'All’s Well That Ends Well' Production Notes, Part 2

by Kirk Woodward

[Kirk Woodward’s “All’s Well That Ends Well Production Notes,” drawn from his production journal, continues below with Part 2.  If you haven’t read Part 1, posted on Wednesday. 26 November, I strongly recommend going back and picking that up before starting Part 2.

[The conclusion of Kirk’s account of his work on this Saint James Players production picks up right where the first part left off—with Kirk returning from his family vacation in North Carolina in mid-July and rejoining the cast and production team in rehearsal for Shakespeare’s All’s Well, already in progress.]

Back from the beach, I watched the next rehearsal, a run-through, and read lines for the missing actors – actually there were as many missing as there were present, which made the rehearsal uninspiring and also meant that occasionally we had to skip scenes because none of the actors in them were present, or only one.

I felt that Colleen had done a fine job of basic blocking, and she had a couple of ideas (the opening parade; a wedding performed as background; a funny bit with the children and a drum) that were spectacular.

We agreed that I’d take the acting scenes for the next few rehearsals, while she worked on the peripheral framing of the play. I was itching to do just that, without knowing whether any of my ideas would work – they seemed to me to be funny but crazy.

Colleen liked my suggestion that I tell the cast, when I was working on scenes, that we were “playing,” and that Colleen would review them to see what we would keep.  We hoped this would keep the actors from wondering which director to listen to.

So Colleen didn’t come to the first rehearsal on 20 July after my vacation. I worked on nine scenes, many of them short and transitional, trying to find “angles” for them that would interest the cast and provide some vitality. It was fun directing scenes again; I hadn’t directed in a while. I ran out of energy with about twenty minutes to go in the rehearsal, and we basically pushed across the finish line.

Rehearsal the following night was cancelled – too many people who were scheduled to be out, and one with a sick child. Colleen and I used the time to talk through costumes, which turned out to be less complicated than we had feared. We decided to go with basic black clothes, enhanced by accessories that we hoped would be emblematic and maybe funny.

Continuing to work on scenes in the next rehearsals, I learned something about myself as a director: when I start to run out of energy I talk too much. Time to stop, so I ended one rehearsal about 10 minutes early. The next rehearsal ended at 8:30 for the same reason.

But on each night we worked through all the scenes we’d planned to. Colleen worked one scene where she had a definite idea on how it should go. So it was a productive period.

Looking ahead to August, though, I saw an impressive number of schedule conflicts – sometimes half the cast Run-throughs were almost impossible. The best we could think of was identify the scenes that most needed work, identify the scenes it was possible to do, and match them up.

Actually at the next rehearsal we had a good percentage of the cast present, and since we had announced that the rehearsal would be a run-through, I told the cast the rehearsal objective for the evening would be continuity.

I had them think through the script in their seats, asking them to narrate to themselves the sequence of events in the play.  This is difficult because there are so many short scenes and I knew Colleen and I had a hard enough time keeping track of them.

Then on Sunday, 3 August, we ran the play from beginning to end, telling the actors they could act or not, work with the script or not, whatever they wanted, as long as they were where they should be when they were supposed to be there.

I think it’s important for each rehearsal to have an explicit goal, especially in early rehearsals, so the actors don’t try to do too much at once. On this night there was some excellent acting, particularly by the two leads. But there wasn’t any pressure for them to do that – it happened as a by-product of reduced stress.

We had few people for the next two rehearsals and only worked for about an hour each night. Colleen solidified a tricky piece of staging, and I worked with two actors, aiming to add more variety and movement to a few scenes and speeches. I hoped that the actors would retain the work.

I was particularly happy with one small blocking change I made, where a tiny “cross” by one actor and a “counter” by the other (one takes a couple of steps in one direction, the other adjusts a little in the other direction set up the rest of the scene with clarity and zest. Little things!

It struck me that in this production the play had two elements, an envelope and its contents. The contents were the scenes. The envelope was the apparatus around them – the children bringing out costume pieces, the location signs, the music, and so on. Colleen specialized on the envelope.

The actor playing the King had been on vacation for several weeks. When he returned we devoted the next rehearsal to his scenes. He had worked on his lines while away and the rehearsal went well until we reached the last scene of the play, which wasn’t blocked at all. Colleen and I had each assumed the other had staged it!

The scene has all the major characters and a lot of activity in it. I had worked out on paper some blocking for the scene, which is fairly complex, weeks ago, but for some reason I assumed that Colleen had staged it while I was on vacation, and she had assumed I’d handle it.

So I went ahead and blocked it now, and we got it done, although this made the rehearsal run half an hour later than we had wanted (9:30 PM instead of 9 PM).

Our next rehearsal, a run through, was the last for two weeks because of a holiday weekend (Saturday, 30 August–Monday, 1 September 2025) – no sense trying to get people to rehearse on Labor Day! Colleen and I gave notes afterward, the first time we’d been able to do that, and the rehearsal felt productive. I have to say, this show was work!

Colleen and I sat down one evening and ordered from Amazon the costume items we needed and were happy with the results.

We prepared the following “director’s note” for the program:

If you haven’t seen “All’s Well” before, you’re not alone – few people have! There’s no record of its production in Shakespeare’s time; its initial appearance is in the First Folio of 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. That script could be a first draft! The directors of this production have edited it to one act and about 70 minutes, but we think it’s a fair representation of the play. Its theme is Shakespeare’s great interest, love, but this time it’s love of every kind but ordinary romantic love. Our heroine is in love, and as you’ll see, she has quite a problem to solve. We think the play is wonderfully funny and have tried to bring that aspect out. The cast is a delight and we’re excited to share this Shakespeare rarity with you!

After a two-week layoff for the Labor Day weekend, and with memorized lines due, the next rehearsal was awful. Sticking to the principle of one purpose per rehearsal, I told the cast the rehearsal was entirely about lines and not to worry about anything else. In most cases the actors had done a good, if often incomplete, job of memorization. Not much else was good, though, and I had to remind myself that I had told them that would be okay.

I had thought we’d be able to get through the whole play; in fact we barely got halfway and continued from there the next night, which went much better. The cast seemed more attuned to the play; the level of memorization of lines wasn’t bad; a few scenes genuinely clicked, with the actors relating well to each other.

We distributed the costume accessories we had ordered, such as sashes, medals, hats and crowns, and even fake moustaches for the children in one scene, and the cast seemed to enjoy them. Colleen reworked a bit of the last scene and improved it.

Meanwhile it appeared after all that I would be the one to play the role of Lafeu on the next to last performance, so I had to learn the lines. I used a portable tape recorder (primitive technology, I know, but convenient), taped all the scenes I was in (five altogether), and started listening to it every chance I got.

Then I discovered an improvement to that method. After each line of my own on the recording, I left a space for me to repeat the line – just like learning a foreign language. No sooner had I started on that method than the assistant pastor of the church volunteered to play Lafeu for the one performance. So I discovered a useful memorization method and was off the hook.

Denise, our trained opera singer in the cast, who was playing Lafeu, told me another interesting method of line memorization that she used. She learned her lines word by word – literally one word at a time. She’d memorize one word, and when she had that one down she’d memorize the next, and now and then she’d review the whole speech. Slow, but possibly effective. I intend to try that approach sometime.

Two rehearsals to go before the final week of rehearsals, 21-25 September. At the first we had several absences that made it difficult to organize scene work. Colleen used the performance space (the church sanctuary) with the four children, and I took everybody else upstairs, told them we were going to “play,” and led exercises on monologues and scenes based on training procedures I’d seen used by members of the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Working together, our actors ran through the material once, then paraphrased it, then did it in the original text making a physical move for every noun or pronoun, then once more to see if anything had changed. In every case it had – the work was fresher, more fun, with better communication

After the rehearsal I asked one of the actors how she thought it had gone, and she said it was good but “I didn’t like it at first” As an actor I don’t enjoy this sort of work either, although I’ve taught “theater games” for years. In a production of a play I want to work with other actors to develop a role, and that’s all.

But the need for “games” arises when the language of the play approaches the “poetic.” American actors, raised on modern plays, approach them through the emotions, and American acting training is based on that assumption.

For example, Lee Strasberg (1901-1982) of the Actors Studio taught actors to reach into their own emotions for experiences they could then apply to basically realistic plays.

On the other hand, it’s generally necessary for actors to approach poetic drama – for example, the plays of Shakespeare – through the language, or they’ll have little idea what is going on in the play.

English actors traditionally have been trained in this approach, which helps explain why American actors often think of British acting as dry and even mechanical – the English are accustomed to approaching the play through its language.

I described this idea to the actors at the following rehearsal. We also talked about the fascinating fact that although the actors know what will happen in the whole play, the characters have no idea, and we tried to apply that insight to our script.

Over the next break between rehearsals, Colleen, one of our performers, and I tried to drum up business at a “sidewalk sale” on the church’s street. We were able to pass out more postcards for the show than I’d expected. Some people took them readily; some tried not to look me in the eye, perhaps because I was wearing a sort of Viking helmet with two big horns – a Shakespearian look, you know.

“Production week,” 21-25 September, leading up to opening night, began on a Sunday night after the usual week’s layover, and I told the cast that we didn’t expect full performances, we just hoped to get the show back in focus. Good thing – there were parts that went smoothly, but the beginning and the end were a mess, and lines were erratic all the way through.

