Shakespeare and Community Performance (Shakespeare in Practice) 3031332660, 9783031332661

Citation preview

SHAKESPEARE IN PRACTICE

Shakespeare and Community Performance Katherine Steele Brokaw

Shakespeare in Practice Series Editors

Bridget Escolme London, UK Stuart Hampton-Reeves Coventry, UK

The books in this series chart new directions for a performance approach to Shakespeare, representing the diverse and exciting work being undertaken by a new generation of Shakespeareans and combining insights from both scholarship and theatrical practice.

Katherine Steele Brokaw

Shakespeare and Community Performance

Katherine Steele Brokaw Merced, CA, USA

Shakespeare in Practice ISBN 978-3-031-33266-1    ISBN 978-3-031-33267-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Ángel Nuñez performs as Silvius in Shakespeare in Yosemite’s As You Like It, Yosemite National Park, 2019. Actors Nicole Terry and Juniper Sprague look on. Photo by Shawn Overton. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Dedicated to those making art—and a difference—in their communities and to the memory of my father, Thomas Earl Brokaw (1948–2022).

Acknowledgments

Shakespeare in Community Performance would not have been possible without the support, inspiration, and collaboration of several communities. Erin Sullivan, Helen Nicholson, and Craig Dionne offered helpful feedback on individual chapters, as did William (Billy) Wolfgang, who also shared in-progress work and collaborated with me creatively. Paul Prescott commented on the entire manuscript and more importantly was a co-­ founder of Shakespeare in Yosemite (described in Chap. 5 of this book) and a vital collaborator and interlocutor throughout the process of researching and writing. A number of people have made Shakespeare in Yosemite and this book’s final chapter, possible, including collaborators Rangers Scott Gediman and Jamie Richards in the National Park Service as well as Rangers Sabrina Diaz and Shelton Johnson. Thanks are also owed to Yosemite Hospitality’s Weston Spiegel and Bryan Hammill. Former University of California Merced Chancellor Dorothy Leland’s vision allowed the project to grow, as did the support and work of current Chancellor Juan Sanchez Muñoz, Kim Garner, Jeff Gilger, Trisha Koenig, and Steve Shackleton. I am grateful beyond measure to all the cast and crew members who have co-created YosemiteShakes’ productions, but extra thanks are owed to Tonatiuh Newbold, Lee Stetson, Connie Stetson, Jessica Rivas, and Shawn Overton, and to current and former students Ángel Nuñez, Cat Flores, Andrew Hardy, Maria Nguyen-Cruz, and Darah Carrillo Vargas. Thank you to my former students Ying-Wei Zhang and Monica Perales for their work interviewing founding EarthShakes directors and YosemiteShakes collaborators, and to Will Tosh at Shakespeare’s Globe for supporting the vii

viii 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Globe4Globe conference. I am continually inspired by and indebted to the global eco-Shakespearean community, especially Theo Black, Rob Conkie, Elizabeth Freestone, Randall Martin, and Gretchen Minton. For Chap. 4, I am grateful to the entire Hamlet team at Det Ferösche Compagnie in the Faroe Islands, especially Búi Dam, Urd Johannesen, and Hans Torgarð, who each spoke with me and responded to chapter drafts. I also owe thanks to Tim Ecott for sharing the interviews he conducted with members of the Hamlet company and to Gudmund Helmsdal for letting me see his footage of the production. Takk, too, to Bergur Djurhuus Hansen, Lív Róadóttir Jæger, and Jens Dam Ziska for hosting me at the University of the Faroe Islands Shakespeare symposium. Many thanks are owed to the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival artists interviewed for Chap. 3 and especially to my marvelous team of student interviewers, Sofia Andom, Isaac Gállegos-Rodriguez, and Mahealani LaRosa, and to William Darpinian for meticulous editing of transcriptions. I am grateful to UC Merced’s Undergraduate Research Opportunities Center for their financial and academic support of these students. Infinite thanks are owed to the incomparable Lisa Wolpe and Debra Ann Byrd for their decades of theatre work and for allowing me the privilege of beginning to document their legacies. For Chap. 2, I was fortunate to be allowed into the rehearsal rooms of the National Theatre of Great Britain’s Public Acts productions, and am grateful to the incomparable community theatre-maker Emily Lim and to Alice King-Farlow at the NT for granting me both access and interviews. Thanks, too, to Doug Rintoul at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, photographer James Bellorini, and the casts of Pericles and As You Like It. I also want to thank Nicolette Bethel, Emily Fournier, Heike Hambley, and Philip Parr for allowing me to highlight their companies in Chap. 1 and a number of other Shakespearean theatre-makers, including Lori Adams, Irwin Appel, Jessica Boone, Devon Glover, Guy Roberts, and John Stark. Additional members of the Shakespeare (and beyond) scholarly community who continue to inspire and support my work include Gina Bloom, Dennis Britton, Diana Henderson, Sean Keilen, Pete Kirwan, Erika Lin, Rowan McKenzie, Charles Moseley, Steve Purcell, Tessa Tinkle, Will West, Bill Worthen, and Jay Zysk. I was lucky to be a part of communities of scholarship and friendship in both the UK and California while writing this book. In the UK, primarily in Stratford-on-Avon, thanks be to Linda Bates, Paul Edmondson, Daniel Grimley, Hedli Nik, Mark Nixon, Bill Prescott, Paul Prescott, Pippa

 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 

ix

Prescott, Will Sharpe, Tiffany Stern, Erin Sullivan, Stanley Wells, and the late Joy Leslie Gibson and Jackie Nixon. Special appreciation is owed to Michael Dobson for supporting my year as scholar in residence at the Shakespeare Institute. My gratitude to scholarly and creative communities in California runs deep and includes Jenni Samuelson, Virginia Ádan-­ Lifante, Susan Amussen, Gregg Camfield, Eileen Camfield, Humberto Garcia, the late Jan Goggans, Alex Green, Alejandro Gutiérrez, Nigel Hatton, Mai-Linh Hong, Bristin Jones, Matthew Kaiser, Collin Lewis, and Tyler Marghetis, as well as the teams at Playhouse Merced and Merced Shakespearefest. I am buoyed by the loving friendship of Asynith Palmer, Shanna Shipman, and countless others. My current and former students at UC Merced are some of my most important collaborators, and among those listed above, particular thanks are owed to Natalie Robertson. Early versions of this work were presented at the Shakespeare Institute and Shakespeare Association of America, as well as the European Shakespeare Research Association, the British Shakespeare Association, the Shakespeare Theatre Association, the University of the Faroe Islands, UC Santa Barbara, the University of Michigan, the University of New Hampshire, and UC Merced; I am grateful to all who have engaged with me in those communities. Many, many thanks are owed to series editor Stuart Hampton-Reeves for his early support of the project and to series editor Bridget Escolme for her incisive and encouraging feedback on each chapter. I am also grateful to the anonymous reviewer of the manuscript and to Eileen Srebernik and Samriddhi Pandey at Palgrave Macmillan. Parts of Chap. 1 appeared as ‘Shakespeare as Community Practice’ Copyright © 2017, Johns Hopkins University Press. This work first appeared in Shakespeare Bulletin Volume 35, Issue 3 (Fall 2017): 445–61. My most profound thanks go to my family: my intrepid mother and fellow theatre-maker Nancy Steele Brokaw, and my fierce brother and sister-in-law, Stephen Brokaw and Amanda Penabad. I was met with things dying and things newborn while finishing this book: in August 2022 I lost my ceaselessly supportive father, Thomas Earl Brokaw, and became an aunt two weeks later to James Tomás Brokaw, for whom I wish a life surrounded by loving and creative communities.

Contents

1 Community  Shakespeare: Access, Adaptation, Activism  1 Terms and Theories (and a Few Case Studies)   6 Methods: A Performance Studies Approach  31 Why (and Why Not) Shakespeare?  41 Introducing the Case Studies  49 Works Cited  53 2 Public  Shakespeare: Public Works (New York City) and Public Acts (UK) 61 A National Theatre for Great Britain  64 Joan Littlewood and Other British Community-Based Theatre  67 The 1916 Shakespearean Tercentenary Pageant (NYC)  70 Joe Papp, the New York City Shakespeare Festival, and the Public Theatre  71 Cornerstone Theater and American Community-Engaged Shakespeare  75 Public Works, New York City (Public Theater)  78 Public Acts, London and the UK (National Theatre of Great Britain)  80 Public Acts’ Pericles (2018)  82 Public Acts’ As You Like It (2019)  98 Evaluating and Valuing Community-Based Shakespeare 103 Works Cited 107

xi

xii 

Contents

3 Identity  Shakespeare: L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival111 Early Histories: Navigating Gender, Race, Theatre, and Shakespeare 115 Women Playing Men in Shakespeare: The Early Years 117 L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company is Born 118 The Work of L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company 121 Final Days of L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Growth of Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender  137 Harlem Theater, Black Shakespeare, and Othello: A Few Early Histories 141 Take Wing and Soar is Born 143 Beginning Harlem Shakespeare Festival and Meeting Lisa Wolpe 148 Becoming Othello, A Black Girl’s Journey  158 Legacies of Lisa Wolpe and LAWSC, and of Debra Ann Byrd and TWAS 160 Works Cited 163 4 Island Shakespeare: Hamlet in the Faroe Islands167 Setting the Scene: ‘A Fair Haven on the Windy Edge of Nothing’ 170 Faroese Art, Theatre, and Shakespeare 177 Preparing a Hamlet on the Edge 182 Hamlet Part 1: A Funereal Opening 186 Hamlet Part 2: ‘To be or not to be, that’s that’ 191 Hamlet Part 3: A Mise-en-scène Coup d’etat 198 Hamlet Part 4: A Visceral End 205 Community Practices, Global Theories 209 The Faroese Hamlet’s Local Legacies 215 Works Cited 218 5 Ecological  Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Yosemite and the EarthShakes Alliance221 Eco-dramaturgy 226 Practice as Research 231 As You Like It (2019) 234

 Contents 

xiii

Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022) 247 Shakespeare in our Planetary Community: EarthShakes Alliance and Beyond 261 Works Cited 266 Index271

About the Author

Katherine Steele Brokaw  is Associate Professor of English and Theatre at University of California Merced, co-founding artistic director of Shakespeare in Yosemite, and co-founder of the EarthShakes Alliance. She is the author of Staging Harmony: Music and Religious Change in Late Medieval and Early English Drama (Cornell University Press, 2016) and has published articles and reviews in several journals and essay collections. With Jay Zysk she co-edited Sacred and Secular Transactions in the Age of Shakespeare (Northwestern University Press, 2019), and she edited Macbeth for the Arden Performance Editions series (2019).

xv

List of Figures

Fig. 1.1

Fig. 1.2 Fig. 1.3 Fig. 1.4

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 2.2 Fig. 2.3 Fig. 2.4 Fig. 2.5 Fig. 2.6

Merced Shakespearefest’s production of Cymbeline (2014) in Applegate Park, with the author as Imogen, center. The backdrop portrays young almond trees, a frequent site in the San Joaquin valley. (Photo credit: Shawn Overton) 14 Fairies perform in Parrabbola’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Craiova, Romania (2018), directed by Philip Parr. (Photo credit Sorin Florea) 18 Recycled Shakespeare Company founder Emily Fournier and Lyn Rowden celebrate the Bard Bash, 2015. (Photo courtesy of Lyn Rowden) 23 Jaquenetta (Selina Scott-Benin) and Don Armado (Allaya Hagigal) with Berowne (T-Day) in Shakespeare in Paradise’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Robert Hubbard, 2021. (Photo by Hartman Brown) 31 Emily Lim rehearsing with the cast of Pericles. (Photo credit: James Bellorini) 81 The cast of Pericles, directed by Emily Lim, rehearsing in the National Theatre building. (Photo credit: James Bellorini) 87 The ‘Mistress Maypole’ sequence of Pericles in performance on the Olivier stage, directed by Emily Lim with design by Fly Davis. (Photo credit: James Bellorini) 89 Kevin Harvey as Boult and other cast members of Pericles. (Photo Credit: James Bellorini) 93 The finale of Pericles on the Olivier stage. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)94 Cast members from many generations made up the cast of Pericles. (Photo credit: James Bellorini) 95 xvii

xviii 

List of Figures

Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 3.3 Fig. 3.4

Fig. 3.5 Fig. 3.6 Fig. 3.7 Fig. 3.8 Fig. 3.9 Fig. 4.1 Fig. 4.2 Fig. 4.3 Fig. 4.4 Fig. 4.5 Fig. 4.6 Fig. 4.7

Katrinka Wolfson as Anne and Lisa Wolpe as Richard in Richard III, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2011). (Photo credit: Tom Zasadzinski) Cynthia Beckert applying a beard to play Antonio in The Tempest, for LAWSC directed by Lisa Wolpe (2003). (Photo credit: Lisa Wolpe) Natsuko Ohama as Prospero and Cynthia Ruffin, Tessa Thompson, and Louisa Jensen as Ariel in The Tempest, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2003). (Photo credit: Mia Torres) Cynthia Beckert as Bassanio and Veralyn Jones as Bassanio, and Lisa Wolpe as Shylock with Michele Gardner as Tubal, in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2005). (Photo credit: Mia Torres) Fran Bennett as Morocco in the Merchant of Venice, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2005). (Photo credit: Mia Torres) King Lear for Take Wing and Soar Productions, directed by Timothy Strickney (2010). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams) Debra Ann Byrd as Othello for Harlem Shakespeare Festival (2015). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams) Dathan Williams in Shakespeare in Sable for Harlem Shakespeare Festival (2018). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams) Debra Ann Byrd performs Becoming Othello (2020). (Photo credit: Ia Chang) Sheer cliffs and seabirds on the island of Mykines. (Photo by author) White crosses surrounding the Nordic House, with the colorful buildings of Tórshavn in the distance. (Photo by author) Búi Dam, director, as Horatio, standing next to Hamlet’s coffin in the opening scene. (This and all remaining photos by Finnur Justinussen) Kjartan Hansen as Hamlet, next to King Hamlet’s shrine in the lobby, with Claudius (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) and the Ghost of King Hamlet (Egi Dam) outside Kjartan Hansen as Hamlet balances on a banister while conversing with Gyllinkrans (Mariann Hansen) Kristina Ougaard as Ofelia, standing atop the Nordic House café Curtains are raised in the auditorium to reveal an empty ballroom, and Claudius (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen). Hamlet (Kjartan Hansen) reacts in the foreground

124 126 130

133 134 144 150 152 158 171 187 188 192 194 195 200

  List of Figures 

Fig. 4.8

xix

The closet scene, staged on a rotating table, with Hansen as Hamlet and Johannesen as Gertrude. (Polonius (Hans Torgarð) lies murdered in a bathtub) 204 Fig. 4.9 Ougaard as Ofelia drowns herself by dumping a bucket of water over her head 205 Fig. 4.10 Hamlet (Hansen) dangles upside down from the ceiling for a reimagined gravedigger scene 207 Fig. 4.11 Gertrude and Claudius look on as Laertes (Buí Rouch) engages Hamlet (Hansen) in a sword fight. The portrait of King Hamlet, used in the closet scene, rests on a bed in the foreground208 Fig. 5.1 As You Like It being performed in Yosemite’s Lower River Amphitheatre in 2019. (Photo credit: Shawn Overton) 235 Fig. 5.2 Andrew Hardy as Orlando in As You Like It. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton) 237 Fig. 5.3 Jess Rivas and Maria Nguyen-Cruz as Ranger Audrey and Touchstone. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton) 242 Fig. 5.4 The final climate march that ended As You Like It. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton) 244 Fig. 5.5 Cat Flores, Bella Camfield, Sofia Andom, and Bethy Harmelin as the Sierra Girls, miming their car journey on the Curry Village stage. (Photo Credit: Grace Garnica) 250 Fig. 5.6 Marion Roubal as Ranger Marion and Anne Schwartzberg as Custard leading the park orientation. (Photo credit: Grace Garnica)251 Fig. 5.7 The Kings of Navarre dressed as the moon and astronauts. (Photo Credit: Darah Carrillo Vargas) 252 Fig. 5.8 Berowne (Tonatiuh Newbold) addresses Rosaline (Sofia Andom). (Photo Credit: Grace Garnica) 253

CHAPTER 1

Community Shakespeare: Access, Adaptation, Activism

There is a connection between us through the artwork that is, on a good day, memorable. And memories change us: memories feed our imaginations and imagination feeds our sense of what’s possible in the world. When we see what’s possible in the world we can assess our options and maybe make some change. It’s important to be in community; it’s important to perform. —Mojisola Adebayo (Quoted in McInvenchy 2014, 73) I truly believe Shakespeare is a community playwright. He is the community playwright that we get to adapt into the world order that we are living in now. And the future of Shakespeare lies in continually turning to community to guide us, to lead us in interrogating what these stories have to say to the present. —Playwright and Public Works director Laurie Woolery (2021)

This book is the story of how theatre-makers have used Shakespeare to engage their communities. It asks why communities around the world continue to perform Shakespeare, and what challenges, opportunities, and triumphs accompany their theatre-making. Studies of Shakespeare in performance have tended to focus primarily on productions that take place in a small handful of places that Martin Orkin describes as the ‘Shakespearean metropolis’, professional venues in London, New York, and, because it is © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8_1

1

2 

K. S. BROKAW

home to the Royal Shakespeare Company, Stratford-on-Avon (2005, 1). Attention to theatre in these Shakespeare metropolises thus tends to feature the creativity of white male directors and actors, who are often British. Shakespeare and Community Performance puts the spotlight on theatre-­ makers who are female, non-white, queer, and non-English speaking, as well as the diverse audiences around the world addressed by these localized performances of Shakespeare. While this book focuses on Shakespearean theatre-making as a potential benefit to communities, it is also important to recognize that, particularly in educational realms, Shakespeare has also been used to destroy communities: students in the British colonies and in schools for indigenous North Americans and Australians were long forced to study Shakespeare plays as a way to erase their own stories and languages and violently assimilate them into the colonizing culture (see, e.g., Marcus 2017). In performance, Shakespeare can exclude those who don’t have certain kinds of training, who haven’t had someone tell them that ‘thee’s and ‘thou’s aren’t what is essential to his capacious texts, who haven’t been asked to collaborate with these royalty-free, malleable balls of creative clay. Shakespeare’s works have long been upheld as the monumental individual achievement of one dead white European man, inviting those with the access and the ambition to feel a personal sense of accomplishment for understanding and mastering his works, and others to feel stupid, left out, indifferent. His plays have become currency: they make money for theatres and publishers, they provide careers for scholars and artists, and they establish benchmarks of achievement for students and creatives. But there’s another way. Madeline Sayet, a member of the Mohegan tribe and director and actor of both Shakespeare and her own writing, explains: We must abandon supremacy culture and return our thinking to the circle. If value is monetary and hierarchical, we continue down the path of extraction, destruction. If value is relational, community-minded, and care-based, we have a world of possibility we can dream into these plays. (2021)

Shakespeare and Community Performance focuses on companies and programs that return our thinking to the circle, in various ways, and dream worlds of possibility into these plays. It speaks of projects that connect disenfranchised people across cities in adaptive theatre-making and of women who created opportunities for those once specifically excluded

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

3

from Shakespearean performance to star in productions and cooperatively explore their own gender and racial identities. It tells the story of how Shakespeare was used to shine a light on an obscured nation’s linguistic and cultural capacities, and how the implausible teams of people with whom I collaborate use the plays to express the beauty of a dying planet and the solidarity needed to save it. I come to research these projects and speak to these artists as a scholar, as a director and actor, as an audience member, and as a teacher of Shakespeare at the University of California Merced, a new campus (opened in 2005) in the agricultural, heavily polluted San Joaquin valley of California. Our student population is 90% people of color, the majority of whom are the first in their families to attend university. Making, teaching, and researching Shakespeare in my Merced community have led me to understand that Shakespeare has the capacity to engage with some of the most pressing issues facing our societies, both local and global. This book explores Shakespearean performance that is socially and politically engaged, a form of what has come to be called applied theatre. Extant accounts of Shakespearean production as applied theatre often focus on Shakespearean performance as an individualist achievement, bringing triumphal senses of accomplishment to a struggling student or feelings of redemption to an incarcerated person performing in a Shakespeare Behind Bars program, for example. But transformative moments happen in community, and the collaborative work of creating Shakespeare is more responsible for Shakespeare’s potential benefits than the content of the plays. Shakespeare and Community Performance attends to these collaborations, while also exploring why Shakespeare is often used in community arts projects and how these projects are reshaping what Shakespeare means and why Shakespeare matters in the twenty-first century. This introductory chapter defines relevant terms and lays out several theories and methods I see as central to the practice and study of community Shakespeare. The remaining four chapters are case studies of Shakespeare companies and projects. The second chapter begins in the Shakespearean metropolises of London and New York, but it outlines the centrality of both community-based and Shakespearean performance in the histories of the National Theatre (NT; UK) and The Public/New York Shakespeare Festival (US); it then concentrates on twinned programs run by these theatres, Public Works and Public Acts, both of which explicitly aim to use theatre to forge communities and reach people often left

4 

K. S. BROKAW

out of well-funded art-making initiatives. Chapter 3 centers the work of Lisa Wolpe and Debra Ann Byrd and the many people with whom they worked to build the companies they founded, L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC) and Harlem Shakespeare Festival; the chapter is almost entirely presented in the voices of these artists. The fourth chapter moves to the Faroe Islands, a self-governing archipelago of 50,000 people in the North Atlantic, focusing on that country’s first-ever production of Hamlet, performed in Faroese. The final chapter looks at the theatre work I do with park rangers, my students, and community members on Shakespeare in Yosemite, which performs free, ecologically themed shows in Yosemite National Park every Earth Day. In examining this theatre-making, I am thinking about performance as far more than an interpretation of an old text. This book explores the social force of ‘Shakespeare’ as something that transforms communities and is itself continually transformed by them. Writing about this kind of theatre requires a new paradigm that’s not about the splashy discovery or auteristic breakthrough, but rather the subtle and gradual transformations that happen in communities that engage in Shakespearean production, with particular emphasis on communities that are usually neglected by mainstream academia, the news media, and professional theatre. That is, I have needed to focus less on what happens on stage and more on who is doing and seeing and engaging, how these communities are creating this theatre, and why they are doing so. This opening chapter organizes itself around these who, how, and why questions. Each question focuses our attention on a specific aspect of theatre-­making, requires certain methods of research, and leads to different insights. Below I summarize each of these three foci and in the bullet points describe the methods best suited to exploring the related question and provide two claims about Shakespeare and performance these lines of inquiry have led me to make.1

1  These claims are, in the words of typical academic discourse, the book’s ‘arguments’. But arguing—asserting my own ideas in opposition to others—is the antithesis of what the projects in this book promote. I’d rather agree, praise, synthesize, explore, and invite you to do the same.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

5

Who Questions: A Social Focus Attention is paid to issues of access: who in these communities is doing the making, seeing, and hosting of Shakespearean theatre. • Methods: These ideas are best researched by using ethnographic methods: interviews, observations of rehearsals, field notes about more than what happens on stage. • Claim 1: Community-based Shakespeare can facilitate collaborative creative activity that can empower and enliven people who were once excluded from the Shakespearean stage. • Claim 2: Shakespearean theatre-making links people in marginalized locations or social positions to a global Shakespeare community. How Questions: A Creative Focus Attention is paid to issues of adaptation: how artists use Shakespeare as a creative springboard to create new art that speaks to their communities. • Methods: In addition to ethnography, these ideas are well understood by engaging in Practice as Research (PaR), working as a scholar-practitioner who makes theatre as well as studies it. • Claim 1: Because of the plays’ hyper-canonicity and because the scripts are out of copyright, artists can use the raw material of Shakespearean texts to create site-specific works of art that are legible to their communities. • Claim 2: While this creativity can be exciting, it is also important to make visible the difficult labor of the theatre: the slog of fundraising and doing theatre on small budgets, the logistics involved in community outreach and social support for participants, the physical exhaustion of assembling and disassembling sets and costumes and props. Why Questions: An Interventionist Focus Attention is paid to issues of activism: why Shakespeare can be used for socially engaged artistic projects. • Methods: These ideas are best understood by using methods developed for the practice and study of applied theatre and community-­

6 

K. S. BROKAW

engaged scholarship. This kind of application and engagement can be of mutual benefit to scholar and community. • Claim 1: The complexity of Shakespeare’s plays, including their sometimes socially problematic content, allows artists to use them to portray and challenge extant injustices. • Claim 2: The plays’ creative openness can invite the kinds of collaborations necessary to imagine better futures for our communities and planet. The next section of this introductory chapter will lay out several terms related to the three key words in the book’s title. I begin with ‘community’, then discuss categories of ‘community performance’; imbedded in this section are four small case studies of community-based theatres in California, the UK and Eastern Europe, Maine, and the Bahamas. The chapter then turns to describing the methods for studying community-­ based theatre previewed above: ethnography, Practice as Research, and applied theatre. I next offer thoughts about the particular challenges and opportunities that Shakespeare, specifically, poses to community-based theatre companies and artists, focusing on issues of access (a who question), adaptation (a how question), and activism (a why question). The chapter concludes with a longer summary of the book’s four case studies. Much of this chapter, particularly the next two sections, will be of greatest interest to those invested in the academic study of community, of theatre, and of community-based theatre. You may be familiar with several or none of these academic ideas, but I hope that getting a sense of these conversations can help guide your interpretations of the four case studies. If you are less interested in scholarly conversations, feel free to skip ahead to the final two sections of this chapter or to the case study chapters. I hope you will come to your own ideas about the work of the companies highlighted in this book, and that some of their practices might even inspire your own.

Terms and Theories (and a Few Case Studies) In this section, I begin by offering definitions for the concept of community and summarize some of the pertinent academic discourse surrounding the concept. I then define several related and often overlapping categorical terms for the kinds of theatre most relevant to this book. I group these identifiers as follows:

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

7

• Amateur and Grassroots • Regional and Local Theatre • Community-Based (or Community-Engaged), Applied, Theatre for Social Change, and Socially Engaged Performance • Postcolonial and Global Theatre; Multicultural and Intercultural Theatre When delineating the terms, I refer to prominent scholarship about that kind of performance in general, and specifically about its Shakespearean iterations. Additionally, as part of my desire to always listen to and amplify the voices of theatre-makers, I embed four brief company case studies in this section. Their work, as articulated by their founding directors, demonstrates the many overlaps between these categories. Community The late middle English word ‘community’ derives from the Latin communitas, which means ‘sameness’. It comprises the Latin prefix ‘con-’, meaning ‘together’, and ‘munis’, which is related to the performance of service. Communities: groups with an element of sameness, groups that serve each other together. In Raymond Williams’s widely cited definition of the word, community can ‘warmly’ describe ‘an existing set of relationships’, or it can describe ‘an alternative set of relationships’ (1985, 76). That is, a community is either an extant thing, and the word is used descriptively; or it is a desired thing, and the word is used aspirationally. Theatre-makers interviewed for this book talk both about serving communities that already exist—the Los Angeles community, the Faroese, the Black community in Harlem—and about creating ideal communities—a cast of diverse Londoners from across the city, a more inclusive Shakespeare world, a sense of inter-species solidarity. In her introduction to Performance and Community, Caoimhe McAvinchey offers two ways to think about the kinds of communities that arise out of existing sets of relationships. One is communities of location, which may describe geographic areas or institutions like schools, prisons, or militaries. As McAvinchey points out, people may or may not want to associate with the area in which they live or the institutions in which they non-voluntarily find themselves (2014, 1–2). A second, and not mutually exclusive, kind of community can exist because of identity markers,

8 

K. S. BROKAW

‘communities of interest’ rooted in things like gender, race, ethnicity, age, sexuality, faith, disability, or neurodivergence (3). When it comes to communities based on an alternative set of relationships—communities based on more than locational or institutional affiliation on shared identity markers—anthropologist Victor Turner’s notion of communitas (named after that Latin root word) can be useful (1975). For Tuner, communitas is a more unstructured and temporary state compared to the quotidian world, one that allows people to share a common experience, which he describes as often being a kind of rite of passage. As Emine Fişek points out in Theatre & Community, Turner’s notion of communitas is ‘often referenced to suggest that community theatre can create spaces of democratic, egalitarian exchange and community’ (2019, 17). The Shakespeare companies described in this book all serve extant communities based on geography or institutional membership, or on identity markers. And each of them—particularly during the rehearsal and performance processes—creates alternative communities consisting of theatre-makers and audiences. The word ‘community’ can suggest a sense of belonging or exclusion. One may feel privileged to be embraced by a community or resentful of their exclusion from it; they could even feel resentful of being included in a particular group. Sociologists have studied the complex social properties of communities (see Delanty 2003), political scientists have explored community formation and the nation state (see Anderson 2006), and philosophers have theorized on the nature and power of community (see Agamben 1993). One of the most frequently cited studies of community in arts and culture scholarship is anthropologist Miranda Joseph’s Against the Romance of Community (2002).2 Joseph’s critique of the ‘romance of community’ is in part focused on her study of San Francisco’s Theatre Rhinoceros, an identity-based theatre company for the Bay Area ‘gay and lesbian population’ (as it was known in the 1990s, when Joseph was involved). She observed that the group had many fundamental differences between members that were masked by the word ‘community’. Communities, Joseph thus concluded, are constructed, not inherent, and their material, social, and financial realities can be obscured by the notion that communities have shared identities 2  See Fişek (2019, 7–14) and Nicholson (2005/2014, 85–110) for helpful overviews of the arguments made by these and other scholars who have theorized and studied communities.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

9

and desires. The idea that communities are constructed leads to Joseph’s larger argument that the word ‘community’ takes part in an outdated Romantic discourse.3 This discourse, Joseph claims, pretends that communities ­recreate the values of a pre-industrial ‘idealized past’ (9), one in which intentionally gathered groups of people—communities—oppose the cold realities of modern global capitalism, with its privileging of individuals and faceless corporations. But that story is a fiction and communities do not work that way, Joseph argues: modern communities are not necessarily an antidote to global capitalism and its values. Rather, they more often reinforce capitalism’s hierarchies and maintain its priorities. Theatres like Rhinoceros, for example, shift their ‘community’ values toward what donors and ticket-buyers will financially support, thereby maintaining rather than resisting mainstream, consumerist values. Despite Joseph’s arguments, community-based and grassroots theatres are sometimes described as resolutely anti-capitalist, as focused on social bonds and interventions rather than making money (see especially Wickstrom 2012; Ridout 2013; Kershaw 2016; and Nicholson et  al. 2018).4 Many such theatres, particularly when run by volunteers, have only a minimal financial imperative, freeing them to direct their energy toward social causes and allowing their art to be unburdened by worries about donor sensibilities. Pointing to the relative cheapness of doing Shakespeare in her small town in Maine (US), Recycled Shakespeare Company (RSC) founder Emily Fournier explained that ‘theatre doesn’t have to cost money. Shakespeare’s royalty-free and we can just perform it in a free space and use recycled materials’ (quoted in Wolfgang 2021b, 360–1). And, there are plenty of non-theatrical examples of community-­ based actions—be they location or identity-based—that are used to actively resist modern political and economic forces. In the face of governmental and corporate inaction on environmental destruction, local communities organize cleanups and recycling drives, and organize in support of town ordinances to ban single-use plastics. As I am writing this, communities of women across Iran are burning their hijabs to protest 3  ‘Romantic’ here refers to the discourse of Romanticism, a European-American movement beginning in the late eighteenth century emphasizing, among other things, a glorification of the pre-industrial past. 4  Not all community arts organizations are immune from capitalistic exploitation, of course: unpaid internships, expectations of free or undercompensated labor, and miniscule profit shares can strain people who work for underfunded community arts organizations and are often particularly exploitative of young professionals.

10 

K. S. BROKAW

their country’s violent patriarchy, and after the 2018 Stonewall Douglas high school shooting, communities of American teenagers staged walkouts protesting the systems that perpetuate gun violence in the US. Just because, as Joseph argued, some communities maintain the status quo, or exclude people, or have internal divisions, or are arbitrarily constructed, does not mean that others can’t resist political oppression, or be radically inclusive, or foster unlikely moments of harmony, or be intentionally, even lovingly, assembled. In the twenty-first century, communities, and community theatres, exist within a global capitalist economy—they don’t have a choice in the matter, that’s our world. But while, as Joseph argues, they may not always be operating in resistance to structures of inequality and consumerism, many community-based organizations, including the ones described in this book, have been able to create at least temporary groupings that emphasize collaboration and collective responsibility over profit and individualism. They are, at the very least, resistant to global capitalism’s worse impulses. While no community-oriented project is perfect, the concept of ‘community’ often focuses an artistic organization’s resources and attention on working with folks who are traditionally forgotten, on creating art that speaks to local concerns rather than the generic (or ‘universal’) stories of the powerful, and on creating cooperative networks based on respect and solidarity. I might also add that there is more to creating positive social interactions than resisting neoliberalism—a particular concern to many academics—and that my academic self should think twice about evaluating an artistic organization based solely on my or another scholar’s values. Jen Harvie writes about how community-based projects, at their best, can ‘work for positive social change, especially where that community is not predominantly catered for by mainstream theatre or is socially disadvantaged’ (2009, 75). Harvie embraces Kwame Anthony Appiah’s notion of cosmopolitanism, which comprises both ‘obligations to others’ and sincere investment in the practices and beliefs that make us different (2006, xiii). Harvie suggests that the theatre can be a space of cosmopolitanism, where one can productively ‘feel like a community in an audience one feels very different among’, an opportunity to both ‘recognize our differences and recognize what we share’ (76). The theatre, a collaborative art form that thrives on different skill sets and an abundance of stories to tell, can (though doesn’t always) create and celebrate communities in their glorious complexity.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

11

Amateur and Grassroots While the word ‘amateur’ is sometimes used to deride something as being non-professional and of inferior quality, the root of the word is from the Latin amare, ‘to love’. An amateur is thus someone who does something for the love of it. As a resistance to professionalism, consumerism, and overwork, amateur pursuits and the outsider status of the amateur thinker or artist have been celebrated by Wayne Booth (For the Love of It: Amateuring and its Rivals, 1999) and historicized, theorized, and defended by Edward Said (‘Professionals and Amateurs’, 1994), and Andy Merrifield (The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love, 2017). In the theatre world, the term ‘amateur drama’ is widely used in the UK and Ireland to describe theatres that operate fully or primarily on volunteerism, usually with unpaid actors. This kind of theatre is often called ‘community theatre’ in North America (but I will primarily use the term amateur drama here, so as not to confuse the category with community-­ based theatre, which I describe below). The majority of amateur dramatic repertoire tends to be Broadway/West End musicals and twentieth- and twenty-first-century plays, for which the companies pay royalties, and the occasional out-of-copyright classic play, for which they do not. Jan Cohen-­ Cruz describes this kind of theatre as enacted by people who neither generate the material, shape it, work with professional guidance, nor apply it beyond an entertainment frame. There need not be any particular resonance between the play and that place and those people, and there is rarely a goal beyond the simple pleasure of “Let’s put on a play”. (2005, 7)

While Cohen-Cruz’s assessment is often accurate, many amateur theatres have the occasional more adaptive and locally focused project, including indigenized pantomimes performed at Christmastime in the UK or pageants celebrating holidays or town anniversaries in North America (lovingly celebrated in the Christopher Guest film Waiting for Guffman). Amateur drama as a cultural phenomenon that contributes to place-­ making and community development has been studied by several scholars who have imbedded themselves in the theatrical communities about which they write. UK-based researchers Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling’s multi-year, ethnographic research on AmDram yielded a book (2018) and a special issue on ‘the amateur turn’ in Contemporary Theatre Review (2017; see also Duggan and Ukaegbu 2013). Leah Hager

12 

K. S. BROKAW

Cohen’s The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theatre gives a detailed and tender firsthand chronicle of her own theatre work in a Massachusetts company (2001). Widening his focus to performances in Russia and Europe, Nicholas Ridout’s Passionate Amateurs (2013) combines theatre history, cultural theory, and his experiences as observer and participant to argue for theatre’s potential to produce experiences of human community that resist capitalistic values, addressing Joseph’s above concerns. Ridout suggests that ‘the amateur—someone who interrupts his or her work in order to make theatre, rather than making theatre his or her work—may be a crucial figure for understanding the appearances of Romantic anti-capitalism in theatre’ (29). For Ridout, then, Romantic notions of community and capitalism-resistant practice can coexist, especially when the artists are pursuing their craft not for profit but for the love of it. Shakespearean performance produced by non-professionals in regional settings can be described as ‘amateur’, as it is in Michael Dobson’s UK-based history of the topic, Shakespeare and Amateur Performance: A Cultural History (2011), and Stephen Purcell’s essay on contemporary amateur Shakespeare (2017a). A frequent theme when it comes to amateur Shakespeare production is the huge advantage Shakespeare’s texts present artists on shoestring budgets: there are no royalties to pay on Shakespeare’s out-of-copyright plays. Grassroots theatre is often performed by amateurs, but the term tends to describe theatre that explicitly responds to local concerns. William Wolfgang defines grassroots Shakespeare organizations as ‘local, community-­ based theater companies’ that ‘produce the work of Shakespeare through their own particular regional lens’ (2021b, 358; see also 2021a). He cites Robert Gard’s definition of grassroots theatre as ‘plays that grow from all the countrysides of America, fabricated by the people themselves and … by playwrights who have no desire to take their plays far away from home’ (1954, 33), and explains that while grassroots Shakespeare productions are by definition written by someone long dead and usually far from home, Shakespeare’s out-of-copyright status means that not only are the plays free to produce, but they are adaptable, allowing ‘a theater company to shape the work to fit their specific regional perspective, molding it to suit any number of desires’ (2021b, 359). In my adopted town of Merced, California, the local community (or amateur dramatic) theatre, Playhouse Merced, produces RENT and Importance of Being Earnest as written, set in 1990s New York and 1890s London. Our local Shakespeare company, Merced Shakespearefest (profiled below), has set Merchant of Venice in Elizabethan times and Comedy of Errors in outer space—both examples of amateur drama that could be done nearly

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

13

anywhere—but has also done more grassroots projects like a Californian-­ Mexican Romeo and Juliet that included local Mexican folklorico dancers, and the adapted bilingual film series, Ricardo el Segundo, shot on location around Merced in 2020 (and directed by Wolfgang himself), when theatres were closed due to COVID restrictions. Grassroots and amateur theatre-makers tend to be brought together because they live in the same geographical community and because they share a desire to create, in Williams’s term, ‘an alternative set of relationships’ through their shared love of theatre. This book features several amateur theatre-makers but is primarily interested in productions that are somehow specifically adapted for the communities that perform and see them, be those groupings geographic, institutional, identity-based, or some combination. As will be discussed below, such grassroots projects can often also be described as community-based.  ompany Case Study: Merced Shakespearefest C An amateur Shakespearean festival doing three annual productions in Merced, California (population 86,000), in the agricultural San Joaquin valley. Founded by Heike Hambley, a German immigrant to the US, in 2002. Venues: A city park (Fig. 1.1), a college campus, a downtown multicultural center, a 1000-seat restored 1930s theatre, and an outdoor amphitheater in nearby Mariposa (population 1500, in the Sierra Nevada foothills). Mission: ‘We are dedicated to staging and performing high quality productions of The Bard’s plays, as well as works related to and derived from his literary creations. It is our goal to create works of theatre that reflect and embrace the diversity of our community, and we will always be a safe haven for any person with a desire to join with us in celebrating the works and influence of history’s greatest playwright’ (About Merced Shakespearefest 2022). Founding moment: ‘In 2002 we had a dream about performing free Shakespeare in the Park, to stage our favorite plays in the relaxed atmosphere of a green city park without a concern about a ticket price—a sort of democratic Shakespeare for all! Now Merced Shakes is truly a community theater by the community and for the community, foremost for Merced and more and more for the Central Valley’ (About Merced Shakespearefest 2022). (continued)

14 

K. S. BROKAW

(continued)

On doing it for the love of it: ‘I was always looking for something where I can put passion and a lot of love in it. I have parents that say, “oh, my child saw their first of your Shakespeare plays at five and now they are almost adults and they love Shakespeare.” And so that’s a very, very satisfying thing. And I don’t want to stop that’ (Hambley 2017). On gradually becoming more adaptive: ‘Starting out, it was just this absolute love for costumes and the swish of the skirt and the wind ruffling the feathers in the hats. At the same time I continued to watch plays everywhere. And I realized, “There’s a theater that does color-blind casting, there is a theater that, oh my God, they don’t have (let’s say as an example, for As You Like It) they don’t have Adam in there, they have Eve.” And I am a woman and I want other women to have the opportunities. ‘And one day, I had a conversation with somebody who didn’t know much about theater, but she said “I saw Shakespeare in modern clothes and it was so much closer to me. I could understand it better”, and I’m thinking, “Oh! Okay! We want Shakespeare to survive. We want people to understand him!”’ (Hambley 2017).

Fig. 1.1  Merced Shakespearefest’s production of Cymbeline (2014) in Applegate Park, with the author as Imogen, center. The backdrop portrays young almond trees, a frequent site in the San Joaquin valley. (Photo credit: Shawn Overton)

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

15

Regional and Local Regional theatre describes professional or semi-professional theatrical activity that does not tend to attract international attention and that draws audiences from within driving distance of the performance venue. The most relevant kind of regional theatre for the purposes of this book are Shakespeare festivals, which have proliferated in North America and Europe since the 1960s. In the US alone, William Wolfgang has counted 365 performance organizations devoted to performing Shakespeare, comprising a mixture of institutional and budget models from large professional companies to university-sponsored festivals to small grassroots organizations (2021b, 355–6). In 2005, Kevin Crawford argued that Shakespeare criticism needed to consider the regional festivals that comprise a large number of these organizations and which are more representative of the American theatrical landscape: venues that collectively are not only visited by hundreds of thousands of playgoers, but that are also the most likely sites for “first time” Shakespeare-on-stage experiences for many in those audiences as well. (2005, 2–3)

But while there have been a few more recent studies of these theatres, coverage of them in academic venues remains woefully understudied, especially considering their prevalence. Large Shakespeare festivals like Oregon Shakespeare Festival (see Maher and Armstrong 2014), the Ontario-based Stratford Festival (see Patterson and Gould 1999), and Utah Shakespeare Festival have been the most well documented. The towns that host these year-round mega-festivals have their own relationship to Shakespeare, who is the primary source of economic activity and a source of ‘civic pride, collective identity, and community engagement’ in the regions in which they are embedded; Shakespeare functions similarly in Stratford-on-Avon (Prescott 2021, 50). There has only recently been a turn to the study of smaller festivals, what Marissa Greenberg terms ‘critically regional Shakespeare’ (2019), including work like Gretchen Minton’s book Shakespeare in Montana (2020), or Niamh O’Leary and Jayme M. Yeo’s embedded scholarship with Cincinnati Shakespeare Festival and Nashville Shakespeare Festival (2021). In the US in particular, many regional Shakespeare festivals are part of the free Shakespeare in the Park tradition, a democratizing venture popularized by Joseph Papp’s New  York Shakespeare Festival (discussed in

16 

K. S. BROKAW

Chap. 2). There are similar festivals—not always free—in other parts of the Anglophone world. Paul Prescott explains that a statistical majority of Shakespeare festivals in the UK, the US, Canada, and Australia could be described as Community Shakespeare Festivals. In these festivals, most of the practitioners and a majority of the audience live locally and have not travelled a significant distance to participate in the festival. (2021, 52)

Pointing out an oversight that this book hopes to help correct, Prescott argues that ‘much journalistic and academic coverage tends to fixate on only one expression of festival Shakespeare—the production—still often read for what it “tells us about the text” rather than what it tells us about the people or the town that made it’ (ibid., 57). In other words, there has long been too much focus on the ‘what’ rather than the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of Shakespearean theatre-making. While regional theatres tend to draw audiences from up to several hours away by car, theatres described as local might draw from a smaller radius and often include partial or fully amateur casts. Illinois Shakespeare Festival, in my hometown, is a local festival that draws its primary audience from Bloomington-Normal, where it is based, but it also brings in spectators from as far as Chicago and St. Louis, making it a regional theatre as well. The term ‘local’ draws attention to regional theatres and to theatres with even smaller geographic scopes, too. Local theatrical activity takes place outside the globally famous mainstream companies in the Shakespeare metropolises of London, New York, and Stratford-on-Avon, and the study of it pays attention to ‘the people or the town that made’ a production, and not just what happens on stage. In Europe, the Shakespeare festival is a different kind of community-­ producing event, one that is usually international in scope or at least pan-­ European. The focus is on sharing Shakespeare across national borders. European arts festivals usually last anywhere from a week to a few months and bring in theatre companies from across the continent to present their work, sometimes alongside the work of a local company. Many festivals have an implicit postwar goal of fostering peace on the continent, and in their book on European Shakespeare festivals, Nicoleta Cinpoeş, Florence March, and Paul Prescott argue that culture played a key role in Europe’s forging of a ‘post-nationalist vision of an imagined community’ and that even European Shakespeare festivals not founded in the immediate

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

17

postwar period share ‘the model of reparative festivity and its logic of benevolent cultural exchange’ (2022, 7). While these events tend to create temporary communities of professional theatre artists, Philip Parr and Brian Abbott’s work with Parrabbola, detailed below, involves locals with Shakespeare theatre-making that stars and responds to the communities that host European festivals. To get a sense of the varied places in which Shakespeare is performed around the world, one can look at the membership directory of the Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA), which was established to provide a forum for the artistic, managerial, and educational leadership for theatres primarily involved with the production of the works of William Shakespeare; to discuss issues and methods of work, to share resources, and information; and to act as an advocate for Shakespearean productions and training. (Shakespeare Theatre Association 2022)

STA’s membership includes well-known heavyweights like Shakespeare’s Globe (UK) and grassroots endeavors like Pennsylvania’s OrangeMite, non-Anglophone organizations like Fundaciòn Shakespeare Argentina and the English-speaking but Czech Republic-based Prague Shakespeare Company, who hosted the 2019 annual gathering of STA directors, producers, and educators. These conferences, together with a quarterly magazine (Folio), and, since 2020, frequent Zoom calls create a worldwide Shakespeare theatre-making community of interest. To my knowledge, there is no such trans-national, professional-amateur collaboration for other kinds of theatre (music theatre, for example).

 ompany Case Study: Parrabbola C A regional collective of artists who perform in the UK and Europe, producing community-engaged, site-specific plays. Founded in 2008 by British theatre artists Philip Parr and Brian Abbott. Venues: Streets, parks, disused buildings, and other found sites around various cities, including host cities of international European Shakespeare festivals; tents, manor homes, and ferry boats. Mission: ‘Parrabbola is a storyteller—producing community theatre and plays, festivals and events, incorporating music or dance— and it develops creative talent in the UK and Europe. Parrabbola is rooted in the communities where it works’ (Parrabbola 2022).

18 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 1.2  Fairies perform in Parrabbola’s Midsummer Night’s Dream in Craiova, Romania (2018), directed by Philip Parr. (Photo credit Sorin Florea)

Sample Shakespeare projects: • Winter’s Tale in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. Performances began in Greencastle (Ireland, as Sicilia) and the participants and the audience travelled through Greencastle and then across the sea to Magilligan (Northern Ireland, as Bohemia) and back again, 2019. • Interactive, site-specific, promenade production of Midsummer Night’s Dream with local actors for Craiova International Shakespeare Festival, 2018 (Romania; Fig. 1.2). • Promenade production in three languages of The Winter’s Tale, starring community actors from Poland and the Czech Republic, for the Shakespeare festivals in Ostrava and Gdansk, 2012 (Poland). On community work: ‘We make theatre that’s driven by communities or by a story that a community might want expressed elsewhere.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

Any member of the community can be in it. And the piece is about that community. They drive the process and the creative team is there to facilitate and to bring their craft and their skill to manage it rather than control it’ (Parr 2020). Why community Shakespeare in Europe: ‘For these big international festivals, we want to create something that comes from the bottom up. It’s about saying “Yes, this is the festival in Gdansk or or wherever and as members of that city community, now, you can also come as a participant.” And those Eastern European countries have almost no amateur theater. Because acting is a serious profession: it’s like how we don’t have amateur plumbers. Therefore the chance to actually be on the acting side is rare. We get people of all ages who have never been on a stage and would like to make some theater. So we embed that participatory involvement within big festivals’ (Parr 2019). On theatre changing a sense of place: ‘When working on our promenade Midsummer Night’s Dream in Craiova, we talked about how walking around a city like that in a performance allows the audience to see familiar spaces with new eyes. So the next time you walk through an alley or lane, you don’t see that building just as that ugly building. It’s where Romeo kisses Juliet. And your world around you, which might not be beautiful, suddenly has a different value. Where our Titania went to sleep and Oberon put the spell on her was a rusted fire escape to a door that doesn’t go anywhere in a site that, frankly, we had to clear the dead cats and the dog shit out of before the audience could walk across it. But people sit there now. It feels different because it’d been inhabited, been touched by the fairies’ (Parr 2020). On adapting Shakespeare for a community play: ‘If the second act of a play is not useful to the way you wish to tell the story, then you cut it. We just take the script and make it work in ways we need to. Because the idea of the community play is that anybody can be in it. But no Shakespeare play has 80 roles in it. How do you create 80 characters in the play? The fact is that our responsibility is first and foremost to the performers. You can’t be precious about Shakespeare’ (Parr 2019).

19

20 

K. S. BROKAW

Community-Based Theatre, Applied Theatre, Theatre for Social Change, and Socially Engaged Performance When theatres have goals for their communities beyond simply ‘putting on a play’—like calling attention to local social injustices, creating political solidarity or a safe space for an identity community, or highlighting nearby environmental challenges—they become a kind of community-based, also called community-engaged, theatre. This kind of work is a form of applied theatre, a term with which it is sometimes used interchangeably. The terms ‘community-engaged’ and ‘community-based’ emphasize that these performances are responsive to a community’s needs. Productions are based in the community because the theatre is creating an original play or heavily adapting an out-of-copyright work to be site-specific. Companies engage the wider community by drawing participants and audiences from groups of people who don’t usually take part in theatre-making. The term ‘applied’ emphasizes the way in which this artistic activity is being applied to address a social issue. Below, when I explain the methods employed in writing this book, I more fully elucidate some best practices for studying community-based/applied theatre projects, but at this point I’ll focus on describing how these kinds of theatre programs have been defined. Chiming with Ridout’s arguments about amateur drama, Baz Kershaw explains that applied theatre emerged out of responses to neoliberal economies to create performance practices whose goals and rewards were not market-driven (2016, 16). Rather than focusing on profit, these kinds of theatre projects are often ‘a cultural expression of identity politics, referring to groups of people who connect on the basis of shared identities fundamental to their sense of themselves’ (Cohen-Cruz 2005, 2). These companies often create alternative communities rooted in cooperation, understanding, and respect for differences. In scholarship and practice, community-engaged and applied theatre go by many other names as well, like participatory arts, theatre for social change, and socially engaged performance, and there is considerable overlap with the term ‘grassroots theatre’, too. As Petra Kuppers argues in Community Performance: An Introduction: ‘to nail it down, to define, is an act that opposes many of the principles of community performance work itself’ (2019, 3). Taking a stab at a definition, though, Kuppers understands what she terms community performance (also including dance and music) to be ‘work that facilitates creative expression of a diverse group of people, for aims of self-expression and political change’ (ibid., 3).

