"Bigger Than Broadway!"

by Richard Zoglin 

A Supplement to the Regional Theater Series

[Richard Zoglin’s report on the regional theater in the United States was published in Time magazine on 27 May 2003.  (The text below is taken from the online posting which had no text enhancements, so in addition to my bracketed comments, mostly identifications, I have italicized the titles of plays and works of literature, and added some boldfacing in the last section.)

[Readers will no doubt note that this article is 21 years old.  For that reason, I have taken the liberty of identifying as many of the plays and productions author Zoglin names that I can, as some aren’t well known today (and a few didn’t make it out of obscurity).  By the same token, I have inserted the life dates of the people Zoglin mentions as a few of them have passed on since 2003.]

The world’s a stage: The outdoor Elizabethan theater is one of three venues in Ashland, Ore.

By the time the eco-terrorists show up — a band of tree sitters, with names like Lynx and Aquarius and Smokebomb, who drop from the skies, rappelling down the trunks of a redwood grove onstage — your head is already spinning. Daughters of the Revolution, one-half of David Edgar’s [British; b. 1948] two-play cycle about an American political campaign called Continental Divide [2003], has mostly been talk up to this point. But what talk! The play has nearly 50 characters, rapid-fire dialogue and an impossibly complicated plot involving leftover ‘60s radicals, skeletons in the closet, the clash between ideals and pragmatism in politics, and a hot-button ballot initiative that would mandate loyalty oaths for all voters. And that’s only half the story. Daughters of the Revolution centers on the Democratic side of a gubernatorial race in an unnamed Western state; its companion play, Mothers Against, focuses on the Republican side. In all, it’s six hours of dense, unruly, sometimes maddening, always engrossing drama.

And you have to go to Oregon to see it.

Continental Divide, currently being given its world premiere at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (in a coproduction with California’s Berkeley Repertory Theater, which will mount it later this year), is just the latest sign that challenging American theater is alive and well and nowhere near Broadway.

[Continental Divide was co-commissioned by OSF and Berkeley Rep in 2003. It premièred at OSF from 1 March to 13 July and then opened in Berkeley on 6 November, running through 28 December.]

It’s hardly news, of course, that theaters beyond the Hudson River are doing good work. Or that many of the plays that wind up on Broadway and off Broadway get their start at regional theaters. Nor should it be a surprise (though it was) that this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama went to a play most of New York City’s tastemakers had never even heard of: Cuban-born playwright Nilo Cruz’s [b. 1960] Anna in the Tropics [2002; 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama], which had been produced only at the 104-seat New Theater in Coral Gables, Fla.

What isn’t so apparent — until you spend some time, as I did over the past few months, surveying regional theaters across the country — is that these companies are pursuing whole chunks of the repertory that New York, with its commercial pressures and unforgiving critics, largely ignores. And local audiences are getting a better taste of the possibilities of theater than most New Yorkers get in an entire season. The plays that succeed on and off Broadway these days are, as a rule, small things: two-and three-character relationship dramas (those big casts cost money!); minimalist exercises in craftsmanship; tidy little plays that convert big subjects into manageable private dramas (Proof, Copenhagen, How I Learned to Drive, to name just a few recent award winners). Plays of epic size and scope, works that examine American history and the American experience, plays that attempt to engage the audience in social and political issues — for those, mostly, you’ve got to look in the hinterlands.

[David Auburn’s (b. 1969) Proof was developed at George Street Playhouse in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1999; it won the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the 2001 Tony Award for Best Play. The play, with a cast of four, originally opened at New York City’s Manhattan Theatre Club on 23 May 2000 and transferred to Broadway at the Walter Kerr Theatre on 24 October 2000.

[The Off-Broadway première also won the 2001 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best American Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play, and Drama League Award for Outstanding Production of a Play.

[Copenhagen by Michael Frayn (British; b. 1933) premièred in London in 1998, at the National Theatre. It opened on Broadway at the Royale Theatre on 11 April 2000, winning three Tonys that year, including Best Play; the production also took the 2000 Drama Desk Award for Outstanding New Play. It has a cast of three.

[How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel (b. 1951), written and developed during a summer 1996 residency at the Perseverance Theatre in Juneau, Alaska, premièred on 16 March 1997 at Off-Broadway’s Vineyard Theatre, winning the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1998. The play, which has a cast of five and a simple set, had many subsequent productions in regional theaters in the U.S., Off-Broadway in New York City, abroad (the London première was in 2015), and U.S. colleges and universities.  It had its Broadway première at the Samuel J. Friedman Theatre on 19 April 2022 and received three 2022 Tony nominations and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Revival of a Play. 

[The 1997 Off-Broadway production of How I Learned also won a batch of awards, including the 1997 Lucille Lortel Award for Outstanding Play, Drama Critics’ Circle Award for Best Play, Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Play, and Outer Critics Circle Award for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play. The Vineyard Theatre mounting also won the 1997 Obie Awards for both Playwriting and Direction.]

A couple of years ago, for example, a San Francisco playwright named Joan Holden [1939-2024] had the somewhat unpromising notion of turning Nickel and Dimed [2001], Barbara Ehrenreich’s [1941-2022] best-selling book about her experiences as a minimum-wage worker, into a stage play. The result is an episodic but incisive series of vignettes about the impossibility of making ends meet while waiting tables in Florida, scrubbing toilets in Maine and stocking discount-store shelves in Minnesota. Nickel & Dimed [2002] has its deficiencies as drama, but it’s a rare example of theater that tries to open people’s eyes to the way life is lived in the real world — and maybe even rouse them to action. Midway through the second act, the actors step out of character, stop the play and conduct a 10-minute discussion with the audience on how much a cleaning woman deserves to be paid. Producers in New York haven’t given it much attention, but Nickel & Dimed is making a successful march through the regionals, from Seattle to the Trinity Rep in Providence, R.I.

[Nickel & Dimed had its New York City première by the Off-Off-Broadway 4Graces Theater Company at the Bank Street Theater from 5 to 28 October 2006. It was reviewed in the New York Times by Andrea Stevens on 11 October 2006 (“Evoking Lives Struggling to Exist on Bare Minimums").]

In Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater last fall presented writer-director Eric Simonson’s [b. 1960] big, imaginatively staged adaptation [6 September-6 October 2002] of Moby Dick; there was no whale, but a surprising amount of Herman Melville’s [1819-91] imposing novel [1851] made it onstage. (Adaptations of epic novels, like John Irving’s [b. 1942] Cider House Rules [1985], have a habit of flopping in New York.) Houston’s enterprising Alley Theater last fall staged a fine production of The General from America [1996], Richard Nelson’s [b. 1650] brooding, against-the-grain, surprisingly convincing historical drama about Benedict Arnold [1741-1801]. (The play later opened off-Broadway [Theatre for a New Audience at the Lucille Lortel Theatre. 2002], where the critics, predictably, dissed it.)