I was “on book” prompting, and Colleen took notes. We agreed that there was no cause to panic, although deep inside I suspect we were both panicking – I found myself recalling many other shows in which, at one point or another, I had vowed never to direct again. But it was a useful night . . . I was pretty sure.

The next night we’d gotten the sound going and the costumes and props were handled pretty well. The run-through matched the previous night’s pattern of starting slowly and gathering momentum as it went along.

It struck me that each actor in the play had a different style of acting. Putting them all together – who knew? Hopefully it would be fun, but at this stage I couldn’t tell. Line memorization was still sketchy this night – lots of stopping and starting – and Colleen and I decided not to offer prompting of lines the next night . . . .

Which worked fine. There was still some stumbling and ad-libbing, but the story was clear and mostly interesting, although focus weakened again at the end. I had a page full of notes and hoped that people listened to them. I will say, it definitely felt like we were seeing signs of hope.

Another rehearsal, the 24th, more progress. The play, with a couple of exceptions, moved swiftly from scene to scene, and I thought it likely that the audience would respond to that.  The whole presentation ran an hour, faster than we had figured.

We started that particular run-through late because the church had double-booked the space until 7:30, and we used that time in another room to work on the last scene. It definitely improved. Dress rehearsal on the 25th was even better – about three major glitches but all easily avoidable.

And then, finally . . . opening night, Friday, the 26th, was a joy. An audience of about 35 saw a fast-moving play that told its story clearly and well and featured some excellent present-moment acting, which I define as the actors seeming genuinely to be talking and listening to each other, rather than just saying words – which makes the work fresher and more fun. Colleen and I were thrilled. I said to her, “There’s a possibility we actually know how to direct.”

With some friends after the performance, I was asked, “Is Bertram [the central male character] really as horrible a person as he seems to be in the play?” I told them that was exactly what Shakespeare had written. My friend Martha Day pointed out that if Shakespeare had weakened Bertram’s “badness” in any way, there wouldn’t have been any play – the whole story is that of a woman who loves a man who has absolutely no use for her at all.

The second performance, the following night, would have shaken my confidence if what happened hadn’t been predictable. Although some performances were solid, much of the show was just a little “off,” and one actor forgot chunks of his speeches. Colleen went backstage during the performance – something I don’t believe I’ve ever done as a director, but she was right to do it – and calmed him down.

The next performance, the Sunday matinee, before the show I said to the cast:

There were some really good things last night, but as you know we had some problems. I think the reason is that we were trying to answer the wrong question. We were asking, “How do we repeat what we did last night?” That’s never the right question. We can never repeat a performance. We can only move forward. The question we want to ask ourselves today is, “How do we tell our story this time?” If we do that everything will be all right.

“Tell a story” is more and more my idea of what a play does. I don’t know if what I said had anything to do with the performance, but it was fine. The story was told clearly, the play moved speedily from one scene to the next, and the audience – our biggest so far, seventy-five people – seemed to enjoy it.

I should add a note about our sound effects, because I was in charge of them. There were only three, at the beginning, middle, and end of the show, all music cues. I ran them from my cell phone over speakers. And I messed them up in just about every way I could. I neglected to test the equipment before a show not once but twice, and each time there were problems. Once I forgot to plug the amplifier in. Twice I was just plain late. A fine showing from the director! Mr. Professional . . . I hate tech.

After a several day layoff, many of us met the following Thursday to work with the actor who was going to play the role of Lafeu the next night. He was in a tough spot because actors often accomplish a great deal of their line memorization through rehearsal, and he only had this one. We agreed that he would use his script in performance and not worry about it.

The nicest moment came after rehearsal when Colleen, who was going to be travelling, said goodbye to the cast. Their affection for her and their gratitude for her work was lovely to see.

The Friday night performance of the following weekend, 3 October, was a pretty good show, and since I knew several of the factors involved – the cast hadn't done the play in five days so they were out of practice with the language, and someone was reading one of the roles as a substitute – the cast had a right to be pleased with themselves.

Our “ringer” paraphrased one line in a way that has made me laugh a great deal since. His line was, “Helena, that's dead: such a ring as this, I saw upon her finger.” What he said, in a furor of exuberance, was, “That ring! I saw it on Helena’s dead finger!”

I think one thing in favor of our production was that almost no one is familiar with the play, so they were wondering what happens in it. (I did meet one man who went home and read it when he saw the poster.) Anyway, I was happy . . . and relieved . . . and tired. Colleen, as I mentioned, had flown the coop, traveling to a wedding in Maine. Two is definitely better than one, if it's the right two.

The final performance on Saturday night, 4 October, was alive and lively, an excellent ending. Facts and figures: we performed for about 250 people (“houses” of around 35, 55, 75, 55, and 35 over the five performances), and took in $1,466 in contributions, well over our expenses, which didn’t reach a thousand dollars.

As my friend Dan Landon, who worked for the Shubert Organization, says, “One dollar over the ‘nut’ – it’s a hit!” (The “nut” is expenses.) We were a hit!

Looking back, I was happy with our production. It didn’t do everything we wanted it to do – its style was neither purely ’30’s slapstick, Monty Python, or graphic novel, but we did borrow from all three.

We also didn’t emphasize some themes that are present in the script – the role of Heaven in the story (the play has a deeply spiritual side), the theme of Honor that Auden emphasizes, and many of the bawdy sexual references.

But we told the story of the play in an entertaining way. I believe that those who weren’t familiar with the play before they saw it (a category that included virtually the entire audience) left with a solid grounding in the play. The show moved fast, with one scene finishing while the next was coming onstage.

Having two directors could be a problem, I’m sure, but Colleen and I were proud of the way we worked together. One thing we were able to do was to bounce ideas off each other. I believe we both tried to reach for the best decision each time, rather than insisting on our own ideas. I’d cheerfully do it again.

At the cast party one of the actors said to me, “I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.” I thanked him politely and thought to myself, “You should have seen what it was like inside me.” No two directing jobs are the same, ever. Colleen and I compared ourselves to ducks, calm above the water and paddling furiously underneath. But that’s part of the fun.

[The first recorded production of William Shakespeare’s All’s Well That Ends Well didn’t occur until 1741 in London, 125 years after the Bard’s death.  The last New York City mounting was in the Delacorte Theater in Central Park from 6 June to 30 July 2011 by the Public Theater for Shakespeare in the Park.  It was on Broadway only once at the Martin Beck Theatre (renamed the Al Hirschfeld Theatre in 2003) from 13 April to 15 May 1983 in a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by RSC artistic director (1968 to 1986) Trevor Nunn.]

[The Saint James Players’ production of All's Well, codirected by Kirk Woodward and Colleen Brambilla, took place on 26, 27, and 28 September, and 3 and 4 October 2025.  Performances were held at Saint James Episcopal Church, 581 Valley Road in Upper Montclair, New Jersey.] 

[Near the end of this installment of Kirk’s All’s Well journal, he recounts: “At the cast party one of the actors said to me, ‘I like working with you – you’re so easy-going.’  I thanked him politely and thought to myself, ‘You should have seen what it was like inside me.’”

[One time—and only one time—I had an almost identical experience.  (The complete tale is related in “The Importance of Being Earnest and the Big Bluff” in “Short Takes: Theater War Stories“ [6 December 2010].)

[After I finished my acting MFA, I meticulously avoided trying to direct.  My two brief experiences in the director’s chair had convinced me that it wasn’t for me.  Eventually, however, I found myself accumulating stage experiences I wanted to apply on the other side of the footlights.

[I’d been working for an Off-Off-Broadway company for about a year or so, and I eventually asked the artistic director to let me direct something there.  One evening, he called to tell me that the cast of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, a couple of weeks into rehearsals, had fired its own director!  They’d become frustrated with him because he hadn’t blocked the show, hadn’t given them any character notes, and, despite fervent requests, hadn’t made any cuts in the script.

[The artistic director asked if I’d consider taking over the production. I agreed to accept the job, my first professional directing gig.  In addition to not wanting to upset the cast any more—they acknowledged that they were floundering—and not wanting them to see that I didn’t know what I was doing, I consciously chose actions to appear more secure and authoritative than I really was.  

[I decided, first, not to tell them that I’d never directed pros before, then to make very specific decisions about text cuts (that was the straw that caused the rebellion) and tell them exactly what was in, what was out, and what we could discuss.  I made some specific blocking decisions, worked out some physical business to insert, and made some very specific character notes.

[I deliberately selected these actions so that I’d seem to be in charge and on top of the situation (even though I wasn’t).  It was all a choreographed act I figured would carry us into the rehearsals far enough until the work itself became a focus.

[One thing that worked in my favor that I couldn’t have known was that the cast was so desperate for some guidance and direction that they glommed onto my efforts like Velcro!  The bluff worked, but mostly because the cast was really ready for it.

[Here’s the bit that parallels Kirk’s anecdote: after the play opened, and we had our opening night party, several of the cast, drunk by then, very forcefully said they’d work with me anytime again and that I was a real “actors’ director.”  That’s when I told them that this had been my first professional gig.  They were shocked—and I was delighted!]