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

21

In Performing Communities, which includes case studies of eight ‘grassroots ensemble theatres’, Robert H. Leonard and Ann Kilkelly focus on rootedness in place to define these theatres as being marked by primacy of place, deep interaction with constituents and commitment to goals including and exceeding the creation of great theater … Dedication to a place both engenders and arises from interaction with the people in that place. Deep interaction with the people both arises from and engenders the need to make great theater and to go beyond that. (2006, 4)

Jan Cohen-Cruz calls community-based performance ‘a field in which artists, collaborating with people whose lives directly inform the subject matter, express collective meaning’. She describes its roots as ‘the turbulent 1960s and early 1970s, when nationwide questioning of the status quo led to significant expansion of art vis-à-vis potential creators, sites, subjects, audiences, and funding policies’ (2005, 1). Indeed, many who make and study this theatre attribute its origins in identity-based and political theatrical movements like the United Farmworkers’ Teatro de Campesino or the Black Arts Movement. Worldwide, directors and scholars also often cite the importance of two key director-theorist-activists whose work in the 1960s and 1970s made theatre more political and participatory: Augusto Boal, working in Brazil (Theatre of the Oppressed, 1974), and Jerzy Grotowski, working in Poland (Towards a Poor Theatre, 1968). Writing from and about the UK, Sam Shepherd says that what he calls socially engaged theatre programs ‘point to a theatre for something and a theatre that has a sense of public engagement (defined as that which is community, participatory, social)’ (2009, 213). The words social and engaged are important to several scholars who theorize and document this kind of artistic activity. Shannon Jackson’s Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics argues that all performances are in a mutually dependent relationship between art and the public, another oft-used word in this discourse (2011, 7; see also Jackson 2008 and Snyder-Young 2013). In Engaging Performance, Jan Cohen-Cruz explains that ‘[t]he term “engaged” foregrounds the relationship at the heart of making art with such aspirations, and dependence on a genuine exchange between artist and community such that the one is changed by the other’ (2010, 3). In his ‘Materials and Techniques Handbook’, Education for Socially Engaged Art, Pablo Helguera lays out the political and economic stakes of much of this kind of practice:

22 

K. S. BROKAW

Downplaying the role of the individual artist, socially engaged art is specifically at odds with the capitalist market infrastructure of the art world…the prevailing cult of the individual artists is problematic for those whose goal is to work with others, generally in collaborative projects with democratic ideals. (2011, 4)

The companies featured in this book all, in their own ways, value collaboration over individual achievement, solidarity over financial success, and democratic ideals over artistic recognition. When calling this kind of work applied drama, or applied theatre, emphasis falls on the way in which artistic endeavors are being applied to social concerns. In her study Applied Drama: The Gift of Theatre, Helen Nicholson identifies ‘the relationship between theatre practice, social efficacy, citizenship, and community-building’ (2005/2014, 2). She also points to an important feature of much of this work, which is its physical embeddedness in the community: Socially engaged theatre takes place both inside and outside the theatre building, and there is a neat reciprocity between contemporary theatre-­ makers’ interest in creating interactive art or immersive theatre in found-­ spaces—disused factories, empty swimming pools, vacated shops and so on—and the institutional spaces such as prisons, schools, and hospitals that are often the settings for applied theatre. (ibid., 3)

None of the companies featured in this book perform in their own theatre spaces, but instead in borrowed spaces within the communities in which they perform (Public Acts, a program of the National Theatre [UK], is a near exception, but it moves to a different regional theatre each year). All the companies produce examples of what is increasingly coming to be known as applied Shakespeare (see Mackenzie and Shaughnessy 2019). Rowan Mackenzie is a scholar-practitioner of applied Shakespeare, and her book-length study of the topic details a diverse range of projects, many of which she has worked with directly and which focus on marginalized communities (2023). The most prominent and frequently studied of applied Shakespeare projects are the many Shakespeare Behind Bars programs in prisons (see, e.g., Herold 2014), but there are a number of Shakespeare companies with explicit social justice aims. These include Flute Theatre (UK), whose ‘innovative productions of Shakespeare for autistic individuals and their

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

23

Fig. 1.3  Recycled Shakespeare Company founder Emily Fournier and Lyn Rowden celebrate the Bard Bash, 2015. (Photo courtesy of Lyn Rowden)

families use … a series of sensory drama games, which allow autistic individuals to share how it feels to be alive and celebrate their identity’ (Flute Theatre 2022), or Shakespeare South Australia, which aims to ‘combine traditional Shakespearean Original Practice with innovative eco-theatrical performance strategies’ (Shakespeare South Australia 2022). As I describe in more detail below, given its historical associations with colonial projects and hyper-canonicity, Shakespearean applied theatre projects face particular challenges that other forms of socially engaged art may not have to deal with; they are also given particular opportunities.

24 

K. S. BROKAW

 ompany Case Study: Recycled Shakespeare Company C A grassroots, applied Shakespeare company with ecological aims, performing free Shakespeare in Fairfield, Maine (population 6500). Founded by Emily Fournier in 2014 (Fig 1.3).5 Venues: Churches, a pizza parlor, parks, community centers, and renaissance fairs. Mission: ‘Reduce, reuse, recite! Recycled Shakespeare Company (RSC) was founded with the mission to entertain and educate the community on a minimal budget, while relying primarily on used and recycled materials, local enthusiasts, and royalty free productions’ (About, Recycled Shakespeare Company 2022). Community focus: In the words of embedded researcher William Wolfgang, the RSC has ‘programs open to their entire community regardless of age (participants range from six to eighty-two), disability (cast members with autism and cerebral palsy were present during my visit), or profession (teachers, students, engineers, social workers, retirees, and “the drive-thru guy,” among many others). The RSC’s inclusivity is but one aspect of their civic approach to their operations; the organization also has held events highlighting recycling and environmental awareness. The idea of collective responsibility is paramount for the organization’ (2021a). The director, on inclusive casting: ‘Anyone who auditions gets a part. So we’re comprised of all kinds of enthusiasts! We get to see these people who don’t consider themselves actors, who are teachers and lawyers or retirees, you name it, and they’re coming in off the streets just to try something new, to do something fun, a friend told them about it, things like that. They’re able to get up on stage, and they love it, and they want more of it. I’m hoping that people are able to now see that you don’t have to be trained by the Royal Shakespeare Company in order to perform in the Recycled Shakespeare Company’ (Fournier 2020). On eco-theatrical practices: ‘At least 80% of everything we use is recycled or repurposed. We have some town cleanups where we find material for upcoming productions. So rather than just throwing

5  Emily Fournier tragically passed away saving the life of another in a whitewater rafting accident in 2020, not long after my student researcher and I interviewed her for this book and for the EarthShakes Alliance, described (along with more of her work) in Chap. 5.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

25

stuff into our town landfill, we sort through these things and find materials that are useful’ (Fournier 2020). On adapting Shakespeare: ‘We are working with making Shakespearean theatre accessible to all, and so one of the things that we oftentimes do is we take these long tedious monologues that mean nothing to anyone and cut them down to size and change them into contemporary-speak and make them something that people will be able to relate to. Because I always say if you can’t relate to what is being performed, then your performance is useless. If your audience can’t find themselves in the script in some way then they’re going to get up and walk out because they’re going to say that was just boring’ (Fournier 2020).

Global and Postcolonial Theatre; Multicultural and Intercultural Theatre Western and Shakespearean theatres have historically privileged European and North American stories, usually told by white, Anglophone, and male voices: playwrights, directors, and actors. The stellar achievements of these star artists become the focus, with Shakespeare being the individual achiever par excellence. While work done by people of color and non-­ English speaking, queer, female and non-binary, and disabled and neurodivergent artists is recently getting more recognition in mainstream spaces, such recognition is the result of hard-fought and ongoing battles. For better or worse, the adjective ‘global’ to describe a study of theatre or a particular company or project usually indicates a focus on non-­ Western, or in the case of Shakespeare, non-Anglo-American productions, often performed in translation rather than English. This descriptor reinscribes notions of a Shakespearean metropolis that is Western and English-­ speaking and stands in contrast to peripheral ‘global’ works. As the final chapter of this book indicates, it is my hope that instead of demarcating non-Anglo-American activity in Shakespearean theatre, the term ‘global’— reminiscent as it is of Shakespeare’s ‘great globe itself’—can instead be used to describe solidarity across an imperiled planet. The world has long been threatened, and useful scholarly work has been done in postcolonial and decolonizing contexts to focus on

26 

K. S. BROKAW

indigenous theatrical responses to violent colonization, as in Chris Balme’s Decolonizing the Stage (1999). Whereas scholarship about theatre around the world—and many a drama anthology—has often replicated the Western versus ‘global’ dichotomy with an implied bias toward Western ‘classics’, Ric Knowles sees recent postcolonial and critical race theories as bringing to the theatre a new kind of rhizomatic (multiple, non-hierarchical, horizontal) intercultural performance-from-below … that no longer retains a west and the rest binary, that is no longer dominated by charismatic white men or performed before audiences assumed to be monochromatic, that no longer involves the urban centers (in the west or elsewhere) raiding traditional forms seen to be preserved in more primitive or ‘authentic’ rural settings, and that no longer focuses on the individual performances or projects of a single artist or group. (2010, 59)

Indeed, not only are myriad artistic projects around the world creating a more multidimensional and inclusive theatrical landscape, but also these projects are increasingly de-emphasizing the achievements of individuals in favor of celebrating collaboration and multiplicity. Performances in the UK and US have long been privileged in Shakespeare studies. This is due in part to the exalted status of Shakespearean language itself, adored and even worshipped by scholars and practitioners alike. Such an emphasis on Shakespeare’s textual English-ness has meant that work done in translation (or heavy adaptation) has been viewed as non- or less Shakespearean. But considering Shakespearean productions in translation as having less ‘authority’ (see Worthen 1997) than those performed in English impoverishes our sense of the possibilities of Shakespearean meaning-making. My chapter on the Faroe Islands (Chap. 4) describes the best Hamlet I have ever seen, which was presented in Faroese, a language with under 60,000 speakers. The translation pulled semantic richness out of Shakespeare’s text in genuinely new ways. While it is easy enough to read about and in principle support theatre artists working around the world, Emine Fişek offers a reminder that many theatre artists work under oppressive and even dangerous conditions. Writing about the assassinations of Palestinian and Turkish theatre-makers whose views were seen as dangerous by those in power, she explains that such deaths ‘underline the fragility of the ideals of theatrical community, and the often-inverse relationship between political efficacy and pragmatic

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

27

survival for community artists active in a volatile global landscape’ (2019, 70). Randall Martin’s admirable applied Shakespeare project Cymbeline in the Anthropocene (in which I took part and which is described in Chap. 5) brought together theatre companies from around the world to stage Cymbeline in response to local ecological catastrophes. Before the project was off the ground, an initially enthusiastic Chinese theatre company dropped out for fear of political backlash. Midway through the process, we lost our Kazakhstani collaborators after the director was fired, most likely for political reasons. While ideally any book about Shakespearean performance would include theatre-making from beyond the Anglophone world, the bias has been so skewed toward British and American performance that it’s been necessary to write books focusing primarily on activity outside the US and UK. Several edited collections, all with the word ‘global’ in the title, have focused on the way Shakespeare makes meaning in non-Anglo-American communities, like Christy Desmet, Sujata Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson’s Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation (2019), Alexa Alice Joubin and Aneta Mancewizc’s Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance (2018), and Craig Dionne and Partita Kapadia’s Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage (2008). Essays as well as Mexican-Spanish translations of Shakespeare plays by Alfredo Michel Modenessi (2019, 2020, for example), Yon Li Lan’s co-creation and directorship of the Shakespeare Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (2015), and much of the work published in the journal Shakespeare in South Africa have the benefit of being produced by scholars—and scholar-practitioners—who live and work in the Shakespearean communities they discuss. These are just a few out of many examples of what’s bring produced across the planet, which is often published in languages beyond English. Elsewhere I have praised the scholarship of Robert Ormsby, Christie Carson, and Sonia Massai, who in much of their work and specifically in their contributions to the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance (Bulman 2017) provide powerful critiques of the exoticizing tendencies of ‘intercultural’ Shakespeare in England and North America (Brokaw 2019, 169). But, as I also point out, that volume puts all its writing about non-­ Anglophone Shakespeare in a section called ‘Global Shakespeare’, and half of the essays in that section discuss the 2012 World Shakespeare Festival in London, Globe 2 Globe, which was hosted by Shakespeare’s Globe and brought in theatres from around the world as part of the cultural Olympiad.

28 

K. S. BROKAW

That is, most of the productions discussed in the ‘global’ section of this book were viewed in London by UK-based scholars, not in or by the communities from which they originated. While this landmark event deserved documentation, it is even more vital that performances around the world are recognized and studied within their own contexts. Beyond the collections cited above and related work, most Anglophone scholarship on Shakespearean theatre tends to be based in just one country. An ideal study of Shakespearean theatre would focus on projects from all six inhabited continents. This  book is far from ideal, focusing as it does on projects in just three countries, one in North America (the US) and two in Europe (the UK and Faroe Islands), but I do represent more geographic variety than has been the norm. My initial ambitions to include case studies that are more geographically and linguistically varied were stymied by a number of factors, including the onset of the COVID pandemic. Truly global attention to Shakespearean performance can track the ways that marginalized and subaltern artists wherever they live (including within the US and UK) often use similar tactics when dealing with the most canonical of playwrights. One of those tactics is strategic appropriation, which Ric Knowles describes as ‘reappropriation of canonical work that has participated in the project of colonization’ (2010, 63). Martinican poet Aimé Césaire’s 1969 postcolonial reworking of The Tempest, Une Tempête, is a famous example. The Tempest was also chosen as the inaugural production of Shakespeare in Paradise (described below), founded in the Bahamas by Nicolette Bethel in 2009. Bethel explains that The Tempest has been used throughout the 20th century to present the central tropes of anti-colonial thinking. Prospero is an apt personification of the British in the colonies. And Caliban’s very name suggests the Caribbean region. Shakespeare is, for the Bahamian people, a sort of Prospero. A writer whose language we may be able to speak, but never to understand, whose art we may learn to appreciate only insofar as it reminds us how far we are from creating it. (2021)

There are also companies like Native Earth in Toronto, made up of indigenous artists who aim to give theatrical training to actors often denied it (Native Earth 2022). They usually produce indigenous playwrights, but when performing Julius Caesar in 2006, they appropriated Shakespeare to talk about betrayals within the community by exploring the way the play presents dysfunctional power (Knowles 2010, 65–6). In the US, the

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

29

New York-based Amerinda theatre company produces both new work by indigenous artists and ‘Native interpretations of classical theater’, including a Macbeth (2014–2015) and a Winter’s Tale (2014) (Amerinda 2022). The goals of Native Earth and Amerinda align with those of Take Wing and Soar (TWAS) and its Harlem Shakespeare Festival, founded by Debra Ann Byrd in 2002 to give leading roles to classically trained artists of color who were being denied them at the time. Byrd is a queer Afro-Latina-­ American actor who has played Lady Bracknell, Othello, and Cleopatra, and tells her own story in her one-woman show Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey. Byrd and many non-white, disabled, and queer Shakespearean actors participate in a tactic of performance that José Esteban Muñoz details in Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Disidentification describes the survival strategies the minority subject practices in order to negotiate a phobic majoritarian public sphere that continuously elides or punishes the existence of subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship. (1999, 4)

Muñoz argues that such performances, in the example of queer performance, ‘permit the spectator, often a queer who has been locked out of the halls of representation or rendered a static caricature there, to imagine a world where queer lives, politics, and possibilities are representable in their complexity’ (ibid., 1). This kind of theatre, with its explicit aims at representing identity communities ‘in their complexity’, is a form of applied or community-engaged theatre. Serving multiple identity communities to create a form of intercultural or multicultural theatre (one word emphasizes interaction between identity groups, the other their multiplicity) is an explicit goal of several Shakespearean companies profiled in this book. The ways some productions and practices have resisted attending to identity politics and cultural differences while others have explicitly embraced them are the subject of too many studies to be enumerated here, but Knowles’s Theatre & Interculturalism (2010) and Harvey Young’s Theatre & Race (2013) offer helpful overviews. In Shakespeare studies, recent attention to race in performance includes Ayanna Thompson’s Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (2011), Delia Jarrett-Macauley’s Shakespeare, Race, and Performance (2016), Coen Hiejes’s Shakespeare, Blackface, and Race

30 

K. S. BROKAW

(2020), and Jami Rogers’s British Black and Asian Shakespeareans (2022). A number of Shakespeare scholars are also documenting the way Shakespearean performance has included or excluded other identity communities, including Sawyer Kemp’s work laying out practices for transgender Shakespeare on stages and in classrooms (2019a, b). Jill Bradbury’s scholarship, film documentary, and theatre work have focused on disability embodiment, particularly for deaf and blind communities (2019, 2022). Recent studies often take an intersectional approach, looking at the ways race, gender, sexuality, disability, and class make meaning on and beyond the Shakespearean stage (see, e.g., Barker 2021; Hartley et al. 2021; Julian and Solga 2021). Every case study in this book centers on the artistry of people traditionally left out of studies of the Shakespeare stage. My hope is that attention to how these companies imbed themselves in their communities demonstrates their civic necessity in a time of increasing division and makes clear that the worldwide Shakespeare community gains infinitely by welcoming the knowledge and creativity of anyone who wishes to make theatre out of the pliable material that is Shakespearean texts.  ompany Case Study: Shakespeare in Paradise C Regional theatre in the Bahamas with an education-focused mission, presenting an annual festival of Shakespeare, Bahamian, and African American and Caribbean playwrights  (Fig. 1.4). Founded in 2009 by Nicolette Bethel and Philip Burrows. Venues: Performing arts centers, art galleries, outdoor theatres. Mission: ‘Developing Bahamian Theatre: The Bahamian tradition of theatre is a long and robust one. Shakespeare in Paradise is designed to celebrate the best of the past while helping to shape a strong future. ‘Education: We’re committed to exposing Bahamian audiences to a range of productions from classical theatre traditions around the world. Our decision to hold the Festival during the academic year enables us to offer specifically tailored educational packages to local and international schoolchildren. ‘Community outreach: Shakespeare in Paradise is specifically targeted to offer opportunities to individuals in the cultural community who have passion and talent, but limited access to training and experience’ (About Shakespeare in Paradise 2022). On adapting The Tempest as the inaugural production: The Tempest was the right play for the right place at the right time because it is about a

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

31

Fig. 1.4  Jaquenetta (Selina Scott-Benin) and Don Armado (Allaya Hagigal) with Berowne (T-Day) in Shakespeare in Paradise’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, directed by Robert Hubbard, 2021. (Photo by Hartman Brown)

hurricane. Our whole existence is the expression, explicit and subliminal, of living against and amidst hurricanes. The Tempest opened up Bahamian dialogue with our colonizers in a postcolonial present, and it allowed us to process our changing environment (Bethel 2021).

Methods: A Performance Studies Approach The focus of this book is on how Shakespeare-performing companies and projects make meaning in communities. As such, it is less interested in what happens on stage—in the directing, acting, and design choices of a production—than it is in the social and cultural impact that making Shakespearean performance has on a particular group of people. The methods required to study productions in their cultural contexts come more from the field of performance studies than from theatre studies (with which it is sometimes confused, including by Shakespeare scholars). Theatre studies refers to the study of theatre, usually with a focus on what happens on stage. Performance studies is an interdisciplinary field that

32 

K. S. BROKAW

studies performance of all kinds—including performances in everyday life, like street protests or political debates—and approaches them from an ethnographic angle, researching how they make meaning in context (see also Brokaw 2017). In her study of the community-based American theatre Cornerstone (discussed in Chap. 2), Sonja Kuftinec explains why performance studies methods suit this kind of theatre: Performance studies situates theatre as a cultural practice rather than an artistic phenomenon, concerned with the way that performance animates the networks of social relations rather than with formally assessing the ­resultant mis-en-scène. Focusing less on textual or production criticism, and more on how performance functions as an expressive device, this interdisciplinary field encourages an investigation of community and culture as well as theater. (8–9)

While each of this book’s case studies does discuss what happens on stage, it is more interested in investigating the community and culture. To understand how community-engaged Shakespearean productions, to paraphrase Mark Weinberg (2000), ally themselves with, involve, and address the concerns of a particular community, we need an incorporative methodology that combines tools and values drawn from scholarly practices more closely allied with performance studies than traditional Shakespearean scholarship. In particular, these methods are: 1. Ethnography: focusing on the social dimensions of the work, and valuing marginalized communities and local knowledge, taking field notes, working as a participant-observer; 2. Practice as Research (PaR): exploring the creativity involved, and working with theatre practitioners as co-investigators on research projects, valuing theatrical process as generative of new research questions; 3. Applied Theatre (defined above): creating and investigating projects that are interventionist, and involving local communities not directly or usually involved with theatre. These methods align with my aims for this book, to focus on the way Shakespearean performance in communities can prioritize social inclusion (access, or who is making and seeing this theatre), creative processes

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

33

(adaptation, or how they make it), and real-world interventions (activism, why these theatre projects are created). Ethnographic Methods: A Social Focus One of the first contributions of ethnographic methods to performance studies is a focus on what ‘dominant culture neglects, excludes, represses, or simply fails to recognize’, to quote Dwight Conquergood, a founder of performance studies who was instrumental in bringing ethnographic methods to the study of performance (2013, 33). The ethnographic methods adapted from anthropology by performance studies scholars— what has been termed ‘performative ethnography’—ask a researcher to embed herself in the often marginalized community she observes in order to best understand the ways cultural production makes meaning.6 The ethnographer does field work: for a theatre scholar that means taking notes and recording the actions of actors in rehearsal and of audiences in parks. They document and describe performances and interview and survey the communities that create and consume theatre, treating shows as entire events embedded in a particular cultural location and moment. Performative ethnographers thus work and write within a far more complex field of signifiers than is encountered when one sees Shakespearean production as merely ‘the communication of an interpretation of the text’, as W.B.  Worthen points out in his Shakespeare Performance Studies (2014, 11). Performative ethnographers have long seen all performances—from theatrical production to street protests to gang organization—as ‘integrated agenc[ies] of culture’ rather than distinctive acts (Strine 1998, 7). They often focus on how performative practices produce and transform systems of power, which is a lens that should remain in view for all of those who study the way the work of a white, European, canonical playwright often perceived as symbolic of ‘high culture’ makes meaning in communities damaged and sidelined by economics, geography, or especially English colonialism. Performance studies’ inclusive definitions of performance have directed the field’s focus toward less mainstream forms: street protest and performance art rather than dramatic theatre. However, comparative 6  See Spry (2006, 339 and passim) for an overview of the relationship between performance studies and ethnography, as well as the entire special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly (Warren 2006), which is focused on performance ethnography.

34 

K. S. BROKAW

studies of Shakespeare in global communities—what R.S. White calls ‘glocal’ studies of Shakespeare’s regionalization (2007, 5)—address many ethnographic concerns, allowing scholars and practitioners to better understand the way Shakespeare both connects local communities to the wider world (i.e., giving actors in a relatively isolated town like Fairfield, Maine, the sense of being participants in global phenomena) and also disrupts and complicates the ways communities think of themselves (i.e., when accounts of Shakespearean theatre come to displace more indigenous cultural activity in the Arts section of a local newspaper). Shakespeare’s cultural capital and aesthetic particularities interact with the cultural values and social circumstances of the communities in which these plays are performed. Central to the way Shakespeare makes meaning in communities is the interplay between the plays themselves and the social and political contexts of the performance event. Ethnographic embeddedness requires one to pay attention to these kinds of interactions between the stage and the world outside it. Too often, analyses of Shakespearean performance focus on how a professional scholar or drama critic interprets the choices of a usually professional company performing in the closed walls of a theatre. But such dramatic analysis would be inadequate for the study of Merced Shakespearefest’s free outdoor Cymbeline, for example, in which I acted in 2014. Ethnographic methods, on the other hand, show how in community performance, actor identities can matter as much as character choices or directorial interpretation, and the mere presence of a production might have effects far beyond the stage. Informal conversations revealed that the child actors in Cymbeline made residents proud of the intelligence of local youth and caused audience members to rethink their pre-conceived notions of Shakespeare’s accessibility. And between the hundreds of joggers and park-goers who walked past the amphitheater during performances and the show’s prevalent publicity, the number of people reflecting on how, for better or worse, Merced had become the kind of town that puts on Shakespeare shows featuring university faculty, community members, and little kids was far greater than the number of attendees. To study Shakespeare ethnographically in communities is to consider all of this: to synthesize analyses of what happened on stage, what happened in rehearsal rooms, what audiences did and said in and after performances, and what community members who didn’t see the show heard or thought. This kind of heuristic approach to the way performance events are embedded in communities can be performed by participant-observers who

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

35

operate as fellow audience members. For this book, in addition to attending performances, I went to (and in the case of Shakespeare in Yosemite in Chap. 5, directed) rehearsals, my students and I interviewed actors and designers and directors, and I talked to audience members and conducted surveys. Approaching marginalized and sometimes fragile artistic companies and the communities they serve requires a sensitivity on the part of the academic researcher that many ethnographers have addressed. Tami Spry describes Conquergood as laying the groundwork for a ‘performance-­ sensitive … empathetic epistemology’ (2006, 342). I have found this kind of empathetic learning requires the scholar to decenter their scholarly authority; to become conscious of their biases; and to listen hard to those whose life experiences, demographics, and perhaps lack of institutionalized training mean that they approach Shakespearean characters and plots and themes with different but no less valuable ways of understanding. Anthropologists have long debated who is best positioned to write about a community: an insider, who might be better poised to pick up on nonverbal communications and establish trust-based relationships but lack critical distance, or an outsider, who might have that critical distance but come to the community with different sets of values or even be seen as a cultural colonist (see, e.g., Aguilar 1981). In all chapters except the final one, I am an outsider to the specific community that I write about. But because I am a scholar-practitioner, I am a part of the community-based Shakespeare theatre-making community, an outsider-insider status that gives me access to theatre-makers not just as a critic or audience member but also as a fellow artist. This is to say that I have found that one of best ways to find what Soyini Madison calls ‘generative and embodied reciprocity’ is to combine ethnography with Practice as Research (2006, 321). Practice as Research (PaR): A Creative Focus Practice as Research (PaR) centers on learning with (rather than merely about) theatre artists.7 PaR uses creative practice as a form of research inquiry: it is reflexive, experimental, and interdisciplinary. Co-creating theatre within communities allows scholars to, in PaR practitioner Mark Fleishman’s words, explore ‘certain epistemological issues that can only be 7  Practice as Research (PaR) is sometimes called Performance as Research (PAR) in the US (see Riley and Hunter 2009, xv).

36 

K. S. BROKAW

addressed in and through performance itself’ (2012, 28). Stephen Purcell argues that the ideal model for Shakespearean PaR involves not only co-­ creative theatre but also co-investigative research. PaR thus moves beyond ethnographic documentary and toward a mutually transformational collaborative process that equally values the expertise and insights of scholars and artists (2017b). Scholars who carry out this kind of work are called scholar-practitioners, and their methods are well suited to exploring how Shakespeare operates within communities. I work as a scholar-practitioner on Shakespeare in Yosemite (Chap. 5) and involve my fellow artists in the research process. I employ student assistants—who are usually part of the cast or production team—as embedded researchers who conduct interviews and help collect and collate audience feedback, taken on paper and in online surveys. Everyone involved in the production takes part in interviews and discusses feedback as it is received, and team members who work with the project for multiple years work with me to incorporate our findings into planning future shows and adjusting our processes. I have learned that to be truly co-investigative, scholar-practitioners must make way for different kinds of authority and different ways of evaluating what is valued and successful. Authoritative notions of Shakespeare can undermine genuine creativity, insight, and knowledge generated by community practitioners who were not trained to interpret Shakespeare according to traditional conventions and cloud one’s ability to see the value of different kinds of cultural capital. Alan Read explains that in community theatre, it is often the local participants and not, say, the playwright who command the most cultural capital (1993, 25). As with many community-based shows, most audience members who attend the Public Acts shows (Chap. 2) do so because their friends or family are in the audience or because the show is happening in their community and stars people who look like them. Faroese audiences came to Hamlet (Chap. 4) because it was being performed in their own language and in the familiar Nordic House, a space that celebrates local artistic achievement (and a wider geographic and cultural identity). In both cases, most spectators were not there for the Shakespeare, at least not primarily. In Worthen’s terms, while institutions like the Royal Shakespeare Company and Globe justify themselves by professing some kind of proximity to an authoritative ‘Shakespeare’ (be those claims geographic, historical, or professional), many community audiences have much less stake in this kind of authority,

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

37

which allows productions to make meanings in different and perhaps less inhibited ways (1997, 3). Taking part in PaR attunes researchers to these nuances. It is often the case that there is a discrepancy between what those of us who write about Shakespeare in performance for a living think we are seeing on stage and what directors and actors think they are doing. And the vast array of responses to theatrical moments exceeds the grasps of any one theory, be it a critical theory, a performance theory, or the kind of theory an experienced spectator formulates about what they think a production is doing. Theory is not particularly good at being surprised. And if my conditioning as a professional academic could prevent me from viewing community Shakespeare on the same terms as many in a local audience, then PaR offers tools to work with and through these biases. That Shakespearean theatre practice can be thus applied to larger aims leads me to my final set of methods, those related to the creation and study of applied theatre. Applied Theatre: An Interventionist Focus Dwight Conquergood lays out three alliterative strands that braid together to create performance studies: critique, creativity, and citizenship, or phrased another way, inquiry, imagination, and intervention (2013, 41). While all three methodologies I discuss here at times perform all three of these ways of knowing, ethnography is a form of critique that asks questions about who is participating in the cultural activity. PaR is focused on creativity, allowing for questions of how creative activity is conducted. And a focus on applied theatre is the citizenship or interventionist strand, and it focuses on those why questions (Conquergood 2013, 41). Shakespeareans can engage with a longstanding set of practices for carrying out this kind of work and also with a recently emerging set of critical tools for creating and analyzing it. In their introduction to Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson encourage those who study—or study and make—applied theatre to adopt a ‘critical perspective [that] starts from a recognition that theatre-making is inevitably entwined in networks of power and exploitation’ (2016, 4). When it comes to Shakespeare—long an instrument of colonialism, a money-making enterprise, and a blunt force in secondary education— such self-awareness about issues of power and authority are especially crucial.

38 

K. S. BROKAW

In Merced, for example, I continue to ask if Shakespearean performance might be seen as a sign of burgeoning educational opportunities in a historically under-served region, and whether or not its presence overshadows the vitality of cultural activities more indigenously rooted in local Latinx, Sikh, and Hmong communities. These questions will never be answered in just one way, but in practice and analysis I strive to be aware of and responsive to the way the community reacts to the presence of Shakespeare. Salley Mackey emphasizes that applied theatre performances draw attention to place, how they ‘subvert and reframe locations of the everyday’ by ‘building a palimpsest of memories that would, in the future, prompt positive, wry and even fond memories of performance-in-sites each time the site was encountered’ (2016, 118). Mackey’s ideas resonate with Philip Parr’s description above of the way that promenade performances in Craiova changed how performers, audience members, and passersby experienced a number of locations that they were used to walking right past. The way that community-based performance contributes to place-making also chimes with the experience my collaborators and I have had with Shakespeare in Yosemite, where that park’s theatrical possibilities create lasting changes of perspective for a community of temporary visitors. In a survey, one audience member commented on the way the show’s articulations of natural beauty came back to them ‘in flashbacks’ as they explored the park over the weekend, and another said the show made Yosemite ‘feel more accessible, like visitors are really a part of the place’. Shakespearean performance may thus allow audiences to deepen their interactions with their local environment and feel more included in a place.8 These altered relationships to place—be they one’s city or a national park—may in turn prompt social, political, or even financial investments in that place’s people (and non-humans), and in the local community. Those who study applied theatre often evaluate it in terms of its efficacy, that is, its social or political effectiveness, and its agency, that is, to what extent participants are able to actively contribute to the art-making. Some community-based projects have been criticized for not centering the experiences and artistry of the community and over-relying on professionals, and others for overvaluing undertrained artists and creating products 8  Beyond Shakespearean theatre, scholars have paid attention to the way local theatres take part in creative place-making in both urban (Harvie 2009) and rural (Robinson 2016) settings.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

39

deemed by the critic to be aesthetically unsatisfying.9 Shannon Jackson articulates why both of these tendencies—evaluating a theatre’s practice based on a standard rooted in Marxist politics, or evaluating a production based on professional aesthetic standards—miss the fact that ‘community is not simply a social ideal that the theatre represents or addresses; it is also something that the theatre enacts in its practices’ (2011, 19). Community artists have their own social aims, and those aims are realized in processes that are themselves essential to the aesthetics. Jackson concludes, and I agree, that there are drawbacks to evaluating the success of a theatre project in terms of ‘political progress’ or ‘professional accolades’, both of which fail to capture the impact it has on participants and to evaluate fairly the work on its own artistic terms (ibid., 19). But assessing projects based on community impact also presents challenges. Leonard and Kilkelly explain the complications that arise when someone tries to quantify the influence of community-based art: Finding out how many people come to the show, how many ‘new’ people, etc., would seem to be a way of evaluating the health of the arts organization … It gets confusing, though, and sometimes blatantly misleading, when it comes to evaluating the art itself. People seem to want to justify the effort according to some long-term, tangible value that is returned to the community for the investment that it makes in the creative process … Once the claim [of social change] is made, the desire to prove it seems to come right along behind. (2006, 73–4)

Community-based projects thus can be assessed in a number of ways that don’t always suit them and don’t do justice to the work they do, like how their perceived progressiveness does or does not live up to a critic’s values, whether the quality of the artistic output lives up to professional, mainstream standards, or if there is some kind of easily measurable difference to the community in which the project is imbedded. Better assessments holistically consider process, product, and impact: the social, creative, and interventionist work of a project. But all these productions can be misread by outsiders who are less familiar with the project’s aims and outcomes than those who were involved in the creation of the project. It is for this

9  See, for example, Brady (2000) for an example of the former, Bishop (2012) for an example of the latter, and Nicholson (2005/2014) for an extensive overview of these conversations.

40 

K. S. BROKAW

reason that in the remaining chapters I privilege the voices of those who make theatre over those who study it. Shakespeare academics, journalists, and audiences in particular tend to evaluate performances based on aesthetics, on literary and historical ‘accuracy’, and on professional execution. The social value of a project is often ignored or even ridiculed. Jackson explains that terms like ‘social practice’—or community performance—can even get used derisively by professional critics and artists to signal art for the masses, ‘capitulations to accessibility and intelligibility that can occur when art practice and social practice—aesthetics and politics—combine’ (2011, 137). This is certainly true in the case of Shakespearean productions. As discussed in Chap. 2, reading the comments section of reviews of Public Acts’ productions reveals everything from skepticism to animosity toward a project that has such egalitarian aims, and such biases against the ‘dumbing down’ of Shakespeare persist in professional responses, too. But rather than see these as mutually incompatible aims, socio-political and artistic impulses might instead be yoked together and viewed through an interpretive lens that understands that a performance event’s aesthetic, social, and activist meanings are inextricably bound up with each other. Shakespeare in Paradise’s Tempest, described above, made meaning for its audiences not only because of its high-quality acting and imaginative design but also because the production was created by and for Bahamians and emphasized the play’s colonial subtext and the presence of a ‘hurricane’, calling to mind long histories and recent traumas for Bahamian audience members. Artistic choices, leadership and casting, and local contexts were intentionally aligned to create meaning together. Many Shakespearean theatres are engaging in applied theatre work: from grassroots operations like Recycled Shakespeare Company, with its ecological mission; to the regional Marin Shakespeare Company, with its programming in prisons and for at-risk youth; to Shakespeare’s Globe, with its Shakespeare and Race festival and other social justice-oriented programs. Shakespeare scholars are increasingly drawn to applied theatre projects, too, including Ewan Fernie’s ‘Everything to Everybody’ project, a collaboration with the Birmingham (UK) City Council to revive and make accessible the Birmingham Shakespeare Memorial library (Everything to Everybody 2022), or Wendy Wall’s teaching with the Northwestern Prison Education Program (Wendy Wall 2022). In recognition of the importance of this kind of work, the Shakespeare Association of America

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

41

(SAA), a scholarly organization, inaugurated the SAA Shakespeare Publics Award in 2020. In addition to working with my collaborators on my own applied Shakespeare project, Shakespeare in Yosemite (Chap. 5), I endeavored to work with all the theatre-makers and communities profiled in this book to ensure that I wasn’t simply writing about their art for my own benefit but engaging in a reciprocity of some kind. For Chap. 3, that meant working with a team of students to begin creating the archives of the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Company: recordings and transcripts of hours of interviews were given to company founders Lisa Wolpe and Debra Ann Byrd, who will add them to archives that will be housed at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Folger Shakespeare Library. My fourth chapter, on Hamlet in the Faroe Islands, is being translated into Faroese for local distribution, and I have advised Det Ferösche Compagnie, who produced it, on subsequent projects. The hybridized methodology I propose for the study of localized Shakespeare, the one I used in this book, involves embedding oneself in and observing the communities in which Shakespeare is made (ethnography), collaborating and sharing in the process of making (PaR), and facilitating and analyzing the company’s wider community impact (applied theatre). These methods allow university-based Shakespeareans to join researchers across our campuses in practicing Community-Responsive Scholarship or Community-Engaged Scholarship. Such practices link us to scholars in all fields—from bioengineering to sociology—who are doing work of mutual benefit to community and researcher. At its best, this kind of work motivates public participation in university life, ensuring that research is conducted with rather than on communities. As we embed ourselves in communities that make promiscuous new meanings with Shakespeare, we can work to ensure that productions and analyses of them bring together the global and the local; the historical and the present; the academy, the stage, and the world.

Why (and Why Not) Shakespeare? We can begin with the ‘why not’. Or, more precisely, the how not to do Shakespeare in community. Shakespearean plays raise specific issues when used in applied theatre projects: his whiteness, maleness, dominance, and historical links with colonization can seem antithetical to egalitarian, community-­building, and non-hierarchical missions. Reviewing some of

42 

K. S. BROKAW

these Shakespeare-based projects, Ayanna Thompson is particularly critical of programs that center their program’s value on Shakespearean authority, that is, his works’ primacy in the canon and status as sine qua none of writers and on a sense of authenticity, proximity to Shakespeare’s ‘original’ language and, in some cases, theatre practices. As cases in point, she cites the way that many Shakespeare Behind Bars programs use unadapted First Folio texts. She also critiques the Hobart Shakespeareans, a program for kids ‘from poor families’ in Los Angeles who perform unabridged productions and whose mission statement explains that ‘mediocrity has no place in their classroom’ (Hobart Shakespeareans 2022). These programs, Thompson explains, ‘rely so heavily on the fantasy of Shakespeare’s authority, authenticity, and textual stability (instead of the notion that Shakespeare is merely a catalyst or medium)’ that dialogues about race, Thompson’s particular focus, or other social issues are distanced or removed. Despite the program’s purportedly progressive aims, she concludes, they are in ‘high wire tension [with] neo-colonialism’ (2011, 122). That is, the programs are more focused on teaching participants that they can find self-worth through wrestling with ‘authentic Shakespeare’ than they are on letting them develop their own creative voices or having them think about how their creativity might be used in and with their community. Focusing on a series of early 2000s documentaries about kids in challenging situations whose worlds are purportedly turned around by performing Shakespeare, Todd Landon Barnes discusses what he calls the ‘White Christian Shakespeare Complex’. The programs documented don’t engage with the social conditions of their participants but rather give the unasked-for gift of Shakespeare to them, with the confidence that working with his challenging and ‘universal’ texts will improve their conditions. ‘If these films show us “underdogs” who become emotionally healthy or culturally rich,’ Barnes observes, ‘they do not challenge or depict the structures that made them unhealthy or poor to begin with’ (2020, 5). He explains that the problem with many programs seemingly focused on inclusion, on letting other kinds of folks have access to Shakespeare, is that many potential participants are still excluded and, in the case of Shakespeare programs, made to feel less than because of their inability to comprehend or relate to a 450-year-old dead white English guy. He also criticizes Hobart Shakespeare for kicking students out of the program for not comprehending Shakespeare or failing to be ‘obedient’ enough (ibid., 50). The problem with many of these Shakespeare programs focused on

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

43

‘redemption’, Barnes argues, is that that they ‘efface cultural and historical difference in the name of a universal and timeless culture of excellence’ (ibid., 59), training participants to be more ‘responsible’ and productive—that is, money-earning—members of society. Both Thompson and Barnes find other applied Shakespeare programs to praise, however: programs that decenter Shakespearean authority and authenticity and instead center the experiences of participants. Such programs tend to privilege different ‘A’ words: they focus on adaptation, access, and activism. Complimenting Will Power to Youth in L.A., which allows students to create their own adaptations of Shakespearean plays, Thompson explains that It is precisely because the program values appropriation, adaptation, and revision that the at-risk youth who participate in WPY are enabled to bring their own voices, narratives, and civic concerns to bear on equal footing with Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s texts. (2011, 141)

Speaking of programs documented in the film A Touch of Greatness, Barnes praises the way that instead of fetishizing Shakespeare’s texts as written, they celebrate ‘the chaotic immaturity of the plays and their language’, focusing not on the individual achievement of mastering Shakespeare’s language but on ‘the rewards of collaborative play’ (2020, 81). For all the companies I profile in this book, Shakespearean texts are a creative springboard, a catalyst for ‘collaborative play’ rather than (just) a way to push individuals to overcome challenges. Their programs focus on adapting plays to fit their community’s concerns, on making accessible texts and practices once restricted to particular communities, and on actively advocating for a more just world for these communities. And while Shakespeare can get in the way of such aims, the creativity his texts invite and their relative cultural familiarity can also be helpful. Adaptation: A Creative Process Many of the artists who work with Shakespeare in communities recognize the vital importance of adapting the plays to fit local contexts and the present moment and find the ability to do so to be one of the biggest creative advantages of working with Shakespeare. While many of the artists herein do talk about these plays as ‘universal’, they do not use that word as an excuse to perform the plays as written, as if Shakespeare were self-evidently

44 

K. S. BROKAW

profound to all humans. Rather, when these artists say that Shakespeare is ‘universal’, they are usually suggesting that the plays are adaptable to their lives, that there are themes, characters, and ideas in the plays that can be brought into conversation with their own experience: the characters and stories are not universal so much as applicable. It’s a way of saying, ‘Shakespeare and I are in the same universe, but I’m in a different world’ rather than ‘the plays of a dead white guy speak for us all’. I’d argue (and I’m not alone) that some degree of applicability—or relatability, as my students would say—can be true of all good writing, not just Shakespeare’s. But the royalty-free status of his plays and their familiarity—how easy it is to riff on Romeo and Juliet—make these plays particularly ripe for localized adaptation. Adaptation, etymologically, means ‘to make fit’ (from the Latin ad, meaning ‘to’ and aptus, ‘fit’). Biologically, it is a necessary process to ensure the survival of a species in a particular environment. One might argue that without adaptation, Shakespeare will become extinct. Shakespeare critics increasingly agree that adaptation is central to Shakespeare’s ability to remain relevant. In the words of Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill, ‘much of the credit for his global reach and historical longevity must go to adaptation—both his adaptations of prior works and others’ adaptations of his’ (2022, 5). Kamilla Elliott, in a book about theatre adaptation in general, singles out the particular case of Shakespeare, arguing that adaptation is no longer simply a facet of Shakespeare or the field of study based on his works and their afterlives but is, rather, a key driver of Shakespeare’s ongoing vitality in the contemporary world. Indeed, adaptation may be said to be the hallmark of Shakespeare. (2020, 45)10

The artists profiled in this book have a variety of perspectives on the inherent value of Shakespeare’s texts and how much they should be adapted, but some degree of adaptation is always central to their creative processes. When choosing Pericles for the first Public Acts project, director Emily Lim explained to me that her team chose the play not because it was Shakespeare, to whom she was initially resistant, but because ‘it had an existing, solid dramaturgical structure that we could then dance around 10  For more theories of adaptation, see Sanders (2006). For more on Shakespeare and adaptation, see, for example, Henderson and O’Neill (2022), and Kidnie (2008).

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

45

and be hybrid with, allowing Chris [Bush, the adaptor] to bridge an old voice with a new voice’. She added that Shakespeare is not ‘all of the answer’, but that it was ‘important to smash through his status and celebrate the story we found’ (2018). And while in its early days L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC) often performed Shakespeare’s texts with relatively few textual changes—and at times, Elizabethan-style costumes—its members, including founder Lisa Wolpe herself, became increasingly more creative with adaptation as the years went by. LAWSC actor Celeste Den pushes back against the notion that Shakespearean authenticity lies in the text: I used to be a real text nerd, all about the pentameter and the rhythm, like militant about it. But that was when I was younger. Now I think the authenticity of Shakespeare is the human experience that it contains, and the way the language is structured can be an obstacle. It can keep people, especially people of color, away from it, instead of serving as a way of access. (2021)

Edgar Landa, who also collaborated with LAWSC and now does his own theatre work, concurs, pushing back again the term ‘universal’: I am not a purist. I change words. I cut lines; I’m not reverent that way. The text gets cut down so that it becomes something that belongs to all of us. When we say Shakespeare is ‘universal’, that’s how we put Shakespeare onto people, especially people of color, in a way that doesn’t resonant for them, isn’t personal for them. There’s a different way of how Shakespeare can speak to us. (2021)

The miniature case studies above also demonstrate the importance of adaptation to Merced Shakespearefest, Parrabbola, Recycled Shakespeare Company, and Shakespeare in Paradise, and how for these companies, the creative license Shakespeare’s plays afford has meant that they can reach audiences and participants where they are, collaborating with communities to shape the plays into something relevant, even vital. One of the many obvious benefits of adapting Shakespeare, then, is the way adaptations make the plays more accessible.

46 

K. S. BROKAW

Access: A Social Endeavor As has been discussed already in this introductory chapter, Shakespeare’s texts can be used to exclude people and violently subdue or erase their culture. Despite these histories (and in some cases, ongoing practices), there have been many artists, often themselves from traditionally marginalized communities, who have used Shakespeare to create anti-patriarchal, anti-racist spaces to celebrate female, queer, trans-, people of color, and disabled excellence and collaboration, and to represent the pain and messiness and humanness and complexity of their lives in defiance of mainstream Shakespearean theatre’s longtime glorification of talented white men and customary focus on the lives of primarily white nobility and upper-class characters. Many of the artists my student research team and I spoke with for this book were drawn to the stage and Shakespeare for any number of reasons, but because of their race or primary language or gender or socioeconomic status—or some combination—they weren’t made to feel like performing and enjoying Shakespeare was a meaningful option for them. It took seeing someone with whom they could identify on stage or in a leadership role to expand their sense of possibility. Those early encounters in turn led Lisa Wolpe and Debra Ann Byrd, and their collaborators like Natsuko Ohama, Dathan Williams, Trezana Beverley, and Cristina Frías, who all tell their stories in Chap. 3, to dedicate at least part of their careers to creating opportunities for others who might find that it enlarges their sense of self, makes them feel powerful, and connects them to enriching social networks to create new art out of Shakespeare. Crucially, the programs profiled here do not force Shakespeare on participants. Rather, they make the world of Shakespearean theatre-making available: workshops in community organizations around New York City and London invite those with an interest to take part in Public Works and Public Acts. A translation of Hamlet into Faroese and its performance make it possible for folks in a remote island nation to experience a powerful story for the first time. Thinking about making Shakespeare accessible can also lead to questions of ownership. If Shakespeare belongs to anyone, who is it? Academics and teachers? The English? White people? Big name directors and theatres? Shakespeare, of course, hasn’t always been thought of as elite: not only were his plays popular in their original time and place of performance, but also Lawrence W.  Levine has shown how, in nineteenth-century

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

47

America, Shakespeare’s plays were popular, his dramas ‘the property of those who flocked to see them’ (1988, 72). However, a number of events and intellectual debates of the nineteenth century meant that, by the dawn of the twentieth century, he’d become more of ‘a sacred author who had to be protected from ignorant audiences’ (1988, 72). In too many times and places, Shakespeare has been used to exclude or violently assimilate those who were different. Andrew Hartley, Kaja Dunn, and Christopher Berry explain how Shakespeare’s historical baggage leads naturally to questions of access: The history of Shakespeare as a tool for performing white cultural superiority is so weighty and insidious, so central to present marginalizations, that the very presence of actors of color in Shakespeare productions today generates anxiety and outrage…Can such a legacy be circumvented or—better yet—rewritten, and what means might be attempted to accomplish this decolonizing process? Can Shakespeare become part of the solution, rather than part of the problem? To put it another way, to whom does twenty-first-­ century Shakespeare belong? (2021, 171)

The artists in this book answer this question in their work: it belongs to them. Two women of color, Laurie Woolery and Emily Lim, direct the Public Works and Public Acts programs at the Public and National Theatre. In response to the chronic undervaluing of female actors and the the superiority of roles written as male characters, a queer woman, Lisa Wolpe, founded L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and created its productions for 20 years with other women, around half of them women of color. An Afro-Latina from East Harlem, Debra Ann Byrd, created Take Wing and Soar and the Harlem Shakespeare Festival explicitly for actors of color, and its leadership has only ever been Black. My primarily non-white and first-­ generation university-going students co-create Shakespeare in Yosemite productions with me each spring and make their own Shakespeare-inspired art in the classroom. One of them, Mahealani LaRosa,, explained the connection between adaptation and access: I like the meaning behind Shakespeare’s words, but you have to be able to adapt. These plays come from so long ago but they’re still applicable to what’s happening in our world now and they can still be used—there’s just an endless use of Shakespeare and I just think that’s super valuable. I know there’s such a divide where some people consider Shakespeare to be out of

48 

K. S. BROKAW

their reach or untouchable. But I say “no, it’s really accessible to everyone once you know you can adapt and make it your own.” (2021)

Who does Shakespeare belong to? It belongs to these artists and anyone else with an interest in doing anything at all with Shakespeare—including make art in defiance of these hyper-canonical and in many ways socially problematic texts. For many of the artists I talked to, adapting Shakespeare to open up access to more members of their community was described as a sort of social justice mission or a form of activism. Activism: A Community Intervention Writing about Shakespeare and political theatre, Andrew Hartley argues that ‘in the most general sense, all theatre is political since it partakes of the same reality as the rest of life and is therefore bound to issues of power, economics, and the competing social forces which frame selfhood and community’ (2013, 3). This is no doubt true, but some forms of theatre have more socially and politically engaged intentions and results than others. Community-based applied Shakespeare projects use Shakespeare to examine present conditions, creatively present alternatives to current injustices, or both. The ability of theatre to create a space for collective reimagining is a particularly important aim. Playwright Mojisola Adebayo, quoted as an epigraph to this introduction, talks about the power of artwork to make memories, and how memories feed our imaginations and imagination feeds our sense of what’s possible in the world. When we see what’s possible in the world we can assess our options and maybe make some change. It’s important to be in community; it’s important to perform. (Quoted in McAvinchey 2014, 73)

As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, a time marked by global unrest, climate change, rising nationalism, and virulent, atomized socio-­ political battles online and in person, being in community and contemplating what’s possible has high stakes. Assessing arts education programs, Lois Hetland and her colleagues praise programs in which the arts are ‘a tool to examine and challenge unjust social dynamics, [allowing] these student activists build a sense of individual and community identity while working to effect change’ (2009, 24–5). Theatrical collaborations based

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

49

on adaptation allow humans to hone the skills needed to both imagine and create a better world.