[Cider House Rules, the stage adaptation of Irving’s novel, had a somewhat tortuous history. It was conceived by Jane Jones (b. 1954?), the co-founding artistic director of Seattle’s Book-It Repertory Theatre, and Tom Hulce (b. 1953), actor and producer, in 1995, and they got Peter Parnell (b. 1953), playwright and children’s-book author, to write the script.

[The result was a two-part play that ran over seven hours together.  It premièred at Book-It in June-July and October-September 1995 under Jones’s direction. It was picked up by Los Angeles’s Mark Taper Forum, where it ran from June to September 1996. 

[The adaptation was scheduled for staging at the Atlantic Theatre Company in New York City for the 1999-2000 season, and Part I, Here in St. Cloud’s, was staged, with Hulce as co-director, in May-June 1999.  It ran 3¼ hours and cost Atlantic about $300,000.  With largely mixed reviews, ATL couldn’t raise the money to mount the second part and the play cycle was never completed in New York.]

“Our responsibility is to do big stuff — not the next one-set, three-character play,” says Gregory Boyd [b. 1951], artistic director of the Alley [1989-2018], which has commissioned, among other new works, a play from Keith Reddin [b. 1956] about the Luddite rebellion in 19th century England. Regional theaters are one place where educational is not a dirty word. Performances are often followed by discussion sessions; the programs (so pathetically inadequate in New York) are filled with background articles on the play’s issues or real-life subject matter. People leave the theater with something more than stagecraft to talk about.

[Reddin’s Luddite play is The Prophets of Nature.  The only production for which I could find a record was by the Off-Off-Broadway Sonnet Repertory Theatre at the Belt Theatre in New York City from 16 to 20 June 2004, which appears to have been the play’s première. I couldn’t find any reviews of the production, however. Six years later, the Salt Lake Acting Company in Utah presented a single, free reading of The Prophets of Nature on 15 February 2010 as part of its New Play Sounding Series. There were several announcements of the reading (including Playbill on 6 February 2010), but no after-event commentary. The text of The Prophets of Nature doesn’t seem to have been published.]

Even with more commercial works that play the regionals with one eye on the ultimate prize — Broadway — the audience participates in a more direct way. Last winter Ellen Burstyn [b. 1932] played the title role in Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All, a one-woman stage adaptation [by Martin Tahse, 1930-2014; not to be confused with the 1994 TV mini-series adaptation] of Allan Gurganus’ [b. 1947] best-selling novel [1989], which had its world premiere at San Diego’s Old Globe Theater [2003]. She was still stumbling a bit (engagingly, catching herself with a casual “I mean . . .”) as she tried to master the demanding part, but audiences had the frisson of being present at the development of what may (when the show comes to Broadway this fall) turn out to be one of the great stage roles.

By most measures, the regional theaters are booming. There were just 23 in 1961, when the first national organization of nonprofit theaters was formed [Theatre Communications Group (TCG), established in 1961]; today there are 1,800. Many have gleaming new theaters, with two or even three stages, and state-of-the-art production facilities that put to shame the cramped old boxes on Broadway. “Frankly, it’s something of a step down for me when I go to New York,” says Jack O’Brien [b. 1939], artistic director of San Diego’s Globe Theaters [1965-present] — who has lately been going to New York often to direct hit shows like Hairspray [Broadway: 15 August 2002-4 January 2009 (8 Tonys, including Best Musical and Best Direction of a Musical); première: Seattle, May-June 2002].

For playwrights, the chance to see their new work given a sumptuous first staging is matched only by the ability to keep tinkering with it while shielded from the harsh lights of Broadway. “One of the things you find is that there’s a low level of audience pretension,” says Richard Greenberg [b. 1958], who has developed plays like Three Days of Rain [1997; Broadway, 2006 (Julia Roberts’s stage début)] and The Violet Hour [2002; Broadway, 2003] at South Coast Repertory in California’s Orange County. “There’s a receptiveness about the audience. Their responses are pure. And that’s especially good early on, when you’re not so sure how or if your play is communicating.”

Today’s tough economic times have brought their share of pain, of course. Subscriptions and ticket sales have held their own at most of the major theaters (though advance bookings have dropped, as they have on Broadway since Sept. 11), but it has been a struggle to keep corporate and private donations coming. Seattle’s ACT company, one of the city’s three major theater groups, announced last winter that financial woes would force it to close down at the end of the season — before $1.5 million was raised at the last minute to keep it going for at least another season. The Seattle Rep, across town, is in less dire straits, but will still have to reduce staff and cut its roster of plays from nine to six next season. These pressures could increase the danger that regionals will shy away from risky fare, in favor of tried-and-true revivals, or new works that might have the prospect of a commercial run in New York. That is a criticism that some have long made of the regionals; off-Broadway is still a more receptive place for certain kinds of stylistically experimental plays. “I find that sometimes theaters are a little tame when it comes to choosing their seasons. They want to cater to their audiences,” says playwright Cruz. “A lot of regional theaters won’t take chances with work that deals more with experimentation.”

A successful regional theater, of course, has to strike the right balance, to know its audience and serve its tastes while pushing it, at least on occasion, into new territory. What’s gratifying is how well many of them are doing it — and proving in the process that all the country’s a stage.

The Top Five Regional Theaters

Some focus on new work; others have a commitment to the classics. Bringing new plays and artists to the national stage is important, but so is serving your local audience. TIME traveled the country to find the five theaters that do both best — and know how to put on a great show.

1 Goodman Theater, Chicago

With the groundbreaking Steppenwolf troupe and such ambitious smaller companies as the Victory Gardens Theater, Chicago’s theater scene is lively. But the Goodman continues to make the biggest national mark. Artistic director Robert Falls [b. 1954; Artistic Director of the Goodman, 1986-2022] has supplied Broadway with acclaimed adaptations of American classics (including this season’s Long Day’s Journey into Night [Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953); 22 February-6 April 2002]) and has nurtured such important new voices as Rebecca Gilman [b. 1964 or 1965] (Boy Gets Girl [13 March-8 April 2000]) and — along with Chicago’s Lookingglass Theater — Mary Zimmerman [b. 1960] (Metamorphoses [premiered in 1996 as Six Myths; Off-Broadway: 2001; Broadway: 2002, Tony for Best Direction of a Play, 2 additional nominations]). The Goodman is currently introducing Gem of the Ocean [28 April-24 May 2003] . . ., the latest in August Wilson’s [1945-2005] 20th century chronicle of the African-American experience, in a vibrant production with a strong cast of Wilson regulars. And Stephen Sondheim’s [1930-2021] long-awaited new musical, Bounce, will open here in June [30 June-10 August 2003]. “New York is a place to celebrate new work rather than to originate or nurture it,” says Falls. “That’s our responsibility.”