 

'All’s Well That Ends Well' Production Notes, Part 1

by Kirk Woodward 

[Kirk Woodward, a prolific guest blogger on Rick On Theater, lives in Little Falls in Passaic County, New Jersey, north of Montclair in neighboring Essex County, in the environs of which, much of his theater work is staged.  Among the many small theater groups in and around Montclair is the Saint James Players.  Kirk’s previous post concerning SJP was “A Directing Experience” (13 and 16 October 2023).

[SJP mounts one main production a year, usually a Shakespeare play (though the production described in “A Directing Experience” was Sophocles’ Antigone, a Greek tragedy and SJP’s first—and, so far, only—non-Shakespearean production).  Associated with Upper Montclair’s Saint James Episcopal Church, SJP is an amateur and semi-professional community troupe.

[This year’s production, returning to the tradition of presenting a Shakespeare play, was All’s Well That Ends Well, a “problem play” (which Kirk defines below) and a comedy.  It was mounted earlier this fall with Kirk codirecting alongside his longtime friend, Colleen Brambilla.  Kirk kept a journal of the work on All’s Well, which he’s submitted for publication on Rick On Theater, as he’s done several times in the past.]

In March 2025, as the Saint James Players (SJP) of Upper Montclair, New Jersey, began to plan for its annual production of a play by William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Sharon Quinn, who had directed the previous year’s production of his play Love’s Labours Lost (possibly written in the mid-1590s; presented by SJP: 13-15 and 20-21 September 2024), suggested a production of his play All’s Well That Ends Well (abbreviated as AWW or All’s Well).

I had been intending to propose a different project – a production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice (probably written between 1596 and 1598) in which the controversial character of Shylock was replaced by another character, eliminating the “religious” issue from the play. But a close friend had just warned me against this idea.

I suspected that she was correct. Not all ideas are good ones. (I still haven’t completely given up on it, though.) I was interested in Sharon’s idea, but she didn’t want to direct again this year unless she had to, and I suggested that I direct the play with my longtime friend Colleen Brambilla (see “Notes from a Sometime Actor” [27 December 2019]), a skilled choreographer and director.

We proposed the idea to the SJP board and the board liked it. I made a cutting of the play, since the SJP requests that when possible its productions be one act and no more than 90 minutes long. This approach might not be appropriate for all Shakespeare’s plays, but it seemed feasible this time.

The cutting was not difficult, partly because a great deal of the original play is comedy that is unlikely to come across to the audience. I adopted the principle that anything that needed a footnote in order to be understood today had to go. I tried to maintain the storyline and not leave the secondary characters with too little to do.

The play itself is problematic, beginning with its dates. Scholars estimate that it might have been written sometime between 1598 and 1608 – a wide range. I see a few things in it that seem to me to date it after 1606, one of them being the use of the word ‘equivocate,’ which came into usage that year in connection with the notorious Gunpowder Plot to blow up the king and Parliament.

There is no report of any production of the play in Shakespeare’s time. It initially appears in the First Folio (the 1623 published collection of Shakespeare’s plays). Compared to more familiar plays of Shakespeare’s, it has been produced little since (see note in the afterword below).

Reading – and, we assumed, seeing – it can be a complex experience. All’s Well is frequently called a “problem play,” defined by Wikipedia as “a play that poses complex ethical dilemmas that require more than typically simple solutions.”

This is well said. For a comedy AWW is peculiar. Comedies typically end in romance; AWW does not, because as far as the reader can tell, although it concludes with a marriage, during the entire play the groom has had no use at all for the bride, and it’s not clear that he ever will.

Shakespeare as a dramatist characteristically examines the themes of his plays from multiple angles. My take on the play as we began work on it was that AWW, like the more familiar As You Like It (frequently abbreviated as AYLI, first registered in 1560), looks at the subject of love from varied perspectives, and that in this case Shakespeare has chosen particularly difficult viewpoints that do not easily resolve themselves.

I thought of AWW as the “underside” of AYLI. Many of the aspects of love in the play make us uncomfortable – unrequited love, self-love, love of status and influence, love of war and glory.

Helena, the principal character in the play, is in love with Bertram, a man above her station with absolutely no interest in her at all. He is however “on the prowl” for other women, and Helena uses this fact, among others, to try to win his favor. She is the active character in the play, and at the end she maneuvers her way to victory, but what has she won? And yet the play, at least technically, is a comedy!

With these things in mind we began preparing the production in April. As a director I’ve never felt I’ve done a particularly good job at preparing for a production, so I wanted to do better this time. I began by heeding the advice of my acting teacher, the late Elisabeth Dillon (see “‘Portrait of a Mentor’” by Alan Geller, posted on ROT on 30 July 2020) – she learned this from her teacher Herbert Berghof (1909-1990; see “Herbert Berghof, Acting Teacher” [1 June 2011]), I believe – that a director should read a play once through for each character in the play, “including the dog.”

Doing this, I began immediately to find nuances in the characters that I hadn’t seen before. For example, something that ought to be useful for us is the observation that many of the main characters seem impetuous, in a hurry.

This is useful because Colleen and I wanted to make sure we directed a comedy. Sharon originally suggested a “screwball comedy” like a number of films from the 1930’s. I pictured the play as a farce – very fast pace, rapid entrances and exits. Colleen suggested that it resemble a Monty Python episode. We thought it likely that it would end up all three.

I wrote my friend Steve Johnson:

I think the text we have is a draft, possibly a first draft. Not to say there weren’t later scripts, but as you know we don’t have any, and no records of production in Shakespeare’s time either; the First Folio is also the first indication it existed. There are a number of peculiarities in the script that to me say “I’ll fix that later – got to finish,” particularly the careless naming of the peripheral characters like First Lord and Steward, and the first indication of the disguise subplot – the widow tells Helena, “I’ve got a great idea, tell you later,” but a few scenes later Helena comes up with the idea and has to sell the widow on it.

 

I read Auden’s lecture on the play; for him it’s primarily about Honor, and that’s definitely correct. I also see it as the reverse side of “As You Like It,” with AYLI’s in-depth examination of love between two people who care for each other. AWW is about two people one of whom absolutely does not care for the other, and other kinds of love get a look too, such as straight-out lust, self-love, love of status, and so on . . . as though AYLI is a lovely piece of needlework and AWW is the stitching you see on the back of it.

 

(Poet and critic W. H. Auden [1907-1973] gave a series of lectures as a course at the New School for Social Research [now simply the New School] in New York City from 2 October 1946 to 14 May 1947. Auden never prepared them for publication as a book himself, but the volume was reconstructed and edited by literary critic Arthur Kirsch [b. 1932], now professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, using notes taken by Auden’s students at the time.  The lectures were published in 2000 by Princeton University Press.

 

(In the published Lectures, the discussions of each play are presented as separate chapters, entitled simply by the name of the play they discuss. [All’s Well is on pages 181-184.] During his original lectures, Auden grouped these as “problem plays” thematically.)

 

Colleen and I agreed not to try to “block” or stage the scenes in the show until we saw who was cast and how they handled the space and the entrances and exits we worked out (which of course were also tentative).

So in early April Colleen and I sat down for three hours and worked out the entrances and exits that the actors would make in the show (tentatively, again, depending on how they looked when we saw them on stage).

We got the job done, and I was happy with how well we worked together. It had been a while since I co-directed with anybody, and forty years or so since I co-directed with Colleen on the farce Chemin de Fer by Georges Feydeau (1862-1921), and on the musical Something’s Afoot (book, music, and lyrics by James McDonald, David Vos, and Robert Gerlach), which had opened on Broadway (not directed by us) in 1976.

My temperament is not basically collaborative; I tend to jump in and do a lot of things before my partner has a chance to get started. I decided not to do that this time, and as it turned out Colleen and I treated each other with respect, listening to each other’s ideas and agreeing on which were better.

A week or so later, Colleen told me she had thought of a formulation of the style of the play that would convey it quickly and clearly – we would do the play as a “graphic novel,” which would allow for strong picturization, non-realistic action when needed, and even “balloons” of words to illustrate what characters were thinking (which we ultimately did to indicate where scenes were taking place). This struck me as perfect, offering clear illustrations of what’s going on in the play, and plenty of opportunities for outlandish ideas or exaggerations.

I presented this idea at the company’s “announcement meeting.” Colleen couldn’t be there – 27 April, so I described the play we were doing, talked about its style, emphasized the important dates, and generally tried to stir up enthusiasm for the project.

Our auditions on 12 and 13 May were “cold readings,” where arrivals are given scenes to read. (If they’ve read the published play beforehand that’s even better, but of course the version we were doing was shorter than the published version.) We tried to find scenes for the principals and for the different types of characters in the play (young and old, energetic and passive, and so on).

A technical note: when I was growing up, a “side” was a script on which one actor’s lines were written, with blank spaces for the lines of the other actors in the scene. This was supposed to encourage performers to listen closely to each other, which you have to do if you don’t know what the other person is going to say.

I haven’t encountered “sides” of that kind in years and I don’t know if anyone uses them today. Our “sides” for auditions were just short scenes. I did add one innovation that I’ve always thought would be worth trying: at the top of each “side” I wrote out a short description of its context, hoping that this would at least start the auditioners out on the right track when they read the scene. (It did seem to.)