Introducing the Case Studies I have outlined above some of the ways scholars have studied, conceptualized, and critiqued community, community-based theatre, and applied Shakespeare projects. You will have your own degrees of familiarity with these conversations and your own priorities and predispositions when it comes to evaluating the companies profiled in this book. I hope that I have provided some tools to build your own interpretive frameworks, but I will resist—as best as I am able—applying my own too zealously. Cornerstone Theatre co-founder Alison Carey (who later moved to Oregon Shakespeare Festival) once said, in response to a Marxist academic critique of her company: Culturally imperialistic critics, praying at the altar of theoretical and oversimplified radicality, disallow human beings the right to see on stage what they want because it goes against the critic’s reductive, knee-jerk, ­uninformed and appallingly patronizing pre-conceived notion of what the community needs and what community-based art should be. (Quoted in Kuftinec 2003, 14)

Carey is perhaps being defensive here, but as a theatre artist myself, I understand that she has every right to be. We do all kinds of art a disservice when we evaluate it for doing or not doing things that it didn’t aim to do, and without an understanding of the many limitations—of time, money, and knowledge—facing the collaborators. These chapters present the work of these companies primarily in the words of the artists, though I gently put their ideas about their projects in conversation with the academic discourses described above. While any reader, armed with some of the theories and ideas outlined above as well as their own experiences and their own moral compass, may criticize aspects of these projects, I will not be doing so, for several reasons. First, as Terry Eagleton (1990) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984) have both pointed out, aesthetic critique and taste cannot be divorced from power and ideology, and as a highly educated cis-gendered white American woman, I am aware of how my sense of aesthetics have been shaped by privilege. Relatedly, my social values are not necessarily (though they often are) the

50 

K. S. BROKAW

same as the artists’ values, and the conversations being had by academics are often different from those of theatrical practitioners. Additionally, as an artist, I know that things audiences and critics might point out as faults often have reasons for them beyond the control of the artists, or have only been an issue for one performance, or changed during the run. It also feels dishonorably unbalanced to critique in print the work of people who themselves, for the most part, do not publish. I also resist critique because in a world emerging from the COVID shutdowns and economic aftershocks of the early 2020s, theatres in most parts of the world are folding or hanging on by a thread. Being in solidarity with theatre artists and anyone trying to better their community is far more important to me than demonstrating my academic knowledge or virtue signaling my awareness of the latest critical conversations, by pointing out how some aspect of a project or production was less than (my) ideal. And most importantly, I chose these projects because I admire them and think that they exemplify best practices when it comes to Shakespeare-­ based community-engaged art, in their processes, artistry, and missions. There is far, far more to hold up as exemplary in these artists’ work than there is to critique. The theatre companies studied were chosen not only for their merits but also for my ability to access the artists involved and their work. I have alluded to the case studies throughout this introduction, but what follows are further descriptions of each of them. The next chapter, ‘Public Shakespeare: Public Works (New York City) and Public Acts (UK)’, analyzes the explicitly community-engaged Public Works project founded by the Public Theatre in New York, and the National Theatre (UK)’s Public Acts project, created in partnership with and based on the model of Public Works. It begins with twinned histories of community-engaged and Shakespearean theatre in the US and UK, focusing on the National Theatre and the New York Shakespeare Festival, now run by the Public. The chapter focuses on the National Theatre’s first two  Public Acts projects. Every year, the National Theatre’s Emily Lim and her associates work with eight communitybased organizations in a British city—none of which specialize in community arts—to create these collaborative productions. I write about the first two: Pericles (adapted by Chris Bush), which was performed on the Olivier stage in London, August 2018, and As You Like It (adapted by Laurie Woolery and Shaina Taub), which was performed at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, in the Eastern suburbs of London in August 2019. Both productions featured casts of around 200 amateur

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

51

performers working with five or six professional actors and a team of directors and designers from the National Theatre and Queen’s Theatre. I observed rehearsals of both Pericles and As You Like It and conducted interviews with Lim and several cast members. Chapter 3, ‘Identity Shakespeare: L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival’, centers the voices of two pioneering Shakespeare company founders and the many actors and designers who co-created these companies. Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company was founded by Lisa Wolpe in 1993 to perform all-female Shakespeare and ‘to create a deeper, more powerful, unbounded view of women’s potential’ (About L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company 2013); it ran until 2014. Take Wing and Soar and its Harlem Shakespeare Festival were founded by Debra Ann Byrd in the early 2000s ‘to support emerging and professional classical artists of color’ (About Harlem Shakespeare Festival 2020). I have collaborated with both Wolpe and Byrd on several projects and interviewed them multiple times. In summer 2021, I worked with a team of three undergraduate researchers—Sofia Andom, Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez, and Mahealani LaRosa—to interview, over Zoom, dozens of people who worked with these companies. My focus in this chapter is on how Shakespeare affects community encounters with intersectional identities of gender, sexuality, class, and race. Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival set out to create opportunities for communities of actors who were traditionally excluded from Shakespearean production, and both were on the vanguard of inclusive casting practices, changing the way communities thought about who gets to perform Shakespeare before gender-blind and racially conscious casting became mainstream. The fourth chapter, ‘Island Shakespeare: Hamlet in the Faroe Islands’, moves to an 18-island archipelago in the north Atlantic with a population of 50,000; the Faroes are an independently governing country in the Kingdom of Denmark (similar to Greenland). In November 2019, the Det Ferösche Compagnie produced Hamlet for the first time in the country’s history, in the capital city Tórshavn. The chapter explores how Shakespearean performance and translation localized by non-Anglophone countries can be made to speak to particular cultural issues. It looks at how legacies of British—and Danish—colonialism might and might not be relevant in this ‘global’ context, and how Shakespeare’s outsider status, in the Faroes, allows a different kind of theatrical freedom, while also providing theatre-makers on these remote islands a sense of participation in a

52 

K. S. BROKAW

larger Shakespearean community in hopes that their overlooked achievements might begin to be recognized. The fifth and final chapter, ‘Ecological Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Yosemite and the EarthShakes Alliance’, focuses on my own theatre work with Shakespeare in Yosemite, a company I co-founded with Paul Prescott in 2017 to produce heavily adapted, site-specific shows in Yosemite National Park for Earth Day every April. The chapter provides a firsthand, Practice-as-Research account of the work my collaborators and I do to create these productions and gather audience feedback. It focuses on our 2019 production of As You Like It and our 2022 production of Love’s Labor’s Lost. The book’s final chapter asks how Shakespearean productions might address broadened definitions of community that include the human and non-human, and how especially outdoor Shakespeare creates temporary communities united around senses of natural place. It looks at the opportunities and limitations of using Shakespeare to understand issues facing the entire planet—climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution—and the need for collaborative action. Several theatre scholars have used the phrase ‘performance ecologies’ to describe networks of theatres and their relationships to the communities in which they operate (see, e.g., Nicholson et al. 2018 and Kershaw 2007). As Ric Knowles writes, this is an apt way to think about the theatre, where, as with any ecosystem, First, everything that happens within an ecosystem affects everything else within that system; second, the health of an ecosystem is best judged by the diversity of its species rather than by the competitive success of individual components or species. (2010, 59)

When it comes to the Shakespearean theatre ecosystem, the system’s health is indeed dependent on diversity. It is only through a multiplicity of often radically adapted productions that Shakespearean theatre thrives and survives, and yet too little attention has been paid, and too few resources have been given, to work outside of mainstream companies and star directors. Some productions and companies in this diverse Shakespearean ecosystem do not challenge hierarchies or injustice, nor do they create opportunities for collaboration. And in fact, some productions maintain the status quo and elevate the careers of already privileged stars. But within this ecosystem, there are other species of companies and projects that use

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

53

Shakespeare’s texts to create new communities, forge improbable connections, and work toward more just futures. Jill Dolan writes of theatre that can ‘inspire moments in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential’ (2005, 2). Caoimhe McAvinchey sees community-based theatre as, at its best, a place of ‘negotiated togetherness that allows us to identify, articulate, and act upon shared concerns: to jump the ethical gap between the way things are and the way things could be’ (2014, 20). I believe the theatre artists whose work is described in this book—and many more—are using Shakespeare to do just what Dolan and McAvinchey describe: they present what is possible, what is more just, what could be. Shakespeare’s texts are not the magical ingredient here: creativity and kindness are. But his work provides a tool to these community artists, a royalty-free, promiscuously valent, widely recognized set of characters and stories and words, available to theatre-makers almost everywhere. Dolan asks, ‘Is it too much to ask of performance, that it teach us to love and to link us with the world, as well as to see and to think critically about social relations?’ (2005, 23). It is not too much to ask of these artists, and I feel lucky to say that learning from them while researching this book has prompted both reflection on my social relations to my community and expanded my love of the world. I hope that reading about their work can do the same for you.

Works Cited About Harlem Shakespeare Festival. 2020. Harlem Shakespeare Festival. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://harlemshakespearefestival.bookmark.com/about. About L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company. 2013. L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company. Accessed 20 July 2022. http://www.lawsc.net/about_us.html. About Merced Shakespearefest. 2022. Merced Shakespearefest. Accessed 17 September 2022. https://www.mercedshakespearefest.org/about. About Recycled Shakespeare Company. 2022. Recycled Shakespeare Company. Accessed 18 September 2022. https://www.recycledshakespeare.org/about. Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Aguilar, John. 1981. Insider Research: An Ethnography of a Debate. In Anthropologists at Home in North America, ed. Donald A.  Messerschmidt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

54 

K. S. BROKAW

Amerinda. 2022. Accessed 19 September 2022. http://amerinda.org/ main/theater/. Anderson, Benedict. 2006. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Penguin. Balme, Christopher. 1999. Decolonizing the Stage: Theatrical Syncretism and Post-­ Colonial Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barker, Roberta. 2021. Bodies: Gender, Race, and Ability on the Shakespearean Stage. In Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, ed. Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince, 211–227. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Barnes, Todd Landon. 2020. Shakespearean Charity and the Perils of Redemptive Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bethel, Nicolette. 2021. Shakespeare in Paradise. Presentation for Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and the Climate Emergency, online symposium, April 23. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIeqSwL8iWc. Bishop, Claire. 2012. Artificial Hells: Participatory Art and the Politics of Spectatorship. London: Verso. Boal, Augosto. 1974. Teatro de Oprimido. Buenos Ares: Ediciones de la Flore. English edition: Boal, Augosto. 1985. Theatre of the Oppressed (trans. Leal McBride, Charles A. and Maria-Odila. New  York: Theatre Communications Group. Booth, Wayne. 1999. For the Love of It: Amateuring and its Rivals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1984. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Bradbury, Jill. 2019. Protactile Shakespeare: Theater for the DeafBlind. Documentary film. Gallaudet Video Services. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=btB_nePm860 ———. 2022. Audiences, American Sign Language, and Deafness in Shakespeare Performance. Shakespeare Bulletin. 40: 45–67. Brady, Sara. 2000. Welded to the Ladle: Steelbound and Non-Radicality in Community-Based Theatre. TDR/The Drama Review 44 (3): 51–74. Brokaw, Katherine Steele. 2017. Shakespeare as Community Practice. Shakespeare Bulletin 35: 445–461. ———. 2019. Review of Oxford Handbook to Shakespeare and Performance. Shakespeare Quarterly 70: 168–170. Bulman, James, ed. 2017. Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cinpoeş, Nicoleta, Florence March, and Paul Prescott, eds. 2022. Shakespeare on European Festival Stages. London: Arden Bloomsbury.

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

55

Cohen, Leah Hager. 2001. The Stuff of Dreams: Behind the Scenes of an American Community Theater. New York: Penguin Books. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2005. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. Rutgers University Press. ———. 2010. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. Taylor & Francis Group. Conquergood, Dwight. 2013. Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research. In Cultural Struggles: Performance, Ethnography, Praxis, ed. E. Patrick Johnson, 32–46. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Crawford, Kevin. 2005. ‘Tis ten to one this play can never please’: Academic Performance Criticism and Conditional Shakespeare. University of Alabama, PhD dissertation. Delanty, Gerald. 2003. Community: Key Ideas, 1993. London: Routledge. Den, Celeste. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom. June 17. Desmet, Christy, Sujanta Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson, eds. 2019. The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation. London: Routledge. Dionne, Craig, and Partita Kapadia, eds. 2008. Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dobson, Michael. 2011. Shakespeare and Amateur Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Duggan, Patrick, and Victor Ukaegbu. 2013. Reverberations Across Small-Scale British Theatre: Politics, Aesthetics, and Forms. Bristol: Intellect. Eagleton, Terry. 1990. The Ideology of the Aesthetic. London: Blackwell. Elliot, Kamilla. 2020. Theorizing Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Everything to Everybody. 2022. Accessed 19 September 2022. https://everythingtoeverybody.bham.ac.uk. Fişek, Emine. 2019. Theatre & Community. London: Macmillan. Fleishman, Mark. 2012. The Difference of Performance as Research. Theatre Research International 37: 28–37. Flute Theatre. 2022. Accessed 16 September 2022. https://flutetheatre.co.uk. Fournier, Emily. 2020. Interview with Ying-Wei Zhang. July 7. Gard, Robert. 1954. Grassroots Theater: A Search for Regional Arts in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Greenberg, Marissa. 2019. Critically Regional Shakespeare. Shakespeare Bulletin 37: 341–363. Grotowski, Jerzy. 1968. Towards a Poor Theatre. New York: Simon and Schuster. Hambley, Heike. 2017. Interview with Author. February 10. Hartley, Andrew James. 2013. Shakespeare & Political Theatre in Practice. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

56 

K. S. BROKAW

Hartley, Andrew, Kaja Dunn, and Christopher Berry. 2021. Pedagogy: Decolonizing Shakespeare on Stage. In Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, ed. Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince, 171–191. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Harvie, Jen. 2009. Theatre & The City. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Helguera, Pablo. 2011. Education for Socially Engaged Art: A Materials and Techniques Handbook. New York: George Pinto Books. Henderson, Diana, and Stephen O’Neill. 2022. Introduction. In Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation, ed. D.  Henderson and S.  O’Neill, 1–22. London: Bloomsbury. Herold, Niels. 2014. Prison Shakespeare and the Purpose of Performance: Repentance Ritual and the Early Modern. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hetland, Lois, Patricia Palmer, Steve Seidel, Shari Tishman, and Ellen Winner. 2009. The Qualities of Quality: Understanding Excellence in Arts Education. Cambridge, MA: Project Zero, Harvard Graduate School of Education. https://www.wallacefoundation.org/knowledge-­c enter/Documents/ Understanding-­Excellence-­in-­Arts-­Education.pdf. Hiejes, Coen. 2020. Shakespeare, Blackface, and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobart Shakespeareans. 2022. Accessed 24 September 2022 https://www. hobartshakespeareans.org. Holdsworth, Nadine, Jane Milling, and Helen Nicholson, eds. 2017. Theatre, Performance, and the Amateur Turn. Special Issue of Contemporary Theatre Review 27: 1. Hughes, Jenny, and Helen Nicholson, eds. 2016. Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jackson, Shannon. 2008. What is the ‘social’ in Social Practice?: Comparing Experiments in Performance. In Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies, ed. Tracy C. Davis, 136–150. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge. Jarrett-Macauley, Delia. 2016. Shakespeare, Race and Performance: The Diverse Bard. London: Routledge. Joseph, Miranda. 2002. Against the Romance of Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Joubin, Alexa Alice, and Aneta Mancewizc. 2018. Local and Global Myths in Shakespearean Performance. London: Palgrave. Julian, Erin, and Kim Solga. 2021. Ethics: The Challenge of Practicing (and not just representing) Diversity at the Stratford Festival of Canada. In Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, ed. Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince, 192–210. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Kemp, Sawyer. 2019a. Shakespeare in Transition: Pedagogies of Transgender Justice and Performance. In Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

57

Renaissance Literature Matters Now, ed. Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, 36–45. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. ———. 2019b. Transgender Shakespeare Performance: A Holistic Dramaturgy. Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 19: 265–283. Kershaw, Baz. 2007. Theatre Ecology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2016. Toward a Historiography of the Absent: On the Late Pasts of Applied Theatre and Community Performance. In Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, 15–39. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kidnie, M.J. 2008. Shakespeare and the Problem of Adaptation. London: Routledge. Knowles, Ric. 2010. Theatre & Interculturalism. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kuftinec, Sonja. 2003. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Kuppers, Petra. 2019. Community Performance: An Introduction. New  York: Routledge. Landa, Edgar. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, June 12. LaRosa, Mahealani. 2021. In Conversation with Brady Rubin, July 7. Leonard, Robert H., and Ann Kilkelly. 2006. Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight US Communities. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. Levine, Lawrence W. 1988. Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lim, Emily. 2018. Interview with Author, November 20. Mackenzie, Rowan. 2023. Creating Space for Shakespeare: Working with Marginalized Communities. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Mackenzie, Rowan and Robert Shaughnessy, eds. 2019. Applying Shakespeare, a special issue of Critical Survey 31:4. Mackey, Salley. 2016. Performing Location: Place and Applied Theatre. In Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, 107–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Madison, D.  Soyini. 2006. The Dialogic Performative in Critical Ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly 26: 320–324. Maher, Mary Zenet, and Alan Armstrong. 2014. Telling the Story: Oregon Shakespeare Festival Actors. Ashland, OR: Wellstone Press. Marcus, Leah. 2017. How Shakespeare Became Colonial: Editorial Tradition and the British Empire. London: Routledge. McAvinchey, Caoimhe. 2014. Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Merrifield, Andy. 2017. The Amateur: The Pleasures of Doing What You Love. London: Verso.

58 

K. S. BROKAW

Minton, Gretchen. 2020. Shakespeare in Montana: Big Sky Country’s Love Affair with the World’s Most Famous Writer. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. Modenessi, Alfredo Michel. 2019. ‘You say you want a revolution’? Shakespeare in Mexican [Dis]Guise. In The Routledge Handbook to Shakespeare and Global Appropriation, ed. Christy Desmet, Sujanta Iyengar, and Miriam Jacobson. London: Routledge. ———. 2020. De orígenes y originalidades. La traducción de Shakespeare en español hoy día. In Reconstruyendo el canon: Shakespeare y otros clásicos en la dramaturgia y la escena latinoamericana, ed. José Ramón Alcántara, 43–94. México: Universidad Iberoamericana. Muñoz, José Esteban. 1999. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Native Earth. 2022. Accessed 19 September 2022. https://www.nativeearth.ca. Nicholson, Helen. 2005/2014. Applied Drama: The Gift of the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. 2018. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Leary, Niamh, and Jayme M. Yeo. 2021. Our Neighbor Shakespeare. Shakespeare Bulletin 39: 323–335. Orkin, Martin. 2005. Local Shakespeares: Proximations and Power. New  York: Routledge. Parr, Philip. 2019. Interview with Author, January 10. ———. 2020. Interview with Ying-Wei Zhang, July 7. Parrabbola. 2022. Accessed 18 September 2022. http://www.parrabbola.co.uk/. Patterson, Thomas, and Allan Gould. 1999. First Stage: The Making of the Stratford Festival. Richmond Hill, Ontario: Firefly Books. Prescott, Paul. 2021. The Event: Festival Shakespeare. In Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, ed. Peter Kirwan and Kathryn Prince, 49–61. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Purcell, Stephen. 2017a. Shakespeare in Amateur Production. In The Shakespearean World, ed. Jill Levenson and Robert Ormsby, 392–404. London: Routledge. ———. 2017b. Whose Experiment is it Anyway?: Some Models for Practice-as-­ Research in Shakespeare Studies. In Stage Matters: Props, Bodies and Space in Shakespearean Performance, ed. Annalisa Castaldo and Rhonda Knight. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Read, Alan. 1993. Theatre and Everyday Life: An Ethics of Performance. London: Routledge. Ridout, Nicholas. 2013. Passionate Amateurs: Theatre, Communism, and Love. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Riley, Shannon Rose, and Lynette Hunter. 2009. Introduction. In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative

1  COMMUNITY SHAKESPEARE: ACCESS, ADAPTATION, ACTIVISM 

59

Cartographies, ed. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, xv–xxiv. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Robinson, Jo. 2016. Theatre & the Rural. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rogers, Jami. 2022. British Black and Asian Shakespeareans. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Said, Edward W. 1994. Professionals and Amateurs. In Representations of the Intellectual, 65–84. New York: Vintage Books. Sanders, Julie. 2006. Adaptation and Appropriation. London: Routledge. Sayet, Madeleine. 2021. Where Does the Story Meet the Earth? Presentation to Globe4Globe: Shakespeare and the Climate Emergency. Online, April 23. Shakespeare in Paradise. 2022. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://www.shakespeareinparadise.org. Shakespeare South Australia. 2022. Accessed 16 September 2022. https://www. shakespearesouthaustralia.com. Shakespeare Theatre Association. 2022. Accessed 16 September 2022. www. stahome.org. Shepherd, Sam. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Snyder-Young, Dani. 2013. Theatre of Good Intentions: Challenges and Hopes for Theatre and Social Change. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Spry, Tami. 2006. A ‘Performative-I’ Copresence: Embodying the Ethnographic Turn in Performance and the Performative Turn in Ethnography. Text and Performance Quarterly 26: 339–346. Strine, Mary Susan. 1998. Mapping the ‘Cultural Turn’ in Performance Studies. In The Future of Performance Studies: Visions and Revisions, ed. Sheron J. Dailey, 3–9. Annandale, VA: National Communication Association. The Asian Intercultural Archive. 2015. Accessed 18 September 2022. http://a-­s-­i-­a-­web.org/index.php. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, Victor. 1975. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Warren, John T, editor. 2006. Special issue of Text and Performance Quarterly 26.4. Weinberg, Mark S. 2000. Community Based Theatre: A Participatory Model for Social Transformation. Theatre Symposium 8: 22–33. Wendy Wall, Wendy. 2022. Northwestern Prison Education Program. Accessed 19 September 2022. https://sites.northwestern.edu/npep/wendy-­wall/. White, R.S. 2007. Introduction. In Shakespeare’s Local Habitations, ed. Krystyna Kujawińska Courtney and R.S. White, 5–10. Łodź: Łodź University Press. Wickstrom, Maurya. 2012. Performance in the Blockades of Neoliberalism: Thinking the Political Anew. London: Palgrave.

60 

K. S. BROKAW

Williams, Raymond. 1985. Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society. New York: Oxford University Press. Wolfgang, William Floyd. 2021a. Grassroots Shakespeare: Amateur and Community-Based Shakespeare Performance in the United States of America. University of Warwick, PhD dissertation. ———. 2021b. Grassroots Shakespeare: ‘I love Shakespeare, and I live here’: Amateur Shakespeare Performance in American Communities. Shakespeare Bulletin 39: 355–373. Worthen, W.B. 1997. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2014. Shakespeare Performance Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Young, Harvey. 2013. Theatre & Race. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 2

Public Shakespeare: Public Works (New York City) and Public Acts (UK)

If one of the aims of our project is to bring people together with ideas and experiences they would not otherwise have encountered in order to build a more united community, then every moment we can dismantle one of those barriers that has made them feel outside or other or marginalized, we have to seize those opportunities. We say “this is not something you are excluded from: take it and Shakespeare will be all the richer and the better for you having taken it.” —Emily Lim , director of Public Acts (2018) Public Acts shows why theatre matters. It is built on a vision to make world-class theatre that is both socially inclusive and relevant to the communities it serves. —Helen Nicholson , embedded researcher for Public Acts (2019)

On October 23, 2021, Little Amal—the 3.5-meter puppet of a nine-year-­ old girl created by Handspring Puppet Company—arrived outside the National Theatre (NT) of Great Britain, on the south bank of London’s Thames river. A giant symbol of refugee children, the puppet had walked 8000 kilometers from the Syria-Turkey border, reminding the many towns she encountered along her journey to not ‘forget about us’ (‘Walk with Amal’). At the National Theatre (NT), she was greeted by an assembled

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8_2

61

62 

K. S. BROKAW

choir who sang a seemingly perfect song: ‘I am my own way home.’1 It came from a 2018 adaptation of Pericles, part of the National Theatre’s Public Acts program, and was sung by the casts of that production, the program’s 2019 As You Like It and its Caucasian Chalk Circle (originally slated for 2020, performed in 2022). Many of the singers had themselves been refugees to the UK. Some were children; some were elderly. Some were in wheelchairs; some were recently unhoused. None of them were typical performers of Shakespeare at the National Theatre of Great Britain. This chapter is a case study of Public Acts and of Public Works, the program on which it is based and which was developed by New  York City’s Public Theatre. These related programs are community-centered, socially engaged, Shakespeare-heavy (but not exclusively so) endeavors run by major theatrical institutions in NYC and London. Explicitly created to engage community members and work with social organizations that serve marginalized people, they are applied theatre  projects and forms of community-­based theatre (see Chap. 1).2 Acknowledging that all theatre is to some extent rooted in a community, Sonja Kuftinec differentiates that ‘community-based theatre, with its emphasis on participatory artistry and a more direct reflection of its audience base, inflects community in an even more intimate and complex manner’ (2003, xvi). In their community workshops and their large-scale annual performances, Public Acts and Public Works bring hundreds of people together to share experiences of participatory, heavily adapted theatre, and they indeed inflect communities in London and New York in ‘intimate and complex manner[s]’. This chapter has three aims: • To demonstrate the persistent centrality of both Shakespeare and community-based theatre to the histories of the two titans of Anglo-­ American theatre that host Public Works and Public Acts—the Public and the NT—and to briefly explain the importance of Shakespeare and community to a few other influential theatres and movements in both countries.

 A video of this moving performance can be viewed online (UK Londoners Welcome, 2021).  For more on community-based theatre, see Cohen-Cruz (2005, 2010), Hughes and Nicholson (2016), Kuftinec (2003), Leonard and Kilkelly (2006), Jackson (2011), McAvinchey (2014), Nicholson (2014). 1 2

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

63

• To describe and analyze the Public Works and Public Acts programs and the first two Public Acts shows—2018’s Pericles on the National Theatre’s Olivier stage and 2019’s As You Like It, staged in collaboration with and at the venue of Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch—with attention to how the values that guide the programs are made manifest on stage. • To propose that these programs and their productions invite academics, critics, theatre-makers, and audiences to rethink what gets prioritized when it comes to twenty-first-century Shakespearean performance. What follows invites all who are invested in Shakespearean theatre to rethink what matters in its creation. Historically, excellence in the Shakespearean theatre has tended to focus on the work of individuals. As I have discussed elsewhere, critics, audiences, and many Shakespeare-in-performance scholars have since the early twentieth century evaluated productions in terms of their textual fidelity to an authoritative ‘original’ text and in terms of the execution of a directorial ‘concept’ and how the production’s aesthetics represent that concept (Brokaw 2021). While it has been over 25 years since W.B. Worthen argued that Shakespearean productions should be valued for their own creativity and meanings rather than their proximity to an authorized Shakespearean text or idealized historical performance (1997), there is a continued emphasis in actor training and rehearsal rooms on verse-­ speaking, and productions are often still assessed in terms of their ‘justice to the Shakespearean text’ or ‘regard for the poetry’ (quoted in Fricker 2008, 241; Billington 2018). In many productions, extensive resources of time, money, and creativity are spent in service of a concept, and analyses of these production values tend to single out particular directors and designers for praise or derision. Individual achievement—be it by a star actor, an auteur director, or Shakespeare himself—tends to be the focus of theatre training, journalistic reviews, and academic analyses. Public Works and Public Acts ask us to reconsider: to think about the collective good and what can be achieved through collaborative, allied work and play. It asks us to value the creativity in bold adaptation, the radical accessibility to theatre-making and producing, and the emotional and even activist possibilities of performance. These projects invite a reorientation of values, related to the terms discussed in Chap. 1, and expanding the ‘A’ terms that chapter delineates. Public Works and Public Acts move their priorities:

64 

K. S. BROKAW

From (‘Shakespearean’) authenticity to accessibility and application: focusing on how Shakespeare is made comprehensible and relevant to performers and audiences, and how plays can be applied to the real-world contexts in which productions are created and seen. From (textual) authority to adaptation: valuing the creativity involved in adapting Shakespeare to best suit these real-world contexts. From (mere) aesthetics to affect and activism: valuing emotion and engagement, and, more accurately, seeing affect and activist commitment as essential to artistry. From individual achievement to allied and often amateur collaboration: acknowledging the social benefits of collective work and play for all kinds of people, including non-professionals.

The influential Anglo-American theatre institutions described below have positioned their missions and work in a variety of ways vis-à-vis these terms.

A National Theatre for Great Britain Let Shakespeare himself lead us back to the straight and narrow path, for from him, as we shall see, more than from anyone else, derive those influences which … were to lead to … the foundation of a National Theatre. —Geoffrey Whitworth (1951, 22)

It is fitting that the National Theatre should be home to Public Acts, given that the long history of its founding is marked by desires to create a community-­oriented, public-facing theatrical enterprise and to institute a venue for the performance of Shakespeare. Plans for a publicly subsidized NT date back to publisher Effingham Wilson’s 1848 manifesto on the subject, A House for Shakespeare, which calls for accessibility, for a theatre that ‘shall be within reach of all’ (quoted in Rosenthal 2013, 3). When the House of Commons finally passed the bill to fund an NT in 1949, advocate and chronicler Geoffrey Whitworth called the victory ‘the culmination of a long and often disheartening effort on the part of a few stubborn enthusiasts, fighting heavy odds over the space of a century or more’ (1951, 15). To support the campaign for a publicly funded NT, Whitworth had founded the British Dramatic League, an organization to promote amateur as well as professional theatre and to represent artists, educators, and social workers (Whitworth 153–6). For Whitworth, robust, nationwide participation in amateur theatre would create the necessary audience for a

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

65

National Theatre. Whitworth solicited actor-director Harley Granville-­ Barker as chair of the British Dramatic League, and Granville-Barker co-­ authored, with William Archer, Schemes and Estimates for a National Theatre in 1904, which called for an NT that breaks away from the ‘profit-­ making stage’ (quoted in Rosenthal 2013, 9). Granville-Barker and Archer shared Whitworth’s commitment to accessibility, to creating an institution that served all of Britain, not just the elite; they poignantly noted that the eventual theatre building ‘must not even have the air of appealing to a specially literary and cultured class. It must be visibly and unmistakably a popular institution, making a large appeal to the whole community’ (quoted in Whitworth 1951, 53). In their book on amateur theatre, Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling document the crucial role that community theatre played in the movement for an NT. The NT that Whitworth, Archer, and Granville-Barker proposed ‘was to embody much of the spirit of the amateur movement: the rediscovered importance of drama in culture, a space for exemplary, non-commercial, serious drama and a demonstration of theatre as social and public good’ (51). Plans for an NT opening to coincide with the 1916 tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death were dashed by World War I, but the war itself gave Whitworth more evidence that there was a national need for what he called ‘community theatre writ large’. He describes British troops creating a ‘reading circle’ in which they’d perform plays with no set and makeshift props for their fellow soldiers: Here was the art of theatre reduced to its simplest terms, yet in this very reduction triumphant … these players were simply following their own instincts, satisfying their own need … but in doing so they were satisfying also the need of the community. Givers and receivers were one. (1951, 148–9)

A century later, the NT’s first Public Acts production that would grace the National Theatre stage—the 2018 Pericles—was not ‘simple’ in terms of its scenography, but one might argue that, with its focus on community need and amateur creativity, it has come as close as any NT production to recreating the participatory spirit of those World War I grassroots productions that Whitworth found so inspiring. Despite Whitworth’s advocacy, Nicholson, Holdsworth, and Milling note that by the time the NT building finally opened in 1975, there existed ‘a firm separation between the professional activity of the National and of all that the “amateur” might represent, with little mention of the relentless

66 

K. S. BROKAW

role of advocacy that the British Drama League had played in the National Theatre’s past’ (2018, 53). But by 2018, when I first met the NT’s director of learning Alice King-Farlow, she quoted Granville-Barker and Whitworth, explaining that Public Acts was a return to the intentions of NT’s early advocates. Equally important to the founding of the NT as the British Drama League’s community-centered vision was a dream for a London theatre that would stage Britain’s national playwright. Wilson’s 1848 proposal and the early twentieth-century efforts of Whitworth, Granville-Barker, Archer, and others all sought to establish London as the center for Shakespearean performance. They wanted to ensure that despite the success of David Garrick’s 1769 Shakespeare jubilee in Stratford-on-Avon, the future of Shakespearean performance would be London-based. By 1879, when Wilson’s call had gone nowhere, a Warwickshire brewer had funded the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre on the banks of the Avon; it was rebuilt after a fire in 1932 and renamed the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in 1961, home then and now to the publicly funded Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC). In response to the Stratford projects, the NT movement joined forces with the Shakespeare Memorial National Theatre committee (established 1908) to advocate for a home for Shakespeare in the capital to rival the one in Stratford. Throughout the decades leading to the 1949 passage of the parliamentary bill to fund an NT, the NT’s initial seasons in the Old Vic theatre (1963–1974) and the 1975 opening of the NT building on the South Bank of London, ‘Shakespeare was the adhesive that prevented the whole ramshackle crusade from falling apart’ (Shaughnessy 2018, 3). The two men responsible for artistically launching the National Theatre in the mid-twentieth century were both prominent Shakespeareans. Actor-­ director Laurence Olivier was the first artistic director of the NT, beginning in 1962. Peter Hall took over a decade later, fresh from serving as founding director of the RSC, and he supervised the move into the permanent building. When Hall became artistic director, he evoked not the singular dead playwright but something closer to Whitworth and Granville-­ Barker’s vision: ‘The theatre is a living element of our community,’ he proclaimed (Hall 1972, 7), and the NT should open its doors to ‘the fringe, to musicians, to poets, to the young with their experiments’ (quoted in in Elsom and Tomalin 1978, 251). Hall’s own directorial work, however, was, like many RSC directors, defined by a firm commitment to Shakespearean textual authority (Holland 2013).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

67

In the twenty-first century, Nicholas Hytner turned to Shakespeare for his first play after assuming the National Theatre’s artistic directorship in 2003. His aim was to connect Henry V to the Iraq war, making the case for how the play allows London-based audiences to contemplate how ‘war leaders have always gone to great lengths to massage the case for war and the South Bank of the Thames, in 1599 as in 2003, was the place people gathered to work out what they felt about it’ (Hytner 2010, x). For Hytner, adapting to the contemporary contexts of time and place made the plays worth doing. When Rufus Norris took over the NT in 2015, his emphasis was decidedly not on Shakespeare (his 2018 Macbeth was the first Shakespeare play he had directed in 25 years). Announcing the programming for his inaugural season, Norris proclaimed that ‘the work we make over the coming years will strive to be as open, as diverse, as collaborative and as national as possible’ (quoted in Bannister 2015). It was under Norris that Emily Lim was brought on to spearhead Public Acts, the project that prompted Carol Homden, CEO of partner organization Coram,  to proclaim that ‘for a moment in time the National Theatre was genuinely a theatre of the nation’ (Nicholson 2019, 18).

Joan Littlewood and Other British Community-Based Theatre We are in the age of community. My belief is in the genius of each person and this form of collaboration can reveal something unique, which is more important than any one producer superimposing on a cast. —Joan Littlewood, Talking about Theatre, 1964 (quoted in Holdsworth 2018, 48)

While the story of Shakespearean theatre in Britain tends to favor endeavors in Stratford-on-Avon and Central London, it is in the theatre of another Stratford—London suburb Stratford East—that one finds the most influential example of twentieth-century socially conscious and community-­engaged British theatre. Joan Littlewood’s work only occasionally engaged with Shakespeare, but programs like Public Works and Public Acts owe much in terms of their practices and priorities to the way she rethought the role of community and collaboration in the theatre. Littlewood is so pivotal to this kind of work in Britain that Helen Nicholson’s book Applied Theatre begins with an account of her impact. For Littlewood, as Nicholson explains, ‘theatre practice, social efficacy,

68 

K. S. BROKAW

citizenship, and community-building … were part of the same political project’ (2). Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop, founded in 1945, toured working-­ class areas of the country with political plays until moving into the Theatre Royal in Stratford East in 1953. In her decades of work, she was a pioneer of creative, collaborative ensembles and of working with local community members: she worked with Trades Unions and groups engaged in political struggles when building her audiences (Holdsworth 2018, 9). In rehearsal rooms, she and her colleagues ‘rejected the more familiar text-driven approach of the English tradition in favor of an eclectic, textured, European aesthetic’ based on movement and improvisation, techniques that are seen today in many applied theatre rehearsal rooms, including those of Public Works and Public Acts (ibid., 13). Theatre Workshop produced a combination of new work and adapted classics, and Littlewood was less interested in poetry or creating star vehicles for the performance of that poetry than in offering bold and relevant interpretations of plays and ‘ferociously egalitarian team-work’ (ibid., 24, 25, 49). Littlewood was anti-authority and unconcerned with stardom, preferring to work with ‘willing amateurs, ordinary working people, and those prepared to explore beyond the limits of their social, cultural, and theatrical inhibitions’ (47). Her approaches to making theatre—which were underfunded and often scorned at the time—are far closer to those of Public Acts and Public Works than the celebrity-studded, verse-driven work usually done in the twentieth century by the NT and RSC. That is, Littlewood valued adaptation, access, and activism over textual authority or individual achievement. With little public funding, Littlewood’s Theatre Workshop staged political, conscience-raising works until the mid-1970s, the most famous being the 1963 World War I musical parody Oh What a Lovely War! While most twentieth-century British theatre was focused more on entertainment than politics or activism, when this pacifist play transferred to the West End, political theatre ‘had finally arrived in the cultural mainstream’ (Paget 2004, 397). Public Works and Public Acts, while being less overtly political than Littlewood, are engaged in the kind of affective, accessible, socially conscious work that Littlewood did much to seed and grow in mid-twentieth-century Britain. She and her company developed many practices that are employed by Public Works and Public Acts: adapting classical texts heavily, focusing on movement and emotion, and creating opportunities for versatile character actors and amateurs rather than reifying individual professionals (Holdsworth 2018, 25, 13, 47).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

69

Littlewood and her colleagues were not the only people doing community-­ engaged theatre in twentieth-century Britain. After World War II, the UK’s first new postwar theatre, the Belgrade in Coventry, emphasized theatre education ‘to promote theatre and develop young people both therapeutically and as leaders’ (Shepherd 2009, 215). In the 1970s, alternative ‘fringe’ theatres experimented with avant-garde techniques and confrontational, often activist performances while other regional-based theatres worked to expand their audiences with more accessible theatre. In both unconventional and more mainstream community-­ based theatre projects, there was a focus on process over product and on participation rather than passive spectatorship. After Tony Blair’s Labour Government took power in 1997, a number of public-­ facing, socially engaged art projects were funded in the UK, including many related to theatre education.3 In the twenty-first century, there are enough community-engaged theatre projects in the UK that Public Acts director Emily Lim was able to name check several of them when describing the good company the NT’s project keeps: ‘The Royal Exchange, Birmingham Rep, Slung Low, National Theatre Scotland, National Theatre Wales and Sheffield Crucible’ (quoted in Swain 2018).4 Public Acts’ Pericles, the inaugural Public Acts show, was not even the first community-engaged Pericles in London. That honor goes to a production by Cardboard Citizens, a company made up of unhoused and formerly unhoused performers in London, who teamed up with the RSC in 2003 for a Pericles. As with Chris Bush’s Pericles for Public Acts 15 years later, the production was heavily adapted and figured Pericles as a sort of refugee figure (Jackson 2009). By the time Public Acts began its workshops in 2017, there were many community-engaged theatre projects in the UK, and many of them centered on or included Shakespeare. The visions of those earliest advocates for a National Theatre that engaged wider communities and staged Shakespeare were finally being realized across the country. This activity carries on despite a lack of public funding to arts and arts education due to economic downturns and, since 2010, the austerity agenda of the 3   A number of New Labour-era theatre projects are described and analyzed in McAvinchey (2014). 4  Lyn Gardner also points to the leadership of Scotland’s and Wales’s NTs, saying that National Theatre Wales’s 2011 collaboration with Wildworks and the people of Port Talbot, The Passion, was ‘one of the greatest theatrical experiences of the century, offer[ing] a signpost to how engagement and art could walk cheek by jowl’ (Gardner 2019).

70 

K. S. BROKAW

ruling Conservative Party; COVID has further diminished financial support for UK arts. But of the projects that have survived into the 2020s, many continue using the out-of-copyright and adaptable work of the UK’s most famous playwright. Across the Atlantic, in the US, the development of community-based theatre in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries is also tied to several Shakespearean projects.

The 1916 Shakespearean Tercentenary Pageant (NYC) A state theatre must not be a theatre which is applied to the community from without or from above; it cannot be the perfected dream of artists; it must spring from the dreams and needs of the everyday person, the need for expression of the whole community. —Louise Burleigh, in 1917 (quoted in Smialkowska 2014, 329)

When Public Works co-founder Lear deBessonet describes the project’s precedent, she refers to a 1916 community masque called Caliban in the Yellow Sands that was staged in New York City and Boston for the tercentenary of Shakespeare’s death (‘Announcing Public Works’ 2013). Caliban, as it came to be known, was part of the early twentieth-century pageant tradition, a movement which Sonja Kuftinec identifies as central to the development of community-based theatre across the country (2003, 26). Caliban was the brainchild of civic theatre enthusiast Percy MacKaye. Its New  York performances had a cast of 1500 amateur and 47 professional actors and were seen by around 300,000 people (Shapiro 2020, 148). MacKaye’s adaptation focused on Prospero’s ‘education’ of Caliban: it was a collage show in which the ‘uncivilized’ wretch watched scenes from various Shakespeare plays along with pan-European songs and dances, gradually becoming more reformed before, in the end, bowing to the greatness of Prospero-cum-Shakespeare, the ultimate theatrical authority. As James Shapiro explains, the pageant was staged at a time of contentious debate regarding a massive influx of immigrants to the US. Caliban, whose many performers came from a number of (primarily European) ethnic groups, was meant to address the shared humanity of these newcomers. How it did so was heavily assimilationist: for MacKaye, the solution to resolving a growing community’s tensions between individual differences was to subsume them all into a unified Anglo-American

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

71

culture, suppressing other traditions. But as Shapiro clarifies, ‘MacKaye’s views on immigration resist easy categorization. The one thing he did believe was that if anything was going to break down the barriers separating “new” and “old” Americans it was participatory theater’ (ibid., 164). MacKaye wanted the theatre to do more than simply entertain the elite: he was trying to address many of the issues of access that concerned generations of National Theatre planners in the UK and that would later preoccupy New  York City Shakespeare Festival founder Joe Papp. Monika Smialkowska emphasizes MacKaye’s belief in theatre’s ‘potential to raise social awareness, educate, and integrate disparate groups within American society’ (2014, 328), a proposition MacKaye articulated in his 1912 volume The Civic Theatre. When, a few years later, Louise Burleigh coined the term ‘community theatre’, MacKaye preferred her phrase (ibid., 328). He was disgusted with what he saw as a shirking of social duties by private, profit-driven theatres, and sought to transform the whole enterprise into ‘the theatre as it ought to be: a properly qualified public institution’ (quoted in Smialkowska 328). MacKaye talked a good talk about creating an inclusive, socially conscious Public Theatre that combatted charges of elitism. Practically and thematically, though, Caliban fell short: most of its amateur actors came from upscale organizations (The German University League, the Alliance Française), and MacKaye didn’t invite Yiddish performers from the Lower East Side or Black actors from Harlem, both of which communities had recently staged Shakespeare. The show’s characterization of Caliban as a hopeless savage in need of reform from a benevolent Anglo-Saxon Prospero was both racist and classist. However, MacKaye’s project created a model on which others could later improve: engagement with extant urban community organizations and collaboration with them on a large-scale show, as Public Works and Public Acts would do, and presenting outdoor stagings of free Shakespeare, as Papp’s New York City Shakespeare Festival and countless others across the world would do.

Joe Papp, the New York City Shakespeare Festival, and the Public Theatre While the directors were interested in directing Shakespeare, I was interested in a larger idea. I was interested in the social aspects of how you use Shakespeare. I was interested, so to speak, in Shakespeare for the masses. —Joe Papp (quoted in Turan and Papp 2010, 76)

72 

K. S. BROKAW

As a program of the Public Theatre, Public Works is a descendent of the New  York Shakespeare Festival, founded by one of the mid-twentieth-­ century great American advocates of civic theatre, Joe Papp. The US does not have a publicly funded National Theatre,5 but the Public Theatre can claim to be its most influential and socially engaged dramatic organization, producing everything from Shakespeare in Central Park to Hair to Hamilton since its foundation in the 1950s. Like the NT, its history is bound up in the twinned desires to produce Shakespeare and to make theatre more accessible and community-engaged. For the New  York Shakespeare Festival, now subsumed and administered by the Public, these desires were two parts of a singular vision. Since its earliest days performing low-budget Shakespeare in a church and an outdoor amphitheater to the opening of the outdoor Delacorte Theatre in Central Park (1962) and indoor Public Theatre in Astor Place (1966),6 the Public has created numerous community-engaged Shakespeare programs as well as new works of American theatre. Papp’s original vision, like Whitworth’s and Granville-Barker’s for the National Theatre of Great Britain, was anti-elitist. But he also imagined an organization dedicated to what we now call applied theatre, emphasizing the affective and transformative rather than the aesthetic and entertaining. In his words, he had a feeling that culture, by itself, was not significant. It had to be always doing something for the masses, for ordinary people, not just servicing an elite. When I got into doing Shakespeare, the whole idea was to give it to people in the parks so that there would be large numbers there who might be influenced. I don’t believe in knowledge for its own sake. My first question is: “What do

5  The National Theatre in Washington, D.C. is privately owned and operated. The US’s first and only public National Theatre, which entertained many US Presidents, was closed in 1948 when its producers failed to address the demands of Actors Equity to desegregate theatre audiences and companies. In other words, racism closed the US National Theatre. For more, listen to the Folger’s Shakespeare Unlimited episode ‘Shakespeare in Black and White’ (Sheir 2015). 6  James Shapiro notes that Papp was conscious of the fact that the Astor Place location was near the location of the 1849 Astor Place riots, a violent clash between Shakespearean audiences of differing social backgrounds: ‘Astor Place remains a contentious site, straddling the cultural divide of New York’s West and East Village. Joe Papp understood its significance when he established the Public Theater—providing free Shakespeare for all—in an Astor Place building a stone’s throw from where the Opera House had stood’ (2020, 107).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

73

you do with it? How can you turn it into something meaningful?” (quoted in in Turan and Papp 2010, 23)

For Papp, it is the context in which a play is performed that matters. Director Daniel Petrie recalls Papp talking to him about his ‘dream of free Shakespeare’, remembering that ‘the emphasis for Joe was political as opposed to artistic, to give something to the masses’ (ibid., 51). In addition to offering free Shakespeare to his fellow city dwellers, Papp wanted to Americanize Shakespeare, to adapt it so it sounded and felt accessible to modern-day New Yorkers. Actor Joe Spinell articulates what he saw as Papp’s success in getting ordinary folks like his own working-­ class family to ‘dig’ Shakespeare: For the most part, Americans really couldn’t give two shits for Shakespeare because they couldn’t understand it. Joseph Papp wanted to use American actors and bring it to people in a simplified manner. Regular people in the neighborhood started coming—my mother, my sister, my girlfriend from high school. And they were getting into it, they were digging it, which is the greatest tribute I can give to him. (ibid., 68)

Making Shakespeare more American and more accessible meant modern-­ dress stagings and the use of actors’ natural American accents. Casting was also crucial. Papp began casting non-white actors—primarily Black and Puerto Rican—in prominent Shakespearean roles in the 1950s, a fact Ayanna Thompson recalls when pointing out that ‘non-traditional casting’ is hardly ‘new’ (2011, 71). In 1971, fresh off the success of Hair, New  York Shakespeare Festival rehired Hair’s composer to turn Two Gentlemen of Verona into a 90-minute musical starring Black and Puerto Rican actors as the four lovers.7 While Papp didn’t live to see the advent of Public Works at the theatre he founded, the program’s 90-minute musical format, primarily non-white casts from all walks of life, and emphasis on social engagement as much as artistry follow a model Papp and his collaborators created. To reach communities where they are, Papp started the Public’s Mobile Unit, which in 1957 began touring New York City with productions of 7  For a full account of this production from people involved with it as well as critics, see Turan and Papp (2010, 244–56). Shockingly, this all-but-forgotten show won the Tony for Best Musical in 1972, beating out Grease and Stephen Sondheim’s Follies as well as the unnominated Jesus Christ Superstar.

74 

K. S. BROKAW

free Shakespeare, as it still does today. Former New  York Shakespeare Festival assistant Anna Kingsbury Resch recalls an early performance: In 1965 I went up to Harlem with Bernie Gersten to see the mobile unit production of Taming of the Shrew at a school playground. Everyone there was [B]lack, and all the seats were absolutely filled. There were people hanging out of their apartment windows, people climbing up on the fence to watch. (quoted in Turan and Papp 2010, 11)

Today, the Mobile Unit performs for free in prisons, parks, homeless shelters, community centers, and libraries across the city (‘Mobile Unit’ 2022). But while the Mobile Unit could be accused of a sort of cultural imperialism—bringing Shakespearean performances to communities and then leaving them once the show is over—the Public Works program (as well as the new Mobile Unit in Corrections program) enacts a different model, involving community members as collaborative co-creators of art, not merely consumers of it. Papp’s legacy expands beyond New  York: the notion of ‘free Shakespeare in the Park’ is now a nationwide tradition in the US, reaching everywhere from West Palm Beach, Florida, to my adopted town of Merced, California. Most summers (2020 and 2021 being recent exceptions), these free park shows reach hundreds of thousands of spectators.8 At the time of writing, Oskar Eustis is the Public’s artistic director, having taken up the role in 2005. He describes the importance of Papp’s original vision—free Shakespeare in the Park—to a post-COVID outbreak world. Discussing the Public’s 2021 Merry Wives of Windsor, a ‘celebration of Black joy’ set in Harlem, Eustis thrice repeats a key word: ‘It is the beginning of a reemergence into a community. Our sense of ourselves as a community has been eaten away; we have all retreated into our personal lives. This is a return to public life, to coming back to being a community’ (Vollandes 2021, emphases mine). While Central Park Shakespeare is a cultural mainstay, when asked about the most important things he’s done at the Public, Eustis lists three things: his revival of Angels in America, Hamilton, and Public Works (‘Announcing Public Works’ 2013).

8  William Wolfgang found that as of 2021, there were 320 active Shakespeare companies in the US, of which 125 are amateur or grassroots groups (2021, 355).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

75

Cornerstone Theater and American Community-Engaged Shakespeare [Cornerstone’s] adaptations enacted a philosophy of artistic inclusion; company members felt that locating classical texts within a contemporary, local setting allowed community participants to reclaim these stories —Sonja Kuftinec (2003, 48)

When Public Works began in 2014, the format of the program resembled the work of Cornerstone Theatre, founded in 1986 by Bill Rauch and Alison Carey. Cornerstone spent its first years travelling to rural towns and working with community members to adapt and perform classical drama that addressed local issues. In 1992, they established a permanent home in Los Angeles and have been working primarily but not exclusively with urban L.A. communities ever since (they have also done projects that partner with other theatres in the US). In the academic study of community-based theatre in North America, accounts of Cornerstone are ubiquitous, and one of the first substantial monographs to study community-based theatre is an analysis of Cornerstone, Sonja Kuftinec’s Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater (2003). In their study of American grassroots theatre, Robert H.  Leonard and Anne Kilkelly write that ‘from artistic techniques to organizational structures, Cornerstone Theater demonstrates a career-long commitment to equality in artistic partnerships with communities’ (2006, 80). In Engaging Performance, Jan Cohen-Cruz makes similar claims: ‘Cornerstone’s choices suggest that the most important element in a production is not the play as written by the playwright, but rather the relationship with the people of the community in which it is being presented’ (2010, 32). Cornerstone’s 35 years of work (at the time of writing) provide three important points of connection with the practices of Public Works and Acts: firstly, the adaptive model of localizing classical texts to address a particular community, as practiced especially in Cornerstone’s early years; secondly, the use of casts including a handful of professional artists co-creating theatre with community members who primarily don’t have performing arts training, as Cornerstone has always done; and thirdly, the creation of lasting partnerships with social organizations across an urban center, as Cornerstone has been doing since moving to L.A.

76 

K. S. BROKAW

While Cornerstone produces more commissioned new writing these days, in the early years, most of their plays were adaptations of extant works. Shakespeare features prominently: there’s a Hamlet in the tiny North Dakota town of Marmarth (1986), a collaboration with the Public and Lower East Side high schoolers called Two Noble Brothers (1997), and a touring production of California: The Tempest (2013) for three examples. They’ve also adapted classical Greek drama; plays by Ibsen, Chekhov, Brecht, Wilder, and Noel Coward; and classical Sanskrit and Chinese stories (Kuftinec 2003, 10). One reason for the adaptations is practical: these texts are old enough to be in the common domain and thus easily and affordably adapted. Their most documented early show, Steelbound (1999, a partnership with Touchstone Theatre), is an adaptation of Prometheus Bound set and performed in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, which was suffering the economic and social effects of losing its steel-working plants and jobs. Rather than assuming that ancient Greek culture was somehow ‘universal’ and would speak to Bethlehem residents, they focused on the community’s varied human experiences, exploring and presenting them through a radically localized adaptation. Adaptation thus allows for heterogenous community stories to be told, while bringing those stories together under the umbrella of an older story. Speaking of their work in the Watts neighborhood after the L.A. riots, Kuftinec writes: Cornerstone’s work proposes that when the residents of Watts claim and contextualize these stories, they enact social and political power. The rewriting of classic texts in the voice of the community prevents these texts from being selectively isolated for a middle-class audience or for university students. (2003, 141)

Bill Rauch explains that Cornerstone’s adaptations don’t idolize Shakespearean textual authority and don’t ask the participants and audiences to ‘rise to the level of the work’ by tackling old stories and complex language. Rather, ‘these classic plays need to rise to the level of the community’ (quoted ibid., 141). Public Acts director Emily Lim said something very similar to me, expressing the notion that these timeworn texts—not the communities—are put to the test in these projects. Referring to the Watts adaptation of Brecht’s Caucasian Chalk Circle, Cohen-Cruz writes, ‘It is not the Watts community that must prove itself capable of grasping Brecht’s text, but Caucasian Chalk Circle, the relevance of which

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

77

is tested in this particular context’ (2010, 34). The needs of the present— and of the community being served—are always more relevant and urgent than fidelity to a dead playwright’s words. As it happens, an adaptation by Chris Bush of Caucasian Chalk Circle was Public Acts’ first non-­London-­ area-based (and first non-Shakespearean) production; it was scheduled for summer 2020 and postponed until 2022 because of the COVID pandemic (Vinter 2022). Performers in Cornerstone productions are primarily people who have never or rarely acted before, and that lack of experience is central to the company’s stated purpose to bring professionals together with ‘people who would never think of themselves as artists to produce works of excellence based on the stories, concerns, and issues of a given community’ (‘About Cornerstone Theater’ 2022). Access to not only theatre but also to collaborative theatre-making is at the heart of their enterprise. Cornerstone’s L.A.-based work provides a model for Public Works and Public Acts in its commitment to partnering with social organizations like homeless shelters, youth centers, and veterans’ organizations. In Watts, for example, Cornerstone held benefit performances for local health clinics and began working with organizations that served communities defined by things like culture, age, and sexuality, not just geography. It is perhaps not entirely coincidental that Public Works and Acts should mirror Cornerstone in some of its practices. At the time of writing, Public Works is headed by Laurie Woolery, who spent eight years as associate director of Cornerstone. Woolery asserts that for both theatre projects, ‘everything is centered around: How do we create opportunity and access for folks who don’t traditionally feel they are welcome in theatre spaces?’ (quoted in Snook 2018). While I have focused on the well-documented work of Cornerstone, there are hundreds of community-engaged theatre companies across North America.9 As mentioned in Chap. 1, many North American Shakespeare festivals run community-engaged programs, including prison arts programs at places like Marin Shakespeare Company and Shakespeare Notre Dame, and school programs at Colorado Shakespeare Festival, Shakespeare in Detroit, Atlanta’s Shakespeare Tavern, and many more. Dozens of these projects are funded by the National Endowment for the Arts’ Shakespeare in American Communities program, which since 2003 has given funding to theatres to create Shakespeare-focused educational 9

 For accounts of eight such projects, see Leonard and Kilkelly (2006).