2  Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Ashland, Ore.

The name is misleading. Although the company began as an all-Shakespeare troupe back in 1935, the Bard’s works now constitute less than half of its increasingly eclectic season. OSF is one of the few U.S. companies left that hew to the classic repertory format. Its 70 to 75 actors take various roles in 11 works that play in rotation from February to November. And since visitors generally travel to this Oregon resort town to see several shows at a time, the Romeo and Juliets and Hedda Gablers can be supplemented with more unconventional fare such as the two parts of David Edgar’s Continental Divide (one of them, Mothers Against . . .) and, in July, Nilo Cruz’s Lorca in a Green Dress [12 July-2 November 2003]. “We’re willing to take a chance on plays that other theaters aren’t interested in,” says artistic director Libby Appel [b. 1937], “because we have the audience for it.”

3  American Repertory Theater, Cambridge, Mass.

Robert Brustein [1927-2023], the longtime artistic director of this adventurous company [1979-2002], turned over the reins this season to Robert Woodruff [b. 1947], a veteran avant-garde director from New York City. Woodruff responded by bringing in a Who’s Who of theater innovators, including Peter Sellars [b. 1957] and Andrei Serban [Romanian-born American, b. 1943], whose quirky take on Shakespeare’s Pericles [10 May-27 Jun 2003] . . ., is currently onstage. Another highlight of the season: Woodruff’s staging of Highway Ulysses [1-22 March 2002], an update of the Ulysses myth, with text and music by Rinde Eckert [b. 1951], about a man on a freaky cross-country trek in search of his son. Even when the journey wandered, Woodruff’s teeming, haunted stage kept you enthralled.

4  Guthrie Theater, Minneapolis

One of the legendary American regional companies has been quietly tending its garden for years, with 32,000 subscribers (among the highest in the nation) who brave the frigid Minnesota winters to see high-quality productions of the classics. But the Guthrie has also launched a program for developing new work, and last summer staged the world premiere of Arthur Miller’s [1915-2005] latest play, Resurrection Blues [world première at the Guthrie, 9 August-8 September 2002] . . ., Artistic director Joe Dowling [b. 1948; artistic director of the Guthrie, 1995-2015], who once ran Dublin’s Abbey Theater [1979-85] and directed a Broadway revival of Tartuffe this season [9 January-23 February 2003, for the Roundabout Theatre Company], says that the audience in Minneapolis is “one of the most sophisticated I’ve ever worked with.”

5  South Coast Repertory, Costa Mesa, Calif.

In Southern California, enterprising regional theaters are nearly as plentiful as orange groves — among them, San Diego’s Globe and the La Jolla Playhouse — but the little engine that could in Orange County gets the nod. Run by two former San Francisco college buddies — Martin Benson and David Emmes [both now over 90; left the leadership of SCR in 2011], who founded the company as a traveling troupe in 1964 — the South Coast Rep has helped nurture such playwrights as Richard Greenberg and David Henry Hwang [b. 1957] (Golden Child [10 January-9 February 1997; commissioned by SCR and co-produced with the New York Shakespeare Festival/The Public Theater]). This spring the theater, along with Baltimore’s Center Stage, staged the premiere of Lynn Nottage’s [b. 1964] Intimate Apparel [SCR: 11 April-18 May 2003] . . ., about a black seamstress in turn-of-the-century New York City who makes corsets for rich ladies — and a mail-order match for herself with a laborer on the Panama Canal. It’s a lovingly rendered slice of the American story that seems to glow especially bright in the heart of Reagan country.

[Richard Zoglin (b. 1948) wrote about entertainment for Time for over 30 years starting in 1983 as a staff writer and in 1996 as the theater reviewer.  He’s the author of three books: Elvis in Vegas: How the King Reinvented the Las Vegas Show (Simon & Schuster, 2019); Hope: Entertainer of the Century—that’s Bob Hope, of course—(Simon & Schuster, 2014); and Comedy at the Edge: How Stand-up in the 1970s Changed America (Bloomsbury, 2008).  He’s now an op-ed contributor to the Washington Post, New York Times, and Wall Street Journal.]

"In rural Oregon, regional theater sparks a creative revival"

by Jeffrey Brown

[The following transcript is from a segment of PBS NewsHour on the Oregon Shakespeare Festival that aired on 24 August 2018.]

A remote area of the Pacific Northwest might not sound like a top theater destination. But as Jeffrey Brown reports, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has sparked a wave of creative and economic growth in rural Ashland. One of the country’s most important regional theater companies, OSF is acclaimed for provocative show content, community engagement and unusually diverse casting.

Judy Woodruff: Now, how Shakespeare has helped to define and build a community in the Pacific Northwest.

Jeffrey Brown reports from Ashland, Oregon. It’s part of our American Creators series.

Jeffrey Brown: A production of William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar,” with a twist. Caesar was played by Vilma Silva, a Latina woman.  [William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar with Silva in the title role ran at OSF from 23 March to 6 November 2011.]

Vilma Silva: I was Caesar.

(LAUGHTER)

Vilma Silva: Lots of explaining, right?

Jeffrey Brown: Not obvious casting, yes.

Vilma Silva: No, it wasn’t.

The news spread pretty quickly in the town, and I was shopping in Bi-Mart, you know, one of our local shops here. And from down the aisle, I heard someone go, “Hail, Caesar!”

(LAUGHTER)

Vilma Silva: And this has just been casting. I hadn’t even started rehearsals. And I looked down the aisle, and there was this woman, and she was so excited.

Jeffrey Brown: It’s the kind of community engagement, high-quality production, and casting decisions that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has become known for, all taking place in the small town atmosphere of Ashland in a beautiful rural part of Southern Oregon.

Bill Rauch: Part of why I fell in love with this theater company was its location. I think it being in a relatively isolated, rural area, surrounded by all this incredible natural beauty, is part of what made my heart sing.

Jeffrey Brown: Bill Rauch has been artistic director here since 2007, helping grow it into one of the country’s most important regional theater companies.

Bill Rauch: I’m here to do the best production of “The Winter’s Tale.”

Jeffrey Brown: He started his career in even smaller settings, touring communities of fewer than 2,000 around the country with a group called Cornerstone, dedicated to bringing theater to rural areas of America that rarely see productions.

Bill Rauch: When we were in college, a bunch of us who started Cornerstone together, we heard a really damning statistic, that only 2 percent of the American people went to professional theater on anything approaching a regular basis.

And so we became determined to do theater for the other 98 percent.

Jeffrey Brown: For you, it was a kind of mission.

Bill Rauch: Absolutely. Absolutely, a passionate mission.