For actors waiting to audition, I also prepared a cast breakdown; a summary of production dates; and a list of numbers of the audition scenes so the papers didn’t get hopelessly scrambled.

And I made “audition sheets” to collect each actor’s contact information, conflicts on rehearsal dates, and any information they wanted us to know about themselves. I forgot to print the audition sheets out, went to auditions without them, and had to dash home, print them out, and bring them back.

We had a small group for the first auditions, eight actors, several unfamiliar to us. The second night was much the same, except that we had many more extremely talented women than we thought we could possibly find roles for in the play. This is a familiar situation in theater: plays written by men, with lots of men’s roles, and mostly women available to play them.

To be fair to Shakespeare, he had severe limitations on how many women’s roles he could write, since acting by women on stage was forbidden by cultural norms at that time. As far as we know, theater companies in his day would have a handful of male actors who specialized in women’s parts – boys, some of them apparently remarkably good performers, and they must have been skilled for Shakespeare to have written Cleopatra, Lady Macbeth, and Helena, in our play, for them.

Nevertheless Shakespeare made as much of women’s roles as he could. In AWW the women are the doers, the ones with agency, much more farsighted than the men. In our production the play came across as a feminist statement. If Shakespeare had been able to write for a cast that included female actors, what else might he have been able to accomplish?

Colleen raised the possibility that Shakespeare had played women’s roles in his early days in theater. (In his day boys played the women’s roles until they grew out of them.) It’s a tantalizing thought.

We have no idea, of course; because there is no information available today on Shakespeare’s late teen and early adult years. But she raises an intriguing possibility. Might he have been equipped to write strong roles for women because he’d played them?

We sat down together and worked out the casting for the show, working slowly from the leading roles on. One event was unique in my experience: we weren’t positive that Lydia De Souza, who had greatly impressed us in auditions, would be interested in playing a role in the broad style we were hoping to use for the play. I suggested that we call her and ask. We did, she said she was excited by the idea, and we told her she was cast.

The next day I drafted an email offering people roles, sent it to Colleen for review, and sent it out. The first reply, which I received almost immediately, read, “No. I would love to work with you and Colleen again, but if I'm doing Shakespeare, I like to be able to speak a few times. . . [.] I'm sorry you thought I only deserved one scene.” This was a turn-down, and we moved on to our next choice.

Casting really is an awful process. I learned from this experience that directors don’t cast actors. They cast plays, as best they can. Life would be easier if actors (including myself, when I’m auditioning) could believe that.

After about a week we collected enough acceptances to assemble a cast, and I went to work on a rehearsal schedule. At this point it was May; the company’s policy is to rehearse on Sunday and Monday nights through the summer, moving to production week (the last week of rehearsals) with performances in late September.

It took about five concentrated hours to finish a draft of a schedule; I had to make a chart with every scene by number (all 27) on one axis and all the characters on the other, in order to be able to keep track of who was in each scene.

We made, and stuck to, several decisions about how the play would be staged. Performing in the front of the sanctuary of the church, we made no effort to conceal any of it (for example, the pulpit, the baptismal font, or the altar). We used no curtains, amplification, or lighting effects. The only “technical” element of the show was a set of speakers for three music cues, for the beginning of the play, a march, and the curtain call.

This decision-making process illustrates something I’ve said many times: directing a play by Shakespeare isn’t the same as directing a typical play. It’s more like staging a musical – or a military campaign. A great deal of the work is strategy.

After creating a rehearsal schedule, I second-guessed myself, felt that the schedule was too loaded on the early rehearsals; second-guessed myself again, and finally felt it was all right. I sent it to Colleen, who approved it, and drafted this email on 15 May to accompany the email with the schedule:

Hi everyone,

 

Below and attached is a tentative rehearsal schedule for “All’s Well.” (It’s always tentative – things happen.) Because of major conflicts in early June, we will begin rehearsals with a read-through on Monday, June 23, followed by two nights of basic staging. From then on, scene work will alternate with full cast run-throughs. 

 

Since the play is only about 70 minutes long, even at run-through rehearsals we will be able to work scenes as well, as needed. We don’t want to waste anyone’s time, but pretty much everyone’s scenes are spread throughout the whole play.

 

The script we’re using has numbered scenes (1 through 27!). Because we will work on multiple scenes in many rehearsals, since the first thing we’ll stage is entrances and exits, when a director calls a scene number, you can go directly to the entrance point. Think of it as movie acting – scene by scene, not necessarily in order! 

 

Because of conflicts, it may be a while before some scenes get detailed work. Don’t worry, it’s planned for.

 

Comments welcome. Thank you!

 

Colleen and Kirk

Meanwhile, as I started to think about “blocking” the movements and events of the play, I wondered if we should be planning to “gag it up” with the play, putting in hopefully humorous stunts within the action.

I found myself thinking this way: “gags” are fine in the framework of the play if we want them, but where the characters in the play are concerned, humor must come from their personalities and not be arbitrary.

Colleen and I sat down, figured out the remaining casting questions, and got a lot further on our ideas for the production. We continued working on things we could pre-plan, agreeing that for this particular show, much would have to be decided as we went along.

My new motto as I worked through the script: “Physicalize!” This has not always been on the top of my list as a director (it is for Colleen), but I was learning.

One of our actors, in a major role, had health issues, and after much discussion I suggested to him that he might switch to a smaller role, and he accepted . . . and then declined the role because it was too small! See earlier maxim – directors don’t cast actors, they cast plays.

Around the same time we had also lost a male teenager in the cast and gained an older woman. Colleen and I met to try to distribute the supporting roles so everyone had a meaningful part in the play.

Then the woman playing Lafeu was cast in an off-Broadway production. We replaced her with another woman we know, an opera singer by training. She had never performed in a Shakespeare play but was willing to give it a go, but there was one performance (the second Friday) she couldn’t miss.

We offered to find someone else for that one performance if she’d take the part, and started looking. I suspected it would be me. We came close a couple of times and finally found someone.

The first rehearsal was a read through on 1 June. We had all but two cast members there (we knew those two had conflicts – the first of many throughout the rehearsal period). It felt great actually to begin work with the actors, and what a lovely group they were – Colleen and I were relieved and excited.

We read through the play (which took about an hour) and caught everyone up on line assignments, and Colleen walked them through the opening procession of the show, up the center aisle to the front, to give them a flavor of what the production would be like. We were relieved to see that the distribution of lines among the actors was fairly even – enough, we hoped, to let everyone feel the show was worth doing.

Meeting again, Colleen and I were uncertain how to proceed with blocking the movement in the play. We decided that at the next rehearsal we’d stage the entrances and exits, letting the actors move freely during the scenes themselves, and then we’d decide how to handle the rehearsal after that.

This was the first time I’d staged the entrances and exits of a play by themselves and before anything else. It made sense in this case because in our version there were a total of twenty-seven scenes in the play, with no two successive scenes in the same location.

We figured the cast would have a sense of security once they had the outline of the play in hand. I told the cast it was like giving them a glass jar and then we’d all fill in the contents.

The “entrances and exits” rehearsal was hard work, but the cast did seem to enjoy knowing what they were dealing with. We repeated this approach at the next rehearsal, at which I offered a few character suggestions.

Then I left on 5 July for two weeks of vacation in North Carolina. I experienced some stress at the beach because I realized that Colleen would be blocking the whole show, and would I know how to work usefully with what she got done, when I got back? 

As I watched the ocean from our rented vacation house I tried to think what “activities” (often called “exercises,” but I’m not fond of that word) might help the actors. But I needed to see her results before I could make any decisions.

Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 1

 

[Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello, written around 1603-04, opened in its latest Broadway revival with Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre on 23 March. It started previews on 24 February and is scheduled to close its limited run on 8 June.  The two-act performance runs 2 hours 40 minutes and the production is set “in the near future.”

[The production is directed by Kenny Leon, a Tony-winner for direction of A Raisin in the Sun (2014) and a Drama Desk-winner for Some Like It Hot (2023).  Scenery was designed by Derek McLane, the costumes by Dede Ayite, the lighting by Natasha Katz, and the sound by Justin Ellington.  The fight direction is by Thomas Schall.

[In addition to Washington as Othello and Gyllenhaal as Iago, the cast includes Molly Osborne in her Broadway début as Desdemona, Othello’s wife.  Andrew Burnap is Cassio, Othello’s loyal captain; Julee Cerda is Bianca, Cassio’s lover; Daniel Pearce is Brabantio, Desdemona’s father; and Kimber Elayne Sprawl is Emilia, Iago’s wife and Desdemona’s maid.

[Despite the limited engagement, the scuttlebutt is that there are seats available for the entire run.  Center orchestra tickets are selling for $921; however, there are $49 student rush tickets available for every performance at the Barrymore Theatre box office with a valid student ID, limited to one ticket per person and a limited number of $49 tickets are also available through a digital lottery at Telecharge Lottery + Rush Tickets.] 

“DENZEL WASHINGTON, JAKE GYLLENHAAL
RETURNING TO BROADWAY IN ‘OTHELLO’”
by Katie Houlis

[This advanced report of the revival aired on CBS News New York (WCBS, Channel 2, New York City) on 6 March 2024.]

