By HOLLY NADLER

In the good old Globe days, William Shakespeare’s audience welcomed the many hours it took to plow through one of his plays. What else did they have to do? There were no movies, no television, even books were in short supply: the richest citizens had two or three volumes per household, and at least one of them was the Bible.

In later centuries, custom dictated cutting some of Shakespeare’s text. Even in rehearsals for the Royal Shakespeare Company, the director instructs the cast which speeches to trim so that the play will not run overlong. Attention deficit disorder is affecting audiences the world over.

This past winter, two influential Vineyard Playhouse figures with lots of Shakespeare experience — to wit, author Nicole Galland and actress Chelsea McCarthy — have hit on a course to make the plays still leaner and meaner, cooking up six of the bard’s plays — Macbeth, Hamlet, All’s Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, Measure for Measure, and The Two Gentlemen of Verona, and, on stage this weekend, King Lear, the seventh and final in the series — so that each play wraps in about an hour.

“Cooking up” is the operative term here, in that Ms. Galland and Ms. McCarthy have simmered each play’s text until all that remains is what chefs call a “reduction,” a piquant, satiny sauce with the perfection of flavors that makes the cook kiss his fingers, then go “mmmoi!”

In a telephone conversation this week with 74 year-old, New York-based actress Jan O’Dell, on board to play King Lear this weekend, the performer said the intent of the editing is to set aside repetitions and exposition, while leaving intact the powerful storyline, the strong characters, and the beauty of the language. A narrator named Folio in each play has been introduced to breeze the audience through all the particulars of setting, relationships and back story not necessarily in need of windy speeches.

And how did Ms. O’Dell come to play an old, increasingly deranged monarch of the male gender? The actress reported that Ms. Galland contacted her last fall, filled her in on the Shakespeare fast’n’fun series, and asked her to think about which character — out of the entire canon of 36 plays — Ms. O’Dell might choose for herself.

Over the phone she chuckled, “I played Cleopatra in my salad days, but by now I’ve gone way beyond the romantic or seductress parts. I wasn’t interested in Lady Macbeth or any of the queens. But there was something about Lear and his powerful life changes that appealed to me.”

This will mark Ms. O’Dell’s second visit to the Island and second performance at the Vineyard Playhouse. The first occurred a couple of summers ago when she received excellent notices for her starring role as Mrs. Tilford in The Children’s Hour.

In the time she’s taken to research the part of Lear, she has discovered the doomed monarch to be much deeper than the madman raging outdoors in a storm. The play begins with Lear in the full flush of his majesty, foolishly believing the false praise from all the sycophants surrounding him, a monster of ego and self-centeredness. It’s only after he loses everything, and reels from the betrayal of his two ambitious and essentially evil daughters, that he achieves his own authenticity.

“It’s the spiritual dimension of dying to self,” said Ms. O’Dell, “that allows Lear to grow into compassion, humility, even saintliness.”

For the staged reading, the lady Lear will be flying in for Thursday and Friday rehearsals preparatory for Friday and Saturday performances at 7 p.m. at the Vineyard Playhouse. Many of the usual egregiously talented cast of performers will be on hand: Billy Meleady, Amy Sabin, Mac Young, Liz Hartford, Christopher Kann, Jill Macy, May Oskan, Molly Purves, Chelsea McCarthy, Xavier Powers, Katharine Pilcher and Nicole Galland, who also is directing.

Shakespeare himself, who knew how to keep an audience titillated, would have approved of all the Bruce Willis-style action left in the upcoming presentation: the swordfights, stabbings and eye-gouges will keep all us modern groundlings shrieking in our seats. And then we’ll be sufficiently tenderized to open our hearts to Lear’s first ink-lings of others’ sorrows: “Poor, naked wretches, wheresoe’er you age/ That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm/ How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides/ Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you/ From seasons such as these?”

And then, of course, there is sure to be no dry eye in the house when Cordelia, the one daughter who is honest and pure of heart, dies in her father’s arms: “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O you are men of stones: / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vaults should crack. She’s gone forever.”

A final enticement to come to the Playhouse on either tonight or Saturday (May 1 and 2) is that the price of admission is zip! zero! nothing! Galland and McCarthy’s Shakespeare on Steroids series has all winter long offered free admission, the better to fit backsides to seats and to gain for the bard new waves of devotees.