Jeffrey Brown: At OSF, as it’s known, Rauch inherited a company that dates to 1935 and began as a tiny three-day showcase of traditional Shakespeare productions.

Today, the Bard remains a staple, but the festival has made a name for itself by commissioning new works.

Actor: [In scene from Sweat] We offer to take 50 percent pay cut.

Jeffrey Brown: Sometimes provocative ones, by contemporary playwrights. Its 10-year American Revolutions project of new plays on American life included Lynn Nottage’s “Sweat,” winner of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize. [Sweat premièred at OSF from 29 July to 31 October 2015 before playing at the Arena Stage in Washington, D.C., 15 January-21 February 2016.  It opened in New York City Off-Broadway at the Joseph Papp Public Theater’s Martinson Hall on 3 November 2016 and ran until 18 December and reopened at Studio 54 on Broadway on 26 March 2017, produced by New York’s Roundabout Theatre Company, running for 105 regular performances before closing on 25 June.  The play won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Drama.]

OSF now offers an eight-month season of numerous productions in three separate theaters, some 800 performances a year. It’s helped make this town of 22,000 a destination for theater lovers and for creative entrepreneurs.

Sandra Slattery heads the local Chamber of Commerce.

Sandra Slattery: It’s built a community based in cultural appreciation. So not only does it bring in visitors and incredible productions every year that enhance our economy. It creates an environment that has spawned other businesses and industries.

Jeffrey Brown: Many of the actors live in town, and some, like 23-year-old Samantha Miller, enter the troop through a program with nearby Southern Oregon University, where OSF directors and actors teach.

Samantha Miller: And so, as we were being trained and going through our acting classes, movement classes, all kinds of classes in order to get here and get to the rest of our lives, we knew that once it’s about time to get our degrees, we have the opportunity to audition for the biggest regional theater in the country.

So that was definitely in the back of our minds.

Jeffrey Brown: In the back of your mind?

Samantha Miller: Yes.

Jeffrey Brown: It sounds like it was in the front of your mind.

Samantha Miller: It was in the front of our minds.

(LAUGHTER)

Jeffrey Brown: To be honest. We were thinking about that every day as we were going to class.

Miller also represents another defining aspect of OSF, the diversity of its casting. Since 2016, the majority of actors on stage have been nonwhite in every conceivable type of role.

And one of this summer’s hits, the musical “Oklahoma,” has same-sex couples in the leading roles.

Artistic director Bill Rauch.

Bill Rauch: We’re in the business of telling stories that reflect the deepest and the widest array of human experiences that we can.

So, we need the storytellers to reflect the breadth of diversity of the stories that we’re telling. And we want everybody who comes to see themselves reflected on stage and also to open up their hearts and their minds to other kinds of human beings.

Jeffrey Brown: Actor Daniel Jose Molina came here because of the diversity.

Daniel Jose Molina: The first year I was asked to come here was to play Romeo set in Alta, California, in the 1840s, two Latin families, Spanish families feuding. Same exact story. [This OSF production of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet ran 17 February-4 November 2012.]

But it was — it was mostly a Latino cast.

Jeffrey Brown: One of OSF’s brightest lights, 29-year-old Molina, went on to perform many different roles, including a much-acclaimed current term as Henry V. [OSF’s Henry V by William Shakespeare ran 21 February-27 October 2018.]

Daniel Jose Molina: I’m been incredibly lucky with the variety of work that I have been able to do here, whether that — my ethnicity needs to be even addressed or not, because that’s the thing about diversity, is that even if it’s not an aspect of the play, just the representation of me as a Latino playing Henry V, an English king, if I had seen it, that would have affected me, if I was in high school.

Jeffrey Brown: In fact, there’s much more diversity on stage here than in the audience, and all involved know more work on that score needs to be done.

Vilma Silva: And I have seen some progress in that. But, yes, it’s something that it’s a continuing effort. Because of who — who is kind has grown up going to theater, who has the time to go to theater, who has the money to go to theater, there’s always going to be those issues that we’re addressing.

Jeffrey Brown: Even as new productions begin rehearsals, artistic director Bill Rauch has announced he’s leaving after 12 years to head up the new performing arts venue at the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan.

He will miss Ashland’s small town atmosphere, he says, but he is confident the festival will continue to push boundaries and engage audiences.

For the “PBS NewsHour,” I’m Jeffrey Brown at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare

[On 26 January, I published an article by Kirk Woodward, a frequent contributor to ROT, on “Frank Kermode on Shakespeare’s Language.”  Kirk took off from an announcement by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland that they were commissioning modern-English translations of all of Shakespeare’s plays; that dovetailed into a book report/review of Kermode’s Shakespeare’s Language (2000, Farrar Straus Giroux).  As a follow-up (and prequel) to Kirk’s discussion, I thought I ought to post OSF’s original news release of 29 September 2015 (Oregon Shakespeare Festival [website]; https://www.osfashland.org/press-room/press-releases/play-on.aspx) and several articles from the press reporting or commenting on the project.  Below are the OSF release, three New York Times articles (including an op-ed column and a report aimed at children), and the New Yorker article Kirk mentions in his piece, Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s “Why We (Mostly) Stopped Messing With Shakespeare’s Language.”]

 “OSF LAUNCHES THREE-YEAR SHAKESPEARE TRANSLATION COMMISSIONING PROJECT”

Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare; playwrights and dramaturgs paired for 39 plays

Ashland, Ore.—The Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced today the launch of a 39-play, three-year commissioning project, Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare. Supported by a generous grant from the Hitz Foundation and inspired by long-time OSF patron Dave Hitz’s passion for Shakespeare, the project is led by Lue Morgan Douthit, OSF’s director of literary development and dramaturgy.

Play on! has engaged many of the nation’s leading playwrights, dramaturgs, theater professionals, expert advisors and emerging voices in the field. Among the goals of the project is to increase understanding and connection to Shakespeare’s plays, as well as engage and inspire theatergoers, theater professionals, students, teachers and scholars. Play on! also will provide translated texts in contemporary modern English as performable companion pieces for Shakespeare’s original texts in the hope they will be published, read and adapted for stage and used as teaching tools.

“We began this project with a ‘What if?,’ Douthit said. “There are differences between the early modern English of Shakespeare and contemporary English. What if we looked at these plays at the language level through the lens of dramatists? What would we learn about how they work? Would that help us understand them in a different way? ‘Translate’ is an inadequate word because it implies a word-for-word substitution, which isn’t what we’re doing. I’m going for something much more subtle. But I like the rigor that ‘translate’ implies. What excites me the most about this is who will dig into these texts. We have paired 36 playwrights with dramaturgs, and we are asking them to go in and look at what the plays are made of. The writers get the great joy of tagging along with the world’s best poetic dramatist. It will be the geekiest exercise ever.”