NEW YORK – Actors Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are returning to Broadway in an upcoming revival of William Shakespeare’s [1564-1616] classic play “Othello.”

Washington will star in the title role, with Gyllenhaal portraying Iago. Additional casting has not yet been announced.

The production, directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon, will open in spring 2025.

Washington was last seen on Broadway in the 2018 production of [Eugene O'Neill’s (1888-1953)] “The Iceman Cometh” [1939; 26 April-1 July 2018], for which he received a Tony nomination for Best Actor in a Play. He previously won the Tony for Best Actor in a Play for the 2010 revival of “Fences” [26 April-11 July].

Gyllenhaal was nominated for a Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play in 2019 for his performance in “Sea Wall/A Life.” 

[This was a mounting on 8 August-29 September 2019 of two solo one-act dramas; Sea Wall was written by Simon Stephens and performed by Tom Sturridge; A Life was written by Nick Payne and performed by Gyllenhaal. Both actors were nominated for 2020 best-actor Tonys.]

Tickets for “Othello” will go on sale at a later date.

“Othello” was last performed on Broadway in 1982, starring James Earl Jones in the title role, Christopher Plummer as Iago and Dianne Wiest as Desdemona.

[Katie Houlis is a digital producer with the CBS New York web team.  She started her career as an intern with the Pittsburgh CW Green Team and the CBS Pittsburgh web team.  She later joined CBS Pittsburgh as a full-time web producer.  Houlis has also written for Tell-Tale TV, an entertainment news website.]

*  *  *  *
“BROADWAY SEEING STARS FOR OPENING NIGHT OF ‘OTHELLO’
STARRING DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL”
by Joelle Garguilo

[This Eyewitness News report was broadcast on WABC (Channel 7, New York City) on 24 March 2025, the evening after opening night.]

NEW YORK (WABC) – Broadway was seeing stars on Sunday night [23 March] for the opening of ‘Othello.’ [There is a post on another production of Othello in “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive” (22 December 2020), a Washington, D.C., staging with Avery Brooks as the Moor and the late Andre Braugher as Iago.]

Othello is one of William Shakespeare’s best-known tragedies, and it has not been on Broadway since 1982. [I have a three-part post as a tribute to James Earl Jones, who played Othello in that 1982 staging, entitled “In Memoriam: James Earl Jones (1931-2024)” (22, 25, and 28 September 2024).]

The revival, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, is set in the near future. It is getting a fresh take thanks to director, Kenny Leon.

“I think Denzel has given his whole self on the stage eight shows a week. He doesn’t have to do that other than he wants to impact lives – his Othello is going on that spiritual journey. It’s just a real special production,” Leon said.

Molly Osborne plays Desdemona.

“It has been a dream working for this company. I hope audiences come and they see something new and fresh even though it’s a 400-year-old play,” Osborne said.

Jamie Lee Curtis [2023 Oscar-winner as Best Supporting Actress for Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022); she and Gyllenhaal have appeared in several films together over the years] was at the opening and said it was thrilling to watch Gyllenhaal’s performance.

“To know someone since they were five and watch them become an artist – to be able to watch Jake tonight to take on one of the most challenging roles is just thrilling,” she said.

It was a historic evening.

“Just appreciative that I get to be a part of history. This is a historic evening. Break legs all over the place – it’s gonna be amazing,” said Rosie Perez.

Othello has already broken records as the highest-grossing play in Broadway history. [The production has amassed $2.8 million from eight previews leading up to the official 23 March première. This surpasses the $2.7 million set by Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in December 2023.]

It only runs through the first week in June, so those wanting to go are encouraged to get tickets immediately.

[Joelle Garguilo is an Emmy Award-winning entertainment reporter for WABC.  A native New Yorker, she began her career in broadcast television 15 years ago at NBC, interviewing hundreds of stars on the screen and stage including Oprah Winfrey, Tom Cruise, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Denzel Washington, Timothee Chalamet, Julia Roberts, Tony Bennett, Idina Menzel and Kristin Chenoweth, among others.

[Throughout her tenure, she held multiple roles across the network. Most recently, she worked as an on-air entertainment and features reporter for New York Live, correspondent for E! News while contributing at the Today Show with Hoda & Jenna.

[Garguilo’s talents have earned her two Emmy Awards, one for the magazine program New York Live Home for the Holidays and a second for Outstanding Entertainment: Program Features/Segment for New York Live Features/Segments.]

*  *  *  *
“DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL
POWER “OTHELLO” TO ELECTRIC OPENING NIGHT ON BROADWAY”
by Dave Carlin 

[This report aired on CBS News New York (WCBS, Channel 2, New York City), also on 24 March 2025.]

Sunday [the 23rd] was opening night on Broadway for two of Hollywood’s biggest stars.

Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal are taking on the new production of Shakespeare’s “Othello.”

The red carpet was full of VIPs, including Jennifer Lopez, Samuel L. Jackson, Anna Wintour, Colman Domingo and many more. And entertainers weren’t the only ones in attendance. Former President Joe Biden and his wife, Jill, were also seen entering the Barrymore Theatre.

Washington plays the conflicted and murderous title character. His jealousy and violence is carefully orchestrated by his backstabbing confidante Iago, played by Gyllenhaal.

Prior to the show, members of the cast explained how horrors and thrills created by Shakespeare now land with a freshness in a modern setting.

“They’ve treated this like a new play,” said Andrew Burnap, who plays “Cassio.”

“I’m excited to share,” said Kimber Elayne Sprawl, who portrays “Emilia.”

“Even if you know it, seeing it happen right in front of you, the conflict that happens in the play, it’s just so human that it will always need to tell the story,” said Molly Osborne, who plays “Desdemona.”

Othello’s director is Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.

“Denzel is an emperor. He’s an emperor of the American stage, of the world stage. He has met this role head on and Jake has met Denzel head on,” Leon said.

In February, while Othello was in rehearsals, CBS News New York sat down with Washington and Gyllenhaal [this is a video; there’s no transcript that I can find]. Both described their roles as exciting, and for each star a dream come true.

“We are given the freedom to break the rules,” Washington said.

“I spent the past eight months really digging in because I’ve never done Shakespeare,” Gyllenhaal added.

Producer Brian Moreland [winner of the 2023 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play for The Piano Lesson; nominated for four Best Play or Best Revival Tonys] said a sizzling Shakespeare is what they were after and he credits the unbeatable cast and creators.

“It’s that good and they’re that good. Night after night they build that same journey, so that you get to the point that we all know is going to happen, it’s all inevitable, but yet you’re there with them on every single word they have to say,” Moreland said.

To call Othello, which runs through June 8, a financial hit is an understatement as it is expected to earn the title of highest grossing Broadway play ever.

*  *  *  *
“DENZEL WASHINGTON AND JAKE GYLLENHAAL’S
UNDERWHELMING BLOCKBUSTER”
by Adrian Horton

[Adrian Horton’s review of the Broadway revival of Othello was published in the U.S. edition of The Guardian on 24 March 2025.] 

The record-breaking take on the Shakespearean tragedy might already be a smash, but it’s disappointingly muddled

With the smell of doom and regression in the air, perhaps it’s not surprising that the hottest ticket on Broadway this season is for a 400-year-old tragedy. There’s been much ado about the box office for Othello, a new rendition of Shakespeare’s classic given movie-star wattage. The show at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre, starring Denzel Washington and Jake Gyllenhaal, grossed $2.8m during one week of previews – the most of any non-musical during a single week on Broadway ever, in part because some orchestra tickets are going for a whopping $921.

The sticker shock is not just an Othello problem – tickets for two other celeb-driven plays on Broadway – Glengarry Glen Ross [31 March-28 June 2025 at the Palace Theatre, with Kieran Culkin and Bob Odenkirk], and George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck [see “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way, Part 2” (30 March 2025)], aren’t averaging much less, and it has already been a lucrative season for celeb-studded Shakespeare as Romeo + Juliet, starring screen-famous Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, recouped its $7m capitalization before closing last month. But before it even officially opened, Othello became emblematic of Broadway’s trend toward luxury experience and status symbol over popular entertainment, billing Hollywood names in a hyper-competitive, exclusionary market. (Full disclosure: the Guardian, denied tickets for review, paid $400 for a middle orchestra seat.)

Ticket prices, of course, are not the fault of the show itself, nor typically relevant to a review. But the astronomical ask hangs over this minimalist, almost dystopian production, which puts the burden of imagination heavily on the performers and largely fails to reach the level of transcendence demanded by its cost. Directed by the Tony winner Kenny Leon, who guided Washington to a Tony in 2010’s Fences, this austere, underwhelming take on Shakespeare seems to acknowledge that people are not paying for a revival of this particular play, which hasn’t been on Broadway since 1982 and still has rich insights on the masculinity, human fallibility and race more than 400 years after its debut. Instead, it’s for the opportunity to see Gyllenhaal, one of the most versatile and thrilling millennial actors, and especially the widely beloved Washington, rightly hailed in the Playbill as “the most lauded stage and screen actor of his generation”, without the mediation of a screen.

