridged—as in Kenneth Branagh's four-hour epic take on Hamlet—to the manic and very abridged. "Shakespeare can be done a million different ways," Huddleston says. "He can stand up to anything. That's why people still do those plays. They're indestructible and they still resonate, no matter what you do."

Will Huddleston can be seen in 'Angel Street' July 25 and 26 at 8 p.m., 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged)' July 27 at 8 p.m., and in 'Arms and the Man,' on July 28 at 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. All plays are performed in the Sunnyvale Community Center Theater, 550 Remington St., Sunnyvale. For more information, call 408.720.0873 or visit www.ctcinc.org.