The project has commissioned a playwright and dramaturg for each of the 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare (including Two Noble Kinsman and Edward III). By commissioning diverse playwrights (more than 50 percent women and more than 50 percent writers of color), OSF will bring fresh voices and perspectives to the work of translation.

In approaching the task OSF has established two basic rules. First, do no harm. There is language that will not need translating and some that does. Each team is being asked to examine the play line-by-line and translate to contemporary modern English those lines that need translating. There is to be no cutting or editing of scenes and playwrights may not add their personal politics. Second, put the same kind of pressure on the language as Shakespeare put on his. This means the playwright must consider the meter, rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric, character action and theme of the original. These translations are not adaptations. Setting, time period and references will remain unchanged.

OSF will continue its commitment to producing all of Shakespeare’s plays between 2015 and 2025, and all these productions will use the original texts. One or more of the Play on! translations may be produced at OSF along with the complete original canon. It is the hope and expectation that a production will inspire audience members to return to Shakespeare’s original texts, ideally with much greater understanding and enjoyment.

“My interest in the question of how to best create access to these remarkable works is life-long,” OSF Artistic Director Bill Rauch said. “As a seventh grader, I translated Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream into contemporary English for my classmates to better understand it. I am delighted that the Play on! translations will give dramatists a deep personal relationship with Shakespeare’s words and that they will give artists and audiences new insights into these extraordinary plays.”

“I’ve been seeing Shakespeare plays since I was a child,” Dave Hitz said. “I love reading a play before the show, especially out-loud with friends, in order to understand the performance better. When I learned that foreign translations of Shakespeare are in modern language, I was jealous. I fantasized about seeing Shakespeare performed in contemporary modern English. I’m thrilled that OSF is taking on this project. No translation can replace the original, but it can broaden the audience and provide new understanding even for those of us who love the original language. I hope these translations will attract a new audience to Shakespeare and lead them back to his original words as well.”

Each play will have a reading and workshop with a director and actors to provide further insight into the work before the final drafts are submitted. OSF will produce readings and workshops of these translations all over the country. In addition, an annual convening will be held to facilitate dialogue and shared discovery among the writers.

Kennenth Cavandar’s translation of Timon of Athens, a pilot for this project, was produced at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2014. At this point in time three translations are scheduled for production: Pericles at Orlando Shakespeare, Two Noble Kinsmen at University of Utah, and The Tempest at Alabama Shakespeare Festival.

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[Jennifer Schuessler posted the following report on the New York Times’ blog ArtsBeat on 1 October 2015 (http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/oregon-shakespeare-festival-plans-shakespeare-translation-project/).  A version of the blog article appeared in print on 2 October 2015, in the “Arts, Briefly” column in “The Arts” section of the paper with the headline: “A Plan to ‘Translate’ Shakespeare Into English.”]

“THEATER: OREGON SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL PLANS

SHAKESPEARE ‘TRANSLATION’ PROJECT”

By Jennifer Schuessler

Taylor Mac, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Lloyd Suh, Lisa Peterson and Naomi Iizuka are among the diverse group of playwrights the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has enlisted in a three-year effort to “translate” Shakespeare’s plays into contemporary modern English, with the goal of making the sometimes difficult plays more accessible to contemporary audiences while also “bringing fresh voices and perspectives.”

“Play On! 36 Playwrights Translate Shakespeare” pairs playwrights and dramaturges to work on 39 plays attributed to Shakespeare, including “Edward III” and “The Two Noble Kinsmen.” More than half of the playwrights are women and more than half are minorities, according to a news release.

Lue Morgan Douthit, the festival’s director of literary development and dramaturgy, said in a statement that while the new versions would not be translations in the strictest sense, the word captured what she characterized as “the rigor” of the project. Unlike free literary adaptations of the sort included in projects like the Hogarth Shakespeare [a project of Penguin Random House in which Shakespeare’s plays are retold by contemporary bestselling novelists], the Oregon effort allows no cutting or editing of scenes, no changes to a play’s setting or references, and no insertion of a playwright’s “personal politics.”

“The writers get the great joy of tagging along with the world’s best poetic dramatist,” Ms. Douthit said. “It will be the geekiest exercise ever.”

A pilot for the project, Kenneth Cavandar’s translation of “Timon of Athens,” was produced at the Alabama Shakespeare Festival in 2014. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, Ore., said it may produce one or more of the modern translations, while also continuing its commitment to staging original-text versions of all of Shakespeare’s plays between 2015 and 2025.

[Jennifer Schuessler is an editor at the New York Times Book Review and a reporter for the ArtsBeat blog.]

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[Here is the New Yorker article by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner that Kirk Woodward mentions in “Frank Kermode on Shakespeare’s Language,” published on 6 October 2015 (http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-we-mostly-stopped-messing-with-shakespeares-language).]

“WHY WE (MOSTLY) STOPPED MESSING WITH SHAKESPEARE’S LANGUAGE”

by Daniel Pollack-Pelzner

Critics of a project that will translate Shakespeare’s plays into modern English may have forgotten the long history of the Bard’s scripts undergoing heavy editing for the stage.

Last week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival announced that it had commissioned thirty-six playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English. The backlash began immediately, with O.S.F. devotees posting their laments on the festival’s Facebook page. “What a revolting development!” “Is there really a need to translate English into Brain Dead American?” “Why not just rewrite Shakespeare in emoticons and text acronyms?” Beneath the opprobrium lay a shared assumption: that Shakespeare’s genius inheres not in his complicated characters or carefully orchestrated scenes or subtle ideas but in the singularity of his words. James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia University, used a regionally apt analogy to express this opinion: “Shakespeare is about the intoxicating richness of the language,” he told Oregon Public Broadcasting. “It’s like the beer I drink. I drink 8.2 per cent I.P.A., and by changing the language in this modernizing way, it’s basically shifting to Bud Light. Bud Light’s acceptable, but it just doesn’t pack the punch and the excitement and the intoxicating quality of that language.”

I don’t disagree with Shapiro, but, as a literary historian who studies the way Shakespeare has been reinvented, I’m struck that so many serious Shakespeareans over the centuries have argued the opposite: that Shakespeare’s genius had to be salvaged from the obscure, indecorous, archaic, quibbling mess of his language. For poets, playwrights, editors, and actors from the seventeenth century through much of the nineteenth, Shakespeare’s language wasn’t intoxicating so much as intoxicated: it needed a sobering intervention. These days, we tend to assume that productions can change anything about Shakespeare (the setting, the period, the characters’ race or gender), as long as the script stays intact—cut or reordered, perhaps, but not rewritten. This is a fairly recent notion. Until the late Victorian era, stage performances usually observed the setting and period implied in the play, but they transformed the language. Shakespeare’s script was the first problem that a production had to remedy.