78 

K. S. BROKAW

programs for ‘underserved’ communities.10 Additionally, nine theatres in the US now have their own Public Works program (Public Works 2022). As with all chapters of this book, my focus on Public Works and Public Acts should not imply that these are the only or best examples of this work, but by virtue of being based at well-funded theatre companies in the two theatre capitals of the English-speaking world, they are two of the most prominent and influential.

Public Works, New York City (Public Theater) You know what? We still are what we were 60 years ago. We are a theatre for the people. —Oskar Eustis on Public Works (Announcing Public Works 2013)

When Lear deBessonet and her colleagues Oskar Eustis and Shirley Brice Heath designed Public Works, they knew they wanted to create a program that culminated in a ‘pageant’ that rivalled the 1916 Caliban production in its spectacle, but whose cast of around 200 would be far more inclusive so that ‘the full spectrum of humanity … is on stage together’ (Announcing Public Works 2013). DeBessonet directed that first pageant, which, in further homage to the 1916 production, was an adaption of The Tempest. While the first Public Works show had many artistic merits, its most important contribution was the creation of the Public Works model, on which the NT’s Public Acts and several other partner theatres have based their programs.11 The pageant is but the culmination of a year-long process of working closely with several community partner organizations to cultivate relationships and embark on mutual learning between participants and theatre artists. These organizations come from all five of New  York City’s boroughs and offer social programming to domestic workers, children, seniors, people who have experienced incarceration, and military veterans. Public Works offers the participants in these organizations tailor-made classes, monthly community-building potlucks, and opportunities to attend performances at the Public. They invite everyone involved in these smaller events to take part in ‘the creation of ambitious 10  For critiques and analyses of Shakespeare in American communities, see Thompson (2011, 131–4) and Shapiro (2020, 228–9). 11  Dallas Theatre Center and Seattle Repertory theatre were founding partners along with the NT, and in 2019 seven additional US-based theatres created their own Public Works programs (Public Works 2022).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

79

works of participatory theater’, that is, the annual pageants that take place in the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park (Public Works 2022). Community participants tend to have limited experience of the performing arts (though there are notable exceptions), and current Public Works director Laurie Woolery explains that ‘the perfect Public Works participant is someone who never imagined themselves on the stage at all’ (Hard Won Joy 2018). Crucial to this project is that the work is, in contrast to a Broadway show, ‘with, by, and for New Yorkers’, in Woolery’s words (quoted in Barra and Issa 2020). The casts and production team are united by place—they are all New Yorkers—but they represent a variety of neighborhoods and affinity communities. The programming, production process, and shows themselves thus create new communities of artists brought together for a shared purpose. Helen Nicholson, an embedded researcher for the first two years of Public Acts, describes the program model as designed around a set of principles and partnership-led work rather than a fixed formula. Public Acts in London followed Public Work’s crowd-­pleasing tradition of staging musical adaptations with large casts, and shared their social ambition to restore and build community through theatre. It was also indebted to the inclusive working practices developed in applied theatre, young people’s theatre and the disability theatre movement. (Nicholson 2020, 25)

Nicholson’s description lays my groundwork for analyzing this program and its productions on their own terms, that is, by focusing on the way this theatre practice is • Guided by principles: staying mission-driven in logistics, rehearsal, design, and production; • Accessible: being boldly inclusive in rehearsal and design processes, and striving for relevance and understanding in crowd-pleasing productions; • Adaptive of source material: applying classical texts to a community’s challenges and making theatre that is relevant not just to the time but also to the place of performance; • Affective and socially activist: creating emotionally engaging theatre that tackles relevant social issues;

80 

K. S. BROKAW

• Centered on and allied with amateur performers: giving community organizations and their members shared performance experiences. The Public Works website sums up the above by explaining that the originating program ‘aims to restore and build community by connecting people through the creation of extraordinary works of art … Public Works seeks to create a space where we can not only reflect on the world as it is, but where we can propose new possibilities for what our society might be’ (Public Works 2022).

Public Acts, London and the UK (National Theatre of Great Britain) As someone who has worked at the National for a very long time, I can say that this was the first time that the theatre connected me with the London I see on my street. —Helen Casey, Deputy Head of Wigs, Hair and Makeup, National Theatre, on Public Acts (quoted in Nicholson 2019, 27)

Public Acts, launched in 2017, shares Public Works’ practices and ambitions, working with community organizations across the ‘complex and fragmented’ city of London to bring ‘people together from across the city with different backgrounds, faiths, ages, abilities, cultures, and life histories to make theatre’ (Nicholson 2020, 7). This theatre, in program director Emily Lim’s words about the project to me, is ‘the city celebrating itself as a microcosm of this country, celebrating what it can be when we have the most inclusive understanding of ourselves’ (2018). Rufus Norris hired Lim ‘to explore how community-engaged work can sit right at the heart of what the National does’ (Swain 2018). The inaugural production of Pericles in 2018, directed by Lim (see Fig. 2.1), was the first time the NT gave the Olivier stage—its largest and most prestigious space—and its full artistic resources to a project focused on community performers. Lim had worked with Norris on we’re here because we’re here, Jeremy Deller’s living memorial to the dead of World War I, which was performed by 1600 volunteers in train stations and shopping centers across the UK on July 1, 2016, the 100th anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. In that project and in Public Works, Lim’s ‘ambition has always been to find meaningful ways of using theatre as a force for social change’ (quoted in Swain 2018). Lim was able to visit New York to meet

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

81

Fig. 2.1  Emily Lim rehearsing with the cast of Pericles. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)

with the Public Works team and see their processes and shows firsthand. She was also inspired by community arts organizations like the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra and Company Three (formerly Islington Community Theatre), of which she is an associate artist (ibid.). The NT’s level of commitment to the project impressed playwright Chris Bush, who explained that ‘everyone is really hands on, from Rufus [Norris] all the way down … What is a National Theatre if it’s not putting the community at the heart of it?’ (quoted in Marcolina 2018). Indeed, the commitment of substantial financial, physical, logistical, and artistic resources from the Public and the NT allows these programs their ambition. As with Public Works, the organizations with which Public Acts associates tend to be less well resourced. The nine partners that worked with the 2018 Pericles and 2019 As You Like It include community centers, trauma support groups, inter-faith organizations, and social programs for children, for elderly and disabled people, for the unhoused and recently unhoused, and for people struggling with poverty. In 2019, the NT partnered with Queen’s Theatre in Hornchurch, Essex, to produce As You Like It in its theatre and with its staff, and their 2022 Caucasian Chalk

82 

K. S. BROKAW

Circle was a co-production with Cast Theatre in Doncaster and six partner organizations in that Yorkshire town. Their 2023 project, an Odyssey, will be staged in five parts and in five locations: Stoke-on-Trent, Doncaster, Trowbridge, Sunderland, and London (back on the Olivier stage); each segment was written by a local playwright. Unlike Public Works, then, the program’s ambitions are truly national: after Pericles was performed in the Olivier, subsequent programming has reached further from the power-­ center of British theatre. To begin the first program, NT staff met with 80 organizations: they sought partners who were excited about the project, had the space and stability to support its work, and didn’t yet have much in terms of their own arts programming. NT staff explained that their workshops would be specially designed for their organization and focused on ‘creation and collective imagining’ rather than simply skills, in the words of NT director of learning Alice King-Farlow. King-Farlow also emphasized, when I spoke to her, that the learning would be mutual: theatre wasn’t a gift that NT artists would bestow upon the ‘underserved’, but was rather a site of exchange and collaboration that would benefit all parties (2018). While the NT’s initial goal was to form two-year relationships with the London-­ based organizations, their work with them is, at the time of writing, ongoing, and there were a number of pandemic-era projects, like YouTube videos and the welcoming of Little Amal, and the return to London and Doncaster for the 2023 Odyssey. Because this book is about performing Shakespeare in communities, I will now turn to the first two Public Acts productions, Pericles and As You Like It. DeBessonet, when describing her vision for Public Works, said that productions show ‘rigorous art making and community building … holding hands’ (Hard Won Joy 2018). My analyses of these two productions focus on that marriage of art-making and community-building, with attention to how the programs’ values guide theatre-making that is accessible, adaptive, affective, and activist, and done in allyship with amateurs.

Public Acts’ Pericles (2018) Has the National Theatre ever felt as open, compassionate, and heartfelt as this? … what might have been a total mess turns out to be mesmerizing: a giddy celebration of humanity and our endless capacity for warmth, togetherness, and love. —Miriam Gillinson, reviewing Pericles in The Guardian (2018)

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

83

Much creativity, care, and organization were needed to mount a relatively obscure Shakespeare and Wilkins play on the stage of the Olivier with a cast of 236 primarily non-professional actors aged 4–79, and ensuring it was not a ‘total mess’ but instead garnered a five-star review from The Guardian. Lim was clear from the start that the production values for Pericles needed to be the best the NT had to offer: ‘The productions have to live up to the community: from the set design to the costumes and the quality of the writing, every element … has to meet the expectation of excellence that we are asking everyone to aspire to’ (Nicholson 2020, 27–8). The NT assembled a top-notch team to collaborate with Lim: playwright Chris Bush, who had worked with the community-based Sheffield People’s Theatre, wrote the adaptation and song lyrics, Jim Fortune composed the music, Fly Davis designed the set, Tarek Merchant music directed, and Robby Graham choreographed the show. Their first task was to select a play to adapt. To make that decision, Lim explained, ‘we spent a lot of time asking what story demands that it is told by its community … I am always looking for material that will be amazing not despite the fact but because you are making it with non-professionals’ (2018). They needed a story that was epic enough to be told by a huge cast, but intimate enough to connect disparate groups of people to the story. In Pericles, Lim said, they found a play that is both epic and universal, and seismic and totally intimate and profoundly quiet. It is the story of a huge global voyage and a journey to understanding one’s place in the world through one’s relationship with one’s family. But that’s the key thing: it’s also at its heart just the story of a man whose heart gets broken and has to rebuild himself.

Had such a story been written by someone besides Shakespeare, ‘we might have gone with that’ (2018). That is not to say that the text of Pericles didn’t need a lot of work before it was ready for its community cast. Lim reflected: Pericles is problematic as an original text, definitely. We needed to be able to really rework it … the whole second half is really problematic, and how do you translate the brothel into a context that is family friendly, and make sure that you don’t lose Pericles himself in the way that you do in the original, where he just disappears for the second half? (2018)

84 

K. S. BROKAW

How, indeed. Bush explained that the obscurity of this ‘messy play’ was an advantage, giving her more liberty to freely adapt and ‘fill in the gaps’. Once she figured out the heart of the story, much fell into place: ‘Fundamentally Pericles, in our interpretation, is a story about home and what it means to call somewhere home, or to find your way home. In a real shipwreck, but also in a far more open and metaphorical sense’ (quoted in Marcolina 2018). Lim and Bush changed the ending to emphasize this idea, and they did so for more than artistic reasons. In this version, Pericles and his daughter Marina are reunited, but Pericles’s wife Thaisa does not reappear in anything more than her spirit form: she has truly died. Lim explained: We didn’t want it to all come full circle, we didn’t want it to be a perfect reunification with the whole family. We felt that wasn’t true to life. And that wasn’t true to the experience of most of our company members in terms of having a perfect resolution; [many of them live] with holes and have to understand that healing is an ongoing and inevitable and difficult process … And we found the image of a broken family at the end that is seen to be connected through time and space through an eternal connection, and that concept of home being something that is defined by the people that we love who can never really leave us. (2018)

While these artistic decisions were being made and Bush and Fortune were writing their musical adaptation, an equal amount of work was going into the logistical operations and community-building endeavors to ensure a truly accessible theatre-making experience. NT staff were holding workshops with the eight partner organizations over the course of eight months (Nicholson 2020, 8), building trust and rapport with the communities from which the cast members would come. And 160 workshops were held in the facilities of the 8 partner organizations, from September 2017 to April 2018, serving almost 500 people. Twenty-two visits to the National Theatre and Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch (who produced As You Like It the following year) brought participants to see live theatre. All participants were invited to audition for the production, and the cast featured 236 participants, including members from all the partner organizations plus several community performance groups of widely different aesthetics, like a cheerleading squad and Bulgarian choir (Nicholson 2020, 8). The large numbers and capacious diversity of the cast were, of course, the point: access is central to the Public Acts’ aesthetics and activism.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

85

The eight community partner organizations engage people who ‘had experienced social isolation, childhood trauma, homelessness, chronic pain or age-related health conditions’ (Nicholson 2020, 7). Performers from these organizations often had needs that differed from those of most professional actors. The NT provided transportation to their Bankside facility for many of the performers, in large vans emblazoned with the Public Acts logo. They provided childcare for those who needed it or cast the children of adults who wanted to perform. Some of the staff of these organizations performed on stage alongside their clients and called participants to remind them about rehearsals. Coordination between Public Acts and these organizations created a continuity of care for participants, particularly those at vulnerable points in their lives. Staff from community partners were part of the company, performing as equal members. They also used their professional expertise to advise the Public Acts team when complex issues arose, to hold appropriate boundaries to keep people safe and put additional support in place. (Nicholson 2020, 10)

Lim explained that in addition to removing barriers that might make rehearsals difficult for some, it was crucial to ‘let all of humanity in our rehearsal room’ because ‘that is the art’. To work with that wide spectrum of people, the team needed to do ‘a huge amount of creative and administrative prep and Research & Development, [so that] when we come into the room, we can have a constructive, professionally run rehearsal space’ (quoted in Swain 2018). Those preparations also included reworking theatre games so that Muslim men and women didn’t have to touch people of the opposite sex, reconfiguring spaces for the several cast members in wheelchairs, and hiring ‘dance champions’ who wore hi-vis (neon) vests and danced among the casts to inspire committed movements from them and remind them of the choreography if need be. As with all efforts at accessibility, what benefits the most vulnerable usually benefits everyone, and many of the practices the NT adapted for Public Acts were then used in other productions, allowing all their theatre-making to be accessible to actors with varying needs. In order to create a new community out of the production team and cast members, Lim needed a clear, mission-driven framework that would ensure that everyone from directors to volunteers to the youngest cast

86 

K. S. BROKAW

members could work in harmony. She led the team in embracing three principles, adapted from her time at Company Three: ‘Be open, be generous, and be brave.’ The words were printed and hung on the rehearsal room wall and repeated frequently. The willingness of hundreds of participants to be open to discovery, generous with their time and talents, and brave in their work and play allowed Pericles to transform lives and Public Acts to transform Pericles. From Bush’s conception of Pericles as being essentially about home, to a real-life older couple dancing with each other on stage, to the unexpected break dance skills of a child performer, the play was entirely transformed by the Public Acts team bringing to it their ‘full humanity’. They shared their home cultures while creating their own, an act which, in an age of rising nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiments, is its own kind of activism. Rehma, a participant, explained that ‘we have Somalis, Ugandans, Europeans, representation from many African countries. When we do drama, we explore each other’s music, the way we eat, our clothing—it’s really great’ (quoted in Naylor 2018). Lim and her team create a space in which theatrical collaboration celebrates differences and vulnerabilities rather than asks everyone to approach drama—and Shakespeare—in one authorized way. Lim has the perfect skill set to develop a community of care for rehearsals and enthusiastically guide the production process. Bush gushes that ‘nobody could ask for a better collaborator because she has a combination of sky-high artistic abilities and the biggest heart. We had 230 performers assembled on the first day of rehearsals for Pericles and Emily knew the name of every single one of them’ (quoted in Gardner 2019). Or as Lim’s Company Three collaborator Ned Glasier explains: One of the most important skills in any artist working with people who aren’t professional actors—and probably for any artist anywhere—is the ability to make participants in any project feel special, important, and loved. It’s something that can’t be taught, you just have to have it, and Emily has it more than almost any other artist I know or have worked with. (quoted ibid.)

Those abilities are something that I not only witnessed when coming to rehearsal but also felt myself, as I was metaphorically and physically embraced by Lim. She was unceasingly open, generous, and brave with me as I sought to understand her team’s work better. Perhaps, as Glasier says,

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

87

these skills can’t be taught, but Lim both exudes and inspires them. The ability to make artists feel special and loved might be one of the most important unsung and under-analyzed skills of theatre directing. It is a true talent, to bring out the artistry and humanity of everyone in a rehearsal room or production meeting and synthesize their collaborative best rather than asserting one vision with authority. The community company of Pericles rehearsed for six weeks before being joined by the show’s six professional actors for four final weeks of rehearsal (see Fig. 2.2). I observed a rehearsal in early August, a couple weeks before opening night. The cast’s rehearsal space was the NT’s largest rehearsal room, the one that reproduces the outline of the Olivier’s turntable on the floor. Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo were rehearsing Antony and Cleopatra in a smaller room next door. On the wall was taped the plot of Bush’s Pericles, including the names of every production number in sequence, artwork created by the cast, and photographs of people the cast found inspiring: Nelson Mandela, Michelle Obama, Judi Dench. Next to the sign reading ‘our values: open, generous, and brave’

Fig. 2.2  The cast of Pericles, directed by Emily Lim, rehearsing in the National Theatre building. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)

88 

K. S. BROKAW

was another that read ‘Tie-ee-sa’ (Lim confessed that she’d been mispronouncing ‘Thaisa’ for the first several rehearsals). As the cast readied for the day’s work, I saw them joyfully interacting: a young Black boy slept on the lap of a white woman, a woman in a hijab wearing a T-shirt that said ‘Theatre: The Makers of Now’ ran through dance moves with friends, and a teenage girl made an older man in a wheelchair laugh. The larger group was divided into several sub-groups to work on a variety of things, and I followed 30-some actors into the Olivier itself to watch them be coached by the NT’s in-house Head of Voice, Jeanette Nelson. Twelve actors lined the stage: they each had one line and needed to be able to give it with enough volume to fill the massive space without a microphone. One woman read out her part, a line that ended (in reference to Marina), ‘wait, why are we selling her again?’ She explained to Nelson that she said the second part more softly, to show that she was being thoughtful. Nelson asked the actors in the house, could they hear the line? They could not, and Nelson instructed the actor to be louder. ‘But how do I do that?’ the actor asked. ‘Find the thought out there, not in your head.’ The actor did it three more times: the final time it was perfect, and the small crowd clapped their approval. After working with this group of twelve, another twenty-five actors lined the stage, including seven children, two people in wheelchairs, and several people who spoke English with non-British accents. Nelson helped every one of them reach the volume necessary, hit their consonants, and figure out how to energize the line’s thought. When the session was over and the stage manager gave inaudibly soft instructions to the actors about what was next, the actors burst into laughter and gave her tips on being heard. From my first glimpse at Public Acts’ process, I could see that the values of openness, generosity, and bravery created a working environment that was as playful and community-affirming as it was rigorous and productive. Back in the rehearsal room, the entire company was assembling to rehearse some of the large production numbers from the show’s second half. Choreographer Robby Graham was to lead a run-through of ‘Mirror Mountain’, part of the Tarsus sequence. I sat down next to Helen Nicholson; as embedded researcher, she attended most of the rehearsals and she generously filled me in on some of the adapted plot details and rehearsal conventions. The cast danced and sung around the space holding large cardboard rectangles that would be replaced in performance by spectacular mirrors. They each found their own style while the Dance Champions among them encouraged ever braver movement choices. The

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

89

desired look wasn’t of Broadway’s choreographed uniformity but rather of cooperation, a community of movers of all sizes creating the effect of an ocean, together. When it was announced that ‘Mistress Maypole’ would be rehearsed next, there was audible excitement (see Fig. 2.3). The number was used to introduce Thaisa’s many suitors early in the show and indeed featured a large maypole in the center of the revolve, around which several cast members danced and wove long ribbons. A parade of suitors walked the circumference of the stage while those who weren’t maypole-ing danced with a partner. They all serenaded Thaisa: ‘O sweet mistress of the feast!’ By my side, Nicholson smilingly sang along too, as a proud parent might; she professed in a whisper ‘I try not to be in the way, but I can’t be invisible!’ I understood why she sang along: Jim Fortune’s music was irresistible. The Bharan Center Drummers, an Indian traditional drumming troupe, skillfully and poignantly accompanied the traditional English maypole dance. The suitors, each played by a community member, tried to woo Thaisa through movement: a skinny man danced to hip-hop, one woman did a

Fig. 2.3  The ‘Mistress Maypole’ sequence of Pericles in performance on the Olivier stage, directed by Emily Lim with design by Fly Davis. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)

90 

K. S. BROKAW

sort of hula, and another who clearly had some ballet training began a lyrical number. She was interrupted by a tiny boy who break-danced to the Jackson 5 before doing a quick floss (the top dance move of 2018), which was greeted with laughter and delight in the rehearsal room, as it was in the performances. The scene culminated in Thaisa running into Pericles, and as these two professional actors sang their duet, the scores of people in the room watched in rapt silence. The community actors then gave their lines, bringing the confidence and vocal skills they’d gained from Nelson back into the rehearsal room. They held their own. At break time, a cast member named Ketrin came up to Nicholson and me to tell Nicholson about how her father had played Shakespeare in her small village in Georgia before Stalin’s invasion. After the war, she had escaped to Europe while some of her husband’s family were sent to Siberia. ‘I feel like Pericles’ story is my own, and now I am home on the Olivier stage,’ she explained. Ketrin would later report to Nicholson that the show’s final song, which tells Marina that ‘you are your own way home’, wasn’t just for that character, but ‘it was for all the people on stage, backstage, the audience, everywhere. For all those whose ships sank in the middle of the ocean and spent a long journey to find home’ (Nicholson 2020, 16). I spoke to another woman who worked with one of the partner organizations and joined the cast to support her clients. She articulated what she found most important about Public Acts: that it is values-driven and collaborative and gives its participants a sense of shared purpose. She would take those lessons back to her organization. Another woman from a different partner organization told me that she’s always wanted to work for the National Theatre and now she was, in an unexpected way. When we reassembled, it was for a run-through of the entire second half of the show, some highlights of which I’ll describe when detailing the show itself, to which I now turn. Rather than give a run-down of each scene, I am going to share several observations about this Pericles that focus on the terms I laid out at the start of this chapter: the show’s valuing of accessibility over (Shakespearean) authenticity, adaptation over (textual) authority, amateur artists over (individual) achievers, and collaboration, creativity, care, and community above all. And while I could almost argue that Public Acts privileges affect over aesthetics, the affect is aesthetic, and all the production’s aesthetics were of a very high value.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

91

Adapting older texts—Shakespearean, Homerian, Brechtian—into 90-minute musicals is a crucial part of the Public Works and Public Acts artistic model. The reason is clear: in trying to make their shows more accessible to an audience who might not be used to theatre-going—and certainly not to sitting through three hours of Shakespeare—they are adopting the most popular of theatre forms, the musical. Shakespeare (and Brecht, for that matter) were themselves rather musical playwrights; Marina ‘sings like one immortal, and she dances/as goddesslike to her admired lays’ (5.1.2–3). But despite the musicality of the source texts, no one would call the Public Works and Public Acts musicals ‘authentic’ in terms of their fidelity to, in Pericles’s case, early seventeenth-century theatre practices. Pericles’s score was described in the Guardian by Miriam Gillinson as ‘catchy, confident, and eclectic’. Gillinson documents the many musical styles Fortune adapted for the songs: ‘Latin pop, folk, and Bollywood’ and ‘soaring romantic ballads’ (2018). The musical variety was not only narratological, helping to mark the differences in location to which Pericles travelled, but also made it more likely that any given audience member found at least one song that resonated with them. The music also served an important logistical function: it created the show’s many large-scale chorus numbers, which featured the singing and dancing—sometime as solos—of the large cast. Some of the songs were informed by the community cast’s talents. When Pericles said goodbye to his baby daughter Marina in Tarsus, the handover to Cleon and Dionza was accompanied by a heartbreaking lullaby sung by the London Bulgarian Choir, with a haunting solo intoned by one of their soloists. All the artistic choices in the show were in the service of making the storytelling as clear as possible, from turning Gower’s role into four helpful narrators to the use of music to convey plot and emotion and give audiences not used to the theatre a taste of the familiar. In focusing on accessibility over some sort of notion of Shakespearean ‘authenticity’— fidelity to early modern practices or slavish loyalty to the 1608 text— Public Acts rightly valued the people and tastes of twenty-first-century England over those of the seventeenth century. When setting out on the Pericles project, NT associate director Ben Power gave Emily Lim some advice that she and adapter Chris Bush heeded: ‘You don’t get any points for being faithful to Shakespeare, you only lose points for being unclear’ (Lim 2018). Indeed, every audience member has the right to feel included and empowered, not excluded and stupid, when watching a play. And to include audiences in the world of a

92 

K. S. BROKAW

Shakespeare play, in any society that isn’t turn-of-the-seventeenth-century London, artists must boldly adapt the material to make it accessible and relevant. It is the kind of Shakespearean theatre-making that early National Theatre visionaries such as Joan Littlewood, Joe Papp, and the Cornerstone founders describe as having revolutionary potential: theatre by and for the people. To collaborate with Shakespeare rather than reproduce a notions of textual or theatrical authenticity is to invite what resonates to a community in its time and place, creating new and relevant art, collaboratively. Paul Taylor praised Pericles for how Chris Bush’s adaptation and Jim Fortune’s songs put the accent more on finding what “home” really means than does the original play, whose haunting poetry surfaces in little snatches only very intermittently. (2018)

That is, Pericles used Shakespeare when it suited, but found more value in the creative joy of the living many (the cast and production team) than in the dead two (Shakespeare and Wilkins). As described above, one important change was keeping Thaisa dead in order to better convey the reality of so many people living in present-day London (and this was pre-COVID): this production celebrated being found but did not erase the pain of loss. The creative benefits of Bush’s adaptations were also apparent, for another of many examples, in the reworked brothel scene. There is much to say about the continued horrors of human trafficking that can and has been said through analyses and productions of Pericles, and long may that continue. But in a show with four-­ year-­old cast members and with a desire to reach audiences of all ages, adaptation was necessary. Fly Davis’s design for the transition to Mytilene (where, in Shakespeare and Wilkins’s version, Marina is sold by pirates to a brothel) brought on florescent lights and shiny black curtains, thus conveying a kind of seediness without creating an on-stage whorehouse. When Boult entered the mood shifted from seedy to camp, from menacing to brash. Played by professional actor Kevin Harvey in high heels and sequins, Boult sang a song to Marina to explain that, in Mytilene, they ‘cater to all types’ (see Fig.  2.4). This led to a group number with a maritime theme: the cast entered in blue and white costumes, many of them in some form of drag. Community dance troupes performed spectacular routines while Marina watched in fear. The humiliation she would face would not be sexual but performative.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

93

Fig. 2.4  Kevin Harvey as Boult and other cast members of Pericles. (Photo Credit: James Bellorini)

Boult addressed the audience as a Dame might address a British pantomime crowd, introducing Marina, who had been tarted up like a sparkly seashell. Timidly, she began to sing about being born at sea, and as she grew in confidence, she reappeared in more and more outrageous sea-­ themed costumes. Her popularity in Mytilene was growing. Whereas in Shakespeare and Wilkins’s play, Marina is a whore who preserves her virginity by singing to her clients with such ‘divinity’ that they will be for ‘no more bawdy houses’, in Bush’s version, Marina is simply an overworked singer, forced by Boult to continue exploiting her talent and her story for ever hungrier audiences. Her songs gradually got slower and sadder, and the spirit of her mother Thaisa accompanied her before Pericles, unrecognized, came on as her newest customer (for the reunion of father and mother, Bush retained much of Shakespeare’s dialogue: when it works, keep it). The Mytilene sequence, then, was a creative, ‘family friendly’ adaption of Pericles’s whorehouse. It didn’t have much to say about sex trafficking,

94 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 2.5  The finale of Pericles on the Olivier stage. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)

but it did have something to say about the entertainment industry. There was, perhaps, some tension between the adaptation’s strategy for presenting Marina’s exploitation and the way that this campy scene was received by many audience members. For some, the mistreatment of Marina was less important than the spectacle of seeing so many people, from so many walks of life, having a ball in drag. Chris Selman gushed in The Gay Times: ‘We particularly enjoyed the outrageous, glittered and sequined Mytilene dance routine, starring Kevin Harvey as Boult—hands down the most glamorous and fabulous drag queen we’ve ever witnessed in any Shakespeare’ (2018). Paul Taylor, writing for The Independent, had a similar reaction: ‘I thought the number of folk who had glammed up for an outrageous RuPaul-style version of the brothel in Mytilene—and were clearly loving it—was immensely cheering’ (2018). The visual meanings— the sight of scores of people happily celebrating drag and gender play— allowed for this moment to mean many things at once and to convey something rather opposite to an ‘authoritative’ Shakespearean meaning. For many, this part of the play celebrated the hard-won sexual and gender freedoms of twenty-first-century London.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

95

Fig. 2.6  Cast members from many generations made up the cast of Pericles. (Photo credit: James Bellorini)

While Harvey’s Boult was a stand-out performance—as were many other performances from both professional and community actors—the show’s celebration of amateurism, of creating collaborative art for the love of it, was far more important than its showcasing of individual talent. That spirit of amateurism was apparent in every group number, with its simple and coordinated but not uniformly regimented choreography, which was performed in a way that celebrated rather than masked physical differences. That spirit was apparent, too, in the costumes and props, which included cardboard and paper mâché animal parts, causing Rosemary Waugh to quip that there were moments that felt like ‘the best-financed school play in existence’ (2018). In a word, the show felt handmade (see Fig. 2.6). Not digital or slick but crafted. In her analysis of Pericles, Julia Lupton analyzes and celebrates the community of creativity crafting that Marina establishes in the play: women who do needlework and performing arts together form a ‘DIY church of craft, where acts of making have value to our humanness’. Lupton points out that the twenty-first-century return to handicrafts amid the digital age

96 

K. S. BROKAW

has ‘heightened attention to the environment, labor, beauty [and] waste’ (2013, 60). The same can be said for this production: its celebration of making, guided by professionals but overwhelmingly carried out by amateurs and done largely with materials available at a craft store pushed back against the overproduced frostiness of so much contemporary art and culture. This was art created together and ‘for the love of it’, by hand: by many, many hands, in fact. And while the production celebrated the spirit of amateurism, what Wayne Booth describes as ‘any vigorous, demanding human pursuit practiced for love of the pursuit’ (1999, 10), it was also evident that this company was as proficient and, for lack of a better word, ‘professional’ as any company of specially trained and paid actors. Paul Taylor articulates this when describing a technical glitch with the maypole on opening night: The cast’s joy in taking part is palpable and very affecting, but I was also impressed by the rigor and discipline on view. On opening night there was a technical problem in the garlanded, multi-layered 21st birthday party for Pericles’ future wife Thaisa … A maypole got stuck but, though the stage was heaving with everyone including tiny tots and the infirm, there was no fuss or delay in clearing it completely so that the fault could be corrected. (2018)

The cumulative effect of seeing so many performers on stage, presenting Bush’s adaptation and Fortune’s score with Davis’s design and under Lim’s direction, was certainly one of aesthetic achievement. But for many, witnessing the show and understanding, on some level, the commitment and collaboration across diverse groups that made it possible, was emotional beyond even the effective storytelling conveyed through script, song, design, and performance. The process and product, then, were one: the aesthetics were affect, and the play’s often overwhelming affect was its aesthetic. I will admit to holding back tears many times in rehearsal at the sight of it all; Nicholson confessed she usually did the same. For audience members, who gave the show standing ovations each night, the show built to tearjerker of an ending. After Marina and Pericles embraced, company members emerged bearing lanterns, illuminating the once emotionally and physically shipwrecked pair: ‘For the first time, they know exactly where they are,’ they sang. Several members of the cast, immigrants themselves, spoke in their native languages about their own

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

97

long roads home, before joining in the language of their adopted England: ‘I am my own way home, and I thought I lost you.’ The choir and cheerleaders, drummers and dance crew joined to swell the numbers, packing more people onto the Olivier stage than there had ever been to deliver a final message to a nation that needs to be home to many of the Pericleses and Marinas of the world and is increasingly resistant to being so (see Fig. 2.5). Even professional critics were moved. Taylor describes the final moments thusly: Who could resist the final chorus when the company hold out lanterns and sing about how home is not the country of your birth or the house in which you grew up? “Home is the one who leaves the light on/And won’t sleep until they heard the door click.” A sentiment such as “You are your own way home” sounds like hard-won wisdom rather than something bordering on a truism as it throbs out from these massed voices. (2018)

Daniel Evans reflected that Pericles ‘was one of those rare occasions when all barriers between audience and actors were banished, and we collectively felt a deep sense of pride in the tolerant, welcoming, generous landscape of the arts’ (2018). Perhaps that is one of the things the arts—including the Shakespearean arts—can do best: create a space for collective feeling, for suggesting that one’s home has the capacity to be ‘tolerant, welcoming, generous’, even when those in power are demanding it be the opposite. Shakespeare is often seen as elitist, intimidating, niche. But if Public Acts productions can, even for a moment, help a community imagine itself at its kindest and most big-hearted, it is hard to think of a more worthy cause for which a ‘a song that old was sung’ might be intoned at the NT (1.1.1). Reflecting on their performances in the Olivier, Lim admits that she is ‘passionate that the National does not mean London’, and had wished that there had been a clearer initial statement of the project’s intended geographic reach. But she admitted ‘it was the right thing to do, and the ways we have learned from it have been profound’ (Gardner 2019) . Those insights not only changed practices at the NT but were taken on the road when the project moved to Hornchurch for 2019’s As You Like It.

98 

K. S. BROKAW

Public Acts’ As You Like It (2019) If Pericles invited reflection on what it means to belong and feel at home, As You Like It addressed the liberating power of friendship, community, equality and love. —Helen Nicholson (2019)

In 2017, As You Like It was adapted for Public Works by songwriter and performer Shaina Taub and program director Laurie Woolery and performed by a cast of over 200 at the Delacorte in Central Park; they revived it in summer 2022 (it had been planned for 2020). For Public Acts’ second venture, Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch worked with the NT and Public Works to mount their own version of the adaptation, which was performed in August 2019 and directed by Queen’s Theatre’s Douglas Rantoul. Taub and Woolery’s adaptation begins and ends with a writerly Jaques, played in Hornchurch by professional Beth Hinton-Leaver (and in New York by Taub herself). She begins the show pondering the line ‘all the world’s a stage’ and wondering what can ‘make the magic real’. The course of the play reveals that the magic is love, a brave, earned, grown-up love. I have written elsewhere of Taub’s final song:12 I am in tears as Indian drummers from London’s Dhol academy join over one hundred community cast members for the musical finale…The stage fills with performers who represent the diversity of London in all its beauty and strength: immigrants, children and teenagers, elderly adults, people in wheelchairs. As the drummers surround the audience and the cast raise their voices, they repeat the chorus … that articulates the mantra of this community-­based theatre project: At you bravest and weakest Our worst and our best Still I will love Still I will love. (Brokaw 2021, 245)

I am not the first person to draw connections between the thematic and musical elements of this adaptation and the projects that produced it.

12  There are two versions of this song available on YouTube, the 2017 Public Works version, and one produced during lockdown in 2021, bringing several different Public Works and Public Acts casts together. I highly recommend watching them both: bring tissues.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

99

Public Acts participant Alya Rashid compared the qualities of As You Like It to the values of Public Acts: It’s about having a voice. It’s about having an identity … The play is everything about growth. Individual growth, growth as a community, growth as a society. I never knew how powerful drama is until I started doing Public Acts. (quoted in Nicholson 2020, 30)

Given that Woolery and Taub had been working with Public Works for years before crafting this adaptation, the resonances make sense. Their 2017 production and the cancelled 2020 remount that Public Works had planned are documented in the short film ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, which features several actors and partner organization members comparing the love-first ethos of this adaptation’s Arden to that of Public Works (Barra and Issa 2020). In it, Ato Blankson-Wood, the first Orlando, explains that while that Arden is a fiction, ‘it is modeling something we could incorporate into our lives. If we are generous and grateful, we could have more than we need.’ The creation of the As You Like It adaptation, then, clearly demonstrates how the practices and values of Public Works inform the shows’ writing and dramaturgy, and how the productions continue to perpetuate those values for casts, partner organizations, and audiences. The Taub-Woolery As You Like It lost none of its power when Public Acts mounted their own version in Essex, an ‘area of outer east London that often feels forgotten by inner London’, in Lim’s words (Gardner 2019). The cast was slightly smaller than it was for Pericles, but included many members of that original Public Acts community: there were 149 people aged 4–84. Nicholson’s report on the project further elucidates the company makeup (these statistics were not recorded for Pericles): 52% were of African, Caribbean, or Asian descent; 13 identified as disabled; and 36% were over the age of 50 (2020, 8). As was the case with the way Public Acts transformed practices at the NT, Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch was transformed by producing As You Like It. After directing the show, Queen’s Theatre artistic director Douglas Rintoul reported that he ‘learnt and changed so much as a result of working with our extraordinary company’ (quoted in Nicholson 2019). As with Pericles, I was once again graciously allowed to attend a rehearsal, this one at Queen’s Theatre. It was a ‘Super Saturday’ practice of the full company, held a couple weeks before opening. Rintoul ran the

100 

K. S. BROKAW

rehearsal, working with Lim, musical director Yshani Perinpanayagam, and choreographer Sundeep Saini. My notes from that day illustrate the team’s deep commitment to theatre-making that is grounded in community-making: • The cast rehearses ‘Oh Deer’, a group number that follows Phoebe falling in love with Ganymede. The synopsis taped to the wall fills me in: ‘The Ardenites gather for a community party in the forest.’ They review the choreography: ‘Cross open run run stop.’ Doug jokes to the cast, ‘I expect you to be doing nothing else while watching East Enders the next two weeks.’ • The subsequent bit of dancing involves have the cast doing the ‘shimmy’ while the other half does the ‘hokey cokey’ and then they switch. It’s easy enough to get confused, and Emily gives the cast a tip: ‘If you mess up the choreo, it’s like your character messed up but you’re having fun, so just laugh and join back in!’ The cast starts to follow this advice, laughing at themselves if they miss a beat. • In the wings, I see actors hugging each other, complimenting each other, and helping each other perfect their dance steps. The interactions are constant, focused on both improving the show and building each other’s confidence. Everyone seems on board with these aims. • During break, snacks are brought out, and many actors continue to rehearse songs, scenes, and dance moves in small groups. I speak with Marjorie Agwang, who plays Celia, and am surprised to learn that she is not, in fact, one of the professional actors, though she reveals her ambition to become one. She just may do it. • I have a long conversation with Beth Hinton-Leaver, the professional playing Jaques. I’d just seen her in Hadestown on the Olivier stage. Beth tells me, ‘I’ve learned more from this show than anything I have done. I have learned not to fear Shakespeare, like you learn to do in drama school. There’s a generosity and bravery in this kind of community theatre that you just don’t find in professional theatre, where you have so much fear of hitting a wrong note or getting your lines wrong. But these actors, if you mess up, they thank you for trying. Why don’t we professionals do that? We’re all human.’ • When Doug announces that they’ll next rehearse ‘In Arden’, people cheer. They clearly love to sing this song. Doug tells them to listen to Duke Senior’s words (based on the ‘co-mates and brother in exile’

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

101

speech): ‘They’re beautiful.’ I’ve heard the song on YouTube, and I listen in as Curtis Young nails his vocals: ‘We shall learn to see the forest for the trees.’ What are the trees? In this version, the trees that make the forest seem to be the people that make a community, each of them mattering. • Sundeep and Doug decide to change the choreography, because the part where the whole company walks in a circle is so heartening to see. Sundeep gives a note: ‘As you’re going around the circle, smile and make community in your new home.’ • When I leave, I walk out with a woman named Blossom, who I recognize from her performance in Pericles. She tells me that being involved in the previous year’s show changed her sense of herself and of London: ‘Now I go to shows at the National Theatre and I look at the Olivier and say, “that’s my stage—I performed there!”’ When I saw the production in performance, the accessibility of the process, the creativity of the adaptation, and the care with which the community and artistry were treated did indeed translate to the stage. Woolery and Taub’s adaptation, which was further adapted by the team at Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, pulls several ideas out of the play and develops them clearly and fully: that Orlando needs to see people for who they are, not who he wants them to be; that we all have our wounds that need healing, which can best be done in loving community; and perhaps most prevalently, in the reworked words to ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, that ‘all are welcome here’. ‘Here’ is Arden and the stage; it is a hopeful, better version of the US and the UK in the time of MAGA and Brexit. I will describe a few highlights of the show that point to the way it, like Pericles, valued accessibility, adaptation, affect, and the expertise of its amateur performers. The first big production number is the wrestling match. In the New York version, veterans from the Military Resilience Foundation partner organization taught the actors who played Duke Frederick’s lackeys how to march and salute, valuing the skills of the community actors. In this production, members of the London School of Lucha Libre (a martial arts organization) performed actual feats of wrestling before Orlando and Charles (renamed as ‘Bronco’) face off. Bright ribbons fall from the fly space when the cast assembles for ‘In Arden’, and the audience is confronted with the heartening sight of the full group singing and dancing together in their colorful costumes. At this

102 

K. S. BROKAW

point we have also met all the leads: Audrey has been reimagined as ‘Andy’ and Silvius as Silvia (played by community actor Malunga Yese; it was supposed to be a role for a professional, but she was so stellar that they cast her in it). Woolery explains that one of the ideas in this adaptation is to explore ‘who gets to love’ (quoted in Barra and Issa 2020). Whereas sometimes gender-flipped roles in Shakespearean comedies reinforce stereotypes by putting same-sex couples into awkwardly coercive relationships, this adaptation and the actors’ performance make it clear that Andy and Touchstone’s feelings for each other are mutual and more than sexual, and that when Phoebe embraces Silvia, she is embracing her true self. The song ‘You Phoebe Me’ is reprised as a loving duet. While most of the dialogue is Shakespearean—and less altered than it had been in Bush’s Pericles—toward the end of the show there are new lines, including Rosalind confessing to Orlando that she has baggage from her relationship with her father and his exile that she will bring to her marriage. This is a grown-up As You Like It: the leads are adults with adult problems, and their choice to love is done with the clear eyes of people who have known heartache. In Arden, Rosalind says at the play’s end, ‘together we’ll heal our wounds’. When Rosalind emerges at the play’s end—in a sparkly pant suit rather than the traditional frock—the company assembles to sing about their scars and how they will heal and grow together. That is the message of the incredibly moving ‘Still I Will Love’, sung by the entire company, backed by the CommUnity Gospel Choir. For me and many performers and audience members, the sight of 149 cast members aged 4–84 singing about their determination to keep loving was a moment of what Jill Dolan calls a ‘utopian performative’: A small but profound moment in which performance calls the attention of the audience in a way that lifts everyone slightly above the present, into a hopeful feeling of what the world might be like if every moment of our lives were as emotionally voluminous, generous, aesthetically striking, and intersubjectively intense. (2005, 5)

It is perhaps overly ambitious to even hope for a world where ‘every moment of our lives’ reached such a level of communal feeling. But the emotional capaciousness, generosity of heart, aesthetic beauty, and intersubjectivity of the As You Like It finale were recreating for audiences the kind of moment that Public Acts creates in the rehearsal room: that

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

103

creative and loving space that asks all who enter to be ‘open, generous, and brave’. For Dolan and the Public Acts team, there is merit in theatre’s ability to demonstrate what a better world might look like, and to imagine what other parts of society might be like if they reflected what’s seen on the stage. Or as Touchstone would have it, ‘there is much virtue in “if”’ (5.4.92). Critics and theatre-makers don’t tend to think about the correlation between an artistic organization’s ethos and what gets represented on stage, but perhaps we should. For certainly the aesthetic and affective power of this As You Like It was a direct result of the love-centered adapting and directing and organizing and rehearsing made manifest. Rather than saying that the work of Public Acts and Public Works privileges affect over aesthetics, I believe that it stages moments where affect—powerful emotional responses that are deliberately and artfully staged and performed—is a form of aesthetics. For many who write about, attend, and produce Shakespearean drama, evaluating and creating this kind of community-­embedded theatre will require a reorienting of values.

Evaluating and Valuing Community-Based Shakespeare [There are] moments in which audiences feel themselves allied with each other, and with a broader, more capacious sense of a public, in which social discourse articulates the possible, rather than the insurmountable obstacles to human potential. —Jill Dolan (2005, 2)

The Public Acts Pericles and As You Like It invite further contemplation on the question of how, as a journalistic reviewer or academic, one might evaluate works of community-based theatre. A look at the newspaper and blog reviews of both shows reveals how many writers praised the production’s process, ethos, and emotional register, adjusting their analysis to take in far more than what happened on stage on any given night. The process that created the show, the feelings provoked in audience members, and the real-world values articulated by the assembled performers made meanings as significant as the acting, directing, and design—the usual purview of a review. At the same time, while the burgeoning study of applied theatre has focused more academic attention on projects like Public Acts, beyond attention to prison Shakespeare programs, there has been limited

104 

K. S. BROKAW

scholarly consideration of applied Shakespeare projects, which demand different methods of analysis than other kinds of performance.13 When reviewing Pericles, Chris Selman for the London-based Gay Times acknowledged that ‘a production like this is potentially divisive. It’s far from traditional, with many scenes either heavily abridged, replaced with music or omitted altogether’ (2018). He elaborates that the occasionally sentimental musical theatre-style songs ‘won’t be to everyone’s tastes’ and admits that there ‘are a handful of scene changes which aren’t as slick as they could be, a few slipped lines, and some technical errors, too’. However, Selman asserts, it’s crucial that this production not be evaluated based on fidelity to Shakespeare’s text or on technical merit: But to judge this performance on these criteria would be to miss the point— this is very much theatre for the people, by the people, and in that respect it ticks every box. Emily Lim’s rendition of Pericles is quirky, creative, entertaining, amusing and highly accessible—we completely bought into it from the start and by the end felt like we’d been on the most wonderful journey. Not only is it a marvelous production in its own right, it’s a superb advert for community arts and makes us excited for the future of Public Acts. (ibid.)

Selman praises Pericles as both a show that is ‘by the people’ and therefore a prime example of participatory community arts, and ‘for the people’, an accessible, exuberant production. In doing so, he is thinking beyond his highly educated, theatre-frequenting self. In reviewing Pericles for The Stage, Daniel Evans puts Public Acts, the project, in the context of the UK’s community arts scene, meditating on the benefits of such work: Projects such as Public Acts—and indeed, its cousins Sheffield People’s Theatre and many other community groups up and down the country—are significant for many reasons, but one reason stands above the others. They offer opportunities for members of our communities to engage with our artistic institutions in a new way. At their best, they invite deeper levels of participation and offer empowering platforms to those who might not have even set foot inside the buildings before—or even thought of doing so. In that sense, they are a democratizing force. (2018)

13  For exceptions to this rule, see two studies of applied Shakespeare: Mackenzie and Shaughnessy (2019), and Mackenzie (2023).

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

105

Both Selman and Evans—as well as Gillinson in her Guardian review of As You Like It—model the open, generous, and perhaps even brave perspective that looks beyond product to see process and sees both as imbedded in communities and in the contemporary socio-political moment. At a time when arts budgets are being slashed in public, private, and educational settings, to see value in artistic engagement with the world is as important as ever and more vital than simply analyzing directorial choices and praising or disparaging actors and designers. A year after Pericles, Lyn Gardner quoted Evans’s review to articulate a sense of the project’s social importance: After it garnered five-star reviews from the national press, Daniel Evans wrote in The Stage that Pericles “was one of those rare occasions when all barriers between audience and actors were banished, and we collectively felt a deep sense of pride in the tolerant, welcoming, generous landscape of the arts”. It felt like a significant moment, a planting of the flag. (2019)

While there have been plenty of instances—many well-documented in the Black Lives Matter reckonings of 2020—of art organizations failing to be ‘welcoming’ or ‘generous’, Evans and Gardner rightly applaud a project that, by all accounts, did indeed show the arts at their inclusive and imaginative best. Public Acts’ Pericles and As You Like It invited such responses by virtue of the diversity in and sheer number of performers, the homemade visual aesthetic, and the adaptations’ emotional evocations of home in Pericles, of loving forgiveness in As You Like It, and of community cooperation in both. The productions therefore invited audiences to delight not only in the shows but also in the shows’ making: the masses of folks on stage invite reflection on how real people could have pulled off the logistics, what it was like to rehearse, how all those paper mâché props got made. Being in the audience was about more than passive consumption of a shiny finished production or suspension of disbelief in fictional characters in another world. It was instead about actively feeding back joy and appreciation of living, feeling humans in a shared space, people with whom most audience members lived in community. This is what community-­oriented Shakespeare can do at its best—delight in the kinds of collaborative creativity and generosity of spirit that are needed in all our weary communities. Not everyone may agree, as Selman suggested, and a quick scroll through the comments left below Miriam Gillinson’s reviews of Pericles

106 

K. S. BROKAW

and As You Like It reveals that skepticism regarding the ability of community projects to meet British standards for Shakespeare remains. These commenters—who had not seen the shows and who I will not quote— failed to imagine that a production involving community actors could indeed be both dramatically and socially successful, which they emphatically and crucially were. Months of hard work and no small amount of expertise went into these shows and the praise they garnered regarding the artistry itself was earned, not condescendingly given. As we enter the mid-2020s, such a valuing of process and real-world context matters more and more in the evaluation of all kinds of art, not only that which is community-based and socially missioned. In Alex Ross’s June 2022 New Yorker write-up of two operas, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X at the Detroit Opera and Brett Dean’s Hamlet at the Met, he ends his rave review of X with a simple sentence: ‘When I got back to my hotel, I opened my computer to find that a racist white teen-ager had killed ten Black people in Buffalo.’ When evaluating the Hamlet, he has one major qualm: ‘[I could not] divine what this “Hamlet” has to say about our time. It seems to emanate from somewhere in the middle of the late twentieth century.’ The time of objectively, apolitically reviewing theatre based solely on what’s happening on stage is perhaps over, if it ever really existed at all. Values are at the heart of Public Works and Public Acts: they guide everything from rehearsal logistics to script adaptation to performance design. Centering a company’s work on values means that collaborators have guidelines for how to treat each other and for what they create and how. And it means that they think deeply about the ‘who’, ‘how’, and ‘why’ of theatre, taking seriously a production’s responsibility to its cast and crew, its audiences, and its community beyond the theatre. That means understanding that being a part of a production—and to a lesser extent, seeing a production—is an emotional and social endeavor with real implications for the lives of others. Applying the Public Works and Public Acts values to Shakespearean drama means being intentional and radical in adapting the text, de-emphasizing textual and directorial authority, and considering how the archaic words and often violent or offensive plotlines of these plays are conveyed (or not) to audiences. It means being selfaware and being Shakespeare-aware, and putting one’s community—the cast and team, audience, and surrounded population—at the very center.

