Much more than the sum of its jealous, sexually threatened, angry, paranoid, violently sundering, new beginning, innocent, open, reconciliatory, and magical parts, The Winter’s Tale is to do with searching for redemption or reconciliation after something absolutely horrific has taken place. I wanted to direct this play in Buffalo in 2024 because I could think…
“Judge not, that ye be not judged. For with what judgment ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure you mete, it shall be measured to you again.” – Matthew 7:1-2 “We are stardust, we are golden.We are billion-year-old carbon,And we got to get ourselvesBack to the garden.” – Crosby, Stills, Nash, and…
Director’s Note The nation is bitterly divided by partisanship and politics. People are scarcely able to credit the humanity of those on the other side of the conflict. Women’s words are dismissed, discounted, and only finally heard far too late. There are regular and increasingly daring transgressions of the rule of law. Large numbers of…
Years ago, when I had made it through the early rounds of elimination for a Fulbright, I was scheduled to have a telephone interview with the Director of the UK Fulbright Commission. I remember receiving very stern written instructions that I was not, under any circumstances, to prepare a statement of any kind; the Director…
Last week, in our Redeeming Time weekly update, I opined at length on the myriad joys of the prison’s multipurpose room, where I delivered an introductory workshop in August before being exiled to a room with a squat column smack in the center of the space for the fall classes. Well, lo and behold, on…
When I arrived in the Twin Cities, I discerned that there were two fallow fields in this utterly verdant theatrical ecosystem where I judged that I could make an impact: I could start a classical theatre company or I could start a new prison performing arts program. But I didn’t think that I had the…
When Joseph Papke at Classical Actors Ensemble asked me to direct Merchant of Venice, I was both delighted to be asked to work with this fresh young company and also wary at the prospect of tackling this deeply troubling play. Is this an anti-semitic play or is this a play about anti-semitism? Should we perform…
In 2016, as our contribution to the celebration of Shakespeare’s 400 year legacy, the men of RTA and I staged Twelfth Night at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. It was my fifth time directing this play; it was my fifth full production behind the walls. It was the first experience of Shakespeare for many of…
“I am the one thing in life I can control. I am inimitable, I am an original. Life doesn’t discriminate Between the sinners and the saints It takes and it takes and it takes And we keep living anyway We rise and we fall and we break And we make our mistakes.” I work with…
Paula Vogel’s Desdemona cannot outrun Shakespeare’s Othello. She cannot escape her death. Nor, at least as much to Vogel’s point, can any woman escape the restrictions and restraints placed upon her by the men who define her existence. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief is one kind of feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s story. Vogel locates…
Last week’s Ira Hates Shakespeare furor illuminated one of the dingier corners within the house of social media: lots of heated, inflated, reductivist and binary declaiming. “Shakespeare’s amazing! “Shakespeare sucks!” This strikes me as particularly unhelpful and more than a little overwrought; can an art form really be undone by one ‘off the cuff’, late…
In January, I was a participant in the month-long intensive at Shakespeare & Company. Tina Packer, Dennis Krausnick, Kevin Coleman and their colleagues have been teaching the intensive for more than 30 years, and intensive is categorically one of the operative descriptors: the hours are long and the work is profound (should one choose to…
In Sunday’s Washington Post, Peter Marks opines the demise of men in tights and the ascent of the high concept. He writes, “It is the fashion in these meddling times — now perhaps more than ever — to put the doublets in mothballs and tie up Shakespeare in the threads of ponderous context. Only cursory…
Harley Granville Barker, a director, Shakespeare scholar and clever redhead, wrote, “Let us humbly own how hard it is not to write nonsense about art.” He wrote this in his preface to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which is a kind of nonsense that becomes art. In no particular order, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is love,…
Last night, we put Claudius on trial. Miching mallecho If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m teaching a Shakespeare workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility this autumn, that the men were curious but deeply skeptical about Shakespeare when we began. A few weeks into the workshop,…
I’m sitting in a run-down classroom as the sun slowly sets on the other side of the Hudson River. The windows are threaded with metal, and there are metal grates on the outside of the glass. Every so often, a corrections officer walks past the door. Twelve men sit with me in a circle. We’ve…
I just finished an exhilarating, thrilling, grueling and very fun rehearsal process, directing A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the American Shakespeare Center. There was no opening night. At least, not yet. My production comprises one-third of the 2011-2012 Almost Blasphemy Tour, and the day after our second dress rehearsal for MND, the actors set to…
[This post originally appeared on www.2amtheatre.com, which is a very cool place to appear.] Collation line. Apparatus. Strip of terror. Whatever you call it, it’s that somewhat inscrutable line or two of apparently Enigma code between the text and the annotations, particularly in a modern edition of, say, Shakespeare. It might seem irrelevant or irretrievably…
“Sir, / You speak a language that I understand not”.
Overview This was my third time directing Twelfth Night. Artistic Director Grant Mudge threw down two especial challenges: stage the play using ‘original practices’ and with only five actors. Modeled on the Actors from the English Stage concept, Richmond Shakespeare annually stages several of their winter season productions with five actors, so that in addition…
Prologue While I was pursuing my M.A. at the Shakespeare Institute, I studied with Dr. John Jowett, who has done a tremendous amount of work on attribution studies in general, and the relationship between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton in particular. I was particularly intrigued by his scholarship with regard to Measure for Measure, and the…
“It’s down to me, yes it is The way she does just what she’s told Down to me, the change has come She’s under my thumb Ah, ah, say it’s alright.” ***** “I will be kind, won’t be so cruel, I will be sweet, I will be true, Because of you, a brand new start,…
Don’t forget about the sex American master director Stephen Wadsworth reminded me that As You Like It is “not necessarily a play about love but about self-realization through exile.” British director David Leveaux, by way of advising me, said: “Don’t forget about the sex.” I kept both of these extremely sound observations in mind as…
The particular challenge I worked to tell the stories of the play as truthfully and as clearly as we can, but I also wanted to celebrate the innate theatricality of the play. We examined every irregularity in the scansion, every short verse line, every shared verse line, every transition from verse to prose: what is…
My program notes Faithful love. Mistaken identity. Lost children. Separated lovers. Magic potions. Wicked stepmothers. Exhausting and frightening journeys through the wilderness. War with the Romans. Reconciliation. Forgiveness. Just your basic fairy, uh —Shakespeare. Only it isn’t. Basic. Cymbeline was one of the last plays that William Shakespeare wrote. Only The Winter’s Tale and The…
[This post originally appeared on www.2amtheatre.com, which is a very cool place to appear.] Last week, I coached an actor who had a big audition this past weekend. It was of the ‘bring two contrasting pieces’ variety. She came to me a little later in her process than I would have liked: I didn’t get…
In collaboration with performers Frank Bradley and Seana Lee Wyman, I founded Some OTHER Shakespeare in the Park. Between 1996 and 1997, we produced and I directed Much Ado about Nothing in Bryant Park (behind the main New York Public Library) and Twelfth Night in Madison Square Park (across from the Flatiron Building). I began…
[I wrote this essay as part of my graduate work at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.] “Surely we’re trying to find out at the beginning what we mean by ‘shrew’. Supposing we said ‘shrew’ equals ‘noisy one’. Along comes a man to tame the noisy one. And for almost five acts we never hear from…
[I wrote this essay as part of my graduate work at the Shakespeare Institute, Stratford-upon-Avon, UK.] Harley Granville-Barker’s dramaturgical criticism has transformed our collective perception of Shakespeare’s plays. Full stop. Once he had completed his work as a director and as an analyst, it would no longer be defensible to consider Shakespeare’s plays as literary…