At the end of the English Civil War, when the restoration of the monarchy reopened the theatres, Shakespeare’s fifty-year-old plays looked, to many, out of date. Playwrights polished up his rusty parts for performance, pruning his unruly plots to fit a French-fuelled demand for dramatic unities, tweaking his politics to suit an age wary of further unrest, recasting his roles to accommodate newly licensed female actors, and rewriting the rough bits that violated neoclassical decorum. John Dryden and William Davenant introduced their adaptation of “The Tempest,” in 1667, as Shakespeare resurrected for the present: “from old Shakespear’s honour’d dust, this day / Springs up and buds a new reviving Play.” Restoration playwrights treated Shakespeare much as he had treated his sources: as fertile soil ripe for tilling. John Crown found “Henry VI” full of “old gather’d Herbs”; he added a dressing of “oyly Words” along with “a little vinegar against the Pope” to pique the taste of his Protestant audience. Shakespeare was seen as an untutored poet of nature who was, as John Milton memorably put it, apt to “warble his native wood-notes wild,” and who lacked the art—and knowledge of classical precedent—to shape his fancy. (The prohibition against ending a sentence with a preposition stems, in part, from Dryden’s attack on this “common fault” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries.) “There are Lines that are stiff and forc’d, and harsh and unmusical,” the playwright John Dennis complained as he tuned up “Coriolanus.” “There are Lines in some Places which are very obscure, and whole Scenes which ought to be alter’d.” The Irish poet Nahum Tate cast “King Lear” as “a Heap of Jewels, unstrung and unpolisht”; his notorious resetting of those smudged gems modernized the language, cut the Fool, and added a happy ending in which Lear survives to see Cordelia marry Edgar—an anathema to our current judgment, but popular enough to hold the stage for the next hundred and fifty years.

Even the eighteenth-century vogue for printed editions of Shakespeare, which often sought to rescue the plays from the perceived travesties of the playhouse, found his work faulty. Nearly all the editions modernized the plays’ spelling and punctuation; some went further. Striving to refashion Shakespeare as a more genteel poet, Alexander Pope, in the preface to his 1725 edition, acknowledged his subject’s shortcomings: “It must be own’d that with all these great excellencies he has almost as great defects; and that as he has certainly written better so he has perhaps written worse than any other.” Pope’s solution was to flag the excellencies with a comma in the margin—or, if they were particularly “shining” examples, with a star—whereas “excessively bad” passages were “degraded to the bottom of the page.” Although Pope blamed these faults on Shakespeare’s need to please the debased taste of his audience, another poet-editor, Samuel Johnson, thought Shakespeare’s defects could not be excused by the “barbarity of his age.” He disdained the comic characters, whose “jests are commonly gross, and their pleasantry licentious”; he deplored the labored tragic writing where “the offspring of his throes is tumour, meanness, tediousness, and obscurity”; he criticized narrative scenes for “a disproportionate pomp of diction and a wearisome train of circumlocution”; and he lamented Shakespeare’s wordplay, sighing that a pun or “quibble was to him the fatal ‘Cleopatra’ for which he lost the world, and was content to lose it.” Although Johnson regarded Shakespeare as the greatest modern writer to depict our “general nature,” he preferred Tate’s “King Lear” for the poetic justice of its ending.

As the scholar Michael Dobson has argued, canonization fuelled adaptation: if Shakespeare was the newly minted national poet, his plays had to be improved to be worthy of his stature. (That impulse spurred Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler’s expurgated “Family Shakespeare” edition, which advertised that it removed “from the writings of Shakespeare some defects which diminish their value.”) In 1838, the great actor-manager William Macready restored Shakespeare’s “King Lear,” complete with the Fool and the original body count, but he could not persuade his audiences to accept Shakespeare’s “Richard III.” Colley Cibber’s trim Restoration adaptation, with its popular lines like “Off with his head! So much for Buckingham,” was preferred until 1877, and even Laurence Olivier’s 1955 film kept some of Cibber’s alterations. “The Taming of the Shrew,” frequently revived in adaptations throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, was not performed in Shakespeare’s version until 1887, almost three hundred years after its Elizabethan début.

So what changed? How did Shakespeare’s original texts regain their popularity? German Romantics had something to do with it. They rebelled against French neoclassical restraint and cited Shakespeare’s unruliness as a liberating precedent. British critics in the nineteenth century followed suit, celebrating Shakespeare’s capacious characters and poetic imagination instead of worrying whether his plots fit Aristotelian unities or if his style matched Augustan decorum. Rather than subject Shakespeare to critical standards, Shakespeare became the standard. (Samuel Taylor Coleridge apologized for importing the clunky term “psychological” from the German, but he said that English lacked a word to capture Shakespeare’s “Philosophy of the Human Mind.”)

Then, with the rise of English as an academic discipline in the Victorian era, scholars took over the business of editing Shakespeare, working to establish more historically authentic texts, rather than correcting poetic defects—-an editing goal matched by the nineteenth-century taste for spectacular antiquarian stage productions. (John Philip Kemble inaugurated a tradition of playing Macbeth in a Scottish kilt.) Shakespeare’s plays entered the new compulsory public education system in 1870; the national assessment standards required classes to recite Shakespeare passages for an examiner. Shakespeare stocked the cultural arsenal for Britain’s overseas campaign as well, getting a push in the colonies from the British Empire Shakespeare Society, whose motto read, “Using no other weapon but his name.” Even the Oxford English Dictionary helped secure Shakespeare’s status as the source of the imperial tongue; one editor instructed researchers to stop looking for earlier instances once they found a word listed in the concordance to Shakespeare. George Bernard Shaw feared that the Victorian tendency to see Shakespeare as immune from criticism verged on “Bardolatry,” warning that “it is false admiration to worship him as an infallible demi-god.” But Shakespeare was well on his way to becoming secular scripture. In the twentieth century, New Critics enshrined Shakespeare’s plays as complex poetic art, unified through patterns of metaphor, irony, and paradox, and generations of students were compelled to write exegeses of his linguistic richness. If witty intricacies appeared opaque, that was the fault not of the poet but of the audience who failed to grasp his genius.

Even in a climate of reverence for Shakespeare, the authentic text of his plays remains elusive. No manuscripts for the plays survive, so contemporary editions and performance scripts cobble together the most plausible passages from early quartos and folios, modernizing the spelling and punctuation and relying on the history of editorial emendations to clarify obscure cruxes. (There is also the tricky business of attribution for scripts that appear to be collaborations between Shakespeare and other playwrights.) Most editors of “Hamlet,” for instance, silently translate “porpentine” to “porcupine” without incurring outrage, though whether the porcupine is “fretful” or “fearful” depends on whether you follow the folio or the second quarto. Every printing of an early modern book was slightly different; hence the oddity of the Norton Facsimile edition of the First Folio, which reproduced the cleanest version of each page from different copies, generating the facsimile of a volume that never existed. The Norton edition of Shakespeare’s complete works that I helped edit when I was a graduate student printed three different texts of “King Lear” (the quarto, the folio, and a conflated version of the two). At the Internet Shakespeare Editions, you can find seven different texts of “King Lear,” along with ten facsimiles. If Samuel Johnson were asked today whether he preferred Nahum Tate’s version to Shakespeare’s, he would have to answer: Which one?