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

107

Works Cited About Cornerstone Theater. 2022. Cornerstone Theater. Accessed 10 December 2022. https://cornerstonetheater.org/about. Announcing Public Works. 2013. YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=J4yd3nXfYsM&list=PLN_BVGqFCTGgSwXA_Iv2a45DJJhd0Zu 6h&index=23. Bannister, Rosie. 2015. Rufus Norris Announces First Season as National Theatre Artistic Director. WhatsOnStage, January 21. Accessed 2 December 2021. https://www.whatsonstage.com/london-­t heatre/news/rufus-­n orris-­ national-­theatre-­season-­chiwetel-­ejiofor_36956.html. Barra, Guto, and Tatiana Issa, dirs. 2020. Under the Greenwood Tree. Documentary film. Art Docs and Public Theatre. Billington, Michael. 2018. Macbeth Review: Rufus Norris’s Brutal Take Misses the Poetry. The Guardian, March 7. https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2018/ mar/07/macbeth-­r eview-­n ational-­t heatre-­r ufus-­norris-­r ory-­kinnearanne-­ marie-­duff. Booth, Wayne. 1999. For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brokaw, Katherine Steele. 2021. Text-Based / Concept-Driven. In Shakespeare / Text, ed. Claire Bourne, 245–263. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2005. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. ———. 2010. Engaging Performance: Theatre as Call and Response. New York: Routledge. Dolan, Jill. 2005. Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Elsom, John, and Nicholas Tomalin. 1978. The History of the National Theatre. London: Jonathan Cape. Evans, Daniel. 2018. The National Theatre’s Pericles is a Radical Act of Inclusivity. The Stage, September 2. Fricker, Karen. 2008. Robert LePage. In The Routledge Companion to Director’s Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown, 233–250. London: Routledge. Gardner, Lyn. 2019. Emily Lim: The Big Interviews. The Stage, August 21. Gillinson, Miriam. 2018. Pericles Review: Musical Shakespeare Adaptation of is a Joy. The Guardian, August 30. Hall, Peter. 1972. Is the Beginning the Word? Theatre Quarterly 2: 5–11. Hard Won Joy: Building Public Works. 2018. YouTube video. The Public Theatre. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WyvfPEi3GEs. Holdsworth, Nadine. 2018. Joan Littlewood. London: Routledge. Holland, Peter. 2013. Peter Hall. In The Routledge Directors Companion to Shakespeare, ed. John Russell Brown, 140–159. London: Routledge.

108 

K. S. BROKAW

Hughes, Jenny, and Helen Nicholson, eds. 2016. Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hytner, Nicholas. 2010. Preface to  Theatre & Nation, by Nadine Holdsworth, x–xii. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Jackson, Adrian. 2009. Cardboard Citizens and the Curious Case of Making Mincemeat. The Guardian, June 24. https://www.theguardian.com/ stage/2009/jun/24/cardboard-­citizens-­mincemeat. Jackson, Shannon. 2011. Social Works: Performing Art, Supporting Publics. London: Routledge. King-Farlow, Alice. 2018. Conversation with author. March 6. Kuftinec, Sonja. 2003. Staging America: Cornerstone and Community-Based Theater. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Leonard, Robert H., and Ann Kilkelly. 2006. Performing Communities: Grassroots Ensemble Theaters Deeply Rooted in Eight US Communities. Oakland, CA: New Village Press. Lim, Emily. 2018. Interview with Author. 20 November. Lupton, Julia Reinhard. 2013. Shakespeare Dwelling: Pericles and the Affordances of Action. In Shakespeare and the Urgency of Now, ed. Cary DiPeitro and Hugh Grady, 60–82. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Mackenzie, Rowan. 2023. Creating Space for Shakespeare: Working with Marginalized Communities. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Mackenzie, Rowan, and Robert Shaughnessy, eds. 2019. Applying Shakespeare, a special issue of Critical Survey 31:4. Marcolina, Cindy. 2018. BWW Interview: Chris Bush Talks Pericles at the National Theatre. Broadway World UK, July 12. https://www.broadwayworld. com/westend/article/BWW-­Interview-­Chris-­Bush-­Talks-­PERICLES-­at-­the-­ National-­Theatre-­2018071212. McAvinchey, Caoimhe. 2014. Performance and Community: Commentary and Case Studies. London: Bloomsbury. Mobile Unit. 2022. Public Theatre. Accessed 10 September 2022. https://publictheater.org/programs/mobile-­unit. Naylor, Gary. 2018. Interview: Community Participants Talk Pericles at the National Theatre. Broadway World UK. August 9. https://www.broadwayworld.com/westend/article/BWW-­Interview-­Community-­Participants-­Talk-­ PERICLES-­at-­the-­National-­Theatre-­20180809. Nicholson, Helen. 2005/2014. Applied Drama: The Gift of the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. ———. 2019. As You Like It: Reflections on Year Two of Public Acts. National Theatre Magazine 14. https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/content/ m e m b e r s m a g a z i n e -­1 4 ? u t m _ s o u r c e = S i l v e r p o p M a i l i n g & u t m _ medium=email&utm_campaign=DEV_MemberMagazine_2019_12_11%20

2  PUBLIC SHAKESPEARE: PUBLIC WORKS (NEW YORK CITY) AND PUBLIC… 

109

(1)&utm_content=&spMailingID=41389442&spUserID=OTAxODU0MDc 5ODkS1&spJobID=1661889350&spReportId=MTY2MTg4OTM1MAS2. ———. 2020. Public Acts: A Story of Hope. Unpublished report for the National Theatre of Great Britain. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. 2018. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK. Paget, Derek. 2004. Case Study: Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War, 1963. In The Cambridge History of British Theatre, ed. Baz Kershaw, vol. 3, 397–411. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Public Works. 2022. Public Theatre. Accessed 15 May 2022. https://publictheater.org/programs/publicworks/. Rosenthal, Daniel. 2013. The National Theatre Story. London: Oberon Books. Selman, Chris. 2018. NT Pericles a Wonderful Act of Community Theatre: Review. Gay Times. https://www.gaytimes.co.uk/culture/nts-­pericles-­a-­wonderful­act-­of-­community-­theatre-­review/ Shapiro, James. 2020. Shakespeare in a Divided America. London: Faber & Faber. Shaughnessy, Robert. 2018. Shakespeare in the Theatre: The National Theatre, 1963–75: Olivier and Hall. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Sheir, Rebecca, host. 2015. Shakespeare in Black and White. Folger Library Shakespeare Unlimited Podcast. https://www.folger.edu/shakespeare-­ unlimited/shakespeare-­black-­white. Shepherd, Sam. 2009. The Cambridge Introduction to Modern British Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smialkowska, Monika. 2014. Patchwork Shakespeare: Community Events at the American Shakespeare Tercentenary (1916). In Outerspeares: Shakespeare, Intermedia, and the Limits of Adaptation, ed. Daniel Fischlin, 321–346. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Snook, Raven. 2018. What Does a Show Starring Everyday New  Yorkers Look Like? Theater Drama Fund, August 16. Accessed 9 December 2021. https://www.tdf.org/articles/1978/ What-­Does-­a-­Show-­Starring-­Everyday-­New-­Yorkers-­Look-­Like. Swain, Marianka. 2018. BWW Interview: Director Emily Lim Talks Pericles at the National Theatre. Broadway World, July 4. https://www.broadwayworld.com/ westend/article/BWW-­Interview-­Director-­Emily-­Lim-­Talks-­PERICLES-­at-­ the-­National-­Theatre-­20180704. Taylor, Paul. 2018. Pericles, Olivier, National Theatre, London, Review: An Uplifting Achievement. The Independent, August 30. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-­e ntertainment/theatre-­d ance/reviews/pericles-­o livier-­ n a t i o n a l -­t h e a t r e -­l o n d o n -­r e v i e w -­c o m m u n i t y -­a n -­u p l i f t i n g -­ achievement-­a8509531.html. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

110 

K. S. BROKAW

Turan, Kenneth, and Joseph Papp. 2010. Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. New York: Anchor Books. UK Londoners Welcome Giant Syrian Refugee Puppet ‘Little Amal’. 2021. MSN Video, October 25. https://www.msn.com/en-­xl/video/other/uk-­ londoners-­welcome-­giant-­syrian-­refugee-­puppet-­little-­amal/vi-­AAPVIap. Vinter, Robyn. 2022. ‘Eclectic Range’ of First-Timers Come Together in Doncaster. Brecht Update. The Guardian, August 27. Vollandes, Stellen. 2021. What Shakespeare in the Park Means for PostPandemic New  York City. Town and Country, August 6. https://www. townandcountr ymag.com/leisur e/ar ts-­a nd-­c ultur e/a37244281/ merry-­wives-­of-­windsor-­shakespeare-­in-­the-­park-­2021/. Walk With Amal. https://www.walkwithamal.org. Waugh, Rosemary. 2018. Pericles Review. The Stage, August 27. https:// www.thestage.co.uk/r eviews/pericles-­r eview-­a t-­n ational-­t heatr e-­ london%2D%2Djoyous-­lively-­and-­community-­focused. Whitworth, Geoffrey. 1951. The Making of a National Theatre. Westport, CT: Hyperion Press, Inc. Wolfgang, William Floyd. 2021. Grassroots Shakespeare: ‘I love Shakespeare, and I live here’: Amateur Shakespeare Performance in American Communities. Shakespeare Bulletin 39: 355–373. Worthen, W.B. 1997. Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Productions Discussed Lim, Emily, dir. 2018. Pericles. Adapted by Chris Bush. Public Acts in Association with the National Theatre of Great Britain. Jim Fortune (composer), Fly Davis (set and costume design), Robby Graham (lighting design), Paul Arditti (sound design), Tarek Merchant (music direction). Olivier Theatre, London, United Kingdom. Rintoul, Douglas, dir. 2019. As You Like It. Adapted by Laurie Woolery and Shaina Taub. Public Acts in association with the National Theatre and Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch. Shaina Taub (composer and lyricist), Hayley Grindle (set and costume design), Paul Anderson (lighting design), Leigh Davies (sound design), Yshani Perinpanayagam (musical direction), Sundeep Saina (choreography). Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch, UK.

CHAPTER 3

Identity Shakespeare: L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival

And this is a kind of nondenominational church, if you will, the Church of Shakespeare, where we can all gather and pray through songs and dances and words and community and everybody should be in the room. —Lisa Wolpe (2022) Once I’m in the door, then I have opportunity to shift people’s minds around human interaction, and what’s true and what’s not true, and what’s fair and what’s unfair and how we need to shift. Shakespeare has been the key to the door. —Debra Ann Byrd (2017)

This chapter is about the work of two Shakespeare companies who worked to expand the communities of who gets to perform and who gets to see Shakespeare. Since its earliest days, the Shakespearean stage has often excluded several communities of people who are not white, cis-male, and able-bodied from  the biggest and best roles or from performance altogether. That this is finally starting to change is due in no small part to the work of people like Lisa Wolpe and Debra Ann Byrd, who created opportunities for women and for classically trained actors of color when other companies were relegating them to minor parts. This chapter tells the

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8_3

111

112 

K. S. BROKAW

stories of Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC), founded by Wolpe in 1993 to ‘produce professional productions of Shakespeare’s plays with an all-female ensemble’ (About, 2013), and Take Wing and Soar (TWAS) and its Harlem Shakespeare Festival, founded by Byrd in 2001 ‘to support emerging and professional classical artists of color by fostering their artistic achievement and personal growth’ (About, 2020). Both women have also written and continue to perform autobiographical one-woman shows: Wolpe’s Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender and Byrd’s Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey. In what follows, I center the voices of Wolpe and Byrd and those who built these companies, acted in the plays, and saw the performances. This is a verbatim chapter, consisting almost entirely of quotations taken from artist interviews, news stories, and the occasional scholarly work.1 It could be read as a play of sorts. I am grateful to my former  students Mahea LaRosa, Sofia Andom, and Isaac Gállegos-Rodriguez, who conducted most of these interviews in Summer 2021, and to my student Will Darpinian, who greatly assisted with transcriptions. Their work helps to create needed archives for both companies, from which future scholars, students, and theatre artists may benefit.2 Talking about the rarity of archives in amateur theatres, Helen Nicholson, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling point out that ‘the fact that the archive exists at all is significant’ (2018, 194), citing Diana Taylor’s The Archive and the Repertoire: ‘“its very existence signals importance and its availability to be accessed and studied”’ (2003, 19).3 And indeed, the work of L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival needs to be available. This chapter also responds to Bridget Escolme’s instructions for better documenting the work of Shakespearean actors: she calls for creating ‘dialogic archives’ between artists, for putting different elements of archives into conversation, and for documenting the 1  The format of this chapter is inspired by Turan and Papp (2009) and Ney (2016), and by the interview chapters in previous iterations of the Shakespeare in Practice series. It is also inspired by Rob Conkie’s work on creative approaches to writing about Shakespearean performance (2016). 2  The entirety of the transcripts and recordings from LAWSC interviews will be housed by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in the future, and the Folger Shakespeare Library has interest in the materials from Harlem Shakespeare Festival. 3  See also Lehmann (2017) for an analysis of Black female director Liz White’s all-black 1966 Othello film, which discusses gender and racial politics and the problems of the performance archive.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

113

work of smaller companies, those outside the mainstream. As she explains, ‘we might be able to have a broader debate about the meanings produced in Shakespeare performance were there more archives to bring into dialogue with one another’ (2010, 90). Journeying through these interviews will lead each reader to their own conclusions about the role Shakespearean performance has played in the lives of Wolpe, Byrd, and the communities they serve through their work. The recurring themes that I find most relevant to this book’s focus include: • The power of representation: the importance of seeing someone on stage, someone powerful, who looks or sounds like you and how that might make someone dream new dreams or feel connected in new ways. • The means by which community is created among theatre-makers in similar identity communities who have been marginalized from the Shakespearean stage, including women, actors of color,  and LGBTQAI+ identifying people. • How Shakespearean theatre, under particular circumstances and with leadership from these communities, can connect these frequently marginalized people to audiences, creating reported senses of kinship and shared humanity. • The specific ways that acting Shakespeare—and acting across written or assumed genders and races—can change people’s sense of selves and their sense of their relationship to their community. • How playing powerful male Shakespearean characters traditionally portrayed by white male actors invites women and people of color to reflect on gender and race privilege. • The power of learning to tell your own story, to community after community, creating one-woman works of art that can travel the world to speak truths both personal and shared. • The exhausting labor of founding and running a company, fundraising, and mounting shows. • The importance of mentorship and personal care to creating the safest and freest possible communities in which to explore Shakespeare and identity. After a brief introduction of the interviewees and interviewers, stories of the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Take Wing and Soar are

114 

K. S. BROKAW

told in the words of those who built these companies. The chapter ends with their reflections on the legacies of these companies and of the powerful women who founded them. Dramatis Personae Lisa Wolpe: Founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC), established in 1993. For LAWSC, she produced and starred in 14 productions and directed 12, and has likely played more male roles professionally than any female actor in the world. Her autobiographical one-woman show, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, has toured the world and she continues to perform it. Debra Ann Byrd: A classically trained actress and producer who founded Take Wing and Soar and the Harlem Shakespeare Festival in the early 2000s, of which she was Artistic Director. In 2022, she was named Artistic Director of Southwest Shakespeare Festival (Mesa, Arizona). Her autobiographical one-woman show, Becoming Othello: A Black Girls’ Journey, has toured the world and she continues to perform it. L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company Members and Affiliates: Erin Anderson, Linda Bisesti, Cynthia Beckert, Leigh Curran, Celeste Den, Cristina Frías, Veralyn Jones, Edgar Landa, Mary Beth O’Donovan, Natsuko Ohama, Cynthia Payo, Lisa Porter, Brady Rubin, Elizabeth Swain, Mary Trahey, Lolly Ward. Take Wing and Soar/Harlem Shakespeare Festival Members and Affiliates: Trezana Beverly, Devon Glover, Petronia Paley, Timothy Stickney, Elizabeth Swain, Dathan Williams, Lisa Wolpe. The interviewers: All interviewers were funded by University of California Merced’s University Research Opportunities Center-­ Humanities (UROC-H), a Mellon Foundation-sponsored program that supports research by students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in academia. They conducted interviews over Zoom in the summer of 2021. Sofia Andom: A 2022 graduate of UC Merced, degree in English. Andom starred as Imogen in Shakespeare in Yosemite film Imogen in the Wild (2021) and as Rosaline in Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022). Currently an experiential leadership educator for Pathways Travels. Isaac Gállegos-Rodriguez: A 2022 graduate of UC Merced, degree in English, and participant in the honors program. Currently an instructor for Justice Outside.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

115

Mahealani LaRosa: A 2022 graduate of UC Merced, degree in English with a minor in Global Arts Studies, who has published a theatre review in Shakespeare Bulletin. For Shakespeare in Yosemite, LaRosa designed costumes and props for Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022) and Romeo and Juliet (2023).

Early Histories: Navigating Gender, Race, Theatre, and Shakespeare Lisa Wolpe: Sometimes I feel like Shakespeare saved my life. I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was just 19. It was at a time when I needed that bigger conversation in order to express what my own family was not willing to discuss (2013/2019). Debra Ann Byrd: My daughter was sick and I was no good. So I laid down. And someone called me and told me that just because my daughter was dying, doesn’t mean I had to die too. I got up from there and I went to school: I went to college so that I could study Shakespeare (2020a). Timothy Stickney: Generally part of the way I got into theater was my father was not going to have shy children and so he pushed me into this program (2021).4 Edgar Landa: My first experience with Shakespeare was very positive, in high school, in a 99.99% Mexican American community. I played Romeo in our three-and-a-half-hour production of Romeo and Juliet (2021). Debra Ann Byrd: Then one day a friend of mine invites me to see a troupe of Black actors performing Shakespeare, at the Harlem Victoria 5 Theatre. I think to myself, ‘Who is this Shakespeare? I sure hope he’s good!’ The stage is alive. It’s Richard III … What is that? That is interesting. Wait, something about that sounds familiar. Yes, yes, like the rhythms of the King James Bible. Oh yes! Oh yes! Now I really want to try that, that Shakespeare stuff (2019). Lisa Wolpe: The first time I experienced my masculinity was playing Viola in Twelfth Night when I was nineteen, Viola and Cesario. And I remember sitting in that rehearsal moment thinking, ‘I am all genders. I’ve always been all genders’ (2022). Celeste Den: English was not my first language. I love the way other immigrants speak English: the way they use language is way more 4  For those artists who were interviewed for this chapter just once, after the initial date of interview is documented the first time, it is not repeated.

116 

K. S. BROKAW

interesting than a grammatically correct English professor. My relationship to language somehow allows the way that Shakespeare is structured to be accessible (2021). Cristina Frías: For so long I felt like Shakespeare wasn’t for me. It was British. It was high class. It was intellectual. I didn’t grow up with Shakespeare’s canon in my family library (2021). Trezana Beverley: I always wanted to be an actress. I think I was nine or eight and I knew. I used to travel with my grandmother, and the first legitimate play that I saw was at the Pasadena Playhouse. It was a Restoration comedy, and to this day, I see those actors on the stage (2022). Dathan Williams: I came to theater because I stuttered as a child. When I was in fourth grade, my teacher, Mrs. Sunlightner, gave me a copy of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and because it was to me a foreign language, I had to slow down in order to comprehend exactly what was on the page. We discovered that part of my stutter was linked to the fact that my brain was moving faster than I could articulate my words (2021). Natsuko Ohama: When I first came to New York in the ’70s, I had never seen Shakespeare, and I heard about this thing called Free Shakespeare in the Park (New York Shakespeare Festival). And it was Winter’s Tale. The lead actor was Randall Duk Kim. I had no idea who that was. Because of the vision of seeing Randy Kim, it was not a big issue for me as an Asian to play a major role. I didn’t think it was impossible because I saw it. I saw it (2022). Debra Ann Byrd: I am invited to go with a friend to New  York Shakespeare Festival’s outdoor production of Julius Caesar … The talented Black actor Jeffrey Wright is playing Marc Antony and I watch him closely. He has a swagger in his walk. One that is totally familiar. One that I have seen so many times before. A tear begins to well up in my eye and I do everything I can to stay in my seat and not jump up and say: ‘He’s from the ‘hood! He’s from the ‘hood! Look at him! Just like me, Marc Antony is from the ‘hood!’ I’m gonna be okay. Yes. I’m gonna be okay (2019). Dathan Williams: Another reason why I got involved in theater: my mom took me when I was ten to Arena Stage to see the musical version of Raisin in the Sun, called Raisin. And it was the first time that I saw people that looked like me on a stage. So, if you see yourself, if you recognize yourself, you know that it is a possibility (2021). Debra Ann Byrd: I was about to graduate college and I had to do senior class showcase. I really wanted to do classical work because that’s

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

117

what I came to college to learn, because I wanted to be a Shakespeare actor. And the first professor said, ‘Debra Ann, what do you want to do when you graduate college?’ ‘I want to be a Shakespearean actor.’ ‘Oh, so it seems that might be a challenge.’ The other professor said, ‘Debra Ann, with your facility for language, perhaps, you should try your hand at August Wilson.’ So these professors are telling me on my exit interview that I can forget about a career in the classics? I was really hurt and I didn’t know how to fix it (2020b). Oskar Eustis: If people don’t speak Shakespeare, if people don’t feel like it belongs to them, it is a way of excluding them from the highest levels of discourse in society. It is a kind of apartheid, which is very real (quoted in Ney 85). James Shapiro, in writing: It turns out that who gets to perform Shakespeare’s plays is a fairly accurate index of who is considered fully American (2020, 4). Debra Ann Byrd, to Lisa Wolpe: You mean to tell me, I just chose to live so I can do Shakespeare, and now you’re telling me that it’s not possible because I’m a brown girl? And that there begins the shift, the shift of my entire world. I had no idea that my life would be this connected to Shakespeare. Lisa Wolpe, to Debra Ann Byrd: And then it’s important that we do the thing that people tell us we can’t do (Byrd and Wolpe 2017).

Women Playing Men in Shakespeare: The Early Years Lisa Wolpe: How many hundreds of great actresses have played Hamlet? How many people have forgotten who Charlotte Cushman was? The greatest actress in the world, and when she died, everybody forgot she existed (2016).5 Debra Ann Byrd: Right after I played Othello, in interviews they’d say, ‘Debra Ann, you’re so brave. You’re actually doing an all-female Othello in Harlem.’ I said, ‘There’s a tradition! You didn’t know women played men 5  For a book-length discussion of Shakespeare and gender in performance, including histories of several single-sex Shakespeare companies and an interview with Wolpe, see Power (2015).

118 

K. S. BROKAW

for a long time, that women played Hamlet back in the day?’ I said that ‘for twenty years, Lisa Wolpe has been doing this!’ (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Lisa Wolpe: The Players Club, in New  York City: the Edwin Booth House. I went there. Charlotte Cushman was the most famous actress in the world when Edwin Booth was alive. And she went to his wife and borrowed his Hamlet costume, walked into a theater across the street from him, played Hamlet, got better reviews than him. Literally the most famous actor in the world. The most revered. A lesbian. When she died, Edwin Booth was so envious of her that he turned the bust of her to the wall. And I say to the docent, ‘Do you have any sense of where Charlotte Cushman is represented here?’ She said, ‘Who?’ To be disappeared as a female, when you were at the top of your craft! It’s really interesting when you get disappeared at the top of your craft. I feel that all the time now. I reach out to people doing all-female Shakespeare in ‘legitimate houses’. They’re like ‘We’re making history. This is new.’ Then to go, showing a 25-year-old tape, ‘This is not new. This is old’ (Byrd and Wolpe 2017).

L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company is Born Natsuko Ohama: I first met Lisa at Shakespeare and Company in Lennox, Massachusetts; she came to one of the workshops. Lisa Wolpe: I’d already played Rosalind and Viola. There’s not much else to play and Natsuko had me play Malvolio. I fell in love with playing male characters. When I asked her how to play a man, she said, ‘Just watch basketball’. So I did what she said, and would imitate the way that they would work in that athletic, exciting, leg-strong way (2022). Elizabeth Swain: I met Lisa when I was doing one of the courses that Shakespeare and Company did. She did this geography thing, about locating things that you say in the space. I thought, ‘Oh, that’s a clever lady’ (2021a). Lisa Wolpe: I started L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company after I did an all-female production of King Lear in Santa Monica under a man’s direction. I started thinking ‘this is great, but a lot of the women in that production weren’t allowed to contribute anything. They were just acting under his direction’ (quoted in Feldman 1993). Natsuko Ohama: When she started to form the company, she asked me to be a part of it.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

119

Lisa Porter: I answered an open call audition for an all-female Hamlet. I remember walking into the theater and doing a monologue. And all of a sudden I heard this woman’s voice, and it was Lisa Wolpe. She said something like ‘that was great and we would love to call you back’, which was really nice to hear being a woman in L.A. at that time, in the Harvey Weinstein years. First of all, even to see a woman, but also to have somebody respond positively rather than ‘you’re this, you’re not this, no thank you’ (2021). Veralyn Jones: When I auditioned for the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare company, it was truly on a whim. I was so ignorant: on the information sheet they said, ‘Which role are you interested in playing?’ I said, ‘Gertrude,’ not realizing I could have said any character, any male character (2021). Mary Beth O’Donovan: I was looking for anything that had to do with Shakespeare in L.A., and I read about what Lisa was doing and just started calling and leaving messages saying, ‘I don’t care what it is, I just want to come and do something with you guys.’ Finally, she was like, ‘Okay, you can do the front of house (2021).’ Mary Trahey: I was originally brought on for stage management-type stuff and then I had told Lisa that I had moved to L.A. because I wanted to work in makeup. For The Tempest she was talking about all these spirit entities that she wanted to be on the island and then I was the makeup artist ever since (2021). Cynthia Payo: I was really brought into the company via my daughter Jesse, because she was in Richard III, as Young Elizabeth. Lisa was intuitive and she picked up that I was an aspiring actress as well. And so she had me understudy Lord Stanley. And from then on, we became part of the company (2021). Erin Anderson: I’d gone to drama school in L.A. and I was a bit awed by Lisa and the whole idea of this company, and I went to audition for The Merchant of Venice (2021). Edgar Landa: I first came in to assist another fight director when he choreographed their first Hamlet. I just remember being kind of awed. Because it was all women I was like, ‘Wow, this is unique and interesting. I’ve never heard of this.’ Celeste Den: I would say I tend to have more Yang energy than Yin. Lisa definitely found a little niche for me, which is that I play masculine roles. I got a low voice so that ever since I was little, I would get ‘sir’ on the phone.

120 

K. S. BROKAW

Romeo and Juliet (1993) Dramalogue: ‘A watershed effort … staged with imagination, taste and passion by Lisa Wolpe, who also plays Romeo. A stirring production, rife with rich performances … a gilt-edged ensemble. The gender gap is erased by actors who enact their roles with style and individual characterization’ (quoted in History, 13). Lisa Wolpe: What does the story teach us? Has the community learned to listen to its children? (2013/2019). Natsuko Ohama (Friar Lawrence): The first thing that we did was Romeo and Juliet. Lisa is one of the greatest Romeos I’ve ever seen (2022). Lisa Wolpe (Romeo, Director): Romeo is the first role I picked for myself. I thought, ‘I’ll play Romeo and show the love that I have for women through this lens. How I could be romantic, how I could be a perfect boyfriend’ (2016). Natsuko Ohama: I think what was really remarkable about our production of Romeo and Juliet is that people really did get that feeling of love between this man and woman even though they were two women playing the parts (quoted in Romeo, 1993). Lisa Wolpe: It’s really fun for a woman to play [Romeo]. For me as a woman, I am probably closer to the open vulnerability of a boy than a man might be, who’d be thicker muscled, deeper voiced, have a long history of conquests male to female, which I don’t have (Quoted in Romeo, 1993). Fran Bennett (Nurse):6 A man and a woman playing it? It’s like ‘Oh, lovely, romantic, and all that stuff.’ But two women playing it? It takes on a different thing altogether (quoted in Romeo, 1993). Donya Gioannotta (Juliet): In this show, as Juliet, I saw a young boy: young Romeo (quoted in Romeo, 1993).7 Natsuko Ohama: I took Lisa and Donya out to the Griffith Observatory at night. It was this beautiful, beautiful evening. Lisa went down into the gully, and they did the balcony scene. Couldn’t have been better (2022). Leigh Curran (Capulet): Playing Capulet was a different kind of power, a different kind of anger. This was not having to tame it. And that’s very exciting and very unsettling (quoted in Romeo 1993). 6  Sadly, founding LAWSC member and award-winning actor Fran Bennett passed away before we were able to interview her. For an account of her life and work, including a tribute from Wolpe, see Ocampo-Guzman (2021). 7  The promotional film from which these quotations are taken is available on YouTube and includes several excerpts from the production, including the balcony scene and Juliet’s fight with her parents (Romeo 1993).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

121

Fran Bennett: It’s a pity that we let inconsequential things get in the way of true love or life. Strike through love and say life (quoted in Romeo 1993). Lisa Wolpe: We need to look at what it is we are scared about and walk right into those shadows and illuminate some of these issues that have been dark for so long. Why is it scary for women to play men? Why is it scary for women to have power? Why is it scary for women to pick up a weapon? Why is it scary for women to play a romantic scene on stage, which was originally played by men? These are huge questions and I am really excited about the questions (quoted in Romeo 1993). Donya Gioannotta: The Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company has opened up a whole ’nother level of opportunities, for myself as an actress and for all women involved in every aspect: acting, directing, the music, the set design. It’s just … access. Access to our art (quoted in Romeo 1993). Brady Rubin (Montague): The first show we did I looked around and I thought ‘this is going to be the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Nobody’s going to believe us; it’s going to be horrible.’ And of course, it wasn’t at all. As soon as we opened, we were a huge success (2021). Lisa Wolpe: We sold out and the audience went bananas, the estrogen in the room, the excellence of our work. There was this powerful sensual, exciting, female voice that I’d never seen (2022).

The Work of L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company Natsuko Ohama: Lisa very patiently over the years corralled all these groups of women with varying degrees of ability and experience and discipline. To mount a production, as the leader of it, that was a lot of responsibility and a lot of energy expended (2022). Celeste Den: I remember being super impressed with just how many hats she had to wear as a producer and actor and director. Mary Trahey: Her knowledge was always a little daunting. She’s just like a force. Cristina Frías: She’s just a force. She’s a very generous collaborator and ensemble member. She’s freaking brilliant. Lisa Wolpe: As a director, I think that it is very important to speak to the inclusion of all people in our communities and on our stages. As a result, I call myself both an activist and a director, an advocate for diversity

122 

K. S. BROKAW

and female empowerment in the Shakespearean theatre tribe (quoted in Ney 83). Nancy Taylor, in writing: Wolpe usually begins rehearsal with a process developed by Tina Packer called ‘dropping in’, which seeks to draw out an actor’s associations with each significant word the character speaks and to develop a connection between the actor’s and the character’s histories and, consequently, a connection between their psyches (2005, 44). Othello (1994) Backstage West: This production by the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company proves definitely that women can stage classic, gripping Shakespeare with the best of them … Othello shows that authentic human drama can easily cross the gender gap (quoted in History 12). Linda Bisesti (Roderigo): I remember feeling slightly dirty behind Roderigo because of his disrespect for humanity. I remember thinking ‘I’m not sure I’ll ever want to play that role again’ (2021). Leigh Curran (Iago): The most unsettling thing was the exploration of evil which I undertook when I was playing Iago. I was way out of my comfort zone but through a combination of body, voice, and text, work was able to find a way in (2021). Hamlet (1995) LA Times: Hamlet proves anew how viscerally effective women can be in the great Shakespearean roles. A case in point is Lisa Wolpe. Intense and boyish, Wolpe mitigates the Dane’s melancholy with a highly developed sense of irony that persists until the last gasp. It’s a convincingly sexy performance, whatever your gender (quoted in History 13). Lisa Wolpe (Hamlet, co-director): Hamlet has 1500 lines, and Gertrude and Ophelia together have 350 lines. So the ability to actually play something with bandwidth and range and stamina and intelligence is the chance to reveal my own stamina and bandwidth and intelligence (2022). Natsuko Ohama (Hamlet, co-director): Working on Hamlet was extraordinary because of the greatness of the text. Lisa and I worked on that text together, sharing a role (2022). Veralyn Jones (Claudius): When I played Claudius, he was a powerful man. He was King. I remember even in our Green Room situation or in

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

123

the dressing room, people didn’t step into my space as easily. There was a space provided for me because I held a position of power. Brady Rubin (Polonius): When I was playing Polonius, I remember being in the bathroom with someone else from the company before dress rehearsal and she came out and she jumped when she saw me in my male costume. But I peed standing up. Linda Bisesti (Osric): I think Osric was unsettling to me because he’s such an entitled, ignorant character. And Hamlet refers to him as ‘who is this waterfly?’ I remember that being really insightful to me about somebody who was lower status trying to become upper status and how that lived in my body. Did it become a bravado across my chest? Natsuko Ohama: That’s the problem with playing Hamlet. Once you’ve played Hamlet, you don’t care about playing anyone else. It’s laughable to us to think of Ophelia as a great role. It’s not. I mean, why would I want to put myself through six weeks of being man-handled, tortured, and insane? And why would you say that the female roles are great? When you compare them to the male roles, they’re just not (2022). Lisa Porter (Laertes): I remember so clearly the night that I first went on as Laertes, how electrifying it was to walk on stage and be a physical threat. Veralyn Jones: After playing Claudius, quite frankly, I did not want to relinquish that power. I felt more powerful. And as women, we don’t walk in that power every day. I’ve taken it and carried it with me every place else. And that’s something I received from working with Lisa. Lisa Porter: I think that we changed the way, especially in Los Angeles, a lot of people thought about gender. What I can say is, I had very heteronormative men come see Hamlet and say that was the best Hamlet they ever saw. Lisa Wolpe: I don’t know that it will make women more masculine to play a role on the stage. But I do know that women are mostly raised to be silent and not participate. The more men who come to the play and say, ‘I thought it was a brilliant Hamlet and after four minutes I forgot about the gender and was just watching the best Hamlet I’ve ever seen,’ that is a win. I don’t think the playing of a role can change your chemistry, but it can change your mind (2016). Erin Anderson: I learned from watching her as an actor and I felt embraced as a person, as a young person trying to figure some shit out. And I felt like she was a friend.

124 

K. S. BROKAW

Mary Trahey: It was nice to be acknowledged for doing what I wanted to do. She took me at my word when I said I was a makeup artist and she just let me do my thing. I was young and that was very empowering. Lisa Wolpe: Not to play the victim on stage is a tremendous opportunity (2016). Richard III (1996) Entertainment Weekly: Wolpe is a mesmerizing and miraculous Richard, giving him such a slithery, most gleeful joy in his deathly web of twisted and world-class scheming … Thanks to the determination of Lisa Wolpe and her Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, even theatrical perfection recognized for several centuries can obviously be improved upon (quoted in History 13). Lisa Wolpe (Richard III): When I played Richard III, I could embody the war-torn soul of a man shaped ill by his fortune (see Fig. 3.1). I can lurch along his path and feel his situation a bit. Compassion is not his thing. Power is (2013/2019).

Fig. 3.1  Katrinka Wolfson as Anne and Lisa Wolpe as Richard in Richard III, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2011). (Photo credit: Tom Zasadzinski)

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

125

Cynthia Payo: The first rehearsal of Richard III for my daughter Jesse was such a defining moment. The stage was being constructed and we entered and Lisa Wolpe was working out her first soliloquy, and we were just stunned. Not only because of her exquisite talent but because it seemed like this production was going to be something special. Linda Bisesti (Catesby): We would do fighting rehearsals in Richard III. I would always break my wrist, which was very feminine. I remember Lisa being very specific in the gender work to stop that. Brady Rubin: There’s a lot of violence in Shakespeare. And when you see a woman doing that, you really notice it. You’re aware that these are two women fighting, and our battle scenes were really good. Lisa Wolpe: Playing Richard changed me. I think it made me a better person because I explored a dark side of myself and, having brought it to light, I was able to choose whether to be a relentless force or a collaborative force in my own life (quoted in Stasio 1998). Celeste Den: In many ways, Shakespeare was very much writing about gender. In his plays, women are constantly disguising themselves as men, men fall in love with other men, and every play examines the power imbalance in male-female relationships. In most productions, these issues are rendered invisible by casting and staging that reinforces contemporary gender norms, whereas all-female productions can keep gender and sex in the front of an audience’s mind. Lisa Porter: It just made me realize that as a woman previously in Shakespeare, I’d never been given that much text before. Just the amount of lines I suddenly had allowed me to be a much bigger part of the story. Cynthia Beckert: Taking up the space is something that that I still use to this day when I go in to take an audition. I stand and I take my space. All I’m doing is expanding my presence to fill the space, rather than holding myself limited as I had been taught by society all my life (2021). Celeste Den: Naturally it came easily to me because I am loud and take up space and I’m gregarious. Although I do have a bone to pick which is that she always put me in facial hair. Linda Bisesti: It would be so much fun to make our beards (see Fig. 3.2). Lisa taught us how to take a cork of a wine bottle and put the ashes on it with a match. And then we would put the beard on the face and we would draw our eyebrows to be thicker. I remember thinking, ‘Wow this feels really good.’ Elizabeth Swain: I’m not a fan of facial hair, which I’m sure Lisa will be furious to hear (2021a).

126 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 3.2  Cynthia Beckert applying a beard to play Antonio in The Tempest, for LAWSC directed by Lisa Wolpe (2003). (Photo credit: Lisa Wolpe)

Mary Trahey: I made a lot of beards and a lot of mustaches. For me it was a really fun challenge to figure out the fundamental similarities and differences in bone structure and how to express those with makeup and hair. Erin Anderson: It’s the equity of having people of different ages, of different walks, all women, coming in able to explore this work and not feel self-conscious. I keep thinking: the idea of embodiment without shame. Linda Bisesti: By crossing gender and working with Lisa and talking about status, it made me really aware of how people can feel invalidated. And that’s something that is really important to me as a theater artist: celebrating validity for people across the board. Cynthia Beckert: Just working with all women is extremely liberating. It was eye-opening to realize the way that patriarchy has structured not only our society but even woman’s view of themselves, and what they think is possible or even allowed.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

127

Leigh Curran: We were all women exploring the male heart, mind, and body when it came to love, power, murder, war, justice, etc., which gave me a greater understanding of how the white male power structure works. Sometimes I felt compassion, but most of the time I felt and continue to feel deeply saddened about the fight powerful men are engaged in to stay relevant in a rapidly changing multicultural world. Lisa Wolpe: Playing Shakespeare’s great roles is an alchemical process about unpacking the vulnerability of a villain or a man in order to understand why men do what they do. I am poised between victim and villain, comparing without despair, having a kind of perspective on both. The Hamlet or Iago or Richard experience will run right through you and change you. It’s surprising to find out how many people and worlds one can create to inhabit, and how compelling it is to take on different worldviews (quoted in Avila 2014). Brady Rubin: We noticed that as we were playing men, we got more masculine and we could kind of take over a bar. If we walked into a bar, we got service right away. We weren’t the little girls waiting to be served. Much Ado About Nothing (1999) Nitelife: These marvelous women have turned out a sharp, funny, farce comedy with the creative dexterity that has become their trademark. You go, girls!! (History 14). Linda Bisesti (Dogberry): There’s a difference between gender-­ bending and playing a comic character and it’s different from gender-­ bending when you play somebody like Roderigo. There’s a certain kind of laser clarity that I needed for the characters and Lisa just made them accessible by the questions she would ask. Natsuko Ohama (Don John): I broke my arm then. I was working on the set; we were not being technical. We used to always try to pitch in, lots of women. I fell a short distance, trying to catch one of those shop vacs, and I really shattered my elbow. I was in the hospital for three days and then I came back with a cast and I played Don John and nobody seemed to notice (2022). Veralyn Jones: I remember once going to an audition for another Shakespeare company. On the information sheet, they always ask, ‘Which roles are you interested in playing?’ I brought in Claudius, and the director gave me the feeling like, ‘Oh God, here’s another one.’ So we weren’t always met with the most encouragement. They think women shouldn’t be playing male roles and they take it as though it’s some sort of a gimmick.

128 

K. S. BROKAW

Sharon Perlmutter, in writing: Now, if you take one thing away from this, one thing about L.A. Women’s Shakespeare, it’s this: it is not a gimmick. L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare is not about, ‘Oh, look! A bunch of women in drag, burping out loud and scratching themselves, playing at being men. How cute.’ L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare is about putting on honest, thoughtful productions of Shakespeare’s plays, without being limited by gender, and, in the meantime, doing their part to even out the cosmic scales from all that time Shakespeare’s women were played by men (Quoted in History, 2014). Lisa Wolpe: Although gender-bending is trending now, it was seen as a gimmick when I was first working on cross-gender performance in the late 1980s. But it has to be said that women have played great male roles like Hamlet for hundreds of years, and it really isn’t new or ‘gimmicky’ at all (quoted in Elizabeth 2016). Lolly Ward: There were many times I had friends who came to the show and they were saying, ‘Those performers are just the best person for the job, not even male or female, just the best person in that role I have seen (2021).’ A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1998) Playbill: Wolpe’s casting of the show was equally innovative. She chose a double cast of more than 20 girls, ages 5–15, all members of the locally based, multi-ethnic Dance for Self-Esteem Ensemble, for the fairy roles (Manus 1998). Entertainment Today: Lisa Wolpe has outdone herself again, as creative visionary, as director, and as the young hero Lysander. There is a palpable spirit and joy that radiates in waves from everyone in this not-to­be missed presentation, one of the true theatrical highlights of the year in Los Angeles (quoted in History 13). Veralyn Jones: One of the things that Lisa did that I thought was wonderful was we always tried to incorporate young girls in the productions too. Some of these young girls had never really been involved with theater and when they first started, they’d be shy little girls and then at the end, you’d see them owning their own place in the company. Sharon Permutter, in writing: One year, we brought with us a young friend, a teenage kid more interested in basketball than the Bard. And we somehow managed to get him into his seat without seeing the photos of the performers in the lobby. During intermission, we slyly asked him if he’d noticed anything unusual about the performers. He hadn’t. We took

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

129

him out and showed him the photos, gleefully pointing out that the company was all female. ‘No way!’ he said. ‘Not all of them!’ What was really remarkable about this wasn’t that he didn’t know the company comprised women. What was remarkable was that this kid watched, understood, and was entranced by A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And got a little reminder that the potential of women is unlimited (quoted History, 2008, 9). The Tempest (2003) Cristina Frías: I saw their production of The Tempest. And it was my first time seeing an all-women Shakespeare production and I was blown away for a lot of different reasons. At that time in my younger artist life, I didn’t know that was possible. To see all women, and in a sort of gender fluid production, and women of color: that was really important to me. I’m Latina, Mexican American and my friend Cynthia’s Black, and Natsuko, she played Prospero and she’s Asian American (see Fig.  3.3). The aesthetic and artistic directorial vision that Lisa brings makes it really gratifying for someone like me who is always looking for those spaces that are more inclusive. Celeste Den: I used to be a real text nerd. Now I think the authenticity of Shakespeare is the human experience that it contains, right? The way the language is structured can be an obstacle. It can keep people, especially people of color, away from it. Because I think the only reason the Shakespeare plays have lasted this long is that the authenticity in the plays remains in the human experience of those characters. I think people who want a rigid ‘authentic’ Shakespeare are probably a little racist. Edgar Landa: [Ayanna Thompson] talks about ‘Shakespeare’s universal’ and she calls that bullshit that it’s not universal, you know, and that’s how we put Shakespeare onto people, especially people of color, in a way that doesn’t resonate for them. Lisa Porter: It’s not just that we were an all-female company. We were an all-female company, who were very committed to equity, diversity, and inclusion. It was very mixed, in terms of race and age group. And that was one of the other things that I think we changed, was that suddenly you have a Black woman playing the king, the most powerful person in the room is a Black woman. I watched Lisa make that decision. Cynthia Beckert: It was a diverse group of people who had the shared experience of growing up in our society as female, and already being marginalized, and then two different degrees based on race and gender

130 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 3.3  Natsuko Ohama as Prospero and Cynthia Ruffin, Tessa Thompson, and Louisa Jensen as Ariel in The Tempest, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2003). (Photo credit: Mia Torres)

preference, or gender identity. When we look at the script’s themes, we looked at it from the point of view of the marginalized, of the minority, and of the weaker power in society, and it informed everything we did. Tony Frankel, in writing: Wolpe is also to be praised for proving that diversity in casting—whether by gender or color—will not, in and of itself, be detrimental to a production, and her leadership has paved the way for minority actors to dig their teeth into roles that would, not long ago, have been positively taboo for them to play (quoted in History, 2014). Cynthia Payo: My husband José and I were married in 1978. We were a mixed-race couple. When our daughter Jesse was in preschool, for

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

131

Halloween, all the little girls wanted to dress as Disney Princesses. She came home crying, saying, ‘I can’t be a Disney princess because I’m not white.’ Well, José and I just went, ‘Whoa, there are so many beautiful queens of color.’ And so we made her the most magnificent Cleopatra costume. So when Jesse was invited to audition for this company, we saw how beautifully diverse it was, and I thought, ‘Gosh for a young girl this is going to be so important, for Jesse to see women of color and women of all colors and in male roles and female roles, being powerful.’ Cynthia Beckert: The work with Lisa made Shakespeare about social activism, where before I just loved the poetry. Now, I realize that these plots are all about social justice and balance in society, and the need to forgive and to expand our concept of community and humanity. Sofia Andom, to Celeste Den: In theater in general and classical theater, you step into a room and generally everybody is white. Shakespeare historically has made people of color feel unwelcome, because that was a space that we were once not able to act in. Has that ever made you feel uncomfortable? Have you ever felt a little bit wary of stepping into that room? Celeste Den, to Sofia Andom: I’ve never questioned being in that room. Have I questioned why I didn’t get the role versus some other person who might be of the white persuasion? That I have done. When auditioning for Shelby in Steel Magnolias in 2000, the director told me I gave the best audition, but she couldn’t see someone Asian in the role. But I have never questioned my right to be in the room. The only thing I question is the white people on the other side of the table, whether or not they have the imagination to see me in the role that I think I can play. The Merchant of Venice (2005) Backstage West: Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company, after 11 years of stand-out productions, has nothing left to prove. The gender question has no bearing on the quality of the work in this terrific production … Lisa Wolpe’s Shylock may be the most outstanding of any viewed in a multitude of productions, here and in England (quoted in History 2014, 12). Lisa Wolpe: As a Christmas present for my brother and sister, I purchased my dad’s family tree from the internet. And my dad suddenly began to become much more real to me. So there we were, my brother and sister and me, looking at this curious document which showed that my father’s side of the family tree was filled with Rabbis right back to the seventeenth century. Suddenly the phone rang. We heard the voice of a

132 

K. S. BROKAW

lovely older man, weeping, and he asks, ‘Are you the long-lost children of Hans Wolpe?’ He said he was the Rabbi Jerry Wolpe, who had known my father in their Harvard days, and he said, ‘You must come to the first Wolpe family reunion ever,’ which was to be held at the Holocaust Museum in two weeks. There were over 300 Wolpes who came from all over the world: Germany, South Africa, Australia, the US. I didn’t know any of them. Each one with the wind blowing through a hole in their heart, where the lost ones ought to be. Jerry told me that my dad killed over 300 Nazis in a six-month period. Because he was a stateless Jew, his Canadian friends arranged to have him nationalized as a Canadian citizen, so he could be cared for. A comrade that fought with him said my dad was the bravest man he ever knew. But war is a kind of madness, and peace doesn’t come easily to a war veteran. He was a survivor, but he was rocked by mass murders, scorched by that incredibly fast fire of death that took so many lives … I decided to direct and produce The Merchant of Venice with our all-female company. I set it in Venice in 1942, and I played Shylock (2013/2019). Cynthia Beckert (Bassanio): I noticed playing Bassanio (Fig. 3.4): the way I looked at the women in the play, even how I looked at Portia, who Bassanio loves graciously, his first line about her is ‘There is a maiden richly left and she is fair.’ So his first comment is that there’s this available woman who is rich and good-looking. It made me aware of how for the man, the priorities always seem to be putting themselves first and personal power. And it’s the female characters who were building community and who were working for peace. Erin Anderson (Salerio): The Merchant of Venice production was set in the context of the rise of Hitler and the fascist Reich in Germany. I think the anti-Semitism and the xenophobia were elevated by Lisa’s performance and the context in the story we were playing. There’s this scene where they trashed Shylock’s home. Lisa talked about it: this is like kristallnacht, the night where they went in and destroyed Jewish businesses and shops. Lisa Wolpe: A young Christian named Lorenzo steals away with Shylock’s daughter Jessica and Shylock’s money. What can Shylock do? I can imagine my father, seeing all those dutiful Jews putting their suitcases down and boarding the death trains quietly, never to return (2013/2019).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

133

Fig. 3.4  Cynthia Beckert as Bassanio and Veralyn Jones as Bassanio, and Lisa Wolpe as Shylock with Michele Gardner as Tubal, in The Merchant of Venice, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2005). (Photo credit: Mia Torres)

As You Like It (2007) LA Weekly: This time it’s even more interesting, not only because of the already gender-bent nature of the material but because the Forest of Arden has astral-projected into the American West of the 1880s. Lisa Wolpe directs with an assured hand, cleverly adding period music and dance (History 12). Lisa Wolpe: I played Jaques, and I was tired. And I thought, ‘I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.’ We had 30 women on stage in this amazing musical, cowboy version of As You Like It, in Los Angeles. And the next year, I got a telephone call saying, ‘We’re from the Gaia Foundation. We want to fly you out to Provincetown and give you a house for a month and you can just write anything you want. Would you like to come?’ I’m like ‘Spam, liar’, but it was a very wealthy woman who had come and seen that As You Like It (Byrd and Wolpe 2017).

134 

K. S. BROKAW

Erin Anderson (LeBeau): I played LeBeau and then I also understudied Celia, which was a dream. And I did go on, because Lisa always provides an understudy performance at some point during the run. Lisa Wolpe: I never had that before, a place of my own to write, and I went to Provincetown and I began to write this piece, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, about what I believe and what I’ve done in my life (2022). Othello (2008) 2008 Maddy Awards, Madeleine Shaner, Critic: Best Direction: Lisa Wolpe, Acting: Lisa Wolpe as Iago and Nell Geisslinger as Desdemona Backstage West: A match made in heaven … stellar production values … outstanding set, lights, sound, and costuming. This partnership is an elixir of the purest theatricality! The focal point of this richly appointed presentation is the steadfast, magnificently shaded performance of Fran Bennett (Fig. 3.5)… the supporting cast is exceptional (quoted in History, 11)!

Fig. 3.5  Fran Bennett as Morocco in the Merchant of Venice, directed by Lisa Wolpe for LAWSC (2005). (Photo credit: Mia Torres)

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

135

Linda Bisesti (Duke): There was always a respect for the journey in the room. How can you not be aware of race when you are in Othello in the first scene with all the senators? The way they talk about Othello who’s like, Colin Powell, this great military man. I was made very aware and we talked a lot about status and about race because we were women of diverse backgrounds. Cynthia Beckert: Fran Bennett, she played Othello; she was magnificent. But the audience knows that we’re women. Audiences said that they found Othello’s violence to Desdemona even more disturbing and terrifying because it was two female performers. It was easier to stomach when it’s a male enacting violence on a female because that’s something that we see in society. But when it was a woman as a male enacting violence that really made them realize how wrong the situation is. Mary Beth O’Donovan: Lisa was always inclusive. Some people had problems with the way that the doors were totally open to all people who had the passion to be a part of the project. That was more important than what their resumé said they knew about Shakespeare. Lisa opened her arms and her stage to people that wanted to be there with everything that they had. Lisa Wolpe: We have gay women and straight women working happily together—some bring their kids to the production and some bring their girlfriends. In the rehearsal room, there is respect, humor, and an excitement at the permission to play with other women without having guys around to define a traditional hierarchy and sexuality (quoted in Taylor 2005, 48). Linda Bisesti: It was incredibly welcoming and it informed everything I do now as a professor, this work. By the grace of God I was lucky enough to be in the room. Cynthia Beckert: The common factor was that none of us had a penis, yes, but we were very varied even within that common label of ‘female’. Helen Nicholson, in writing: Linking community to empathetic identification with like-minded others, and to identity politics, opens up the possibility of new ways of thinking about community, but it also begs questions about how multiple identities might be narrated and understood … Communities of identity are constructed on a balance between sameness and difference—on the acknowledgment that particular interpretations of experience are somehow different from the experiences and understandings of others (2005/2014, 97).