Othello does provide a showcase for these two heavyweight talents to bend iambic pentameter to their will – to convey, with their considerable magnetism, both the plot and the emotional nuances of this tragedy to an audience that probably does not totally understand what they’re saying. And it does not provide much else. Derek McLane’s scenic design keeps the stage bare except for some peeling columns, the props minimal save for occasional accoutrements of a modern military operation (army fatigues, Apple laptops). A lit message at play’s opening sets this medieval drama in “the near future” – still Venice (and later Cyprus), though when Gyllenhaal’s devious Iago first appears to set the stage for the fateful manipulation of the general, one might mistake him for a hustler at a basement club in Bushwick. His eyes near glow in the spotlight, and a preponderance on blue-white floor lighting (design by Natasha Katz) gives the production, particularly its monologues, the feel of a concert at the ruins of the Colosseum.

Star power does the heavy lifting, though not enough to elevate this Othello into the pantheon of Broadway greats. As expected, Washington, at 70, brings the bearing of an elder statesman to the fallible Venetian general, a role he first played at age 22 [at Manhattan’s Fordham University in March 1977, his senior year]. This has the double-sided effect of making the character feel especially tragic – the well-respected veteran general, imbued with glorious authority by one of the most well-respected actors, felled by a shocking streak of insecurity – and ill-fitting; his chemistry with Desdemona (a much younger Molly Osborne, an English actor with an unwieldy American accent) feels more father-daughter than new husband and wife, despite Washington’s best attempts at charming, sexy beguilement. Washington has moments of sublime melody as Othello descends into jealous delusion, the kind of rhapsodic deliveries that feel worth whatever price of admission, but the overall tone of his performance is one of perfunctory hyper-competence.

The show, instead, belongs to Gyllenhaal, an actor of singular intensity who makes a meal out of Iago’s desperate two-facedness. He opens the show with a hypnotic screed against “the Moor” he so loathes – a denigration of blackness (of soul and skin) in Shakespeare’s time titled just enough to resonate more clearly in ours, and never ceases to mesmerize. At turns preening, desperate, boastful, plaintive, easily convincing in his maneuverings of the guileless lieutenant Cassio (Snow White’s Andrew Burnap), as well as gullible townsman Roderigo (Anthony Michael Lopez), Desdemona and Othello, Gyllenhaal’s Iago is the one truly fun performance to watch throughout the show’s nearly three-hour runtime.

The rest is a muddled affair, in details and delivery – Italian polizia but American uniforms, Iago prejudiced against the black-skinned general yet married to Emilia, played by Black actor Kimber Elayne Sprawl. Even Washington seems, at the play’s ignominious and violent end, confused by his character, his grip on reality or his evolution from hero to villain slippery. His Othello is never not compelling; the whole thing, in fact, is consistently competent and spirited, though weighted down by expectation – enough that it should keep the green-eyed monsters who miss out at bay.

[Adrian Horton is an arts writer for Guardian US.

[After my “recovered” report on the Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger’s 1990 production of Othello, I added a personal comment.  It’s appropriate to repeat here, I think, so I’m appending it to this post as well:

When I was trying to make a career as an actor, there were roles I ached to play—a phenomenon among most actors, I believe.  One I got to do was the title character in George Bernard Shaw’s one-act The Man of Destiny: Napoleon as a 26-year-old general.  [I was 31 at the time.]  Most of the others, I never got to.  At the top of that list was Shakespeare’s Iago, arguably one of the greatest villains in theater. 

I wanted to play Iago so badly, I could feel it in my bones.  I came somewhat close: I got to play Don John in Much Ado About Nothing, a kind of Iago-lite in a comedy rather than in a tragedy.  I loved doing that part, largely because Much Ado is my all-time favorite Shakespeare and it was a lovely production—but it wasn’t the brass ring.  Alas!

[I think most actors long to play Hamlet—including some women (though I believe many female actors long to play Henrik Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler as their most coveted classic role.  I went for the bad guy.

[This is the first part of a two-part post.  On Sunday, 30 March, I’ll run the second installment, a collection of pieces on another movie star-led Broadway show, Good Night, and Good Luck starring George Clooney as newsman Edward R. Murrow.  Please come back to Rick On Theater in three days to read the second part of “Film Stars Twinkle on the Great White Way.”]

Shakespeare's Development as a Dramatist (Part 2)

by Kirk Woodward 

[In the conclusion of “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist,” below, Kirk Woodward continues his explication of George Pierce Baker’s analysis of the Bard’s growth as a playwright in his 1907 book, The Development of Shakespeare as a Dramatist.  

[I gave a brief run-down of Baker’s career as a teacher in the Harvard English department and his introduction of practical courses in theater arts in my introduction to Part 1.  For readers who are just logging onto Rick On Theater, I recommend going back to the first installment of “Shakespeare’s Development” before reading Part 2.]

Baker next examines A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1595-96), Romeo and Juliet (1591-95), and The Merchant of Venice (1596-98). In each of these Baker looks to find

some central purpose to act as a kind of magnet to draw to itself unerringly and swiftly the filaments of illustrative incident, selected for some definite purpose, whether mere story-telling, study of character, or tragic import.

To do their job properly, these elements must be

proportioned and moulded till they tell a unified story with perfect clearness and with just the emphasis on each part which the artistic purpose of the author requires.

Midsummer, Baker believes, was either written or revised for some special occasion, possibly at court, probably a wedding, and he demonstrates how confidently Shakespeare handles the requirements that such a situation poses – audience-pleasing, references to the hosts at the beginning and end but not too much in the middle, and so on.

But Shakespeare’s growth is best shown, Baker says, by his subordinate characters, who I think all would agree are superior to those in, say, Love’s Labour’s Lost. The reason, Baker points out, is that

They are real, and not caricatures; they are amusing not only for what they say, but for what they do. Moreover, both what they say and what they do in every case adds to the clearness of their characterization.

In Romeo and Juliet Baker also finds advances in Shakespeare’s ability to provide dramatic motivations for his characters in ways that are not found in his source material.

By the way he also offers an answer to the question of why the two lovers are so young. Juliet, 14 in the play, is 16 and 18 in the earlier versions, and people in Shakespeare’s day married at an average of 25 years old and often did not marry at all – none of Shakespeare’s three brothers, for example, ever married.

The answer, Baker suggests, is that because the time frame of the play must be radically condensed from the original sources, the lovers must have a reason to be so headlong in their passion, so the younger, the better.

Shakespeare makes many similar changes in his treatment of the story’s sources, all of them designed to increase the acceptability of the motivation of the characters.

Baker makes another point that is essential in understanding what dramatists do. He says:

Whether the dialogue be narrating, describing, expounding character, or seemingly indulging in beauty for beauty’s own sake, its phrase shall, first of all, be in character.

When we try to understand what Shakespeare means by what he writes, or for that matter when we try to understand what Shakespeare was “like,” we have to remember that dramatists express themselves not directly but through what their characters say and do.

This is true even of a writer like Shaw, who claims to be promoting his ideas for social change, but who in his plays cannot help embodying his plots in characters who think and say what their nature compels them to (if more articulately than they might in “real life”).

As Baker says, “quick and well-trained sympathy makes it possible for the dramatist to lose himself in his characters.” If this is true of Shaw, it is certainly true of Shakespeare. This is one of many reasons why using his plays in an attempt to establish his identity is a waste of time. His identity is that of a playwright who uses a playwright’s tools.

The Merchant of Venice is credited by Baker with

the art of interweaving in his narrative many different strands of interest [so] that if the sources were not known, no one would suspect him of bringing together incidents and episodes not originally connected.

Again, Shakespeare, like his fellow playwrights, was in many ways a “rewrite man,” and one of extraordinary skill.

Baker I think makes much more sense of Shakespeare’s relationship with the public than do remarks that his audience was ignorant and primitive. Shakespeare’s plays were not written for dolts, though of course not for crowds of college professors either. Instead:

He dared to lift his audience far beyond its usual level by his constant, incisive touches of characterization, his thoughtful comment on life, and by splendid passages of poetry. Is there not here a perfect illustration of the right relation of the dramatist to his public?

Considering his audience, regarding it, Shakespeare moulded his material so that while it delighted them as much or more than the work of his contemporaries, he yet accomplished in characterization what most interested him, and by poetry, philosophic comment, and ideality lifted his audience to an unwonted level of artistic appreciation.

So is Shylock in Merchant a tragic or a comic figure, sympathetic or off-putting? The answer surely is that Shakespeare was capable of handling more than one idea at a time. We’re the ones who demand a single answer, not Shakespeare.

Shakespeare has shown that whether working with a single strand or with many, he can develop a firm plot of compelling interest.

Baker summarizes the result of Shakespeare’s development in this way:

In the first place, each new story which he had to tell he apparently undertook with no rigid preconception as to what a play must be. That is, he was totally without hampering preconceptions in regard to dramatic forms. On the other hand, he understood perfectly the conditions of the stage for which he was writing, and his relation to his audience was also one of sympathetic and kindly understanding. He faced each play as a special problem in technique.

The phrase “special problem in technique” illustrates the fact that the traditional categories of melodrama, farce, tragedy, and comedy, apply only approximately to Shakespeare.