In light of this history, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s translation project seems fairly conservative. The translations are billed as “companion pieces” for Shakespeare’s originals, not replacements. According to the O.S.F. Web site, the playwrights are charged not to cut, not to edit, not to add personal politics, not to change the setting or time period or references. “First, do no harm,” the commission states. Instead, O.S.F. wants its writers to “limit their efforts to updating the more antiquated language in the plays” while putting the “same kind of pressure on the language”—rhyme, rhythm, metaphor, rhetoric—“as Shakespeare put on his.” Although accessible, stylish play scripts could offer handy entry points for Shakespeare newbies, one almost wonders why O.S.F. needs thirty-six playwrights (and supporting dramaturgs) to do the sort of clarifying work that annotations to modern editions have been doing for years. In its combination of updating and deference, O.S.F.’s commission looks like an eighteenth-century project couched in nineteenth-century terms.

What is genuinely radical in the commission is not the process but the people involved. Under the leadership of O.S.F.’s director of literary development and dramaturgy, Lue Morgan Douthit, more than half of the selected playwrights will be women, and more than half will be writers of color. Shakespeare’s scripts have always resulted from collaborations among playwrights, actors, and editors. For most of the history I have traced, those collaborators were white men. Updating Shakespeare isn’t a new business, but now its ranks will reflect the rich diversity of artists who, four centuries later, both relish and renew his language.

[Daniel Pollack-Pelzner, who trained at Yale University as a Shakespearean actor, teaches Shakespeare, Renaissance drama, and British literary history at Linfield College in McMinnville, Oregon.  His research focuses on Shakespeare adaptations—how writers have transformed Shakespeare’s plots, characters, and style into literary forms that speak to their own cultural moment.  He has published numerous articles on Shakespeare and other English literary figures, has assisted in editing the new Norton Shakespeare, and is completing a book on Shakespeare and the Victorian novel.  He has appeared on Oregon Public Broadcasting and given public presentations at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.]

*  *  *  *

[This Op-Ed column by James Shapiro appeared on 7 October 2015 (http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/shakespeare-in-modern-english.html).  A version of this column appeared in print on the Opinion Pages of the New York edition on the same date, with the headline: “Modernizing the Bard?”]

“SHAKESPEARE IN MODERN ENGLISH?”

by James Shapiro

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.

Many in the theater community have known that this day was coming, though it doesn’t lessen the shock. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been one of the stars in the Shakespeare firmament since it was founded in 1935. While the festival’s organizers insist that they also remain committed to staging Shakespeare’s works in his own words, they have set a disturbing precedent. Other venues, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the University of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare Theater, have already signed on to produce some of these translations.

However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.

Claims that Shakespeare’s language is unintelligible go back to his own day. His great rival, Ben Jonson, reportedly complained about “some bombast speeches of ‘Macbeth,’ which are not to be understood.” Jonson failed to see that Macbeth’s dense soliloquies were intentionally difficult; Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work, tracing the turbulent arc of a character’s moral crisis. Even if audiences strain to understand exactly what Macbeth says, they grasp what Macbeth feels — but only if an actor knows what that character’s words mean.

Two years ago I witnessed a different kind of theatrical experiment, in which Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” in the original language, trimmed to 90 minutes, was performed before an audience largely unfamiliar with Shakespeare: inmates at Rikers Island. The performance was part of the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit initiative.

No inmates walked out on the performance, though they were free to do so. They were deeply engrossed, many at the edge of their seats, some crying out at various moments (much as Elizabethan audiences once did) and visibly moved by what they saw.

Did they understand every word? I doubt it. I’m not sure anybody other than Shakespeare, who invented quite a few words, ever has. But the inmates, like any other audience witnessing a good production, didn’t have to follow the play line for line, because the actors, and their director, knew what the words meant; they found in Shakespeare’s language the clues to the personalities of the characters.

I’ve had a chance to look over a prototype translation of “Timon of Athens” that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been sharing at workshops and readings for the past five years. While the work of an accomplished playwright, it is a hodgepodge, neither Elizabethan nor contemporary, and makes for dismal reading.

To understand Shakespeare’s characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of emphasis that he embedded in his verse. They will search for them in vain in the translation: The music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too, are the shifts — which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy — between “you” and “thee.” Even classical allusions are scrapped.

Shakespeare’s use of resonance and ambiguity, defining features of his language, is also lost in translation. For example, in Shakespeare’s original, when the misanthropic Timon addresses a pair of prostitutes and rails about how money corrupts every aspect of social relations, he urges them to “plague all, / That your activity may defeat and quell / The source of all erection.” A primary meaning of “erection” for Elizabethans was social advancement or promotion; Timon hates social climbers. The wry sexual meaning of “erection,” also present here, was secondary. But the new translation ignores the social resonance, turning the line into a sordid joke: Timon now speaks of “the source of all erections.”

Shakespeare borrowed almost all his plots and wrote for a theater that required only a handful of props, no scenery and no artificial lighting. The only thing Shakespearean about his plays is the language. I’ll never understand why, when you attend a Shakespeare production these days, you find listed in the program a fight director, a dramaturge, a choreographer and lighting, set and scenery designers — but rarely an expert steeped in Shakespeare’s language and culture.

A technology entrepreneur’s foundation is bankrolling the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s new venture. I’d prefer to see it spend its money hiring such experts and enabling those 36 promising American playwrights to devote themselves to writing the next Broadway hit like “Hamilton,” rather than waste their time stripping away what’s Shakespearean about “King Lear” or “Hamlet.”

[I agree in principle with Shapiro, especially with respect to actors and directors assuring that they understand the content of Shakespeare’s words.  (See my articles “Acting Shakespeare” and “Staging Shakespeare,” posted on ROT on 5 and 21 September 2009, which treat both endeavors.)  Further, in “Frank Kermode,” Kirk Woodward addresses the idea that Shakespeare meant for some of his lines to hard to understand, asking “Did they try to straighten out passages that Shakespeare left obscure . . .”?  (I responded in my closing remarks with an anecdote about a play by Heather McDonald of a production of which a dramaturgy teacher of mine complained that the director “ironed out all the quirks.”)

[James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606 (Simon & Schuster, 2015).]