136 

K. S. BROKAW

Leigh Curran: The open, exploratory atmosphere was liberating: I felt I could go all out, fall on my face, and the space created was safe and respectful. Mary Beth O’Donovan: People were always aware that everyone was carrying as much as they possibly could and wanting to help other people be able to do that. Mary Trahey: For most of the time that I was working with the company, I was stuck in an office job and so it was very gratifying for me to have an artistic community who gave me the opportunity to prove myself. Lisa Porter: There was a feeling of community. I had to leave a relationship that I was in at the time very suddenly and who did I call? I called Lisa Wolpe and I lived in her house for a period of time. It was really a feeling of, ‘Hey, we’re the first call you make when you’re in trouble and we will show up for one another and we’ll celebrate you.’ Natsuko Ohama: I think Lisa had to carry so much of the show. I think the less than professional behavior was because of work and family. All those are the things that would go along with people because you’re not paying anybody. It is very hard to keep the group together. There’s always somebody missing in rehearsal. That would be very frustrating for her (2022). Lisa Porter: I think it was transformative for many of the people involved. I think it changed people and I think that also provided many of us with a haven from what we were experiencing professionally in Hollywood at the time. It was an amazing opportunity to be seen for who I actually was. Natsuko Ohama: There were such diehard fans and such support from people in the community. I think Lisa doesn’t even recognize that. I think her sense of self is not able to absorb how much affection and excitement there were around her productions. But there was a tremendous following and support, and people who were just waiting to see the shows. I mean she was like a little rock star there. I’ve seen it myself, and it was adorable, especially with young women, just so excited to see her, looking at her the way that they look at a star. And she was a star (2022). Veralyn Jones: You see some of the same people coming back time and time again. Somehow it wasn’t a novelty to them anymore; it was just good theater that they were coming to see.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

137

Final Days of L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Growth of Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender Lisa Wolpe: My company might fold this year. No matter how fabulous we are, we’re not getting the funding that everyone else is getting. There are certainly more gay men succeeding in theater than gay women (Woman’s Will, 2012). Holly Derr, in writing: Wolpe’s muse, the Victorian actor Charlotte Cushman, announced her retirement from the stage many times before she was really done. Hopefully Wolpe is only following in Cushman’s footsteps when she threatens the end of her company, but you never know. Catch her while you can. Even if you’re not in L.A., you can still defy the patriarchy by supporting what is clearly not a gimmick (2013). Hamlet (2013) Ellen Dostal, in writing: You will not find a more impassioned version of Shakespeare’s Hamlet than the one Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company is currently offering at the Odyssey Theatre. And with the very real possibility that this may be the company’s final work comes the necessity of experiencing what these dedicated professionals have created while under the influence of Shakespeare’s words (2013). Lisa Wolpe: I play Hamlet and I say ‘frailty, thy name is woman’; there are layers. I am playing Hamlet, and in that moment I am believing that the weak ones are Ophelia and Gertrude. But the audience knows ‘it’s Lisa, we’ve seen her for twenty years. She’s a woman. She may look like a man, but she is a woman, saying something political and personal at the same time.’ It is subversive and it is also revolutionary: I hope so (2016). Elizabeth Swain (King Hamlet): When I came to LA, I re-met Lisa and she invited me to be in the Hamlet, which was the last production, which is sad. Linda Bisesti (Osric): I played Osric again and that was kind of interesting to revisit it, almost 18 years later. Cynthia Beckert (Laertes, Hamlet Understudy): I was Laertes to Lisa’s Hamlet, and I was also the Hamlet understudy, and I got to perform Hamlet one night, and that was a thrill. Lolly Ward (Gertrude): I’d come off another Hamlet and there had been some masculine and aggressive encounters in that other cast that I

138 

K. S. BROKAW

was in. There was just less tension because of a shared understanding of some of the goals that we had. Elizabeth Swain: I’m glad I was in their last one and it was a wonderful experience and people coming backstage afterward and sort of saying how amazing it was to see that those roles can work in the hands of women. It gave me strength to go on and continue cross-gendering. Celeste Den: Shakespeare’s not my favorite. I love it, but it’s not my favorite. Definitely more interested in new works by diverse underrepresented communities, but that being said, when Shakespeare is done right? When it’s done right by the actor, it’s magical. And I still think about Lisa’s Hamlet. It wasn’t flashy. You know, it was a 99-seat theater in Los Angeles. The set and costumes didn’t reek of money. It was just a bunch of actors playing the truth on stage. I think my takeaway from both working with Lisa and watching her is that Shakespeare is not outside of ourselves. It’s not outside of our experience or outside of our reality. We can connect to it, truthfully, as human to human. Cristina Frías (Guildenstern and Marcellus): Around the time I was working with Lisa on Hamlet, I was working as a teaching artist with Shakespeare Center L.A., which does amazing outreach with students here in L.A., high school students, primarily Latino. I’m building these skills and each experience gives you confidence. Suddenly I’m not the only one. I don’t want to be the only Latina in a sea of white people doing Shakespeare. And I’ve been lucky enough to work on Shakespeare plays, in L.A. anyway, that have an intersection of identities. Once I realized, ‘oh, this is for me. I can do this’, then my confidence started building. Tony Frankel: Can it really be 20 years now that I have admired Lisa Wolpe’s work? Time and again, the actress has impressed me with her ability to seamlessly inhabit male Shakespearean roles while bringing fresh significance to characters as disparate as Romeo, Juliet, and Shylock (2013). Lisa Wolpe: Twenty years ago I created the L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company, an all-female, multicultural theater company. Our mission was to bring women and girls’ voices onto the stage and into the world, and we have worked with over 1000 women and girls over the last 20 years (2013/2019). Natsuko Ohama: The fundraising was the biggest challenge. Anyone who’s run a theatre knows how difficult that is, to run a theater with no money. I’m sad that she couldn’t continue it, but that’s easy to say when you don’t have any responsibility for it (2022).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

139

Linda Bisesti: Lisa was constantly doing all that as well as running the theater company and I think it would just have been such a luxury for the Los Angeles Women Shakespeare Company to have had regular funding. Having to do everything at once and trying to figure out how to pay people and how to make it work: that’s a huge thing when you’re acting and being an Artistic Director. Lisa rose to the occasion. She would write grants until two o’clock in the morning, four o’clock in the morning. Veralyn Jones: No place else was hiring women around here to do these roles. It was life-changing for me, it really was. Because once you prove whatever it is that you’re trying to do, that you’re capable of doing it, then it doesn’t become this big thing anymore. Cynthia Beckert: I’ve been in theater for 45 years. I would say that Lisa is the single most influential person in all my theatrical experience, because of what she challenged me to do, because of the opportunities she gave me to play iconic characters. And also the way it’s opened up my awareness of myself and society. Cynthia Payo: My daughter became a performer, and she always credits Lisa—and the company—for being a major influence in her life and in her creativity. I miss it, but for what it did for me and for my daughter, I am eternally grateful. Eternally. Lisa Porter: I ended up training at Shakespeare and Company with everybody there, including Lisa, and I ended up auditioning for Kristen Linklater, and being chosen, and certifying in voice. And that led to me becoming a professor at Syracuse University and it eventually led to me returning to my alma mater, the American Conservatory Theater, where I’m now head of acting and dialects. So L.A. Women’s Shakespeare completely changed the course of my life. Cynthia Beckert: Working with Lisa has certainly made me more active in social justice. Once you become aware of the imbalance, you have to address it. You have to fight to fix it. So I would think that the roots of my current political activism started with L.A. Women’s Shakes. Emine Fişek, in writing: Community is a crucial question for identity politics activism … Feminist and anti-racist emancipatory movements often use the idea of the community-as-commonality as a political strategy for social change (2019, 13). Natsuko Ohama: There’s no other way to do Shakespeare [besides casting women and people of color]. Because we can’t have just a bunch of European white people doing it anymore. Of course they can do it, but

140 

K. S. BROKAW

not alone. The doors have been opened. Lisa’s part of the reason why those doors are open (2022). Lisa Wolpe: Sometimes producing for other people is a distraction from my artistic work. I decided to put the ever-constant yoke of fundraising for my company down so that I can run faster and lighter. The immediate response from my colleagues in the Shakespeare community was to invite me to come and direct all sorts of things at their companies and to perform my solo show (quoted in Avila 2014). Elaine Avila, in American Theatre: Now Wolpe is making a huge transition, putting her company on hiatus in order to move her work out into the world. In the 2014–15 season, Wolpe will direct three all-female Shakespearean productions, in New  York, Vancouver, and Virginia. She has written a new solo show, Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, which she performs in tandem with her directing projects (2014). The New  Yorker: Lisa Wolpe’s solo show brings wry humor and Shakespearean insight to a range of wrenchingly difficult subject matters, including sexism, domestic abuse, suicide, and the Holocaust. Weaving monologues from her favorite male Shakespeare roles—Lear, Hamlet, Shylock—with reflections on her family history, Wolpe explores her fascination with upending gender conventions as a way to reclaim power in the face of a traumatic past. Many of her family members died in the Holocaust; her father, who confronted Nazis in battle, committed suicide when she was four. Several surviving relatives similarly self-destructed, while, for Wolpe, founding the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company became a form of salvation (Shakespeare and the Alchemy, 2015). Lisa Wolpe: LAWSC has been a huge endeavor these past two decades, and playing the great parts has made me a much stronger actor, director, and leader. It’s vitally important to have wise, generous, hard-working teachers, and role models. I pay that forward (quoted in Avila, 2014). Natsuko Ohama: And there are going to be young women who love language, who see Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender, who are just going to take it for granted, which gives them a lot of strength and confidence to not question that ‘of course, I could play that’. And that really moves everything forward (2022). Lisa Wolpe: If we can build empathy, we can invigorate the purpose of art, which is to create alliances that save lives and offer hope. You can never take away the sense of being heard (quoted in Went, 2015).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

141

Harlem Theater, Black Shakespeare, and Othello: A Few Early Histories8 Debra Ann Byrd: Ira Aldridge played Othello in the nineteenth century in the UK, because America was too racist. When he signed the register at the Shakespeare birthplace, he wrote ‘mislike me not for my complexion’ (2017). Adrian Lester, in writing: When James Hewlett performed Othello in the 1820s, Ira Aldridge in the 1830s, or Paul Robeson in the 1930s, people from the African diaspora were dealing with life-threatening, day-to-­ day violence in Western societies as they tried to gain rights and establish social change (2021, 226). Jan Cohen-Cruz, in writing: The second phase of the Harlem Renaissance epitomizes the balancing act of arts and activism familiar in community-based performance … African American artists sought to balance professional cultural expression with political goals intended to overcome racism (2005, 22). National Black Theatre Website: National Black Theatre (NBT) was founded in 1968 by Dr. Barbara Ann Teer, an award-winning performer, director, visionary entrepreneur, and champion of the Black Arts Movement (Our Story, 2022). Donna Walker-Kuhne: I took George [Wolfe] uptown to meet with some artistic leaders in Harlem. I chose Harlem for several reasons. First and foremost, because it was rare at that time for a major arts institution to go to Harlem to have a dialogue with its artistic community. My goal was to build a cultural bridge from Harlem to The Public. We sat in a circle and began to talk. ‘How can The Public support you?’ George asked. ‘We would like some Shakespeare up here,’ one man responded. ‘Nobody ever does Shakespeare in Harlem!’ Everyone in the room nodded their heads.

A new program, ‘Shakespeare in Harlem’, was launched by The Public in August 1994 as a direct response to our meeting (2005, 72).

8  For longer histories of Black Shakespeare in America, see Hill (1984), Thompson (2011, 2021), Young (2013), and chapter 1 of Shapiro.

142 

K. S. BROKAW

Sherri Young, Founder of San Francisco’s African American Shakespeare Company: Colorblind casting was putting your hands over your eyes and pretending that there’s not a different person onstage, someone who has a different background or story or narrative. When people say, ‘I don’t see color,’ that’s an insult. Because that means you really don’t see me (quoted in Goodwin, 2021). Debra Ann Byrd: I went to college so that I could study Shakespeare. I did all my years of school, and I was getting ready to do my senior class showcase. All of a sudden, I was told that I couldn’t do any classical work in my showcase and that really sent me for a spin because that’s what I wanted to do after I graduated. I began to ask myself questions like, ‘What’s going to happen? Is this really America in 2001, they’re telling me that as a Black girl I’m not going to have a career in the classics?’ (2020a). Dathan Williams: Both Debra Ann and I share a very common mission and a common thing: we both got out of undergraduate programs or grad programs and then were told that we would not be able to work as classical actors because of our skin color. Timothy Stickney: There was a time, early, early, early in my education, when people were surprised that you could speak clearly, the King’s English, and be understood. So they were like, ‘but doing Shakespeare at the height of the English language is beyond you. It’s impossible!’ And then it was like, ‘Well, you’re the special one and so we’ll put you in this little part over here on the periphery of the world.’ Debra Ann Byrd: I turn my pain into power and decide to fight back. First thing I do is look it up! And there it is: The History of Black Shakespearean Actors. 1821, New York City, down there at the African Grove Theatre. The African Company was all set to produce Richard III when they were warned not to mount their show, as a rival white theatre company was set to mount their production of Richard III as well. The African Company moved forward with their plans and on opening night the police stormed the theatre, put the Black actors in jail, and carried them down to the courthouse; and the judge only released when they promised, never to try to act Shakespeare again! Damn! Really? Reading all this only strengthens my resolve (2019). Dathan Williams: I auditioned for the Stratford Festival in 1990. David William, who was the Artistic Director then, had gone through the Stratford Festival’s 40-year history. And he saw that in that 40-year history that there were only two actors of color who were actual full members of the company and as a result of that he went and found five actors of color.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

143

I was the only American, and four Canadians were there. First, we were part of the young company and then we became, for the first time ever, full members of the Stratford Festival. That was in the ’91–’92 season. Timothy Stickney: I was in Pittsburgh doing Twelfth Night, Orsino, doing a talk back. And this man, my senior, a white man, had to be 70 if he was a day, is like ‘I just have to say, congratulations! You did a really good job. I’ve never seen a Black man with authority.’ You’re 70! You’ve never seen a Black man with authority? This is the work we do. Trezana Beverley: You know, I have a Tony Award and yet I was told by someone, a very prominent, professional person of color when I got the award, said to me, ‘If only you were a white girl.’ It’s things like that that can become very discouraging if you don’t have a good strong spirit.

Take Wing and Soar is Born Debra Ann Byrd: I decided to start a company called Take Wing and Soar Productions, and Take Wing and Soar Productions’ mission was to help classically trained actors of color reach their highest potential, and I set out to change the face of American classical theater (Fig. 3.6). And that was in 2002. By 2003, we were incorporated. I was in residence at the National Black Theater and my mentor was Dr. Barbara Ann Teer. She founded the National Black Theater in 1968 and she has a serious pro-Black mission. And so we’re in residence there, and we’re doing classical theater (2020a). Trezana Beverley: One of the beautiful things about Debra Ann was that because she had the experience being told that she would never perform in classical theater, she went ahead and proved them wrong and did what she knew in her heart and spirit she knew she could do. And in doing that, she opened the door to others like herself who would not, in the flow of the business, get the opportunities. Timothy Stickney: I got correspondence from Debra Ann asking if I was interested in playing Richard III for her company. I’d been in the business for a while at that time, but I was working in a soap opera. And so I had my bills paid but soap doesn’t feed the soul. I had grown to love Shakespeare. But I always had to jump through flaming hoops, first to prove that even though I look like this, I can do work that may not have been written for this exterior. Dathan Williams: I was in New York and I was looking for something, and I saw this ad looking for Black actors of color who were classically trained. They were doing Julius Caesar, and that began a journey.

144 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 3.6  King Lear for Take Wing and Soar Productions, directed by Timothy Strickney (2010). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams)

Trezana Beverley: I think it’s to her credit that she sought out a Black community to set her theater in. It’s to her credit that she sought out a theater that was very prominent in the community. That took a lot of courage, a lot of guts, and a lot of savvy. Very brave. Petronia Paley: They needed a director for Medea and a friend recommended me. This introduction began an enduring friendship and a meaningful collaborative relationship connecting me with the Harlem theatre community (2021). Dathan Williams: I hadn’t seen anything like that in New York and it certainly was something that was part of my heart and part of what I feel should happen with classical theater. Trezana Beverley: I’d been acting for a very, very long time. But mainly based in New York and when I heard about Take Wing and Soar, I just said, ‘Well, I need to go up there and see what this is all about.’ I had been up to the National Black Theater many times, but I wanted to go see who Debra Ann was. And once I did, I saw that she was a woman of tremendous integrity. And I told her, ‘I want to be a part of your theater. I see what you are about. And I want to be a part of it.’

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

145

Debra Ann Byrd: My stages were always multiracial, but at the center of the stage, you’re going to find a Black, Latino, or Asian Richard III, Queen Elizabeth, or Medea. I’ve been able to create opportunities for people I did know and people I didn’t know. From all over the nation people who were graduating, we just invited them. And they came in droves. Not just the people coming out of school auditioned for us, but also the ones who were older. We had the older generation who just didn’t have a chance to play those roles because they were never cast in those roles. Someone like Trezana Beverly who won the Tony for Colored Girls back in the 1970s, who couldn’t get hired in a classical role. We gave her the role (2020b). Trezana Beverley: Debra Ann went out there and she said, ‘I am going to give all I have learned to a whole community of people of color. And I’m going to encourage them. I’m going to invest in them so that they can have a chance.’ Debra Ann Byrd: And we put everybody on the same stage: Black, white, Asian, Hispanic, young, old, abled, disabled, sign language. We put it all out there because we wanted to show the world that it is possible for all of us to be on the stage and the stage will not fall. It will not explode. Because Shakespeare belongs to all of us, Shakespeare belongs to whoever can perform it (2020b). Dathan Williams: At first, we were at the Poet’s Den, which is in East Harlem. For a good three years, our main theatre was in that section of that community. Timothy Stickney: We looked for who came in the door most excited and ready to experiment during the early years. A lot of our work ended up being gender-bending or non-traditional. We did a Caesar staged reading where of the lead characters, there was only one man. Dathan Williams: We bring young actors on a journey. We are hiring them because we recognize something in them that we can help develop. If they are hired, it is therefore our responsibility to care for them. When they leave our company, they can say, ‘I got this experience here. I have the ability to use it somewhere else. I can actually analyze text in a way that it is playable, believable, and performable.’ And that’s the journey that we take them on. Petronia Paley: I directed a reading of Julius Caesar with an all-female cast, which included the living legends, Vinnie Burrows, Trezana Beverley, Mary Hodges, and Pat Floyd, among others. I also directed Mary Stuart in 2017 with Trezana and Debra Ann at the New York Historical Society,

146 

K. S. BROKAW

also favorably received. I name these actors because they represent the caliber of actors who performed at Take Wing and Soar. Timothy Stickney: When we would think of work to do, I would think about Shakespeare, because that’s where I was most confident in breaking tradition. So when we would think about the plays, the first thought was, well, ‘What does that say when you put it in a Black world?’ Are we interested in spending all of our resources to say what this play will say, when it is populated by people of color? Just doing it because it’s Shakespeare isn’t enough anymore. Elizabeth Swain: Debra Ann asked me a bit later to direct Hamlet [in 2007] for her and I did that, and we had a wonderful company. I think we lost the initial space, but she just doesn’t give up. She got us a space, and we did this play, and it went over quite well, and I had a wonderful cast. But we lost our Claudius and we were about to open and I said there was a guy from Marymount who has played the role. He was the only white actor in that company. It was very funny because he was so young but had one of those ageless looks. Petronia Paley, who was playing Gertrude kept saying, ‘How old is he? He’s my husband?’ ‘Oh You, look great together’ (2021b). Petronia Paley: We presented Medea [in 2008] at the National Black Theatre. The NBT joined the legacy of African American theatre producing plays for the Harlem community dating back to before the Harlem Renaissance. Overcoming the vicissitudes of producing theatre with a limited budget, Medea was enthusiastically received and attended. The cast included Trezana Beverly, Dathan B. Williams, Bryan Webster, and Beverley Prentice, among other talented actors. Elizabeth Swain: Debra Ann asked me to direct a reading of Oroonoko, which was originally a novel by Aphra Behn. And this was an adaptation by a Nigerian playwright (2021b). Timothy Stickney: Classical Theatre of Harlem was under the leadership of two white men at the time.9 There was a brief time of collaboration and companies always are in some level of competition, even though it’s ridiculous. But we had encouraged them to go forward and do the Festival, to continue to do Black, brown, multicultural, diverse work in Harlem. Dathan Williams: When we see ourselves being represented, we will show up. And because we show up, that means that there is money 9  Classical Theatre of Harlem was founded at the Harlem School of the Arts; it closed in 2008 and reopened in 2009 (About, 2022).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

147

coming in and it is supportable and sustainable. People don’t want to come to see something if they don’t see themselves there. Petronia Paley: Debra Ann is a force empowering herself to reach ever higher and deeper and in doing so empowers us all. Dathan Williams: She is a force of nature. The fact is that she went on this journey to become a member of the Shakespeare Theater Association. Very early on, she walked into that room and was essentially the only person of color there. And a female. In essentially an all-male white environment. And she was able to continue to be in that room and make them see the humanity of who she is. Debra Ann Byrd: I didn’t make it to grad school because I had to choose: am I going straight to an MFA [Master of Fine Arts]? Or am I going to start this company? And I chose to start the company. So what that meant for me as an actor is, I don’t get to act. I have to produce. And so I was having a rough time with that because I had studied so hard to be this classical actress (2020a). Petronia Paley: Debra Ann, like so many actors, has many skills; but hers include the administrative skills of running and sustaining a theatre company, writing grants, creating budgets, keepings records, and building a set, if warranted. Timothy Stickney: I don’t know if anyone starts out wanting to be a producer and wanting to tell everybody what to do, but I don’t want to be that. But regardless, she has made a place for other people to do their thing. Trezana Beverley: And I sat in her office more than once and saw how it took a lot of business savvy for a woman to hang in there. Now she’s having an opportunity to act again which is important because I know that myself being an actress, I have to act, you know. Debra Ann Byrd: My mentor told me, ‘Don’t be a martyr, Debra Ann. I know that you’re an actor and for all the years that I’ve known you, you haven’t acted. You’ve been building the company to help all these other artists fulfill their dreams. Which is good, but your artist self will suffer and you’ll feel like a martyr. Don’t do that to yourself. You must get on the stage.’ So of course, when she died, I got on stage (Byrd and Wolpe, 2017). Antony and Cleopatra (2011) Antony and Cleopatra press: He is a Roman general, handsome and brave. She is the Queen of Egypt, beautiful and proud. Together they will defy the power of an emperor. Join us as the AUDELCO Award-winning

148 

K. S. BROKAW

Take Wing and Soar Productions presents Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra from March 17 to 27, at The Poet’s Den Theater. Award-­ winning actress and director Petronia Paley leads the TWAS Classical Actors of Color as they share the stage with classical Michael Early as Antony and Take Wing and Soar’s Producing Artistic Director, Debra Ann Byrd, as she takes on the role of Egypt’s last Queen. The Opening Night Gala on March 17th will honor Councilwoman Inez Dickens (Antony and Cleopatra). Debra Ann Byrd: Taking on these roles is such heavy thing. There’d never been a Black Cleopatra in New York. Well, I’m gonna do it, damn it! You know, having not acted in eight years. Board of directors was like, ‘Really? I don’t know … I’ve never seen you act.’ You know, the pressure on you to be excellent because you know that if you fail your whole company fails and this mission might fail (Byrd and Wolpe 2017).

Beginning Harlem Shakespeare Festival and Meeting Lisa Wolpe Debra Ann Byrd: Take Wing and Soar Productions is ten years old and soaring, indeed! And I’m tired. Tired because my little company has somehow produced 25 plays: 11 Shakespeare plays, 5 turn-of-the-century plays, 3 Greek Tragedies, 2 contemporary plays, and 4 other plays by and about people who lived prior to 1900. This year-round shit is killing me. I’m shorthanded, short on funds, and I need a new way of producing theatre. Then I come up with the idea of creating a festival. Harlem (um hum) Shakespeare (of course) Festival (ha-ha!). Three months. A summer/fall festival with 1 indoor show, 1 outdoor show, a family picnic, a staged reading, Shakespeare-On-Film, Shakespeare-in-Music and Shakespeare-in-the-Open-Air. Harlem Shakespeare Festival Press: Festival Highlights include: an outdoor performance of Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra at the Waterfront Amphitheatre in Riverbank State Park [August 29th through September 1st]; a family day picnic in the park and ribbon cutting ceremony [Saturday, August 31st]; Shakespeare-On-Film Series, featuring the Royal Shakespeare Company’s contemporary African Julius Caesar [October]; an Indoor Mainstage Production of Coriolanus: The African Warrior [Opens October 31st]; a Shakespeare-In-Music concert Come Again Sweet Music created by Dathan B. Williams [November]; and an

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

149

all-female production of The Tragedy of Othello, Directed by Lisa Wolpe of Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company [December] (Barbara, 2013). Debra Ann Byrd: That first year, in 2013, went extremely wonderful. We did Antony and Cleopatra again, in the open air. And now I’ve got five members of the Harlem Shakespeare Team. We’re just getting stronger and stronger (2020a). Othello Staged Reading, 2013 Debra Ann Byrd: The inciting incident for Othello was when I saw Charles Dodson playing a scene. He was doing a workshop with John Barton in 2001 and when I saw him perform the ‘it is the cause’ scene it was so magical and I thought, ‘Oh I have to say those words, and not only say them, but say them like that, because if I can say them like that I’m really doing something’ (Shakespeare Lightning Round 2020). Lisa Wolpe: I was at a STA conference, Shakespeare Theater Association. And once again, I looked around the room and there’s one Black person in the whole room and I was frustrated. And so I walked over to Debra Ann and I said, ‘Is there anything I can do to help you?’ (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Debra Ann Byrd: Roll on 13 years, and that dream became reality when I met Lisa Wolpe. Lisa and I were in New York planning a staged reading for my newest project, when we went to see our mentor Tina Packer perform Women of Will. As I watched, I remembered my college dream. After the show I asked Lisa, ‘Do you have any Iago in you?’, to which she replied, ‘Yes! I do.’ ‘Do you have any Othello in you?’ I blurted out, ‘Yes!’ We locked eyes and said, then that’s what we’ll do: an all-female Othello (Shakespeare Lightning Round 2020). Lisa Wolpe: So when Debra Ann says ‘staged reading’, she means come to New York City for ten days, stage the entire play and pretend you’re holding the script and also be Iago. And do it in your spare time because everybody has a job (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Debra Ann Byrd: It was during rehearsals for that 2013 production that I came up with the idea to write about some of the discoveries I made on my acting journey to becoming Shakespeare’s noble, flawed general Othello (Fig. 3.7). It was an exciting, challenging, frightening, and earth-­ moving time. Exciting because I got to realize a dream. Challenging because, as an actor, I had never taken on a role of that size. Frightening because I needed to become a man to play the role. And then show up on the stage, in front of all my friends, family, and peers (2020c).

150 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 3.7  Debra Ann Byrd as Othello for Harlem Shakespeare Festival (2015). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams)

Lisa Wolpe: Debra Ann wanted to be excellent and she knew that once she stepped on stage in New York City as a classical actress, people were going to judge her on her merits (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Debra Ann Byrd: And with the racism that Othello feels, I think, ‘If Shakespeare was anything like I imagine he might be and he wrote to the depth of people’s souls, he might have just understood.’ I think about over the years how being in a room with a lot of white folks, somehow you end up being the entertainment. So I’m thinking for Othello, they keep him because he helps to keep everything wonderful. And then I think of the times he must have had, in those rooms, in those communities and those places where he might have been one of the only ones [of color]. I imagine that there have been many people over the years who have hurt

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

151

him. Who might have been white folk that kidnapped him from Africa. Desdemona’s not just a woman who hurt him. She’s a white woman who hurt him. It’s another white person and when over the years it piles on and piles on and piles on, it cooks your goose. But you can’t be angry here, this is not a safe space. And so if Iago finally comes to Othello and says, ‘Look your wife is blah, blah, blah,’ there was nothing else for him to do but lose his damn mind (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Lisa Wolpe: The actual experience of doing it in Harlem was such because Debra Ann is a super producer, not an average producer. Her skills in graphic design, in marketing and in networking are beyond anybody else’s I know terms of making something out of nothing. So she got us an amazing theater for almost nothing from a university. She got some really amazing actresses to play, and I have friends too. So we had Kathryn Meisle, who’s on Broadway now, as Emilia (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Debra Ann Byrd: Being a leader in my Harlem community was challenging enough. I kept thinking, ‘Wow, can I do this?’ Once I decided that I could do it, then gender issues started to arise. My actor’s mind was really beginning to believe that I was this man, this general, when nature hit my woman’s body, knocking me out of my created reality, spinning my mind out of control, and landing me somewhere in an altered state of a new world. Then after some time and contemplation of gender, I realized that I was home. Now I really knew I had to write about becoming Othello. Not just for me, but for all those who ever dreamed a dream and those who wrestled with themselves about the binary idea of gender (2020c). Lisa Wolpe: When it was over, I’m in my dressing room, gathering up my few things thinking, ‘It’s been a tough ten days and we’re done.’ I went upstairs and nobody had left. The entire audience was there. There was food spread out for 150 yards, everybody was in their finery, Debra Ann had the unofficial mayor of Harlem there. Then she had Congressional certificates and the key to Harlem for me. She had the radio there. Women I didn’t know were wrapping their arms around me and saying thank you for coming and making this gift. It went on until they turned the lights out. It was almost Christmas and I wandered home in a glorious daze with these gifts, you know? (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Shakespeare in Sable, (2014; revived 2016, 2018) Shakespeare in Sable Press: A special evening of poetry and song, featuring the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar with monologues and scenes

152 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 3.8  Dathan Williams in Shakespeare in Sable for Harlem Shakespeare Festival (2018). (Photo credit: Hubert Williams)

from Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, Antony & Cleopatra, Richard III, and Othello, along with moving spirituals, and the songs of Paul Robeson (Fig. 3.8). Many know the contributions of Paul Robeson and even Ira Aldridge, but do you know Henrietta Vinton Davis (the Celebrated Shakespearean Tragedienne who later became the right hand of Marcus Garvey)? Come share, learn, and be inspired! Written by Debra Ann Byrd and Dathan B. Williams. Directed and dramaturged by Dathan B. Williams (The Sable Series 2014). Debra Ann Byrd, to Harlem Talk Radio: I’ve heard people giving many congratulations, that people are learning a lot about history that they did not know before, in sharing about Ira Aldridge, who was acting in the 1820s and 1830s and 1840s. And then Henrietta Vinton Davis who

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

153

later debuted in 1883. And of course Paul Robeson. And they liked the singing. Our patrons were happy to see the history and see the Shakespeare (Shakespeare on the Road HSF 2014). King Lear, (2015) Trezana Beverley: I remember when we first performed at the National Black Theater, they had renovated that space. I just remember it being so much of a community. Timothy Stickney: We did a female Lear with Trezana Beverly, in 2015. And you know, my first conversation with her was always the same question: so are you a woman passing for male in the world as we know it or are you a man? Trezana Beverley: I remember Timothy Stickney asked me, ‘Do you want to play him as a woman?’ I said, ‘No, no, no, I want to play him as a man because, you know, there was a time in history where women, especially English actresses, played male roles. I want to transform myself.’ Dathan Williams: There’s something very joyful about performing our particular plays with audiences that recognize themselves and their ability to respond to what they see and not feel shunned. So that there will be times when we’re doing our show and someone from the audience would say, ‘Oh child, that’s the wrong person. You don’t want to go in there!’ And we don’t tell them ‘shhhh’, because they are engaged enough to participate. And that’s what the groundlings essentially did for Shakespeare. That’s the excitement. When you’re in a community that is able to express themselves the way they need to and not feel shunned. And that’s the beauty of what can happen when they recognize themselves. Lisa Wolpe: We had this fantastic experience with call and response of people yelling at me from the audience: ‘Oh, don’t do that!’ It was a truly Shakespearean actor-audience experience. I’m more moved in small theater than I am in large theaters. Sometimes these larger theaters feel like the Titanic: the iceberg is coming, going, ‘You’re no longer relevant. You can’t do this, white male sixteenth century stuff now.’ But in Harlem, with the whole community participating: ‘There’s that white man lying to you, can’t you see that?’ They’re shouting at the theater. And you should shout. Do shout at the liars! If you see something, say something. That was the best audience I’ve ever played (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Trezana Beverley: Performing in the Harlem community, it’s just a really, really special joy when folks who don’t frequent theater, who don’t bring all the trappings of sophisticated audience, and how you’re

154 

K. S. BROKAW

supposed to respond to theater come and are very open and very curious. And if you talk to them and ask them what they got out of it, they’re so grateful for seeing something that’s refreshing and new. And I can tell you that I had invited some theatre folks Uptown to see me do Medea, who were very offended and turned off, because they did not understand the loud audiences. Avid theatregoers, professional people, they don’t go to community theater. Take Wing and Soar was a professional theater, but it was Uptown in a community where there were no other heavily financed theaters. These people, they were offended and they told me that they were offended. Those are the realities that we are faced with. Othello, (2015, 2019) Debra Ann Byrd: I did a staged reading of Othello first with Lisa Wolpe. And then our staged readings usually move to main stage and we took on another director because Lisa wasn’t available and we did the main stage, and so that was time #2. And then at Shakespeare Theatre Association I met Mary Way with Southwest Shakespeare Festival and we set out on a collaboration to do it together: four ladies from Harlem, four ladies from Southwest Shakespeare. And pow, Othello #3 for me! (Shakespeare Lightning Round 2020). Trezana Beverley: I directed the first full Othello that had an all-female cast. When I directed Othello, we had a set designer come in and I was going over some designs with him and then he walks into this church basement and the poor fellow, he couldn’t handle it and he just left. So you know, we didn’t have a whole lot of the sophisticated accoutrements that theaters with money have. But we did the play. And at the end of the day, the play is the thing. Debra Ann Byrd: When we did the production, I was seven, eight weeks in my Othello self, which means I spoke that way for seven to eight weeks in my lower register. So I spoke that way, and the world around me began to change. How people spoke to me changed (2020b). Trezana Beverley: I marveled at how Debra Ann was able to embody the character and allow the character to drop in and she would put on that hat and then take it off and then become this producer. And I also saw her wear those two hats and she wore them so gracefully. You know, I think a lesser person would not have been able to do that because the role is daunting. And it’s enough just to focus on being an actor. But when you have to be the actor and the producer, at the same time, I could tell that it was something that was transforming her inside.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

155

Dathan Williams: Our work is political even from the standpoint that Debra Ann is a woman playing Othello. That can make it political or that can make it uncomfortable. And uncomfortable theater can also make change. It is going to first piss you off. But then when you recognize that it is necessary, that it makes for growth, then you step into the growth and change happens. And we’re in a very tenuous time now where we are processing a great deal to figure out what we can change and what we can use to make ourselves better to keep this moving forward. Ayanna Thompson, in writing: Authenticity and authority, then, do not reside in the text or the fantasy of the author but in the individuals who must work long and hard to communicate, cooperate, and collaborate (2011, 142). Timothy Stickney: And what I remember sticking out was a commitment to excellence and giving opportunity to actors of color who trained to do what they train for. I didn’t realize how that would continue to be a need or resonate in my own career at the time. Debra Ann Byrd: That’s where the social justice part comes in because, in our cores, those of us who really like Shakespeare, something happens deep in the chakra, bottom part, when you speak from your soul. So who’s to say that I can’t do it if my soul is being stirred? (2020b) Timothy Stickney: It was, and to some degree still is, a radical act in the perception of the mainstream society, a revolutionary act just to occupy the space. Elizabeth Swain: If you are creating a company of Shakespearean actors in Harlem, I think if you do what she did, you are demanding justice for your group and she did and I hope she got it. Dathan Williams: During voting for the presidential election in 2020, we did a play on Zoom that was called Just About Love. It was a modern-­ day adaptation of All’s Well That Ends Well, and it’s based on a true situation. During the Freedom Summer, there were Black actors who went out to help get out the vote. They went to a Black community and they would take a classical play, inside of that community, and they would adapt it to what was happening in that community. And so in our production of Just About Love, we created that exact same situation. It was classical, it was political. It was again serving what we had done before in a new way because the urgency was happening again. Timothy Stickney: And some people of color don’t think we should be doing it because it’s not a Black piece and I don’t think they’re wrong, but I disagree.

156 

K. S. BROKAW

Dathan Williams: There’s always going to be some critique about exactly what is acceptable in Black theater. There was a time period from the 1930s to 1960s, where actors of color were doing more classical theater. And then in the 1970s, we went into a different mode of Black power: we should only tell stories that were significant to our community. Really majorly significant to what was happening in the middle of our community. We didn’t have the ability to fantasize. And certainly Shakespeare to them was something that was a fantasy. And so there became a kind of criticism about what exactly is Black theater? Is it Black theater because there are Black bodies on stage doing theatre? Or is Black theater only theater that talks about the lives of Black people? But it is my theory that if it is important to me, then it is my life. And if my Black life is attached to the classical theater, then it matters to me, and therefore, it is part of our community. Debra Ann Byrd: Other non-white actors want to know why you’re doing Shakespeare. ‘You’re a Black actor, you should be doing Black shows.’ ‘You’re a Black producer, you should be producing Black stories.’ I look at arguments on both sides … But I’ve decided that people should be able to do whatever brings them joy because the world we live in is full of terror, sadness, and heartbreak (quoted in Alberge, 2019). Dathan Williams: And when you welcome our community, you open the gates more to other people coming in, you open the gates more to other seats being filled, you open the economic gates more. So is it Black theater when Black people do it, or is it Black theater when it has a subject matter that is intrinsic to the community? I say both can exist equally and serve our community, both in equal ways. Timothy Stickney: I’ve learned that because of our walk through the last few centuries, given an opportunity, and some assistance in the process, people of color—I won’t say that we have a monopoly—but I will say that because of the frequent abuse of our persons and spirits, we have a faster path to a greater breadth of human experience, often difficult. It’s not the purview of simply people of color. If you are working class or, God bless you, if you are dealing below poverty, then the same insults and abuse or hate go into a person, so that it is in your memory. And so, when you’re working with one of the greatest writers humanity has produced, certainly in English, then you combine that with a spirit embodied in a human that has personal experience of that width and breadth and depth, and if you can let them feel comfortable enough to express it in front of others in a society that tells them not to, you will blow people away.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

157

And that person will be forever changed because they will have felt their connection to what acting and theater is. It’s not an individual pursuit, right? The energy is universal, but we are channeling it in those moments because of our connection to a human truth. And you never go back to believing in total the things that you’re told about yourself and your people in the dominant culture. And that’s worth doing. Dathan Williams: If a theater company with people of color is inside of your community, and you always see people that look like you on that stage, if you see a Black artistic director, if you see a Black associate artistic director, if you see a Black sound designer, if you see all Black lighting designers, if you see all Black costume designers, then you know that the possibility of doing that is there. We would not be who we are if we were not part of a community that recognizes what we do. Timothy Stickney: After working with Debra Ann, TWAS, and the festival, then I was positive. There was no doubt in my mind, which then just made it clear why some people in the business who come from other cultures and traditions are actively afraid of having more people of color involved, because to reach a level of experience nearly on par, they [other actors] have to delve deeply into imagination. And the two don’t compare. Lisa Wolpe, to Debra Ann Byrd: It is now come to a head where I live, because Equity came in and said, we’re shutting down the entire city. And 350 theaters have to close because you’re not paying people minimum wage. Debra Ann Byrd, to Lisa Wolpe: Indeed. But when there are social justice missions, like yours and mine, you can’t just close the theater. Wolpe: Well, you can; I just closed mine. Byrd: I know you did. I may at some point, but it’s not right now. Wolpe: No, you haven’t done enough roles yet because most of it’s been producing. Byrd: I’ve been producing up the wazoo. Wolpe: Yeah, and that’s not the same as acting. Byrd: It’s absolutely not the same (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Debra Ann Byrd: I was a little poor girl in Harlem, and I was sometimes a hungry girl in Harlem. And I understood anger in a certain way, I understood jealousy in a certain way, I really understand pain in a certain way, and so because I can access that in a certain way, it feels useful to me to use those emotional tools to be able to tell Othello’s story, while being noble, while being loving to Desdemona, while being understanding, and then while being completely pissed off. So just that emotional landscape is

158 

K. S. BROKAW

so huge and wide, and it mirrors mine. I can be fun and funny and laughing and acting a damn fool, and I can be completely sad and broken and feeling helpless despair. And I understand all of those colors. I understand hopelessness, I understand helplessness, but I understand how not to choose those things, and not choose death. I know better. But I didn’t always know better. And I know that there can be a victory story, it doesn’t have to end in that knife coming out (Folger Lightning Round 2020).

Becoming Othello, A Black Girl’s Journey Debra Ann Byrd: I wrote Becoming Othello because I looked at all the hardships I was having and how I was playing Othello (Fig. 3.9). I wanted to talk about my actor’s journey to the stage. And I wanted to share with the world how to overcome pain and trauma and not die, like Othello did, but to learn to make better choices (2020a). The (London) Observer: Byrd spoke to the Observer during [British] Black History  Month, before coming to Britain in November. She will spend a few weeks as writer in residence in Stratford-upon-Avon working on her memoir, following an invitation from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust and Warwick University, whose scholars describe her as inspirational and extraordinary (Alberge 2019).

Fig. 3.9  Debra Ann Byrd performs Becoming Othello (2020). (Photo credit: Ia Chang)

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

159

Stratford Herald: The show includes multimedia images, lyrical language from Black women playwrights, William Shakespeare, Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King Jr, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, and the King James Bible, along with soulful songs and the music that shaped Debra’s life in her beloved Harlem home (Sutherland 2019). Trezana Beverley: It’s a very hard piece to talk about, because it’s very personal for her. And I love the way she threads Shakespeare through the play, because it means so much to her. But when you look at this woman, and when she started coming into herself and all of the obstacles that she has been up against, there are almost no words. And you know what she has endured is quite something indeed. Dathan Williams: It speaks about that journey of humanity. You see a complete journey of Debra Ann telling you who she was, who she became, and where she is now. I think that’s why people will walk away and say: ‘I see a journey of a human being in a life that makes me recognize the beauty and humanity of the character.’ Debra Ann Byrd: Since COVID and Black Lives Matter and all of that, I had to look back at my script and I don’t want to look back at my script. February 27 was the last day I performed Becoming Othello, and I didn’t look at it again until September. Because of what was going on in the world, it was such heavy lifting. And then I realized: ‘Why are you creating your own problem? For the past twenty years, you’ve been talking about equality. That’s your whole mission of your company. So don’t feel like you need to do something different or you need to change something. You’ve been doing it all along’ (2020b). Wall Street Journal: By turns play, sermon, and Black history lesson, ‘Becoming Othello,’ into which she has interpolated 200-odd pointedly chosen lines of Shakespeare, is also a show of uncanny timeliness, not least because playing Othello led her to start questioning her own sexual identity (a tale that she tells with irresistible good humor) … I expect we will hear much, much more about ‘Becoming Othello’ and its prodigiously gift author … it’s the kind of solo show that an actor so inclined can spend the rest of his or her life playing in every corner of the English-speaking world (Teachout 2021).

160 

K. S. BROKAW

Legacies of Lisa Wolpe and LAWSC, and of Debra Ann Byrd and TWAS Lisa Wolpe: Although gender-bending is trending now, it was seen as a gimmick when I was first working on cross-gender performance in the late 1980s. Thankfully, it is quite a different field now for non-white actors, and for female actors, at least in the current practice of casting Shakespeare plays more consciously and diversely (Elizabeth 2016). Cristina Frías: I was working with Latina Theatre Lab, writing and creating stories about our lives as Latinas from all different parts of Latin America, and realized there was a space for me to also bring this other passion I had which was for Shakespeare. Slowly I started realizing: ‘Oh I can make this my own. Shakespeare’s actually written for me. English is my Birthright. I was born into this.’ Companies like Lisa’s had been doing the work for years and understanding that, no, this is for everyone. Lisa Porter: She’s been doing the work 30, 40 years now. I just can’t think of anybody who consistently, as a woman, crosses gender as much as she does. And so, she’s at the forefront of that conversation in a practical way rather than people who write about it and who theorize about it. Lolly Ward: Lisa just blew apart so many expectations of what could be done and to rethink the way things have been done: the way we’re used to seeing things, we should stop taking that for granted. Cynthia Beckert: I got called back for an Oberon part recently and I’m auditioning for Jaques at another theater company. That wasn’t the case back when Lisa was making these strides forward in making these opportunities for women to experience these characters. Natsuko Ohama: Now it’s a vogue thing, gender-blind casting. Now, I really believe that that’s in the climate because of what not only Lisa did and also probably Joe Papp and then there was the tradition of the females like Sarah Bernhardt. But L.A. Women’s Shakespeare, and Lisa, she was really ahead of the wave, and she does not get the credit that she deserves in doing that 20 years, before it became common (2022). Edgar Landa, to Sofia Andom: Shakespeare is tricky and presents different levels of maneuvering for different people. But what I think is important is that if these works speak to you, if you’re interested in them, then make them your own. However you sound. However you look. You, Sofia, should play Hamlet. You should play Lear, you know, you should play Juliet. And I think that’s why Lisa started her company: she wanted to play these roles that nobody was going to let her play, and let these

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

161

other women that were amazing artists play them. So you do like Lisa, force your way in. Kick the door open, and at some point, they’re going to get tired of holding the door down. Sofia Andom, to Edgar Landa: I will kick the door open. And Lisa’s a great role model as far as doing that. Timothy Stickney: I think Harlem is more open to and has a higher expectation and understanding and connection to classical works than they did before Take Wing and Soar and Debra Ann’s involvement up there. Trezana Beverley: There was Dr. Barbara Ann Teer who developed the National Black Theater, and I’m trying to think of another Black woman who really created such a whirlwind of theater in New York as did Debra Ann Byrd. She really took her power as an actress, and her passion, and that real generosity of spirit along with a lot of business savvy because she made that theater run for quite a while. Lisa Wolpe: Debra Ann charges that whole community with a sense of pride and she’s mother to 1000 mentees and she’s helping people get on stage who have now moved into a sense of confidence that makes them pursue professional work in a way they couldn’t before (Byrd and Wolpe 2017). Devon Glover, AKA the Sonnet Man: The Misfit conference in Fargo in 2015 was best thing that ever happened to me. When I got there, I was able to perform and meet Debra Ann. She gave me words of encouragement, and I felt very welcome. We weren’t represented that well. She came and was like ‘So happy to see another face, a familiar face and a New York face, a person of color representing (2021). Sofia Andom, to Debra Ann Byrd: Debra Ann, I empathize with your experience. That’s one of the reasons I was scared of going into theatre: casting people see you in a certain way. I understand the way I look: with my hair, I’m five foot ten, I’m a plus-sized person. People wanna have you play the mother, a certain kind of dominating figure, but my personality is so opposite that. So getting cast as an ingenue, it flipped my world around, and hearing you share that, Debra Ann, it made me realize someone else feels that. Debra Ann Byrd, to Sofia Andom: When we can see ourselves as something different and then there comes that one person, it only takes the one who says, ‘I see you, and not only do I see you, but I see you and I celebrate you, and I know that in you is the ability to make this happen.’ Something magical happens in that person (Andom 2021).

162 

K. S. BROKAW

Dathan Williams: If we bring you into our company, you will recognize that it has a rainbow inside of it. It is a reflection of America and is a reflection of what you see in New York City. Debra Ann’s greatest legacy is that she made the effort to make sure that for young actors of color, artistic directors could no longer look at their resumes and say, ‘I can’t hire you because you don’t have this leading role in your resumé.’ People now have that leading role: they have Hamlet, have Macbeth, have Julius Caesar, and have those roles on their resumé. Timothy Stickney: And now, I get to love more people, but it hurts. It hurts that I just keep meeting more and more people who need to experience someone who can see them. But I walk more firmly and assuredly in that because of the experience in Harlem, with Debra Ann and TWAS and all of the people who came through. Devon Glover, AKA Sonnet Man: I’ve gotten push back and I wonder: ‘Should I keep working? Or should I find another author, like August Wilson?’ But when people like Debra Ann speak about plights that they’ve had in the Shakespeare world, that has actually helped me be at peace and keep on trucking along, trying to figure out how I can make theater, make hip-hop, make art better for POCs. Any orientation that would like to present. I see that in Lisa, I see that in Debra Ann. Lisa Wolpe: Now, with our planet in crisis, if humans can really resonate at the heart level and bring their actions and their words together and influence groups of people to feel their hearts and use their words … Maybe we can save the planet (2022). Debra Ann Byrd: I think artists are born into this planet, to help shift it, to help save it, to help other people (2020b). Lisa Wolpe: I don’t need the applause. I need to save the world and the people in it. I feel like if all of us speak Shakespeare to our communities, and communities gather, that we as people can wake up our desire to love and live and save the planet, save one another, and save the arts. And I believe that arts and culture lead to strong democracies and healthier communities (2022). Debra Ann Byrd: Once I can get in the door, something comes over me. And then there’s an ability to begin to shift people’s minds about how to behave toward each other. How do we make this world a better place? How do we interact and be okay, all together, men, women, boys, girls, gay, straight? How do we find a sense of peace in this difficult world? How do we find a place of calm and peace and fun and bliss and joy? And if Shakespeare is the key to get me in those doors, I’ll gladly use it (Byrd and Wolpe 2017).

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

163

Works Cited About Classical Theatre of Harlem. 2022. Classical Theatre of Harlem. Accessed 31 August 2022. https://www.cthnyc.org/about-­2/. About Harlem Shakespeare Festival. 2020. Harlem Shakespeare Festival. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://harlemshakespearefestival.bookmark.com/about. About L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company. 2013. L.A.  Women’s Shakespeare Company. Accessed 20 July 2022. http://www.lawsc.net/about_us.html. Alberge, Dalya. 2019. Black Shakespeare Champion Working to Change Views on ‘colour-blind’ Casting. The Observer, October 28. Anderson, Erin. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, July 9. Andom, Sofia. 2021. Conversation with Debra Ann Byrd in Author’s Class. UC-Merced. Conducted on Zoom, March 4. Antony and Cleopatra Presented by Take Wing and Soar. 2011. Broadway World, March 2. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://www.broadwayworld.com/off-­off-­ broadway/article/Take-­Wing-­and-­Soar-­Presents-­ANTONY-­AND-­CLEOPAT RA-­31727-­20110302. Avila, Elaine. 2014. Lisa Wolpe Uses Shakespeare to Bend Gender Roles. American Theatre, August 13. https://www.americantheatre.org/2014/08/13/ lisa-­wolpe-­uses-­shakespeare-­to-­bend-­gender-­roles-­around-­the-­country/ Barbara, Carole. 2013.  Debra Ann Byrd and Christopher Sutton Lead the Cast of Harlem Shakespeare Festival’s Production of Antony & Cleopatra. Accessed 31 August 2022.  ­https://loreyhayespowerplay.wordpress.com/author/ carolebarbaraassociates/ Beckert, Cynthia. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, June 18. Beverley, Trezana. 2022. Interview with the Author, July 15. Bisesti, Linda. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, June 9. Byrd, Debra Ann. 2017. Public Research Conversation at Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Hosted by Paul Edmondson, October 11. ———. 2019. Becoming Othello: A Black Girls’ Journey. Directed by Tina Packer. Unpublished play. ———. 2020a. Guest Lecture to Author’s Class. UC Merced. Conducted on Zoom, November 6. ———. 2020b. Guest Lecture to Author’s Class. UC Merced. Conducted on Zoom, November 7. ———. 2020c. Becoming Othello: A Gender-Flipped Journey Onstage and in the Archive. Shakespeare and Beyond Blog: Folger Library, July 24. Accessed 30 July 2022. https://shakespeareandbeyond.folger.edu/2020/07/24/becoming-­ othello-­gender-­flipped-­journey-­onstage-­archive/. Byrd, Debra Ann, and Lisa Wolpe. 2017. In Conversation with the Author, October 19. Cohen-Cruz, Jan. 2005. Local Acts: Community-Based Performance in the United States. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

164 

K. S. BROKAW

Conkie, Rob. 2016. Writing Performative Shakespeares: New Forms of Performance Criticism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Curran, Leigh. 2021. Email Correspondence with Author, June 11. Den, Celeste. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom. June 17. Derr, Holly. 2013. All-Women Shakespeare: A Dying Tradition? Ms Magazine, August 27. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://msmagazine.com/2013/08/27/ all-­woman-­shakespeare-­a-­dying-­tradition/. Dostal, Ellen. 2013. Review: L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet is a Passionate Affair. Shakespeare in LA. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://shakespeareinla.com/2013/09/15/review-­l-­a-­womens-­shakespeare-­companys-­hamlet-­ is-­a-­passionate-­affair/#more-­4615. Elizabeth, Lyndsey. 2016. The Art of Gender-Bending Shakespeare. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://www.orlandoshakes.org/2016/02/19/art-­of-­gender-­ bending-­shakespeare/. Escolme, Bridget. 2010. Being Good: Actors’ Testimonies as Archives and the Cultural Construction of Success in Performance. Shakespeare Bulletin 28 (1): 77–91. Feldman, Gayle. 1993. Wherefore Art Thou, Lisa Wolpe?: An Interview with the Founder of the Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company. Gay and Lesbian Times 303, October 14. Fişek, Emine. 2019. Theatre & Community. London: Macmillan. Frankel, Tony. 2013. Los Angeles Theater Review: Hamlet (Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company at the Odyssey Theatre). Stage and Cinema. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://stageandcinema.com/2013/09/17/hamlet-­odyssey/. Frías, Cristina. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, July 7. Glover, Devon. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, June 14. Goodwin, Jeremy D. 2021. Black Theater Artists Are Helping Shakespeare Speak to More Diverse Audiences. National Public Radio, July 29. Accessed 10 July 2022. https://www.npr.org/2021/07/29/1019258187/shakespeare-­black-­ theater-­race-­diverse-­audiences. Harlem Shakespeare Festival. 2020. Shakespeare Theatre Association. Accessed 2 August 2022. http://www.stahome.org/harlem-­shakespeare-­festival. Hill, Errol. 1984. Shakespeare in Sable: A History of Black Shakespearean Actors. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. History of LA Women’s Shakespeare Company. 2014. PDF. Accessed 4 August 2022. http://www.lawsc.net/pdf/lawsc_history.pdf. Jones, Veralyn. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, July 16. King Lear: Projects. Center for New Performance. Accessed 29 July 2022. https://centerfornewperformance.org/projects/king-­lear/. Landa, Edgar. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, June 12.