Baker, then, observes the principles of drama as described in the Poetics of Aristotle (384-322 BC), but not in a mechanical way, and neither did the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time, including Shakespeare himself, follow them slavishly. Baker notes that

Aristotle’s incisive distinctions, in his Poetics, as to tragedy in his own day have so much truth that they have fairly hypnotized later generations into talking as if the tragedy and the comedy of their own days could be ultimately analyzed and described in terms of Aristotle.

[But] drama depends not merely on the dramatist, but also on his public, whose ideals may be vastly different from those of the Greek public. Even if the dramatist derives his inspiration from the past, he must so express it that it shall not be wholly foreign to the instincts and ideals of his audiences.

The comic in general as distinguished from the tragic is a matter of the point of view from which the dramatist looks at his material and the emphasis he gives it. The comic depends on the view of the writer.

We realize the truth of what he says when we compare characters such as, for example, Rosalind and Viola (in As You Like It [1599] and Twelfth Night [1601-02]) with definitions about comedy such as Aristotle’s that “comedy is an imitation of characters of a lower type.” In terms of Shakespeare’s work that misses the mark entirely.

There simply are different kinds of comedy. For example, Baker points out:

High comedy in contrast to low comedy rests then fundamentally on thoughtful appreciation, contrasted with unthinking, spontaneous laughter. Low comedy rightly produces only the latter, and always verges on the exaggeration of farce. The comedy of manners is a link: it may be low and run into farce; it may rise into high comedy; and we shall often find comedies which range from low to high if they have, as Shakespeare’s have, two or more strands of plot.

And crucially “the characters grew even as the audience watched the development of the play.” Shakespeare’s characterization at its best is not static but continually on the move.

What’s more, “Shakespeare does not deal in local types, nor even in English men and women. They remain so true to human nature that they delight strange audiences in foreign lands.”

This statement seemed debatable to me when I first read it, but I believe it’s true, evidenced by our embrace of his characters even today. Baker contrasts this aspect of Shakespeare’s work with that of his contemporary playwright and friend Ben Jonson (1572-1637), who “drew with photographic accuracy the people he saw in the taverns, the theatres, and the streets of the London of 1600-1616,” but whose plays have limited appeal today.

The accepting response to Shakespeare’s characters does not extend to every aspect of his plays, of course, and it is the local allusions that are most often cut in performances today, since they make little sense to us without footnotes. But people are people and generally speaking Shakespeare’s people are life studies, not types.

Baker makes the important observation that in many, perhaps most, of Shakespeare’s great plays he uses more than one source – his plots are “chock full.”

He who cares most for story finds his satisfaction; he who delights in character may enjoy his fill; he who is pleased by witty and characterizing dialogue is not disappointed; and even he who loves poetry for its own sake is provided for. What wonder, [that] these plays also please the actor!

Baker distinguishes between “tragic” – anything that’s “mournful, cruel, calamitous, bloody” – and “tragedy” – “a struggle between an individual and his environment in the sense of the working of the unseen forces of nature which govern life and death.” The tragic is an incident; tragedy is a process, “a sequence of serious episodes leading to a catastrophe and all causally related.”

Baker makes the interesting suggestion that

It is doubtful whether the greater part of Shakespeare’s audience, in seeing the tragedies I have in mind, felt it was seeing anything whatever except specially interesting specimens of the chronicle plays which dealt not with English kings and nobles of relatively recent times, but of foreign lands or of a period so remote as almost to be mythical.

He believes that Shakespeare’s chief preoccupation was with story, which his audiences loved – “the situations and the incidents of the stories so gripped their imaginations that they placed themselves in them, deducing rules of conduct.” He points out that Shakespeare’s stage makes possible a fluidity of action, an ability to “keep things moving,” that might turn plays like King Lear (possibly 1603-06) from solemn occasions to breathless adventures, from studies of character to headlong action.

An Elizabethan audience, as long as in the space of two hours and a half an interesting story revealed itself in interesting scenes, did not prefer characterization to incident, did not bother itself at all about act divisions, and worried neither itself nor the dramatist over climactic movement, but was content to let the story double back on itself or even offer an excursus if the dramatist so willed. But be the scene essential or an excursus, it must be interesting.

My own belief is, that certainly not till Shakespeare had written most of his tragedies, did he have any theory of tragedy whatever, but rather that his tragedies are a perfectly natural and normal development from the serious side of the chronicle plays.

Instead of working from a theory, Baker feels,

he must have felt free simply to give himself to his desire to understand complicated human nature in intense situations and to working out the problems of dramatic presentation it offered. That is exactly what I believe he did. Characterization must be set in an illustrative story of strong dramatic action. By crowding his plays with story, he strove to keep his audience attentive even as his scenes developed states of mind in some central figure or figures. And those states of mind he pictured by action.

On the other hand,

When any attempt is made to distinguish between Shakespearian tragedy and the tragedy of the Greeks, one finds critics indulging in large generalizations or shading off into vagueness.

Shakespeare seems not to have had a single theory of tragedy. Certainly his work involves “a struggle, a clash of wills,” but whose wills, and against what? We may be asking questions and posing theories about tragedy that Shakespeare would have found irrelevant.

Each new play was to him a fresh problem to be separately conquered, though of course every preceding conquest made his judgment surer and his hand firmer.

This statement is particularly important as Baker considers the experimentation we see in Coriolanus (1605-08), Cymbeline (likely 1610), The Winter’s Tale (possibly 1610-11), and The Tempest (probably 1610-11), all late plays of Shakespeare’s. There are puzzles here, for example:

Why should a man as thoughtful as Shakespeare heretofore of his audience, so far forget it as often to write without lucidity and in phrases extremely difficult to deliver? . . . Shakespeare’s steadily increasing interest in characterization becomes so absorbing as to make him forget that for the bulk of his audience the action of his scene is still of prime importance.

Consistent with his thesis that a playwright’s work strongly relates to its audience’s expectation, Baker suggests that

About 1608 the English public evidently experienced one of those revulsions from dramatic scrutiny of the graver or grimmer sides of life such as the public knows periodically.

And, looking at Shakespeare’s late plays, Baker asserts that

Shakespeare does not really change: like the perfect host, he merely tries to subdue his mood to that of his guests.

As Baker sees it, Shakespeare does not abandon his attention to plot, which remains complex and compelling; but he is not entirely comfortable with the demand of the audience for romance and for simple happy-mindedness, and he meets those demands with dramas that may be romantic but are also deeply serious-minded. The result is, from our point of view, experimentation.

Shakespeare may have seen, as a result of the way society and playwriting were going, that

so far as popular acclaim was concerned, he could satisfy his standards of characterization with far less deft structure and pervasive artistry . . . a little more personal in phrase, and somewhat careless as to the minute details of technique which had helped to give him his supreme position.

After all, for the playwrights of Shakespeare’s time,

The drama was the art of the story-teller, not of the characterizer or of the poet except in a secondary degree.

In summary,

Mere fable, story, is not enough in play-writing. For the best results there must be clear exposition, which depends on underlying unity, – which in turn depends on carefully considered structure. That structure, in its turn, rests on proportion and emphasis. The fable or story before it can become, dramatically speaking, plot must be so proportioned as to tell itself clearly and effectively within the space of two or two and a half hours; and this exposition must be emphasized with regard to the tastes and prejudices of the audience . . . .

In regard to the underlying principles of dramatic composition a play succeeds best when a central figure or group of figures, or a unifying idea, focusses the attention of the spectator. Shakespeare’s experience shows, moreover, that a play must have movement, gained by initial swift, clear exposition and a skilful [sic] use of suspense and climax. Characterization is the ladder by which we mount from lower to higher in the so-called forms [comedy, tragedy, melodrama, farce], and a predetermined point of view is the means by which the dramatist so emphasizes his material as to differentiate it in form.

In nothing does Shakespeare proclaim his genius more than in his repeated winning of popular acclaim for fulfilment of his artistic desires.

There is much more in this splendid book than I have reported here. A couple of additional observations may be appropriate.

Early in the book Baker writes, “The drama just before Shakespeare . . . did not differentiate clearly, indeed, hardly at all, between what we know as different dramatic forms.”

Baker states this as a criticism, but whether it was actually a deficiency is debatable, particularly today when theatrical genres split and merge continually. In fact, Baker goes on to demonstrate that Shakespeare himself had little interest in dramatic forms as such; his basic concern was for story as an embodiment of characterization.

Baker doesn’t spend a great deal of time on Shakespeare’s language, so it may be worth noting that a considerable part of Shakespeare’s poetry has a purpose of spelling out the locale and the action, making sure the audience understands what is happening.

A friend of mine, reading his plays for the first time, said, “It’s all stage directions!” A sensitive reading of his words will often make clear what is physically happening on the stage.

Baker knows this, of course. “Dramatic dialogue must first of all expound, making the story clear; if it fails to do that, no amount of characterization or cleverness in itself will compensate. In addition, even as dialogue expounds plot, it should expound it in character for speakers.”

This is so, and therefore a director can often find clues for “blocking” the actors’ moves by what the characters say. And, of course, it’s also true that “dialogue, in addition to its work in characterization and exposition, might give pleasure in and of itself for its ingenuity, its wit, and its beauty and style.” The two aspects of dialogue – technical and artistic – can complement each other.