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[The following article, directed to young readers, was posted on the Learning Notebook, a New York Times blog, on 14 October 2015 (http://learning.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/10/14/is-shakespeare-too-hard/).]

“IS SHAKESPEARE TOO HARD?”

by Michael Gonchar

Reading Shakespeare is pretty much a rite of passage in many high school English programs. Students are expected to stumble through centuries-old dost’s and thou’s to discover the beauty of Shakespeare’s language and explore the twists of his classic plots. After all, Shakespeare is generally thought of as the greatest writer in the English language.

But is Shakespeare just too hard for today’s students — and today’s audiences?

In “Shakespeare in Modern English?,” James Shapiro writes about changes at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival to make the bard more accessible:

The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.

Many in the theater community have known that this day was coming, though it doesn’t lessen the shock. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been one of the stars in the Shakespeare firmament since it was founded in 1935. While the festival’s organizers insist that they also remain committed to staging Shakespeare’s works in his own words, they have set a disturbing precedent. Other venues, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the University of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare Theater, have already signed on to produce some of these translations.

However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.

Claims that Shakespeare’s language is unintelligible go back to his own day. His great rival, Ben Jonson, reportedly complained about “some bombast speeches of ‘Macbeth,’ which are not to be understood.” Jonson failed to see that Macbeth’s dense soliloquies were intentionally difficult; Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work, tracing the turbulent arc of a character’s moral crisis. Even if audiences strain to understand exactly what Macbeth says, they grasp what Macbeth feels — but only if an actor knows what that character’s words mean.

Students: Read the entire article, then tell us . . .

— Is Shakespeare too hard for today’s students and audiences? Does the difficulty of Elizabethan vocabulary get in the way of appreciating the rich and colorful language, plot lines and characters?

— Is adapting Shakespeare to modern English a good way to engage students and audiences with these classic texts?

— Or do students and audiences lose the essence of Shakespeare’s plays if they read or see them in modern English? Is something lost in translation?

— Have you ever read or watched a Shakespeare play in the original language? Do you have a favorite play? Did you enjoy the experience? How did you cope with the difficult vocabulary?

— Have you ever read or watched a Shakespeare play translated into modern English? Did the adaptation enhance or detract from the experience?

[On the website (the link for which is above), 34 students 13 and older had commented at the time I uploaded this post.  Have a look at what some young Shakespeare students had to say about OSF’s project.

[Michael Gonchar started teaching in 1996 as a humanities teacher at East Side Community High School in Manhattan.  He joined the Learning Network in 2012 after spending ten years as a school coach, instructional coach, and teacher-mentor in over two dozen New York City public middle and high schools.]

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[OSF’s “translation” project is dubious in my view, but if it “does no harm” (a dramaturg’s pledge, by the way—borrowed from the medical profession; I bet OSF’s literary manager had a hand in writing the release), I suppose it’s innocuous.  I note that of the four translations being staged, three are among Shakespeare’s less-frequently produced plays: Timon of Athens, Pericles, Two Noble Kinsmen.  The rationale might be that a script that’s easier to follow might make them more appealing to general audiences.  That’s at least a laudable goal on the theaters’ part (OSF’s and ASF’s).  That was principally the thinking of Classic Theatre for Schools, an outfit I did some work for in the ’80s, and the Classroom Classics modern-language adaptations they published.  It was also the reason I started reading the Charles and Mary Lamb Tales from Shakespeare (which, of course, were early 19th-century texts rather than 21st) back in the 1950s: I could follow the story without having to slog through what was very difficult language for a middle-schooler.  (It worked, too: from that time on, I have loved Shakespeare’s plays.)  As Kirk quoted from the New Yorker’s Pollack-Pelzner above, if it gets some “newbies” into the theater or a Shakespeare text, then it’s all good.

[Here is a list of the playwrights and dramaturgs OSF has commissioned to make the Shakespearean translations:     

All’s Well That Ends Well:  Virginia Grise (playwright), Ricardo Bracho (dramaturg); Antony and Cleopatra:  Christopher Chen (p), Desdemona Chiang (d); As You Like It:  David Ivers (p), Lezlie C. Cross (d); The Comedy of Errors:  Christina Anderson (p), Martine Kei Green-Rogers (d); Coriolanus:  Sean San Jose (p), Rob Melrose (d); Cymbeline:  Andrea Thome (p), John Dias (d); Edward III:  Octavio Solis (p), Kimberly Colburn (d); Julius Caesar:  Shishir Kurup (p), Nancy Keystone (d); Hamlet:  Lisa Peterson (p), Luan Schooler (d); King Henry IV, Part One:  Yvette Nolan (p), Waylon Lenk (d); King Henry IV, Part Two:  Luis Alfaro (p), Tanya Palmer (d); King Henry V:  Lloyd Suh (p), Andrea Hiebler (d); King Henry VI, Parts One, Two, Three:  Douglas Langworthy (p), Mead Hunter (d); King Henry VIII:  Allison Moore (p), Julie Felise Dubiner (d); King John:  Brighde Mullins (p), Katie Peterson (d); King Lear:  Marcus Gardley (p), Nakissa Etemad (d); King Richard II:  Naomi Iizuka (p), Joy Meads (d); King Richard III:  Kwame Kwei-Armah (p), Gavin Witt (d); Love’s Labor’s Lost:  Josh Wilder (p), Jeanie O’Hare (d); Macbeth:  Migdalia Cruz (p), Ishia Bennison (d); Measure for Measure:  Aditi Brennan Kapil (p), Liz Engelman (d); The Merchant of Venice:  Elise Thoron (p), Julie Felise Dubiner (d); The Merry Wives of Windsor:  Dipika Guha (p), Christine Sumption (d); A Midsummer Night’s Dream:  Jeff Whitty (p), Heidi Schreck (d); Much Ado About Nothing:  Ranjit Bolt (p), Lydia G. Garcia (d); Othello:  Mfoniso Udofia (p), Ayanna Thompson (d); Pericles:  Ellen McLaughlin (p), Alan Armstrong (d); Romeo and Juliet:  Hansol Jung (p), Aaron Malkin (d); The Taming of the Shrew:  Amy Freed (p), Drew Lichtenberg (d); The Tempest:  Kenneth Cavander (p), Christian Parker (d); Timon of Athens:  Kenneth Cavander (p), Lue Morgan Douthit (d); Titus Andronicus:  Taylor Mac (p), Jocelyn Clarke (d); Troilus and Cressida:  Lillian Groag (p), James Magruder (d); Twelfth Night:  Alison Carey (p), Lezlie Cross (d); The Two Gentlemen of Verona:  Amelia Roper (p), Kate McConnell (d); Two Noble Kinsmen:  Tim Slover (p), Martine Kei Green-Rogers (d); The Winter’s Tale:  Tracy Young (p), Ben Pryor (d).]