3  IDENTITY SHAKESPEARE: L.A. WOMEN’S SHAKESPEARE COMPANY… 

165

Lehmann, Courtney. 2017. Can the Subaltern Sing?: Liz White’s Othello. In Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare and Performance, ed. James Bulman, 402–420. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lester, Adrian. 2021. Othello: A Performance Perspective. In The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race, ed. Ayanna Thompson, 223–236. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lisa Wolpe: About. Accessed 14 June 2022. https://lisawolpe.com/about/. Manus, Willard. 1998. L.A. Sees All-Female Hip-Hop Midsummer Night’s Dream. Playbill. Accessed 6 July 2022. https://playbill.com/article/la-­sees-­all-­female-­ hip-­hop-­midsummer-­nights-­dream-­com-­74972. Ney, Charles. 2016. Directing Shakespeare in America: Current Practices. London: Bloomsbury. Nicholson, Helen. 2005/2014. Applied Drama: The Gift of the Theatre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Nicholson, Helen, Nadine Holdsworth, and Jane Milling. 2018. The Ecologies of Amateur Theatre. London: Palgrave Macmillan. O’Donovan, Mary Beth. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, June 23. Ocampo-Guzman, Antonio. 2021. Remembering Fran Bennett. Voice and Speech Review 15 (3): 354–362. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268263.2021.1989878. Ohama, Natsuko. 2022. Interview with the Author, July 8. Our Story. National Black Theatre. 2022. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://www. nationalblacktheatre.org/our-­story. Paley, Petronia. 2021. Email Correspondence with Author, June 10. Payo, Cynthia. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, June 21. Porter, Lisa. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, June 24. Power, Terri. 2015. Shakespeare and Gender in Practice. London: Bloomsbury. Romeo & Juliet Promo Video, LA Women’s Shakespeare Co. 1993. YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kh3tAHr9Cvc. Rubin, Brady. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, July 7. Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender. 2015. The New  Yorker. Accessed 20 July 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/goings-­on-­about-­town/theatre/ shakespeare-­and-­the-­alchemy-­of-­gender. Shakespeare Lightning Round: Debra Ann Byrd. Folger Shakespeare Library. 2020. Accessed 4 August 2022. https://www.folger.edu/events/lightning-­ round-­debra-­ann-­byrd. Shakespeare on the Road HSF Sable Series. 2014. YouTube Video. Accessed 1 September 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4hzrJfseTXY. Shapiro, James. 2020. Shakespeare in a Divided America. London: Faber & Faber. Stasio, Marilyn. 1998. To Be Male or To Be Female That Is the Question: Gender, Sex and Politics in Shakespeare. On the Issues Magazine. Accessed 4 July 2022. https://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/1998summer/su98_Stasio.php. Stickney, Timothy D. 2021. Interview with Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez, July 5.

166 

K. S. BROKAW

Sutherland, Gill. 2019. See Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey at Birthplace. The Stratford Herald, October 8. Swain, Elizabeth. 2021a. Interview with Sofia Andom, June 21. ———. 2021b. Interview with Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez, June 30. Taylor, Diana. 2003. The Archive and the Repertoire. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Taylor, Nancy. 2005. Women Direct Shakespeare in America: Productions from the 1990s. Madison: Farleigh Dickinson University Press. Teachout, Terry. 2021. ‘Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey’ Review: From Harlem to the Shakespearean Stage. Wall Street Journal, July 22. The Sable Series: The History of Black Shakespearean Actors. 2014. Harlem World. Accessed 1 August 2022. https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/ the-­sable-­series-­the-­history-­of-­black-­shakespearean-­actors/. Thompson, Ayanna. 2011. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———, ed. 2021. The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Trahey, Mary. 2021. Interview with Sofia Andom, July 18. Turan, Kenneth, and Joseph Papp. 2009. Free for All: Joe Papp, the Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told. New York: Doubleday. Walker-Kuhne, Donna. 2005. Invitation to the Party: Building Bridges to the Arts, Culture, and Community. New York: Theatre Communications Group. Ward, Lolly. 2021. Interview with Mahealani LaRosa, June 25. Went, Emma. 2015. TranShakespeare: Lisa Wolpe, and the Art of Empathy. Howlround, August 16. Accessed 20 August 2022. https://howlround.com/ transhakespeare. Williams, Dathan. 2021. Interview with Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez, July 12. Wolpe, Lisa. 2013 (written); 2019 (revised). Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender. Directed by Laurie Woolery. Unpublished play. ———. 2016. Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender: Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty Interview with Lisa Wolpe in Conversation with Salome Asatiani. YouTube Video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-­mct2EOu-­O8&t=8s. ———. 2022. Interview with Paul Edmondson. Shakespeare Alive. Podcast. Accessed 20 August 2022. https://www.shakespeare.org.uk/explore-­ shakespeare/podcasts/shakespeare-­alive/. Woman’s Will Shakes Up Shakespeare. 2012. Curve. September 6. Accessed 16 June 2022. https://www.curvemag.com/blog/performing-­arts/womans-­ will-­shakes-­up-­shakespeare/. Young, Harvey. 2013. Theatre & Race. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

CHAPTER 4

Island Shakespeare: Hamlet in the Faroe Islands

Far out in the radiant ocean glinting like quicksilver there lies a solitary little lead-colored land. The tiny rocky shore is to the vast ocean just about the same as a grain of sand to the floor of a dance hall. But beneath a magnifying glass, the grain is nevertheless a whole world. —William Heinesen in The Lost Musicians (2007, 15) Shakespeare does it in one line “to be or not to be? That is the question.” It’s huge, and it’s very small at the same time. —Hans Torgarð, translator of Hamlet into Faroese (2020)

A play is performed for the first time on an island in the North Atlantic. This society is small and tight-knit, and in many ways more homogenous than the ones to which most are accustomed. It’s a world where ballads hold crucial cultural information, where live music is everywhere, where the lines between ritual, culture, and religion are blurry, and most people belong to and attend the same state church. This play was Hamlet, and it was performed in 2019. Or another way to open this chapter would be to say this: the best production of Hamlet I have ever seen was in a country with a population of 52,000 people and 70,000 sheep, performed entirely in a language that is not on Google Translate.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8_4

167

168 

K. S. BROKAW

The country is the Faroe Islands (Føroyar to the Faroese), a self-­ governing archipelago of 18 islands between Iceland and the north of Scotland, politically part of the Kingdom of Denmark in an arrangement similar to that of Greenland.1 It’s a country with a long history of Viking invasions and Norwegian then Danish colonialism, and a more recent history of occupation by a protective British Royal Air Force during World War II. Artistically, this tiny country punches far above its weight: its active presses, university, galleries, record label, and professional visual and performing artists belie its size. Shakespeare has only ever been a marginal player in this rich culture, but his most famous play was at the center of the country’s most ambitious theatrical project to date, and the Faroes’s relationships to Britain and Denmark were much less relevant to the decision to stage it than one might suspect. Rather, as the producing company, Det Ferösche Compagnie (DFC; ‘The Faroese Company’ in German) explained in advance of the production, ‘the title of the production is Funeral, the Tragedy of Hamlet and it will be a feast of sorrow and death and an exploration of funeral rites in the Faroe Islands’ (About DFC 2022). The Hamlet project took two and a half years to develop and included the creation of a new translation of the entire play into Faroese. Twenty-­ three people appeared on stage, including a practicing priest (for the funeral rite that frames the production) and an eight-person choir; fifty-­ four people were on the production team. The promenade production was staged in the capital city of Tórshavn’s Nordic House,2 a multi-­ disciplinary arts and culture space that is the country’s most prestigious venue. The show featured outdoor pyrotechnics, an extraordinary original score, and bathtubs descending from the ceiling onto a rotating turntable. It cost 2,412,975 Danish Krone (roughly £300,000 or $384,000) to produce. Director Búi Dam was clear about the cosmopolitan aims of this ambitious project: ‘I am very excited about what will come out of creating 1  There are a limited number of English-language books about the Faroe Islands. The most widely available is Tim Ecott’s 2020 The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year. Guðrið Syderbø and Sunva Esturoy Lassen’s 2017 Secrets of the Faroe Islands and Eva Nielsen’s 2019 The Faroes(e) are both aimed at international tourists and difficult to find outside of the Faroes. Two older books are excellent but out of print: Anthony Jackson’s 1991 The Faroes: The Faraway clearly presents basic, if in some cases out of date, information, and Kenneth Williamson’s excellent The Atlantic Islands: A Study of the Faeroe Life and Scene from 1948 gives detailed natural and cultural histories and is beautifully written. I do my best to cite these written sources when possible, but much of my knowledge of the country comes from time spent there, and I don’t always have written documentation of every piece of information. 2  Phonetically, the name of the capital sounds something like TOE-uh-shown, though locals refer to it simply as ‘Havn’, (sounds like hown).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

169

such a big production in such a small country. Our long-term goal is to lift the standard of theater in Faroe Islands and to have more collaborations abroad’ (Dam 2019a). Including public performances and school shows for both teenagers and young children, 2444 people were involved in or saw this Hamlet: that’s 10% of Tórshavn’s 20,000-person population. And 4.7% of the entire country saw this production. Nationwide, high school curricula focused on Hamlet in the fall of 2019, and posters for the show were all over the capital; most Faroese people who didn’t see it at least knew it was happening. At the time of writing, I have been to the Faroe Islands three times. On my second visit, in June 2019, I met Dam and learned about the show, after which I arranged to return to the Faroes in November of that year to see the production. Over the course of ten days in November, I presented at a Shakespeare symposium in honor of the project at the University of the Faroe Islands, saw the show twice, and spoke to several members of the cast and production team; I’ve since followed up with many of them over Zoom. In what follows, I will first describe the community context out of which this astonishing production was created with a brief history of the Faroe Islands themselves, and a depiction of their literary and arts scenes. In the description of the Hamlet production that ensues, I focus in particular on four ways in which the show functioned as a kind of community-­ based theatre: (1) the use of a new Faroese translation of the play that is rife with cultural references; (2) the site specificity of the production and engagement with local school groups; (3) the use of a religious ritual important to the Faroese as a framing device; and (4) the way the production self-consciously provoked contemplation of local cultural and political attitudes toward emotion, love, violence, death, and art itself. In addition to the important meaning-making it did in the Faroes in 2019, this production, which drew on religious ritual for its theatrical power and was performed in a small island metropolis, provided unexpected resonances with the 1600 London community in which Hamlet was first performed. I also explain how the production interacts with critical theories about the status of so-called Global Shakespeare beyond the former British colonies, and explore why a theatre company trying to prove itself in a tiny country most people haven’t heard of chose to do Hamlet. I end with a reflection on the legacy and local interventions of this production and its educational outreach programs.

170 

K. S. BROKAW

Det Ferösche Compagnie Hamlet was a huge production in a tiny country and a highly sophisticated piece of theatre in a place that outsiders associate with fishing, whaling, and wool sweaters, if they have heard of the country at all. To think about the Faroese Hamlet is to think about the way tiny islands can contain whole cultures, and the way a theatrical behemoth like Hamlet can express very localized cultural histories even while creators proclaim the play’s ‘universality’. Or as the production’s translator Hans Torgarð says of Shakespeare’s most famous line, this show helps us contemplate the way a community can be ‘huge … and very small at the same time’ (2020).

Setting the Scene: ‘A Fair Haven on the Windy Edge of Nothing’ The geography and climate of the Faroes have inevitably shaped the people who live there and the art they create. The islands are the result of volcanic activity during the early Tertiary Period, about 50 million years ago, and they are technically the tips of a subsea mountain range that goes from Ireland to Greenland (Jackson 1991, 16). Eons of glacial activity, wind, and the pounding North Atlantic waves shaped a landscape that does not look immediately inviting for life of any kind, and that’s before you factor in that it is five times wetter than the wettest part of the British Isles, and five hundred times windier (Ecott 2020, 13). In the words of Kenneth Williamson, an English man who was stationed on the Faroes in the 1940s and married a local woman: I will not deny their rugged, majestic beauty, especially under the Midas-­ touch of the winter sun. But they are a little frightening too—not in their immensity … nor in the steepness of their slopes, but in their obvious hostility to human life. The land, the sea, and the elements are in perpetual league against all humankind. (1948, 37–8)

Putting ‘Faroe Islands’ into YouTube or a Google image search will tell you more than verbal description can, but Williamson’s words are apropos. The massive sea cliffs, waterfalls emptying into the ocean, barren hilltops casting shadows over treeless meadows: it is stunning, certainly, but often not ‘pretty’. I have had multiple moments, walking through the Faroes, when I’ve been acutely aware that one slip on that wet ground would have me plunging off the trail and to a certain death in the cold

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

171

waters swirling below. On the westernmost island, Mykines (year-round population: ten people, half a million seabirds; see Fig. 4.1), a farmer told my friend and me that a horse had recently been blown off one of the sea cliffs we had just been standing near. We were horrified. ‘Eh. It wasn’t a very good horse,’ he said before walking away. One should not overgeneralize, but the wet, windy, and stormy weather and hazards like losing farm animals to a sea cliff perhaps have helped shape the reserved personalities of the country’s human inhabitants and their relatively high civic values. Tim Ecott titles his recent book on the Faroes The Land of Maybe, a reference to the Faroese word kanska, ‘maybe’, which is both a commonly uttered word and a way of life: maybe

Fig. 4.1  Sheer cliffs and seabirds on the island of Mykines. (Photo by author)

172 

K. S. BROKAW

we will go fishing today, maybe not; maybe we will leave this island tomorrow, maybe not; maybe we will get married next week, maybe not. In Ecott’s words, ‘the mutability of the weather here has shaped not just the land, but the way people look at the world. It is why they band together and still value community’ (2020, 18). Such a statement might seem sentimental, but Ecott’s assessment, published in 2019, is echoed repeatedly in the 2020 documentary about the Faroes under COVID-19 lockdown: inhabitant after inhabitant explains that it is part of the ‘DNA’ of the Faroese to work together (Witek 2020). When you are one of 50,000 on an island archipelago (or, indeed, a ten-person island), the next nearest landmass is 200 miles away, and a storm or virus is approaching, there is no other choice. Perhaps it is because of the harshness of these conditions that the Faroese have, in the islands’ few spots of flat land, built towns of almost extreme coziness: bright colors and grass roofs on the tightly packed houses, a simple church and communal football pitch in even the tiniest of hamlets (for lack of a better word). Writer Eric Linklater, himself raised in the Orkney islands off Scotland, sees a link between ‘the heroic vivacity of their people, and the menacing abruptness of their scenery’, well describing the Faroese as ‘people who, by their indomitable spirit, have made a fair haven on the windy edge of nothing’ (1948, 13, 16). The first humans to reach the islands were likely Irish monks, who brought those sheep to the islands as early as the fourth century. St. Brendan probably writes about them in 560 C.E., and in 825, the Irish monk Dicuil describes them as the ‘northernmost islands … filled with countless sheep and diverse seabirds’ (qtd. Ecott 2020, 57). Viking invasions began around 800 and the monks were banished to Iceland. By 900 most of the islands were inhabited by Norse settlers, who were also settling the Orkney and Shetland islands to the South-East. Recent DNA analysis has revealed that Viking men brought Pictish (Scottish) women with them. Eventually, Vikings took possession of the Faroes for King Olaf of Norway, who converted the islands to Christianity around 1000; St. Olaf’s day is still the major local holiday in the Faroes (Nielsen 2019, 61). They established a parliament, the Løgting, one of the oldest in the world, and still the seat of government today.3 By the later Middle Ages, sheep and fish had started to dominate the Faroese economy, as they still do to some extent today. The Reformation 3  The parliament has been through various iterations and has held varying degrees of power depending on the strength of Danish rule (Jackson 1991, 23).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

173

reached the Faroes in 1537, and 80% of Faroese today belong to the Faroese state church, which is Lutheran (Lassen and Syderbø 2017, 18). The Faroes remained under the control of Norway-Denmark (for a long time, one kingdom) until 1814, when after the Napoleonic Wars, Denmark lost control of Norway but retained the Faroes (and Iceland and Greenland). The Faroese have often expressed their feelings toward the controlling Danes in their culture. The national symbol of the islands is the oystercatcher, a chirpy, territorial little bird who yells at bigger birds when they invade his space. The Faroese still sing a ballad written by ship captain and folk hero Nólsoyar Páll (1766–1809), the 200-verse ‘Ballad of the Birds’ (Fuglakvæði) that satirizes the Danes as aggressive birds who are told off by the brave oystercatcher (Ecott 2020, 119). Starting in 1556, the Danish crown had a monopoly on all Faroese trade, effectively cutting them off economically and culturally from the rest of the world. The 1856 abolition of this 300-year monopoly finally opened the country up to trade and dialogue with the rest of the world, and human populations began to increase in the latter half of the nineteenth century (Jackson 1991, 32–37). Williamson surmises that the oppressive years of the monopoly had a profound effect: ‘if the economic situation kept the people poor, it also gave them great opportunities for developing their culture undisturbed, and forced upon them the necessity for perfecting a peasant life of such economy that they could be self-­ supporting in every way’ (1948, 23). Indeed, talk of Faroe Islanders’ ability to be ‘self-supporting’ recurs today in conversations about everything from COVID health precautions to whaling controversies (more on that soon) to climate-induced catastrophes. The official language of the islands is Faroese, a descendent of those Old Norse-speaking Vikings: it mixes words and grammar from Icelandic, Norwegian, and Norn (the now obsolete language of Orkney and Shetland). The distinct language seems to have evolved between the ninth and fifteenth centuries, and was passed down orally, including through ballads like Pál’s (Jackson 1991, 70). Knowing its cultural importance, the Danes tried to suppress this indigenous language, forbidding it in churches (how anti-Lutheran, really) and schools. But the tenacious Faroese continued to speak it, and today the streets of Tórshavn bear names of men who are heroes of this linguistic battle, who turned Faroese into a written and literary language in order to save it. V.U. Hammershaimb and Dr. Jakob Jakobsen toiled for decades devising Faroese spelling systems in order to prove to the Danes that theirs was a ‘real’ language, finally formalizing

174 

K. S. BROKAW

Faroese orthography in 1890. Hammershaimb and Jakobsen’s work was based largely on the sagas and ballads that had preserved Faroese, a language that hadn’t adapted to modern vocabularies. Borrowing from Danish vocabulary for words expressing newer concepts felt like a betrayal, so new words for modern concepts were coined from Icelandic and indigenous combinations of Faroese words; the first Faroese dictionary was published in 1928 (Jackson 1991, 80). Steeped in Romanticism and heady notions of nationalistic revival in the 1880s, Faroese students studying in Copenhagen started campaigning for Faroese to be their homeland’s official language, a campaign that finally led to Faroese being spoken in schools and churches in 1938; similar efforts were contemporaneously led by Copenhagen-based students from Iceland and Greenland (Jackson 1991, 79–80). When the University of the Faroe Islands was founded in 1960, one of its primary aims was studying the language and literature of the Faroes. It is true to say that Faroese is both an ancient language and a modern one. The next major change to the Faroes came in 1940, when, after the Nazi invasion of Denmark, 8000 British troops were sent to the islands to keep the locals—and this strategic area—safe and, as it turned out, ensure that the British population could continue eating fish. Considering that the country had only about 27,500 inhabitants at the time, their presence was strongly felt, and 151 Faroese women married English men. When other countries, like Iceland, refused to sail in unsafe waters to bring fish to the UK, the Faroese sailed on, and their boats flew the Merkið, an unofficial, student-designed Faroese flag, rather than the Danish flag that could have marked them as allied with Germany. One hundred and thirty-­ one Faroese fishing men lost their lives this way—an immense sacrifice— and Winston Churchill didn’t forget it. After the war he urged the Danes to let the Faroese fly their own flag, that Merkið, and govern themselves. The Home Rule Act followed in 1948, and Faroese flag day commemorates Churchill’s proclamation each April. Today these legacies are felt in the fact that children learn Faroese first in school, then Danish, and then English: most younger Faroese people are trilingual. From about 1940, before the British occupation, to 50 years later in 1990, the Faroes went through a dizzyingly fast transformation from a society of primarily farmers and fisherman in remote, disconnected villages to a modernized population based in an interconnected network of roads, ferries, and helicopters linking up the entire archipelago (Jackson 1991, 11). The Faroese parliament can now make its own decisions on most

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

175

domestic matters, but money from Denmark helps fund massive infrastructure projects like the bridges and under-sea and under-mountain tunnels that connect those far-flung towns. A country that often faced starvation because of its remoteness now has the longest life expectancy in Europe (82.2 years on average) and one of the lowest crime rates in the world. Its only prison, with its bright windows overlooking a gorgeous fjord, is surely the world’s most picturesque, and only used for misdemeanors like drunk driving; a rare more serious crime sends one to Denmark (giving new resonance to Hamlet’s remark that ‘Denmark’s a prison’). With 52,000 residents, the population of the Faroes today is smaller than many towns called ‘mid-sized’ in other parts of the world. But Føroyar is a whole country: with culture, a unique language, a government. In the words of Sunva Esturoy Lassen and Guðrið Syderbø, The Faroes are small-scale, but full-scale. Having your own geographical area, your own political and economic system, your own language and culture and a football team that competes against national football teams of the big European nations on a regular basis makes you a full-scale country. At the same time, the Faroe Islands are microscopically small. If there were just fifty thousand fewer people there would be zero … However, because of the full-scale part, the small-scale part tends to escape the Faroese. Which is why you hear the Faroese—in all seriousness—talk about the difference between the American and the Faroese way of life, the German and the Faroese work ethic, the English and the Faroese style of football or the Italian and the Faroese family values. (2017, 26)

Ecott attributes the typically civil behavior of the Faroese in part to population size: ‘This is somewhere that enforces mutual respect. You can’t be rude to anyone easily, as in this small population of just over 50,000 people that person may well be a relative, and if not, you will certainly meet them again’ (2020, 19). The idea that the community is ‘tight knit’ takes literal form in the bindiklubb, or knitting clubs, that most women belong to (knitting clubs are also an important facet of Icelandic social life). In Tórshavn, all are welcome to join the monthly Sambinding, or ‘intertwining’ in the city library, ‘an initiative meant for immigrants and Faroe

176 

K. S. BROKAW

Islanders to meet, spend some enjoyable time together, and get to know and learn from one another’ (Lassen and Syderbø 2017, 17).4 The Faroes are islands of paradox: the warm hospitality contrasts with the harsh landscape and weather, the people are self-characterized as both fiercely tenacious and emotionally taciturn, and the integrity of national traditions that many would see as old-fashioned or quaint exists alongside the fastest 5G network in Europe. Ecott reflects: In Faroes, culture survives in the way men gather together in the autumn to collect their sheep and go into the mountains to shoot hares and out to sea to catch fulmars with nets. Fishing still occupies much of the workforce, and the perils of braving the North Atlantic remain a real and present danger. (2020, 15)

Indeed, despite the country’s low murder rate (ten murders, mainly committed by visitors, since 1950), life is plenty dangerous. And when a member of such a small community dies, often up to 700 people will attend the funeral, and the town stops to listen to the church bells and watch the procession. The centrality and importance of the funeral to Faroese life is, as we will see, a crucial context of the DFC Hamlet. But it is not just human death that is particularly present in the Faroes: slaughtering sheep, catching and killing seabirds, and whale hunting remain a part of life for many Faroe Islanders. Hunting the grind (pilot whale) has occurred on the islands for over a thousand years; the 1298 ‘Sheep Letter’, the country’s oldest written document, gives stipulations about the practice, and specific records of how many whales were killed, on what day, and on what beach go back to 1584, perhaps ‘the oldest continuously documented record of a human relationship with another species’ (Ecott 2020, 178). As with the buffalo for Plains American Indians, all parts of the whale are used: the meat, the blubber, the oil, the bones. Little vegetation grows in the windy islands, which for centuries spent many months entirely cut off from the world. Thus, whale and sheep meat (which is dried for the winter months) was the only source of nutrition. Today, meat gained from a hunt is divided among locals and not sold 4  While ethnically the Faroes are a relatively homogenous society, their high international adoption rates, a history of Faroese men marrying Asian women (local men outnumber women, who are more likely to emigrate to Denmark after going to university there), and some immigration means that this community has some racial diversity.

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

177

for profit, though an alarming rise in mercury levels in the oceans and therefore the whales has meant that consumption is generally down. On my first trip to the Faroes, I stumbled upon the aftermath of a grindaráp, the unforgettable sight of a bay where the carnage had made the ‘multitudinous seas incarnadine’. I personally object to the killing of animals, particularly when they are as social and intelligent as pilot whales, but I recognize that this particular species is not endangered and hunted sustainably. Many Faroese argue that factory farming, with its animal torture and environmental destruction, is much more ethically and ecologically harmful than the quick deaths of these wild creatures, and point out that a special tool cuts the blood vessels off to their spine immediately. When Pamela Anderson (that Pamela Anderson) and other Americans in the Sea Shepherd project visited the Faroes in 2014 to tell the islanders to stop the hunt, their presence had the reverse effect: a tradition that had started to become the province of older generations was taken up by younger men (and it is men) who didn’t like foreigners telling them that their culture was wrong (Ecott 2020, 181; Day 2017). The Faroe Islands are a small society, a community-country of people who spent centuries in isolation and relative depravation, developing survival skills and resilience. They are now connected and, thanks to fishing and tourism and Danish subsidies, well-resourced, though plenty of challenges remain. In most ways, this place is unlike anywhere in the world else except perhaps a few other island nations, and its inimitability extends to its artistic culture as well.

Faroese Art, Theatre, and Shakespeare When flying to the Faroes on one of the three planes in the fleet of the national airline, Atlantic Airways, one might find themselves on the William Heinesen jet. Heinesen (1900–1991) was a painter and composer as well as poet and novelist: while his immense success in all these fields was unusual, his participation in so many artistic endeavors was and is typical. Today, time spent browsing the Faroese book titles in Tórshavn’s downtown bookstore; listening to classical, folk, and punk records released by the local record label Tutl; or visiting the national art gallery has one quickly marveling at the quality and quantity of artistic output in the Faroes. One woman explained the phenomenon thus: ‘The Faroese consider that they live in a complete country and therefore expect to have a wide choice of literature, music, and art. As a result, they each feel they

178 

K. S. BROKAW

have something which they can contribute’ (Nielsen 2019, 100). It is in this rich cultural context that the DFC theatre company, founded in 2010, operates. Excluding ballads and folk tales, Faroese literature is only as old as the written language, and was essentially established by a handful of writers around the turn of the twentieth century who were keen to have Faroese accepted as a living language. Anthony Jackson even surmises that the 1938 approval of Faroese in churches and schools ‘was probably due less to political pressure than to the obvious fact that a respectable body of Faroese literature was there to prove that it was a viable language’ (1991, 83). The fact that it is within living memory that Faroese writers have wanted to prove their language’s literary merit is relevant to the short history of Faroese translations and productions of Shakespeare. But indigenous literature has blossomed, and by 2015, 6622 books had been published in Faroese. They include Heðin Brú’s The Old Man and His Sons, which has been translated into English and documents painful generational differences in the mid-twentieth century, as the older ways of life were supplanted by modernizations  (2011). Heinesen, the most famous Faroese writer, wrote in Danish rather than his native Faroese. He received many prestigious literary prizes in Scandinavia, but when he was rumored to be considered for a Nobel in 1981, he wrote the prize committee to pre-empt them from giving him the reward: The Faroese language was once held in little regard—indeed it was suppressed outright. In spite of this, the Faroese language has created a great literature, and it would have been reasonable to give the Nobel Prize to an author who writes in Faroese. If it had been given to me, it would have gone to an author who writes in Danish, and in consequence Faroese efforts to create an independent culture would have been dealt a blow. (Heinesen 1983, 12)

Today, multiple Faroese presses publish everything from textbooks to poetry collections to translations of Harry Potter. In 2019, Stiðin press released Hans Torgarð’s new translation of Hamlet and his father’s translation of Richard III, timed to coincide with the DFC opening. Heinesen mentored Sámal Joensen-Mikines (1906–1979), one of the many visual artists worthy of serious study but the only one I’ll mention here. Like many Faroese painters and printmakers, much of Mikines’s work depicts dramatic landscapes, but he also paints people. His

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

179

masterpiece ‘Home from the Funeral (Hjem fra begravelse)’ hangs in the national gallery: a giant, brooding canvas showing a family boating back to their island from a funeral on another island in the dead of night. I mention Mikines for two reasons: the trajectory of a self-taught artist who left the Faroes to study at Copenhagen Royal Academy of Art is similar to the artistic careers of many contemporary theatre artists who worked on Hamlet, and this most beloved of Faroese paintings is of a funeral, which was the framing context of the DFC production. As an art form, music had a bigger role to play in the Faroese Hamlet than painting. There are choirs, bands, and informal musical nights all over the islands.5 Write Lassen and Syderbø: Music is to a Faroese person what water is to a fish, what the wind is to the birds and the grass to the sheep. Living in a remote and barren place with no trees and therefore no wood from which to make instruments, the people would sing everything. Stories, prayers, and sometimes even conversations. (2017, 90)

There are classical music composers who perform concerts on boats in rocky grottos, and the Tutl record store has frequent launch parties for its many albums. After one band made a British top 100 list, the local press unironically declared that ‘[t]he world, it seems, has started to notice the Faroese punk band Joe and the Shitboys’ (Samuelsen 2020). But there are truly internationally acclaimed musicians, like Eivør, who tours Europe and North America and has several successful albums. She comments on the outsized creativity of the Faroese: It’s because we’re all alone in the middle of nowhere … I really think it has to do with the isolation. The weather conditions also play a role. When it’s cold outside and nothing is happening, you can’t help but get creative. (2015)

In this way, the Faroes bear a resemblance to the North Atlantic island nations with which they share histories, for Orkney, Shetland, Iceland, and Ireland are all artistically rich and accomplished cultures relative to their population sizes. 5  In the 1948, Williamson noted, ‘There are choral and orchestral societies which give occasional recitals, and an amateur dramatic society produces plays now and then at the theatre’ (32).

180 

K. S. BROKAW

A choir featured prominently in the DFC Hamlet, singing both traditional hymns and a fabulously eerie original score by Faroese composer Tróndur Borgason. They also played the travelling players, and when I expressed to Hans Torgarð my surprise at the acting abilities of these amateur singers he explained: Many of them, as well as being singers they are amateur actors as well … It’s a very natural Faroese thing to be involved in several things: if you like to sing then suddenly before you know it, you’re involved in some theater projects and you are doing amateur theater. If you’re in one side of the culture here, then you get involved in all the other parts as well. (2020)

Such a multi-talented population clearly served the DFC Hamlet well. The Faroe Islands do have a National Theater in Tórshavn, and it co-­ sponsored the DFC Hamlet, but most theatre productions in the islands are amateur, and there are community and school groups across the islands. Torgarð grew up doing amateur theatre in the small village of Kvívík, and many of the other actors in Hamlet cut their teeth doing community theatre, including a youth production of Othello in 2008, 11 years before Hamlet. I have just listed two of the five Shakespeare plays ever performed in the Faroes: the others are The Tempest (1964), A Midsummer Night’s Dream (1998), and Macbeth (2002).6 The Tempest started this small series, and many of the DFC team members I spoke to recounted the story of the 1964 Tempest, the first time Shakespeare was ever performed—in Faroese or any language—on the islands. Torgarð’s account is the most thorough and revealing of the relationship between the Faroese language and European classical writers: There always was a rather strong national feeling of having your own language and translating literature, world literature, into Faroese, and writing in Faroese. One of our greatest poets, Janus Djulrhuus, wrote poems and translated Schiller, Goethe, and the entire Iliad from the ancient Greek. So there’s always been this great thing about getting world literature into our language. And when The Tempest was translated and performed by the amateur theater here in Tórshavn in 1964, there was this linguist [Christian Matras] who had been working with Faroese language for 50 years or something. He was crying in the audience and somebody asked him “why are you 6  There are in addition 12 published Faroese translations of 11 of Shakespeare’s plays (there are 2 of Hamlet).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

181

so touched by the play?’ And he said, ‘Oh no, it’s not the play at all, but just that I never thought I would ever be able to hear Shakespeare speaking Faroese.” So that was emotional. (2019)

In both the 1960s and 2010s, it seems that Faroese linguists, writers, and artists have seen translating Shakespeare into Faroese as a way to prove the literary value of their once suppressed, once entirely oral language. When generalizing about Scandinavia (and he omits the Faroes from this discussion), Gunnar Sorelius observes, ‘There is no sign that [Shakespeare] was used in the formation and strengthening of a national culture as in many other countries that looked upon translations of Shakespeare as proof of the maturity and capabilities of their national languages’ (2002, 9). The story of this early Faroese Tempest and of the DFC Hamlet, however, suggests that while Shakespeare has not played a vital part in ‘strengthening … national culture’ in the Faroes, his texts have and are being used to prove the literary capability of their little-known language. While there is not what anyone would call a tradition of Shakespeare in the Faroes, there are substantial pockets of people within artistic communities who see Shakespeare not as an inescapable cultural behemoth or remnant of colonial oppression but rather as a body of work which, alongside native literature, has an elevating presence. Many of the earlier productions were translated by Torgarð’s father, priest, and translator Axel Torgarð, who translated seven Shakespeare plays into Faroese. Today, most Faroe Islanders encounter Shakespeare as teenagers if they study English seriously as high school students, which some do and some don’t. Kristian Blak, the composer who runs Tutl records, told me that he has composed some unpublished tunes to Shakespearean sonnets, and filmmaker Gudmund Helmsdal described himself as a ‘Shakespeare nut’, whose woodworking father had him learning bits of Hamlet at a young age (Helmsdal is currently putting together a documentary about the DFC Hamlet). Director Búi Dam’s parents are both actors, and he describes falling in love with Shakespeare at a young age because ‘I think there’s an honesty and brutality in many of his plays. I mean it’s really quite simple but at the same time it’s very honest and to the point, which is maybe quite rare’ (2019b). ‘Simple’, ‘honest’, and ‘brutal’ are all words that have been used to describe Faroese life, which is perhaps no coincidence if you believe that communities are conditioned to recognize that which is like their own culture in work as capacious as Shakespeare’s.

182 

K. S. BROKAW

The arts of any country—even one of 50,000 people—cannot be adequately described in a few pages. There’s Joe and the Shitboys, there’s amateur theatre and multiple choirs, there’s knitting clubs and abstract printmakers. The current cultural minister of the Faroes, part of the conservative government who was in power in 2019 and who Dam describes as ‘a religious fanatic’, has gone on record saying that he believes Faroese art should be ‘cute’. No doubt some of it is, but DFC explicitly seeks to challenge quaint, cute art, and the notion that such things are all that this island nation can create. The company’s mission statement expresses this, as well as the (typically Faroese, we might say) multi-talented nature of its artists, and their collaborative, community-focused creation process: All the core members of Det Ferösche Compagnie (DFC) come from The Faroe Islands but have studied abroad and worked internationally. Founded in 2010, DFC strives to create innovative and experimental performing art which is radical yet accessible. International connections, exchanges and collaborations are the company’s priorities, as well as to re-invent, challenge and question the Faroese art scene … The company works collectively which means that every member is part of the whole process, from research to the creative outcome. (Det Farösche Compagnie 2020)

When DFC chose their biggest collaboration yet, they turned to Hamlet. While in some contexts, taking on Shakespeare may be seen as the conservative choice, the heritage choice, in this tiny country on the ‘windy edge of nothing’, this newly translated work of a locally little-known text by a foreign playwright was an ambitious, deliberately cosmopolitan choice and, for lack of a better word, an edgy one. And it is to the development of that extraordinary production that I now turn.

Preparing a Hamlet on the Edge In June 2019, I took a 20-minute ferry from Tórshavn to the island of Nólsoy, docking at its one and only village of the same name, population 200. After surveying the whale bone gateway, the football (soccer) field, and the seaside church in the rain, I gratefully ducked into a tiny house called Gimburlombini (‘youth female lambs’), which doubles as the Nólsoy visitor center and town café. It was then run by Tjóðhild Patursson, who also organized a theatrical summer camp for the island kids where they enact plays about the Scottish princess who, according to legend, is

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

183

buried on Nólsoy. Patursson is the partner of Búi Dam, whom I was there to meet to learn about his forthcoming Hamlet. Over homemade rhubarb sodas and sublime fish sandwiches, Dam animatedly described his plans. I began to get a sense of the project’s immense scope and of its aims to use Shakespeare to catalyze a more cosmopolitan and ambitious era of Faroese theatre. Dam trained as a jazz guitarist and released a few studio albums before taking a directing course at the Danish National School of Performing Arts and later co-founding DFC. Until 2019, the company had focused on dramatized retellings of Faroese myths, often performed in Denmark. The company’s core members were dispersed across the Faroes, Denmark, the UK, and Germany, and Dam wanted a project that would bring them together, creating a more coherent theatrical community in the Faroes. For that project, he didn’t turn to another indigenous myth, but to Shakespeare: ‘I hoped this production would make everybody get over here. You know, we’re doing the good stuff, let’s give this a go; let’s make this theatre group go somewhere’ (2020). Shakespeare, in Dam’s mind, had the power to turn DFC’s far-flung actors and designers into a more coherent community. Hamlet producer Urd Johannsen further describes the process by which the company came to take on the play: The former managing director of the Nordic house, Sif Gunnarsdóttir, is an Icelandic woman who’s very much into theatre. She had been to this performance of Hamlet in Denmark. She asked Búi and Kristina [Ougaard, a founding DFC member who played Ofelia]: “has Hamlet ever been performed in the Faroes?” And they said “no.” And that question actually led to “why hasn’t Hamlet been performed in Faroes?” I mean it’s maybe the most well-known play in the whole world. That was a turning point for DFC because previously it’s all been connected to Faroese myths and stories. (2020)

And so it was decided, sometime in 2017, that DFC would develop a translation and production of Hamlet, one of the biggest theatrical projects the country had ever seen. Over the ensuing two and a half years, Torgarð translated Dam’s adaptation and then the entire play into Faroese, Bogason wrote the score, and Sámal Blak (an award-winning, UK-trained designer) drew up plans for the site-specific set. Dam and Johannesen raised money from private

184 

K. S. BROKAW

companies and public foundations including the national government, granting agency Nordic Culture Point (Finland), a shipyard, Atlantic Airways, Hiddenfjord salmon, a hardware store, and local brewery Okkara. Johannesen explained that there were challenges ‘both in terms of funding and in terms of the whole scenography and the whole logistics around it, and you realize that you are quite isolated on these eighteen islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean’ (2019b). Indeed, the production’s sophisticated design and ambitious programming would be impressive anywhere, let alone on a secluded archipelago. Despite the challenges, the prospect of a Faroese Hamlet was, as Dam hoped, enough of an incentive to lure actors like Kjartan Hansen—who acts professionally in Århus, Denmark, and played Hamlet—back to the Faroes: in his words, ‘there was no doubt in my mind that this is something I would do’ (2019). The actors, scattered as they were, first rehearsed in Copenhagen in two-week intensives in May and July 2019 and then spent four weeks together in Tórshavn before opening. That’s a fairly short rehearsal process for such a complex production; in the words of Hansen, ‘we have been really pushing it to the edge’ (2019). As we will see, that was physically true for Hansen as well. The ambition was staggering, and for Dam, that was in order not only to put Faroese theatre on the map but also to bring Shakespeare’s story— at that point virtually unknown to most Faroe Islanders—to his country: ‘Hamlet hasn’t been performed here before. We’ve done it big, as we think it’s a really important story: it’s canon. Every teenager should know this’ (2019a). The Faroe Islands do not have much in terms of a history with Shakespeare—they don’t have the baggage of a true former British colony—and yet Shakespeare is who DFC turned to when putting together a production that they hoped would both elevate Faroese theatre and, perhaps, attract more global attention. And they didn’t choose just any Shakespeare: they chose Hamlet, the play Laurence Olivier chose to open Britain’s National Theatre in 1963, and the play that a small community group performed in the Orkney Islands (with whom the Faroese bear some affinity) in summer 2020 to demonstrate COVID-era cultural resilience (Sutherland 2021, 48). The DFC is part of what might be described as a tradition—or a pattern, at least—of theatres using the most famous play by the world’s most famous playwright to prove their community’s cultural might. Crucially, this Hamlet was not ‘about’ Denmark, as one might expect of a production mounted in a Danish colony-cum-autonomous territory.

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

185

Translator Hans Torgarð later explained that the company felt that making it a Danish play would limit its scope: We discussed this a lot when we started talking about the project in the beginning: are we going to go there? Are we going to make it a play about Denmark? And we finally came to the result that it … would sort of hijack the play and make it our own political statement. And that would just make it about one thing when this is about a hundred things. (2020)

He further explained that the play wasn’t particularly ‘Danish’ for Shakespeare either: And also because of course it’s called Denmark, but for Shakespeare it’s just a Fairytale Land somewhere.7 He didn’t know anything about it; he has never been to Denmark. He describes Denmark as a country of high mountains and cliffs and it’s as flat as a pancake. So for him, it’s just somewhere to put his play … So it’s not really Denmark Denmark. (2020)

In order to indigenize this Faroese Hamlet, then, the DFC team felt that they needed to avoid the semantic weight of Denmark, which, in a sense, is what the Faroese have been trying to do for centuries. Claims to something like Shakespeare’s ‘universality’ therefore allowed them to dispense with the play’s specific referents to their colonizer and make the play more specifically Faroese: as we have seen with other community-focused productions, for producers, a sense of ‘universality’ can be seen as a liberating invitation to adapt and indigenize. By the time I returned to Tórshavn in November 2019, everyone at least knew about Hamlet. Torgarð’s translation had sold out at the bookstore. When we took a day trip to the quiet island of Sandóy on the Tuesday before the Friday opening, the woman at the visitor shack told us that people on the island had spent days making soup—the traditional Faroese funeral dish—for the production’s interval. On the opening night, our cab driver to the Nordic House (which is North of City Centre, and 7  Torgarð is probably right about this, though for an argument that Shakespeare’s Danish setting was specific and targeted, see Srigley 2002, who argues that English interest in all things Danish peaked after first decade of Christian IV of Denmark’s reign and culminated in his visit to England in 1606 to see his brother-in-law James I and his sister Anne. He suggests that Shakespeare revised and extended the second quarto of Hamlet with an eye toward that visit.

186 

K. S. BROKAW

it was raining) asked us if we were headed to Hamlet, adding ‘our theatre is extraordinary and can compete with anyone’. His confidence was justified.

Hamlet Part 1: A Funereal Opening The DFC Hamlet was divided into four parts, each of which took place in a different location in the Nordic House: two parts were before the intermission, two parts after it. The production’s opening scenes established the creative ways this Hamlet had repurposed the spaces of the Nordic House to theatricalize community ritual. The play’s staged funeral was key to the production’s aim to provoke strong emotional responses in often reticent Faroese spectators. The Nordic House is a beloved building that is culturally and architecturally linked to its Nordic neighbors: it was built in the early 1980s using Faroese and Norwegian stone, Swedish timber, Icelandic peat, Danish steel and glass, and Finnish furniture (Nielsen 2019, 141); similar cultural centers exist in Iceland, Åland Islands, Greenland, and Finland creating a pan-Nordic community. In November 2019, the presence of DFC’s funeral-focused Hamlet was felt before audiences even entered the familiar space. Big white crosses were placed around the building’s exterior, constructed to look like Faroese grave markers (see Fig. 4.2). Throughout the run, more were added each night, as if the body count continued to mount. Dam explained that some people found it offensive that a sacred symbol had been co-opted for theatrical purposes, but the conflation of ritualistic and theatrical space was precisely the point: For me, theater is as real as life. So there isn’t a separation between the two. There are funeral rites, and also there are the theatre rites, and this is all our way of expressing ourselves and dealing with this thing called life where we absolutely have no idea what’s going on. So for me the theatre is as holy as the church. (2019a)

The ritualizing of theatrical space and the theatricalizing of religious ritual—subjects much discussed in early twenty-first-century scholarship of

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

187

Fig. 4.2  White crosses surrounding the Nordic House, with the colorful buildings of Tórshavn in the distance. (Photo by author)

Elizabethan and Jacobean drama—was crucial to this production’s aesthetic and interpretive aims.8 The promenade production took the audience through several different spaces in the Nordic House, each of which was made to signify thick layers of religious and theatrical meaning, something that was firmly established in the opening moments of the play. After passing the controversial outdoor crosses, the audience mingled in the lobby, noting the presence of a giant black platform surrounded by extravagant flowers. At 8:00, loud 8  See, for example, Coleman (2007), Degenhardt (2011), Diehl (1997), Lake (2002), and Zysk (2017).

188 

K. S. BROKAW

bells—specifically the sound of the public funeral bells that are still tolled by churches in the Faroes—interrupted any small talk, and we were led down a winding ramp into a windowless basement room, normally used as a conference room or space exhibition space. It had been transformed into a chapel (see Fig. 4.3). A backlit cross hung on the back wall, in front of which sat an eight-­ person choir, a priest, and a man behind an organ. A small stage had been erected, on top of which was a white, rose-topped casket surrounded by a floral wreath and lit candles. Two rows of seats flanked the stage, with well-dressed mourners in the front rows, and the rest of the room was filled with seats facing the cross and coffin head on. On each seat was placed what looked like a Gravarsálmar (literally ‘funeral psalm’), the standardized Faroese funeral bulletin that is familiar to all locals. On the folded, plain white cover was printed the usual black outlined cross and, where the name and life span of the deceased would be, the words ‘Hamlet

Fig. 4.3  Búi Dam, director, as Horatio, standing next to Hamlet’s coffin in the opening scene. (This and all remaining photos by Finnur Justinussen)

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

189

8 Novembur 2019’. Once we were all seated, the priest—who was recognized by almost everyone as Heri Joensen, a real priest in a local church— told everyone to sing along to the hymn ‘Harri, mínar troyttu hendur’ (‘Lord, My Tired Hands’ in English); the words were printed in the bulletin, which doubled as the theatrical program. The singers were also recognizable to most, as they were members of the choral group Tarira. As the hymn concluded Joensen took the stage and delivered a funeral oration about the deceased prince Hamlet. He had written the speech himself, a meditation on the idea of ‘all the world’s a stage’.9 Dam was clear that this communal, participatory opening—having the audience sing along to a familiar funeral hymn and listen to a funeral oration by a real priest, just as they had done many times—was key to setting up the production’s emotional content: ‘I wanted to begin with a ritual that we all know and that has a connection to very deep emotions. And so the hymns and his sermon create the emotional ground for Hamlet the story to grow’ (2020). Johannesen also explained that being invited to sing a familiar psalm functioned to ‘create some kind of community’ as the show began and that this meant the show ‘got closer to the heart’ for audiences (2019a). According to DFC members, many spectator accounts of the show indicated that the opening often achieved its desired effect, as people listed the funeral and the presence of the recognizable priest and choir as one of the show’s most poignant aspects for them. One man told Tim Ecott that he had gotten to the age where he recognized someone on the radio death announcements most weeks and was almost disturbed by the feeling of walking into the all-too-familiar funereal setting. While Dam and Johannesen and several cast members repeatedly emphasized the uniqueness of Faroese funeral rites, those of us visiting from out of the country struggled to find what was exceptional. Communal hymn singing followed by an oration seems typical of Christian burial services in the Western world. I looked for more evidence of what might make Faroese funerals distinctive but couldn’t find anything in English-­ language sources. In the several pages in which Williamson details the ‘customs and folk-lore’ of the Faroese, he talks about rituals for the rowing back of bodies to a deceased person’s home island, but does not mention anything noteworthy about funerals (254). However, the specificity of the sung psalms and the standardized Gravarsálmar bulletin, along with 9  As I was unable to understand the extra-Shakespearean sermon, delivered in Faroese, I relied on Dam and Johannesen for information about the sermon’s content.

190 

K. S. BROKAW

the presence of an actual, well-known priest clearly called to mind a frequently experienced, standardized ritual that felt specifically Faroese to the performers and audience members. This experience would be even more familiar given that almost every Faroese funeral follows this format (whereas in other countries, funerals might take many forms).10 Shakespeare scholar Bridget Escolme, who also came to the Islands for the production, noted the rarity, among Shakespeare productions, of ‘taking a ritual that people are familiar with and making the audience part of the community of the play’ (2019). I have never seen a production that so clearly sought to capture localized religious sentiments by replicating the community’s rituals in performance. So while in this Hamlet, performed funeral rites may not be quite as unique as the production team thought, the evocation of them in this small, highly Christian country was community-specific and utilized the valence of a particularly important community ritual for its theatrical power. In being so localized, it was also in its way ‘universal’. For in precisely recreating a Faroese funeral, the production heightened the play’s emotional impact for its local audience, while also—for the few of us in attendance who were not Faroese—bringing the play’s persistently resonant themes to the fore. The sermon was interrupted by Dam himself, self-identifying as Hamlet’s friend Horatio and shaking a small notebook. ‘There’s more to the story,’ he explained to the priest and the audience, ‘and a theatre company, Det Ferösche Compagnie, will tell this story.’ Collective, standardized ritual also contains a deficiency that theatre—and stories—can address. Those well-dressed mourners all stood, revealing themselves as actors. Hansen, now playing Hamlet, took the stage, picking the roses up off the coffin as the lights dimmed. In a spotlight, he delivered the ‘Oh that this too, too solid flesh’ soliloquy to the audience (1.2.129), his acting clear enough that I could easily identify the speech and some of its lines. He began ripping buds off stems in disgust as Claudius and Gertrude approached, addressing Hamlet while looking out at the audience. Tróndur Bogason’s Philip Glass-like score undercut their mollifying words with a screechy, eerie dissonance. Claudius (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen, a 10  While almost everyone involved with the production cited the opening funeral as one of the play’s most important and unique aspects, Torgarð dissented: ‘I personally do not agree with [Dam] about the idea of funeral. I think that sort of became a very big thing in his mind that he couldn’t get away from. And I don’t really see the basis in the rest of the story for making it all about a funeral. But I guess it sort of worked’ (2020).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

191

woman playing Claudius as a man) wore a long black trench coat and Gertrud (Annika Johannessen) donned an elegant silvery dress over which was draped a Faroese knit overcoat: she was both a queen and a local. The choir took over the underscoring with a more upbeat a cappella tune, intoned as Hamlet shouted ‘Ofelia!’ and a laughing Kristina Ougaard emerged, jumping on Hansen’s back. After a gleeful chase around the casket, Hamlet exited down the darkened center aisle. Her name was shouted again, this time as if to silence her joy. When she glanced up, Hamlet was gone, and she was left alone on the stage to be accosted by Laertes (Búi Rouch) and Polonius (played by translator Hans Torgarð). While they lectured her, Laertes patronizingly braided his sister’s hair. By this point in the production, the presentational style of the first few Hamlet moments had been abandoned, and the actors were interacting with each other. The frame narrative would never again be referenced, which I did not find troublesome. In an island country’s first-ever production of Hamlet and its most elaborate theatrical production to date, there was no forgetting that these were actors, as they foretold us. The story they proceeded to tell was almost entirely based on Shakespeare’s Folio text in translation, with some key differences, including several cuts and the fact that it was set entirely on a single day, Claudius’s coronation day. The first section concluded with the audience filing out of the ‘chapel’ behind the coffin, which was borne out by members of the cast, while all sang another familiar hymn printed in the bulletin, ‘Gakk tú fram við góðum treyst’ (‘Walk with confidence’). We processed back into the lobby, where the pall bearers laid the casket on the big black plinth in front of which was a portrait of the deceased, who was now King Hamlet. Having begun with Prince Hamlet’s funeral, we were now witnessing a moment from King Hamlet’s funeral, which led straight into coronation day for Claudius.