Shakespeare’s chronicle plays strike us today as having a more unified vision than they did to Baker, based on more recent productions that have brought out their coherence. An excellent introduction to this phenomenon is the chapter in the 1953 book In Search of Theater by Eric Bentley (1916-2020) entitled “Doing Shakespeare Wrong.”

Professor Baker must have been quite a teacher. There is much to learn from him.

[As I noted in Part 1, the dates following the titles of Shakespeare’s plays above are the generally accepted, but approximate years in which they were composed.  If we’re going to look at the chronological development of Shakespeare’s dramaturgy, I asserted, it’s helpful to have an idea when the plays cited as examples of each stage of his growth appeared.  (I also pointed out that dates of publication, frequently cited in analyses of the plays, was often years after the play was written and the dates of the performance premières aren't always known.)

[In both Parts 1 and 2 of “Shakespeare’s Development as a Dramatist,” Kirk makes points about Shakespeare’s dramaturgy that caused me to think of something related.  Sometimes it’s on point, an expansion of Kirk’s or Baker’s idea, and sometimes it’s tangential.  As I wrote in another post on this blog, “That's a good thing, I think.”  To quote myself (possibly the pinnacle of egotism):

When I used to teach writing in college, I told my students that writing, especially essay-writing, was a sort of conversation between the writer and the reader(s).  It’s what an essay is supposed to do: make the reader think, look at something from a fresh angle, ask questions.  In an extended version, the “reader” would write another essay in response (the other side of the conversation), then the original writer or another essayist would chime in, and so on.  Books sometimes respond to other books, too (though the process is longer).  Well, this is a perfect example of that, and this [afterword] will be my contribution to the conversation.

[So, here are some of my thoughts:

[In Part 1, Kirk points out that Baker began his analysis of the playwright’s dramaturgy by looking at “the environment out of which Shakespeare emerged.”  This led Kirk to remark,

Many of our images of Shakespeare see him as a sort of playwriting monolith, always great and somehow greater than ordinary mortals. This has led to silliness like the idea that someone other than the “man from Stratford” wrote “Shakespeare’s” plays – “How could a simple actor have written these plays, since they are so ineffably great?”

[The argument is that William Shakespeare didn’t write the plays attributed to him because he wasn’t equipped to write them.  The son of a provincial glover with a local grammar school education could not have developed the skills and knowledge to have created such artistic triumphs. 

[This reasoning clearly shows how shortsighted was the classist view of society the Elizabethans (and European cultures in general) had then and even held into modern times.  There’s no allowance for self-education and the reach of a curious and exceptional intellect, not to mention innate talent.  Oddly, as I observed to Kirk, this was an issue which my dad had to confront in Germany in the 1960s.  A version of it still operated in Europe even 400 years later. 

[What I was thinking of was a matter that came up during my father’s tenure as a Foreign Service Officer with the United States Information Agency (1962-67; see An American Teen in Germany, 9 and 12 March 2013).  Part of Dad’s job was to explain America to the Germans, and, at the time of the Wirtschaftswunder (‘economic miracle’; ca. 1950s-70s) burgeoning across West Germany, the business leaders in particular had a question that reflected the entrenched corporate class system.

[These corporate heads and industrialists couldn’t understand how U.S. businesses managed to spot and promote talented workers and employees from all over their work forces.  No matter how they tried, they always seemed to come up with the same candidates, from the same societal echelons and career paths.

[What they didn’t see, until Dad and other USIA officers in other districts got them together with American business executives in similar industries and company sizes, was the concept of lateral promotions—taking talented and accomplished employees from one line of work and moving them into another line.  

[The established career lines were so rigid and inviolable for so long that it never occurred to the executives to break with the traditional career tracks.  These leaders couldn’t see it, just as the scholars and academics couldn’t (and still can’t) see that a William Shakespeare could have broken with the expectations and accomplished the great works he did despite his background and social standing.

[Then, a paragraph or so later in Part 1, Kirk writes that Baker points out “that the greatest in an art is almost never the pioneer in the art as well.”  Kirk, a great fan of the Beatles, makes a parallel with the Fab Four who “didn’t invent rock ‘n’ roll, the Motown sound, or any of the numerous other influences they incorporated into their music.”

[I thought of Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), considered the godfather of dramatic Realism.  But Ibsen didn't start writing his Realistic plays until after he'd seen the work of the Court Theater of the Duchy of Saxe-Meiningen in Germany.  This little theater introduced the modern stage director to European theater, and under the direction of Duke Georg II (1826-1914; reigned 1866-1914) and his Intendant (‘manager,’ or what we might call today, ‘artistic director’) Ludwig Chronegk (1837-91), presented plays with the beginnings of stage Realism in movement costuming, scenery, and, especially, crowd scenes.

[Ibsen was also first influenced by Émile Zola's (French; 1840-1902) novels (Thérèse Raquin, 1873) and the work of English naturalist and biologist Charles Darwin (1809-82) and Austrian neurologist Sigmund Freud (1856-1939).  The Norwegian dramatist, himself, went on to influence the work of generations of playwrights, arguably most notably, George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950).

[Baker attributes much of Shakespeare’s progress as a dramatist to the fact that he was, first, an actor (from about 1585, years before he wrote his first play).  Most scholars agree that he was also his own first “director” as well, which must also have helped him and his fellow writers not only “visualize their material not merely as dramatists but also as actors,” but as a director, that is, see it as a staged work of theater, as well.

[We’ve seen that the modern director of a theatrical performance wasn’t conceived until the late 19th century, but before the “Theater Duke” and Chronegk worked their magic with the Meininger, as the troupe was called, a leading actor would make the staging decisions.  For the Bard’s plays, that would have been the author, himself.

[Now, as I noted in my introduction to Part 1 of Kirk’s report, what Baker believed the nascent playwrights learned from producing their plays in the 47 Workshop were the same lessons William Shakespeare learned that helped him grow as a dramatist: experiencing the work coming to three-dimensional life on stage and seeing how it all works—or doesn’t.

[When Kirk reports that “Richard III is a hero – a dynamic central character – although of a perverse sort,” I mused that perhaps that makes him the first anti-hero.  Kirk agreed.

[In Part 2, Kirk states that Shaw’s characters speak more articulately than they might in “real life.”  This relates to something I've been trying to say about Tennessee Williams (1911-83) and some other playwrights, like Arthur Miller (1915-2005), Ibsen, and Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), who are usually labeled Realists or Naturalists. 

[I maintain that these writers, along with some others, write dialogue that sounds like natural speech, that we accept as ordinary conversation—but if we read or listen carefully, we can see/hear that it’s really not.  It’s more articulate, more meaningful, more resonant than anyone would utter unless they prepared beforehand, selected the best words and phrases for what they wanted to convey.  It’s really poetry that sounds like prose. 

[One of the critic/analysts that I read when I was working on a Tennessee Williams project—Roger Boxill (1928-2015) in Tennessee Williams (St. Martin’s Press, 1987)—made the distinction between “theater poets” and “poets in the theater” and Williams and those others were “theater poets.” 

[The difference is that “poets in the theater” write actual poetry—not necessarily verse, but deliberate prose poetry or street poetry (August Wilson, 1945-2005).   Williams writes prose that verges on poetry, that’s more lyrical than ordinary speech—not in the sense of “musical,” but in the sense that it has to convey more in the way song lyrics have to because they’re constrained by the music’s parameters.  Shakespeare was a sort of hybrid or a bridge, sometimes a “theater poet” and sometimes a “poet in the theater.”

[Kirk quotes Baker above on Shakespeare’s "popular acclaim" and I wondered if there was really any extant evidence of that from his time.  Is there any record of how viewers responded to William Shakespeare's plays? 

[Newspapers were just beginning in the 17th century, and the first successful English daily didn’t appear until 1702, 86 years after Shakespeare’s death.  There were no such things as professional “reviewers” or “critics” for another 200-250 years.  So, did anyone record what Elizabethan audience responses were?  How do we know, aside from the fact that the plays lasted till now, that William Shakespeare actually won “public acclaim”?

[Kirk informed me that there isn’t a lot of documentation, which is what I suspected.  “So it's mostly a matter of deduction from two sources” that we have a record of the playwright’s popular success.

[The first is which play texts were printed and sold.  There were over 50 editions of Shakespeare’s plays, so it seems clear that he was “marketable” in his day.  Of course, this is problematic since only the literate would be buying books, excluding pretty much all the “groundlings” in the audiences.  Books were also expensive, so only those who could afford them would be counted.

[“References in letters, poems, plays (yes!), and so on, to Shakespeare by people at the time” were a second source, added Kirk.  I was surprised when he said that there exist a large number of writings by tourists, Oxford students, and so on, “making it clear that he was top of the line.”

[It was really this kind of written record of which I was thinking—though that, too, only includes the literate and educated.  (Those groundlings would mostly have been illiterate.)  I'm surprised to hear, though, that there’s a lot of that extant. 

[I asked if anyone had compiled that record into an “Elizabethan Theatergoers’ Response to Shakespeare’s Plays”—thinking it could be interesting.  Kirk responded by sending me a link to a website from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., home of the world’s largest collection of Shakespeare-related material, which, he noted, indicates there may be more such material around.