Hamlet Part 2: ‘To be or not to be, that’s that’ Creative—and daring—use of the site marked the sequence of scenes in the Nordic House’s lobby, no doubt changing spectators’ relationship to that social and functional area. The second part also began to reveal how casting choices—Búi’s father as the ghost, two women playing Claudius and ‘Gyllinkrans’—made particular meanings for this small community, including provocations related to gender and sexuality politics. This

192 

K. S. BROKAW

section also began to reveal how in Torgarð’s translation, a once-­suppressed language bore traces of Faroe Islanders’ characteristic taciturnity and the islands’ remote geography while drawing new meanings out of Shakespeare’s old text. Throughout these scenes, actors surrounded the primarily standing audience while they went from place to place within the Nordic House lobby. As the sounds of the hymn faded, they were replaced by a voiceover of King Hamlet, ringing through the darkened lobby. The audience was surrounded by the Nordic Center’s ample glass and the pitch black of the Faroese night. Hamlet alone was illuminated, standing in front of his father’s coffin, until another light appeared in an outdoor vestibule behind the glass window. It revealed the ghost, a brooding figure, smoking outside (see Fig. 4.4). As his disconnected voiceover continued, a pantomime played out behind the glass: Claudius taking the crown off King Hamlet’s head, then joining Gertrude and putting his arms around her. Many in the audience would have recognized the ghost as Dam’s father, also an actor.

Fig. 4.4  Kjartan Hansen as Hamlet, next to King Hamlet’s shrine in the lobby, with Claudius (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen) and the Ghost of King Hamlet (Egi Dam) outside

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

193

So that his appearance would be a surprise, he was purposely unlisted in the program, and he didn’t attend rehearsals with the rest of the team. The unexpected presence of Dam’s father and the fact that he never entered the building created relevantly paradoxical meanings: the actor was erased and outside the human world, and yet most people’s insider knowledge linked him to both the play’s director and the history of Faroese theatre. His presence haunted the production. Creative and precise use of space marked the entire lobby sequence. At other moments, Hamlet and Horatio climbed onto furniture and up ladders, speaking to each other across the lobby, over our heads. A raised area—connected to the lobby by a serpentine ramp—became a sort of platformed stage. Most memorably, the royal party—Claudius, Gertrude, Laertes, and Ofelia— burst through a door as if retreating into a private space to get a breather from the public coronation festivities. There was a palpable sense that we were backstage at the big event, watching the royal family’s domestic drama unfold while the festive masses gathered just out of view. Unlike the Danish, the Faroese have never had royalty or aristocracy, but, as Johannesen explained, the production was more interested in how ‘we can still relate to their relationships and problems’ (2020). A Faroese-speaking monarch may be a contradiction in terms, and yet, the production managed to incorporate that impossibility into the play world. The presence of these royal characters in the cosmopolitan Nordic House, enacted by Faroese-born and -speaking actors who had in many cases trained and now live in monarchical places like Denmark, Sweden, and the UK, was a reminder of the international communities to which the Faroe Islands are most closely linked. At the same time, the production’s ability—through its brilliant use of space—to make the audience feel like they were privy to these royal character’s most private moments allowed the production to get at Dam’s stated aim to reveal that Hamlet can be ‘everybody’s story’, a play about strong emotions like ‘love and the sorrow that can grow from it’ (2020). That sense of intimacy—and the bold use of space—continued when Hamlet spoke to Gyllinkrans, a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern amalgam played by female actor Mariann Hansen (as with Mikkelsen’s Claudius, ‘he’ pronouns were used but Hansen’s performance seemed more non-­ gendered than a performance of masculinity). Mid-conversation, Hamlet hopped onto the serpentine ramp’s banister. High above us, balancing on two inches of banister width in dress shoes while telling Gyllinkrans what a piece of work man is, Kjartan Hansen steadied himself by holding one of

194 

K. S. BROKAW

Mariann’s hands and placing his other hand on the ceiling, which he was just tall enough to reach (see Fig. 4.5). In the middle of his monologue, he took his hand off the ceiling, relying entirely on the nervous Gyllinkrans for balance. Were he to fall, he would have fallen onto spectators from a dangerous height; it was one of the most daring live stunts I have seen in the theatre at close proximity. This was a Hamlet who was both unhinged and in total control. The relief Gyllinkrans exhaled when Hansen dismounted was shared by us all. When the choir returned, they did so as a group of hired performers and were greeted like rock stars by Hamlet. They assembled around a grand piano in the middle of the lobby, causing the audience to reorient toward a space that had been behind them. When the first player—played by soprano Anna Kristin Bæk—began to give a rhythmic interpretation of the Hecuba speech, she was accompanied by discordant intervals sung by the choir and played on the piano. The ethereal beauty of the original composition, and the sense that Hecuba’s story of loss was being expressed anew by this Faroese singer, contributed to the frisson of a moment that

Fig. 4.5  Kjartan Hansen as Hamlet balances on a banister while conversing with Gyllinkrans (Mariann Hansen)

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

195

was so beautiful I nearly cried and could understand Hamlet’s emotional reaction. Enhancing the affective power of this moment with music may not be a uniquely Faroese innovation, but it was certainly in keeping with a country for whom music is a ‘constant way to communicate belief, entertainment … and sorrow’ (Lassen and Syderbø 2017, 90). As the choir departed, Hamlet ran over to a ladder that had been leaned against the Nordic House’s coffee bar, an approximately eight-foot stand-­ alone structure within the capacious lobby. Its top had been lined with champagne bottles (see Fig. 4.6), one of which he grabbed once alighting on its roof. While drinking and wondering what the singing actor would do had she the ‘same motive and cue for passion’, he could hear that the Fig. 4.6  Kristina Ougaard as Ofelia, standing atop the Nordic House café

196 

K. S. BROKAW

choir was now serenading the ongoing coronation festivities off-lobby, as it were, in the distance. The coffee bar roof thus established as Hamlet’s getaway, it became the site of one of the production’s biggest textual interventions. When a worried Ofelia was trying to understand her boyfriend’s antics better (in this case, out of genuine concern as well as in response to Claudius’s directive), she climbed up to the bar and found the small notebook we had seen at the start of the play. She read aloud: ‘At vera ella ikki; tað er tað’ (‘To be or not to be, that is the question’) (Torgarð 2020, 94; 3.1.55). She paused, as if realizing the implications of this discovery, before continuing. After ‘í treiskni enda alt?’ (‘or by opposing end them?’; following Torgarð’s translation, it became a question), Hamlet, standing behind the audience in the lobby, took over, and Ofelia looked over our heads at him as he said the next few lines, as if in her head (3.1.59). She resumed reading aloud a few lines later: asking the question, again punctuated as such: ‘For in that sleep of death what dreams may come / When we have shuffled off this mortal coil?’ Hamlet answered aloud: ‘Her ivast vit’ (‘[It] must give us pause,’ 3.1.65–7). They finished the speech with more volleying, and at the end she took a ring off her finger and held it aloft: the gestural moment transitioned into Hamlet approaching and commencing the break-up scene, antagonistically played out on the ladder and ending with a crying Ofelia running into the arms of Polonius, waiting below. Dam, a self-proclaimed feminist director, explained the decision to give much of the play’s most famous speech to Ofelia (and thus to the magnificent Ougaard): There you have two things that strengthen the story. She becomes a stronger, better character and has more to say in the story, but also, her descent into madness and into suicide becomes clearer when you see that scene; she starts to reflect over the same things that Hamlet is reflecting over. (2019b)

Ougaard herself agreed, explaining that, consistent with Dam, the company had realized that the whole piece was about ‘all these big feelings and emotions that all come from love’, which come to a head when Ofelia encounters what looks like a suicide letter in Hamlet’s notebook. The emotional intimacy created in these café bar-top scenes—Hamlet alone, Ofelia with Hamlet’s thoughts, Hamlet and Ofelia aggressively fighting atop a ladder—emphasized the volatility of that relationship with such

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

197

potency that the audience was made to feel as though they were spying on something they perhaps should not. The ‘to be or not to be’ speech had presented Torgarð with one of his biggest translation cruxes, as he tried to figure out how to ‘put the very big question into small words’. He describes how he came to use Faroese colloquialisms for this most famous and simple of lines: In Faroese language if you would translate it literally it would go over two or three lines; it would be un-rhythmic and very ugly. So I called my sister and I asked her, ‘how would you translate “That is the question?” And her answer was: “Yeah, that’s that” [‘tað er tað’], which is a very typical Faroese way of answering big questions. So I figured why not use it, “to be or not be, that’s that”. This is a typical Faroese understatement of making something big, small. (2020)

Torgarð’s comments reveal how the Faroese penchant for understatement (c.f. ‘it wasn’t a very good horse’) is not to ignore big emotions, but a tactic, understandable in a culture built in such dangerous elements, for dealing with the constant arrival of the unexpected. It seems to me that the Faroese make big things small, expressing big ideas in few words, and also make small things, like their culture and their place on the European and world stage, quite big. This wasn’t the only moment in the lobby sequence when Torgarð’s translation reflected something particularly Faroese. When Hamlet described himself as ‘only mad north-by-northwest’, his words tapped into local knowledge in a place of a hundred kilometer per hour windspeeds eight months out of the year (Ecott 2020, 12). Torgarð explains: That line makes a hell of a lot more sense in our language than English, actually: it really touches onto something deep in our soul … What is north-­ northwest to an Englishman? It’s something to do with where the wind is coming from. But in this country, in these islands, we’re in the middle of the North Atlantic and we’re always conscious about the weather. Where the wind comes from is very important to us. We have to know it, all the time. And we noticed that in performance, when he says that line, ‘I’m only mad north-northwest’, there was a laugh every night … As a translator, it is really fascinating when you’re working with a text like Hamlet, which you would think is so far away from your own culture and your own way of looking at the world, and then you’re just recognizing yourself all the time (2020).

198 

K. S. BROKAW

Indeed, the Faroese have names for every kind of wind, dating back to the Viking era. The early Faroese called everything coming from the West, that great expanse of sea that was a sort of oceanum incognitum to them, ‘out’; anything from the East, toward Norway from whence the Vikings came, became ‘land’. Williamson explains that the Faroese compass indicates prevailing winds, not just Out, Land, North, and South, but eight more directions like north-north-out/west (Útnyrðingur-norðan). The 12 directions are of such importance that every directional point can also be used to express time; north-north-out is 10:30 pm (1948, 86). Thus, when a Faroese Hamlet talks about being mad ‘north-by-northwest’, in this language he is calling up both an ancient notion of the unknown waters and lands where madness may lie, and a particular time of day when he can switch on his madness. Perhaps never has this short line held such relevant semantic density, one unique to this community’s context. The lobby sequence ended with impressive spectacle: the royal party, in full post-coronation mode, returned, now clearly in the public eye as the lobby filled with the sound of fireworks and flashing lights, and pounds of gold confetti cut in circles, each several inches in diameter, dropped onto the audience. Outside the Nordic House, a wire frame depicting a crown burst into flames: no expense was spared for this coronation. In the last semblance of a nod to the frame structure, Horatio/Dam announced the interval and directed the audience to receive their complimentary refreshments from the coffee bar. Out of paper cups, we sipped the traditional Faroese funeral soup that had been so painstakingly prepared on the island of Sandóy; the funeral soup did warmly furnish forth the coronation tables. This was immersive theatre focused on community ritual: with both the funeral and coronation, there was a strong sense that we as audience members were not just witnessing these community-defining events (one very Faroese, one not), but we were a part of them.

Hamlet Part 3: A Mise-en-scène Coup d’etat Antes were upped in the location: uses of space became breathtakingly surprising as strong emotions and violence increased. During intermission, an accordion wall had been pulled back to reveal the Nordic Center’s auditorium, where the pianist was playing on the stage. The auditorium’s stage was covered in the same large golden confetti that had showered down on our heads in the lobby. By the end of the interval, we were all seated in the semi-circled auditorium, facing the stage (the most ‘normal’

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

199

theatrical arrangement of the evening, though it is more often used as a concert hall than theatre space). A heavy black curtain formed a back wall. Part three began when Hamlet, popping the cork on a champagne bottle, stepped onto the stage with the choir. He began giving glasses to people in the audience, filling them up with a celebratory twinkle. After he gave acting notes to the choir as per Shakespeare’s advice to the players in 3.2, Claudius, Gertrude, Ofelia, Polonius, and Laertes (who did not travel abroad in this production, as it was set on one day) entered to fanfare and were seated on one side of the auditorium, easily visible to most in the audience. Hamlet’s dirty joke to Ophelia before ‘The Mousetrap’—‘Do you think I meant country matters?’ (3.2.110)—relies on an English pun. In Torgarð’s translation, the laugh line came a bit sooner and was indigenized to refer not to body parts but Faroese pop music. When translating the line in which Hamlet refers to Ofelia as ‘metal more attractive’ (3.2.106), Torgarð realized that ‘attractive metal’ is a magnet, and this old Faroese love song came into my head that says, “you draw me in like a magnet”.11 So the line was translated into “no mother, there’s another magnet drawing me”. And it’s a joke that goes into the audience’s mind because everybody recognizes it immediately as the lyric from the old song, but it still makes sense in the context. I think that’s how so many of Shakespeare’s jokes work. (2020)

Indeed, we know that Shakespeare and his contemporaries often referred to and quoted popular ballads and drinking songs in their plays, so this moment connected the audience not only to their homegrown culture but also to Elizabethan theatrical practice. The magnet joke is much tamer—even sweeter—than the ‘country’ pun, which was in keeping with the production’s idea that Ofelia and Hamlet were back together by the time ‘The Mousetrap’ was staged and that Ofelia was in on the plans.12 Indeed, after Claudius and Gertrude left in anguish following the choir’s excellently performed—and musically 11  The song is Jens Lisberg’s ‘Tú Dregur Meg Sum Ein Magnetur’ and can be found on YouTube. 12  Torgarð did retain a version of Shakespeare’s crude ‘country matters’ pun in his written translation. He translated that line ‘Helt tú eg meinti okkurt fúlt—ella hvussu?’, literally ‘did you think I meant something dirty—or what?’ The Faroese word for ‘what’, ‘hvussu’ can be pronounced as ‘kusse’, an offensive slang word for the vagina. Hansen opted not to pronounce it this way, thus foregoing the pun (which in English, too, can either be emphasized or not).

200 

K. S. BROKAW

accompanied—‘Mousetrap’, Ofelia and Hamlet embraced and began passionately kissing. Laertes pulled his sister away, leaving Hamlet in place for the recorders’ dialogue with a returned Gyllinkrans (3.2.337–68). When Hamlet was left alone on stage to tell the audience that it was ‘the very witching time of night’ (3.2.377), bells chimed to tell the time, echoing with the sound of the funeral bell that tolled for him at the start of the evening. The final words of the soliloquy—‘so set, mín sál, tey ongantíð í verk’ (‘to give them seals never my soul consent’, 3.2.389)— corresponded with one of the most spectacular moments of theatre I’ve witnessed, and it was accompanied by audible gasps from fellow spectators who must have felt the same. As Hamlet addressed the audience, the black curtains rose, revealing the Nordic House’s massive ballroom space behind him (see Fig.  4.7). There was a huge round table in the foreground draped in white tablecloths; a long, rectangular table was centered behind it, and that table abutted the head table set perpendicular to it at the very end of the

Fig. 4.7  Curtains are raised in the auditorium to reveal an empty ballroom, and Claudius (Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen). Hamlet (Kjartan Hansen) reacts in the foreground

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

201

massive space. We were clearly looking at the ballroom post-coronation banquet, and one quickly worked out that in Part Two when we saw the royal family escape to their privacy in the lobby, they were exiting from that very ballroom. Behind the table at the far end of the room hung a floor to ceiling painting of a crowned Sofia Nolsøe Mikkelsen: Claudius’s spectacular portrait dwarfed the space. Standing below the portrait, behind the head table, was Mikkelsen herself as Claudius. He (as with Gyllinkrans, I’ll say ‘he’ when referring to the character Mikkelsen played) was drinking out of a half empty bottle of champagne and clearly distraught. Hamlet turned to look behind him and, spying his enemy, dropped to the floor and shimmied to hide beneath the big round table in front, raising himself briefly to grab an empty wine bottle off the table. A tipsy Claudius approached, traversing the length of the ballroom, toward the audience. While he approached, Hamlet wrapped the bottle in an abandoned napkin and tapped it against a table leg until it broke, giving him the sharp weapon he needed. He was hidden beneath the tablecloth by the time Claudius was center stage in the auditorium, confessing that his ‘offense is rank’ before dropping to his knees. Hamlet snuck onto the tabletop, holding the broken bottle over Claudius’s head, ready to bring it violently down, but he lost his nerve and missed his opportunity. He put the broken bottle into his coat pocket so it would be ready when he got another chance. It was a jaw-dropping spectacle. New to the Nordic House, I had no idea that there was a massive space behind the auditorium’s black curtain, and I wondered if my unfamiliarity with the space made the moment more shocking. Torgarð explained that most locals were similarly surprised: Nobody’s ever experienced that concert hall in that way, where you get to actually see the big room from a distance, because usually you’re in one or the other. So the amazing thing that happens is that you’re not used to knowing that there is another room [behind the curtain]. And suddenly the wall opens and oh, there’s the other room! Even if you did know, you forgot it, and then suddenly it just opens up the Nordic House in a different way. (2020)

The Claudius scene wasn’t just spectacular for its spatial coup d’etat, though: the acting was, as it had been by the entire cast throughout, emotionally powerful and crystal clear. I asked Dam why he cast a woman as Claudius, and his response resonates with what many actors who’ve

202 

K. S. BROKAW

worked with L.A. Women’s Shakespeare Company and Harlem Shakespeare Festival, quoted in Chap. 3, have said about women and people of color performing Shakespeare: I find that women are often better actors than men. Very often, I find, they have better access to their emotions and more complex emotions. All the great big parts, most of them have been written for men, but I think it’s important—and it’s also being done all over the world—that they should be played by women. (2020)

Dam’s focus on his sense that women may have better access to strong emotions relates to his focus on the play’s emotional register, though Kjartan Hansen remarked that the strong expression of emotion is not a particularly Faroese trait: When Claudius gets on his knees to beg and changes his mind, being so extroverted about it is I think the least Faroese thing about the play. All people in the world may know about these feelings and how they would appear if they surfaced, but there’s a certain dynamic going on in the families of small, isolated societies like the Faroe Islands. It is less common than [in other societies] to act out your rage and sorrow. (K. Hansen 2019)

Hansen’s assessment suggests that the extremes of emotion on display throughout the production may have registered as more intense—even more foreign—to local audiences than they might in other contexts. Getting the audience to confront more outward displays of emotion is in line with DFC’s desire to push boundaries, to get the Faroese to think about their inner architecture in a different way, too. That is, there is a desire on the part of the company not only to reflect Faroese life but to affect and constitute it, too. Dam also explained that the casting of a woman as Claudius had a political edge in a country with a ‘religious fanatic’ of a cultural minister and a small but growing population who agrees with his views: I’m a devoted feminist. And in the Faroe Islands, it can be a bit conservative. It is a statement, for example, having two women being the royal couple. It is a statement because we still haven’t had any gay marriages in the Faroe Islands. So the first gay marriage was in Hamlet. It was Gertrude and Claudius. (2020)

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

203

Gay marriage has been legal in the Faroes since 2017, but it took this production to give locals the visual image of a married same-sex couple. While the character Claudius was referred to with male pronouns throughout the production, the image of two female actors portraying a recently married couple would likely read as homosexual to most audience members in the community-saturated contexts of this production. As was explored in more depth in the previous chapter, Shakespearean performance can be a site where progressive gender politics finds expression in front of people who may otherwise avoid such things. The visual feasts of Part Three were not over with the ballroom reveal. The action moved to the huge center table immediately behind the stage, which became Gertrude’s bedroom in a transition for which designer Sámal Blak deserves much credit. A metal-framed bed descended from the high ceiling on chains and landed on the table, which then began to rotate; it was a turntable under that tablecloth. A sleek stand-alone bathtub came down from the ceiling next and was placed behind the bed. Gertrude paced down the center table, which now acted as a hallway, tossing heels off her tired feet before starting to draw herself a bath in the implied en suite off her bedroom. Polonius interrupted Gertrude’s relaxation and was thrown into the bathroom to hide when Hamlet entered moments later. The closet scene was an excellent version of a fairly standard (and not overly sexual) mother-­ son row (see Fig. 4.8). When the ghost reappeared, he was on a ladder back in the lobby, a space that—with all the Nordic House’s walls opened up—was visible to both actors and audience. After Hamlet threw Gertrude onto the bed rather violently, Polonius stirred in the imagined bathroom. A clanking, plodding soundtrack accompanied the actors going into slow motion as Hamlet reacted to the interruption. Polonius stepped into the bathtub as a steady stream of blood dripped from the ceiling, put his hand beneath the bloodstream, and smeared his face and heart with the blood. Hamlet approached, broken bottle raised above his head. The music cut out and the slow motion ended: Hamlet quickly thrust the bottle at Polonius while both screamed, and the murdered Polonius lay back in the tub, covered in stage blood. The adaptation deviated from the source material in the aftermath of the murder. In the DFC production, Hamlet and Ofelia tried to run away together, with Ofelia innocent of her boyfriend’s crime. The pair were chased around the ballroom and ended up back on the auditorium stage, slipping on the genuinely hazardous gold confetti, at which point they

204 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 4.8  The closet scene, staged on a rotating table, with Hansen as Hamlet and Johannesen as Gertrude. (Polonius (Hans Torgarð) lies murdered in a bathtub)

were apprehended by guards and Gyllinkrans, who interrogated them about the whereabouts of ‘the body’. It was only when Claudius entered and asked ‘where’s Polonius?’ (4.3.16) that Ofelia realized that the body was her father and that Hamlet had killed him. She let out a blood-­curdling scream in a moment about which Ougaard explained, ‘Ofelia kind of loses it, and that’s my way into her madness’ (2019). That madness scene was the final visually arresting image of Part Three. Ougaard walked down the center table with a bucket in her hand, tearing out hair—that hair that Laertes had so carefully braided in Part One—in substantial clumps. Those stringy bundles became the flowers of remembrance that Ofelia handed to a horrified Claudius and Gertrude. Few large flowers grow in a climate like the Faroes—a real bouquet would have been out of place. The clumps of hair were not only more believable and attainable in context but also were a moving way to stage a woman’s psychosis in a scene that often is reduced to cliché. The audience also saw Ofelia drown herself: she stood in the bath and poured the bucket of water over her head and then, as her father did before her, lay back in the tub of death (see Fig. 4.9).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

205

Fig. 4.9  Ougaard as Ofelia drowns herself by dumping a bucket of water over her head

Hamlet Part 4: A Visceral End The production’s bloody imagery continued through to the end. The final sequence of scenes featured allusions to Faroese folkloric tradition and daring stagings of violence and death evocative of the risky, visceral lifestyle that is part of the Islands’ cultural history. The audience was moved into the ballroom, where chairs were placed for us on either side of the three connected tables. Borgason’s score became increasingly disjointed and localized: this final location move was accompanied by sounds of static, far off boat horns, wind, and heart beats.

206 

K. S. BROKAW

The most visually arresting moment of the final part was also the biggest textual deviation: a reworking of the gravedigger scene. As this Hamlet story took place over twenty-four hours, there was no storyline involving the prince being sent abroad. Instead, he got captured by the guards when he tried to escape the castle and thrown into a dungeon, where he had to pass a mythical test in order to escape. As with so many cultures, early Faroese oral traditions include several riddles, which were among the earliest  surviving literary fragments that creators of written Faroese transcribed in the late nineteenth century. The relative proximity of these riddles to contemporary life, then, is considerably closer than, say, Anglo-Saxon riddles are to modern Anglophone cultures. It is thus not a surprise that when trying to create what Dam called both a ‘dream’ and a ‘mythical moment’, he turned to riddle. As the scene began, Hamlet was lowered on chains from the ceiling itself, upside down. He dangled over the center long table, between the two halves of the audience (see Fig. 4.10). It was the show’s most salient manifestation of what Kjartan Hansen called the ‘Wild Wild West’ of Faroese health and safety regulations in the theatre. Hansen speaks from experience when he says that while he felt safe ‘hanging from the ceiling with one trained person holding [him]’, that kind of staging would ‘never be allowed in London or even Denmark’ (2019). The lack of actor safety protocols in the Faroes as well as Hansen’s physical abilities and willingness to take risks were factors in making this moment possible, but it is also worth noting that for centuries—and still today—some Faroese men lower themselves on a rope down massive sea cliffs in order to hunt for sea birds. The relationships to risk and to dizzying heights are different in the Faroes than in most places where Hamlet is performed. While Hamlet dangled upside down in his dungeon, a single gravedigger appeared, as a sort of ‘shaman’ figure. Standing on a balcony overlooking the ballroom, he posed a riddle to Hamlet, the answer to which would result in his release: ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright, or the carpenter?’ (5.1.36–7). The inverted Hamlet—not a second gravedigger—knew the answer: ‘the gallow-maker, for that outlives a thousand tenants’ (5.1.38). Cracking the macabre Shakespearean riddle, Hamlet earned his release. After all that spectacle and actorly risk taking, pulling off a rapier and dagger match—or longsword fight, as it was in this production—should have been a piece of Faroese oatcake. However, at the final open dress rehearsal (also a school performance), disaster struck: Laertes’s sword

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

207

Fig. 4.10  Hamlet (Hansen) dangles upside down from the ceiling for a reimagined gravedigger scene

broke clean off the hilt. There were no spare swords hanging around the Faroes, to anyone’s knowledge. How would they get a new sword in time for the premiere the next day? It was at this moment that Johannesen was reminded that ‘you’re so far away from everything and isolated from the world’ (2020). She first investigated mending: could someone at one of the local shipyards weld the sword back together? Alas, it wasn’t possible. She posted an urgent call to Facebook, asking if anyone was flying into the islands from Copenhagen the next day. Within minutes, a friend called her to say her husband would be flying midday. The volunteered prop mule was initially ‘quite reluctant’ to put a sword in his luggage, but eventually agreed, and was declared a hero by the entire team (Johannesen 2019b).

208 

K. S. BROKAW

Laertes and Hamlet’s acrobatic fight choreography played out on the long center table (see Fig. 4.11). The staging of that sword fight was gory as can be, and Hamlet poured a massive chalice of blood on top of Claudius’s head in a symbolic murder. The Faroes have no tradition of sword fighting—medieval or modern—but Kjartan Hansen explained how the visibility of the harness in the gravedigger scene created a metatheatrical mindset that allowed the audience to comprehend the final fight: When I hang from the ceiling, not hiding the harness and so forth, this theatrical machine is obvious to all. This makes the climax of the play actually work because you’re in people’s faces with all of these things. And with the dinner table as a stage, you break so many norms and rules for etiquette. People are on thin ice as audience, and I think this is a good manipulative grip. (2019)

Indeed, the fighting was at such close range and so soaked in stage blood that the person sitting next to me got a few drops of it on his glasses, perhaps a breech in both dining and theatrical etiquette.

Fig. 4.11  Gertrude and Claudius look on as Laertes (Buí Rouch) engages Hamlet (Hansen) in a sword fight. The portrait of King Hamlet, used in the closet scene, rests on a bed in the foreground

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

209

The sort of double consciousness that Hansen describes—being reminded that it is theatre while also experiencing the violence at close range—chimes with the way this violent ending was both more and less shocking in the Faroese context. On the one hand, Hansen pointed out that there have only been ten murders in the Faroes since the 1950s, most committed by visitors. If the killings in Shakespeare’s Hamlet had really taken place on the islands, it would have almost doubled that amount.13 But, on the other hand, the country is plenty bloody, and killing animals at close quarters is still a reality for many of the Faroese. In Ecott’s words, ‘They are not afraid of blood and guts. Their reality can be brutal, and quite literally visceral’ (2020, 12). Dam’s assessment of the Faroese reaction to the bloodiness of the final moments elaborated on that idea: I think also killing and violence is quite easy for Faroese people to do and also to experience, because of our traditions, the whale killings and the sheep slaughtering and all that stuff, which is a part of our culture. I grew up in the city but as a child I would go to the sheep slaughterings. So that is something that’s in us, an awe about death also some kind of mercilessness towards it. If an animal has to die, it has to die. So that part of us as nature people I think resonates very well in Shakespeare’s work as well. (2020)

While an early modern playgoer seeing the first Hamlet would have been more familiar with the spectacle of violence being done to humans, many Faroese spectators have seen more living things die than the average twenty-first-century playgoer. Whatever their reactions to the final bloodbath, though, come curtain call, audience reactions were the same every night. No matter the characteristic taciturnity of the Faroese: after seeing this production they were rapturous.

Community Practices, Global Theories This Hamlet’s theatrical practices engaged and relied on its community in several ways, including the newly translated Faroese script, the site specificity, and the staging of ritual, all of which allowed it to explore specific cultural attitudes to big—universal, even—human concepts like love, death, and violence. Its status as a non-English-language production in a 13  The DFC’s Fortinbras-less final scene did have one major variant that made it less bloody: Gyllinkrans had not been murdered and was present at the end, taking some of Osric’s lines. When he realized how he had betrayed his friend Hamlet, he ran away in tears.

210 

K. S. BROKAW

little-known country categorizes it as a manifestation of Global Shakespeare, and it testifies to the ways in which a focus on community context can be crucial to that field of study. Hans Torgarð’s translation of Hamlet revealed new resonances in the play that are culturally specific and, at the same time, helped Faroe Islanders reflect on particularities in their own language. Indeed, Dam said that in addition to the funeral context, the other aspect of the production that locals responded to most positively was Torgarð’s translation, which Dam describes as ‘accessible, cultural, and physical’ (2020). I discussed the translation with several cast members. Mariann Hansen suggested that there was no separating the play’s Faroese language with the way the play spoke to its community: ‘The translation goes straight to Faroese culture and the images deep in our world, and so you feel our Faroese feelings with the music of the language and the imagery of the idiomatic Faroese’ (M.  Hansen  2019). Given its ancient Viking history and its recent history of oppression and revival, Faroese language, like Faroese culture, is a mixture of old and new, archaic and modern. Búi Rouch reflected that because the language is spoken by so few people, some Faroe Islanders are quite protective and think that the more archaic the language sounds, the more ‘authentically Faroese’ it must be (2019). Kjartan Hansen elaborated on how Faroese traces of ancient Norse make it work well as a vehicle for Elizabethan English: The funny thing about Faroese is that you are allowed to still use some old language, like old words. Our language hasn’t evolved as fast as on the mainland, like the other Scandinavian languages, so you can still use these poetic, old words and it still seems like modern Faroese language. (2019)

Ougaard concurred, suggesting that Shakespeare and Faroese are a ‘natural merger’ because of shared rhythms and the way that even contemporary Faroese sounds old, and yet is understandable to anyone who speaks the language (2019). That is, while Shakespearean English is full of words that are no longer used by modern English speakers, Faroese retains and continues to use words that speakers recognize as ancient. The Faroese Hamlet, then, allowed the Faroese to reflect on their linguistic heritage and their language’s literary capabilities, contemplating how their language is suited to describing modern ideas and emotions while bearing the traces of both a 420-year-old source text and the specific cultural contexts—wind directions, pop songs—that make up modern Faroese.

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

211

English-speaking theatre-makers often express some envy that those who work with translated Shakespeare get to work with new writing. Ougaard said that even the smallest schoolchildren could understand what everyone was saying in this Hamlet, and the same could not be said for a production in Shakespearean English. When it comes to creating localized, community-centered Shakespearean productions, then, non-­ Anglophone companies have an advantage. But while anyone would have difficulty following the plot and understanding the significance of a piece of new writing in a language they don’t understand, Shakespearean drama allows anyone familiar with the source text some access to productions in other languages and thus to the cultures producing them. So it is all to the good that productions from around the world are becoming accessible digitally, allowing viewers and scholars more insights into Shakespeare and more windows into other communities.14 The culturally specific translation tapped into Faroese culture textually, while its site-specific setting was spatially significant to the community. Its spectacular scenography helped locals see their country’s most prestigious cultural building anew. Torgarð elaborated: One of the most fantastic things about the production was how the entire Nordic House was related. This house has become sort of an institution: it’s been there for almost forty years and everybody knows it and everybody knows about the architecture. To use the architecture of the house as the actual setting gives the place new life and you get to see the house in a different light. Instead of putting up a big set, just using the environment as the set gives new life to the very beautiful architecture of the house. (2020)

Thus, the production’s promenade staging did for the Nordic House’s architecture what the production as a whole was trying to do for the theatrical landscape of the Faroe Islands, contributing to the sort of place-­ making discussed by Salley Mackey in her discussions of community-based theatre (2016; quoted in Chap. 1). As important as the translation and setting were, members of the production team were clear that the funeral setting was to their mind the play’s key link to the Faroese community. And while audience responses indicated that this was true for many locals, I found that the evocation of 14  Many non-Anglophone productions of Shakespeare are available on the open-source website MIT Global Shakespeares: A Video and Performance archive (Global Shakespeares 2022).

212 

K. S. BROKAW

ritual had me unexpectedly reflecting on another community, that of Shakespeare’s London. Many scholars of early modern England have emphasized the closeness of ritual and theatre in the era, pointing to the way secular drama emerged from religious mystery, saint, and morality plays and still bore traces of the sacred, and how church ritual—often to the consternation of the most Puritanical—was theatrical in its sights and sounds. Reconstructed theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe in London were built specifically to study those early productions but tend to focus on theatrical practice: costume, technology, and sometimes ‘original pronunciation’ and all-male casts. But it was not until seeing this Hamlet, in a city of 20,000 in a country of 50,000, and contextualized by shared, deeply felt funeral rites, that I ever had a moment of feeling like a performance was giving me at least a faint glimpse of the well-documented religious and ritualistic contexts of Shakespeare’s England. I realized that the 80% Lutheran, 90+% Christian Faroe Islands have more consensus around spirituality and churchgoing than many modern societies in the West; commonality around rituals and music gave the Faroese audience common touchstones that mirrored the shared—if contentious—ritual and music of early modern London. Recreating an aspect of Shakespeare’s England was not part of the DFC’s goals for this production. But on opening night, Dam said that one of the things he was most excited about was seeing how audiences responded to the funeral frame in which ‘religious ritual and performance merge together’ (2019a). Dam has been to the Globe, though what he took away from the experience was not so much about original practices as it was about community: ‘There is a fantastic communal feeling, a sense of community at the Globe, a playfulness that brings people together’ (2019a). As it happened, the DFC Hamlet was able to create a sense of community through its translation, its rooting in place, and—in an unintentional nod to Shakespeare’s own community—its evocation of shared religious ritual. Craig Dionne and Parmita Kapadia explain how global adaptations of Shakespeare are not ‘derivations, excisions, or manipulations, but … forms of continuation and congruence’. They cite Gérard Genette’s idea of ‘heterodiegetic transpositions’ (‘where setting and characters are changed and plot is playfully shuffled’), arguing that what might look like ‘quixotic rearrangements within the text’ in fact redeploy the plot so that the audience is affected ‘in a way consistent with the original’ (2008, 4). Genette, Dionne, and Kapadia are primarily thinking about how the updating and

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

213

indigenizing of narrative and thematic elements allows for audiences to better approach the emotional experience of original audiences than, say, an original practice production would. But in this Faroese Hamlet, the combination of the adaptation and the societal context approximated some of the historical conditions of ‘the original’, too. Dam and the company were explicitly interested in provoking reflections on modern Faroese attitudes toward emotional expression, love and family, violence, and death. Relatedly, many were quick to point out that their production aimed to be ‘universal’ and ‘for everyone’. It has become increasingly unpopular in academic circles to say that the work of a long-­ dead cis-gendered white man is ‘universal’. But, as we’ve seen in other case studies, too, theatre-makers, especially marginalized ones, may find that in demonstrating that the ‘universal’ Shakespeare speaks to their community, too, they’re able to show outsiders a shared humanity that had perhaps been denied. In describing a particular situation or emotion or oppression as ‘universal’, does a Shakespeare production, or any cultural artifact, connect its local producers to other communities, or risk papering over the specific differences that make their situation unique? Universally human experiences are marked by cultural specifics. Death is the most universal of human phenomena, but the Faroese Hamlet relied on precise references to funeral ritual to tap into emotional audience memories. Faroese people have the longest life expectancy in Europe, are likely to participate in the killing of animals at close range, and live in towns where monuments to those killed at sea abound. Faroese spectators are thus part of a community with specifically shared funeral traditions and cultural attitudes toward death, the great universal. Community Shakespeare makes particular meanings for its intended audience while also being connected to the rest of world. Evoking strong emotions and staging violence, this production also scrutinized the paradoxes of Faroese life, where there is both a low crime rate and whale hunting, where there has never been an indigenous monarchy and yet they are technically Danish subjects, where the cultural minister wants art to be ‘cute’ and its artists have other plans. It explored love and death—those big universals—in culturally specific ways. Questions about how Shakespearean theatrical practice makes meaning for various audiences have long been central to the research field of Global Shakespeare, the somewhat problematic term for productions that aren’t

214 

K. S. BROKAW

produced in English in Anglophone countries (see Chap. 1).15 Sonia Massai asserts that when viewing or studying Shakespeare in contemporary global performance, ‘context really is all’ (2021, 127). I have argued elsewhere that the effectiveness of all twenty-first-century Shakespearean production is ‘best understood according to the way it responds to the context in which it is produced’, and that ‘the ways productions contextualize themselves in their community and world—and the creative energies of an entire cast and production team—are … crucial to theatrical meaning making’ (Brokaw 2021, 246). A production’s embeddedness in its community—be that an island nation, a city neighborhood, a university, a small town—allows us to attend to the way that context shapes the conditions under which artists work and audiences create meanings out of that work. Thinking of the Faroese Hamlet as created in and for its community links it specifically to its context. But it also links it to all other Shakespeare productions—performed in any language and geography and with any budget—that are grounded in community practice. Seeing productions as part of this shared phenomena without differentiating by region, size, or language presents what Douglas Lanier calls a ‘decentered, non-­hierarchical structure’ of Shakespearean performance (2014, 28). Limiting the study of productions like the DFC Hamlet to categories like Global Shakespeare, European Shakespeare, or Nordic Shakespeare means that, as Sandra Young argues, global ‘translocations of Shakespearean drama remain tangential to larger critical preoccupations within Shakespeare Studies’ (2019, 3). The Faroese Hamlet might share traits with other productions described in a regional framework, but confining it, or any other production, to regionalized study (something like ‘European’ or ‘Nordic’) would both prevent us from seeing how it contributes to other Shakespearean conversations and at the same time risks minimizing the very localized particularities of the Faroe Islands that are different from anywhere else in the world. The Faroes are unusual in that their localized culture is also a country with a unique language, but larger countries contain within themselves myriad localized cultural contexts. And nation states themselves are a modern construct that often violently erase cultures and languages that haven’t been as lucky as those of the Faroe Islands.

15  For an excellent introduction to the history of this field and its current concerns, see Massai (2021).

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

215

I have used the word ‘cosmopolitan’ to describe some of the aims of this production, and I believe that concept can help explain how DFC’s aims were both global (or universal) and specifically local, providing a helpful framework for the study of cultural products. In his formative work on the topic, Kwame Anthony Appiah explains the two strands of cosmopolitanism: the idea that we have obligations to others beyond our communities of kith and kin and citizenship, and the idea that we ‘take seriously the value not just of human life but of particular human lives, which means taking an interest in the practices and beliefs that lend them significance’ (2006, xiii). Shakespearean adaptations—especially when they are community-centered in their artistic practices—are, by virtue of their worldwide ubiquity and cultural specificity, able to remind us of our connections and obligations to people everywhere. They also bring our attention to religious and cultural practices that are rooted in that community. In the days and months that followed the Faroese Hamlet, many local people’s relationships to their own cultural practices as well as the global cultural product that is Shakespeare were at least temporarily altered.

The Faroese Hamlet’s Local Legacies In a community as small as the Faroe Islands, a project like this—with its ambitious production and its educational outreach—can have a considerable impact, and this was certainly the case with Hamlet. The public performances, the on-site high school performances and nationwide Shakespeare curricula, and the touring half-hour school shows for five- to ten-year-olds changed perceptions of Shakespeare and of Faroese theatre for several generations and on a statistically meaningful scale. Dam reflected that ‘getting people to get to know Shakespeare in the Faroes is quite easy because it’s a small community’ and explained the cosmopolitan importance of that: ‘I think it’s really important today, in this global world, to get to know Shakespeare’ (2020). High school teachers reported being shocked at how enthralled the students were by the production, and Johannesen hoped that the educational performances meant that the ‘rings of influence spread to many different people’ (2020). While there were a few older people who complained that the production wasn’t more ‘traditional’ and truer to the ‘actual text’ (perhaps no place is immune to such complaints!), the overwhelming response was positive. On the nights of the show and in the months following it, the team described emotional audience responses. Johannesen said that ‘I had

216 

K. S. BROKAW

people coming over to me, basically crying with excitement. They were so overwhelmed after they’d seen the play’ (2020). Actors reported ‘not being left alone’ because everyone wanted to praise them; when something like one in ten Tórshavn residents had seen the show, that is easy to believe (Dam 2020). Almost a year after the production, in the middle of a second COVID lockdown, Torgarð said that I still get comments from people in the street who mention Hamlet. Either that, “Oh I’m so sorry that I couldn’t get tickets”, or somebody says “oh that was the greatest thing I’ve ever seen”. I think it certainly had some effect and hopefully people will start to read Shakespeare or get interested in knowing more and would want to see more. I’d love that. (2020)

It is perhaps worth noting that while in some contexts the goal of getting more people to engage with Shakespeare might seem culturally conservative, in the Faroes—where Shakespeare is a relatively obscure foreign writer—the aim expresses an ambition to be less provincial and more cosmopolitan, to be linked to a global network of Shakespeareans. Dam reflected on the way the project changed many Faroe Islanders’ engagement with and perception of Shakespeare: ‘I think I lot of prejudice about Shakespeare was shattered because that’s what people usually have.’ Dam feels that it is the ‘obligation of theatre’ to change hearts and minds in a way that is broadly social rather than intellectually narrow, interrogating culture and identity more than niche ideas. He felt that this Hamlet ‘shook the foundation of the people in the Faroes so that they could really get an understanding of what Shakespeare is. These are huge stories that are important for us to know, and it is important that this is for everybody and not a lecture, but inviting and entertaining and provocative all at once’ (2020). Appiah acknowledges how all cultural products help communities understand and interrogate their own values, leading to a more cooperative society: Folktales, drama, opera, novels … music, sculpture, and dance: every human civilization has ways to reveal to us values we had not previously recognized or undermine our commitment to values that we had settled into. Armed with these terms, fortified with a shared language of value, we can often guide one another, in the cosmopolitanism spirit, to shared responses. (2006, 30)

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

217

With its explicit goals of interrogating cultural values and rituals, the Faroese Hamlet engaged in this ‘cosmopolitan spirit’: it might not be ‘cute’, but their provocative production of these ‘huge stories’ provided a place—at least temporarily—for shared dialogue about the things that matter most. Dam also explained that the production reached many people on more personal levels: We’re having emotional conversations with people about how the play and different parts of the story had affected them. There was one woman who had a difficult relationship with her mother. And it had recently got really bad. Her mother was very old and had left her husband and got another one. And she said she was crying through the entire Gertrude and Hamlet scene; it was cathartic for her. (Dam 2020)

To get a significant number of people from many generations to deepen and rethink their perceptions of Shakespeare and their own country’s theatre, and to give people a beneficially affective experience, too: that is community art. Johannesen admitted that it might be ‘years and years’ before another company attempts a production on the scale of the DFC Hamlet, but hoped that its success would ‘leave some kind of belief that if we put our minds to do something, we can certainly do it’ (2020). The arrival of COVID meant that we can’t know what the full, immediate impact of the production could have been on both the DFC and the Faroese theatre scene: travel to and from the islands became almost impossible in March 2020, and while the Faroes had several periods when they were essentially virus-free, successive lockdowns prevented much by way of indoor gatherings—including Dam and his partner’s own wedding—for most of 2020. The DFC put a pause on their next project, a theatrical adaptation of a true story about an autistic Faroese man who went missing in the 1970s, and finally staged it in summer 2022. During the months of lockdown, like so many theatre-makers worldwide, company members moved their creativity to the digital and filmic realm: Mariann Hansen (Gyllinkrans) won awards for her acting in a short film, and Dam has been at work on a screenplay for a feature-length film that will likely star several members of the Hamlet cast and has interest from a Swedish production company as well as Netflix. They have developed new Shakespeare projects, too: Dam staged King Lear for DFC in a Tórshavn theatre in July 2023, casting his mother—who suffers from Alzheimer’s—in the title role,

218 

K. S. BROKAW

and Mariann Hansen and Kristina Ougaard are working on an all-female Richard III. Live theatre resumed in the Faroes more quickly than it did in many places. The National Theatre returned to the stage in January 2021, and theatre returned to the Nordic House in August 2021 with some familiar faces—Dam’s, Ougaard’s, and Torgarð’s—co-starring in a production by another small theatre group, Tvazz (Hamlet’s lighting designer, Súni Joensen, also designed this show). The theatricalization of a Faroese horror novel promised to be ‘haunted and dripping with blood’ and a ‘murder mystery [that] unveils the darkest depths of the human psyche’ (Tvazz website). Theatrical and psychological drama returned to the Nordic House, and before long, maybe Shakespeare will, too.

Works Cited About DFC. 2022. http://www.dfc.fo/about. Accessed 20 July 2022. All quotations from Hamlet in English are from 2006. Arden 3 Edition, eds. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor. Bloomsbury: Arden. All quotations in Faroese are from Torgarð, Hans [trans]. 2019. Faroese translation of Hamlet. Tórshavn, Faroe Islands: Stiðin. Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: Penguin. Brokaw, Katherine Steele. 2021. Text-Based/Concept Driven. In Shakespeare / Text, ed. Claire Bourne, 245–63. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Brú, Heðin. 2011. The Old Man and His Sons. (1970) Trans. Faroese by John F. West. London: Telegram. Coleman, David. 2007. Drama and the Sacraments. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dam, Búi. 2019a. Interview conducted by the author. 8 November. ———. 2019b. Interview conducted by Tim Ecott. 8 November. ———. 2020. Interview conducted by author. 12 January. Day, Mike, dir. 2017. The Islands and the Whales. Film. Creative Scotland and Intrepid Cinema. Degenhardt, Jane Hwang. 2011. Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage. Farnham: Ashgate. Det Farösche Companie. 2020. www.dfc.fo. Accessed 10 June 2020. Diehl, Huston. 1997. Staging Reform, Reforming the Stage: Protestantism and Popular Theater in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dionne, Craig, and Partita Kapadia. 2008. Introduction. In Native Shakespeares: Indigenous Appropriations on a Global Stage, ed. Craig Dionne and Partita Kapadia, 1–15. Aldershot: Ashgate.

4  ISLAND SHAKESPEARE: HAMLET IN THE FAROE ISLANDS 

219

Ecott, Tim. 2020. The Land of Maybe: A Faroe Islands Year. London: Short Books. Eivør, interviewed by Stephan Lücke. 2015. Eivør: I feel sad when I am not creative. Nordic Style Magazine, December 22. https://www.nordicstylemag. com/blog/2015/12/eivor-­i-­feel-­sad-­when-­i-­am-­not-­creative. Escolme, Bridget. 2019. Conversation with author. November 8. Global Shakespeares. 2022. https://globalshakespeares.mit.edu. Accessed 21 Sept 2022. ‘Hamlet in the Faroe Islands’. 2019. Presented by Tim Ecott. Front Row on BBC Radio 4, November 25. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000blxb Hansen, Kjartan. 2019. Interview conducted by Tim Ecott. November 7. Hansen, Mariann. 2019. Conversation with author. 8 November. Heinesen, William. 1983. The Wingéd Darkness and Other Stories. Trans. Danish by Hedin Brønner. Paisley: Wilfion Books. ———. 2007. The Last Musicians. (1950) Trans. Danish by W.  Glyn Jones. London: Dedalus. Jackson, Anthony. 1991. The Faroes: The Faraway Islands. London: Robert Hale. Johannesen, Urd. 2019a. Interview conducted by author. November 8. ———. 2019b. Interview conducted by Tim Ecott. November 8. ———. 2020. Interview conducted by author. September 16. Lake, Peter with Michael Questier. 2002. The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists, and Players in Post-Reformation England. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Lanier, Doug. 2014. Shakespearean Rhizomatics: Adaptation, Ethics, Value. In Shakespeare and the Ethics of Appropriation, eds. Alexander Huang and Elizabeth Rivlin, 21–40. New York: Palgrave, 2014. Lassen, Sunva Esturoy, and Guðrið Syderbø. 2017. The Secrets of the Faroe Islands. Tórshavn, Faroe Islands: Einaferð. Linklater, Eric. 1948. Preface to The Atlantic Islands: A Study of the Faeroe Life and Scene, by Kenneth Williamson. London: Collins. Mackey, Salley. 2016. Performing Location: Place and Applied Theatre. In Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, 107–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Massai, Sonia. 2021. Networks: Researching global Shakespeare. In Arden Research Handbook of Shakespeare and Contemporary Performance, ed. Pete Kirwan and Kathryn Prince, 114–131. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Nielsen, Eva. 2019. The Faroes(e). Tórshavn, Faroe Islands: Sprotin. Ougaard, Kristina Sorensen. 2019. Interview conducted by Tim Ecott. November 8. Rouch, Búi. 2019. Interview conducted by the author. November 8. Samuelsen, Ingi. 2020. Faroese punk band on NME100 List. Local.Fo blog. January 8. https://local.fo/faroese-­punk-­band-­on-­nme100-­list/.

220 

K. S. BROKAW

Sorelius, Gunnar. 2002. Introduction. In Shakespeare and Scandinavia: A Collection of Nordic Studies, ed. Gunnar Sorelius, 9–18. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Srigley, Michael. 2002. ‘Heavy-headed revel east and west’: Hamlet and Christian IV of Denmark. In Shakespeare and Scandinavia: A Collection of Nordic Studies, ed. Gunnar Sorelius, 9–18. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Sutherland, Sarah. 2021. Creative Community. The Orkney Islander Magazine 48. Torgarð, Hans. 2020. Interview with author. September 20. Tvazz [Theatre Company]. Website. www.tvazz.fo. Accessed 10 June 2020. Williamson, Kenneth. 1948. The Atlantic Islands: A Study of the Faeroe Life and Scene. London: Collins. Witek, Kurba, [dir]. 2020. Together in Isolation. Film Documentary. Available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V%2D%2DqSSmIlP4. Young, Sandra. 2019. Shakespeare and the Global South: Stories of Oceans Crossed in Contemporary Adaptation. London: Bloomsbury. Zysk, Jay. 2017. Shadow and Substance: Eucharistic Controversy and English Drama across the Reformation Divide. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame.

Production Discussed Dam, Búi, [dir]. Hamlet. 2019. Det Farösche Companie. Hans Torgarð (Translator), Urd Johannesen (Producer) Sámal Blak (Designer), Tróndur Borgason (Composer). Nordic House, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands.

CHAPTER 5

Ecological Shakespeare: Shakespeare in Yosemite and the EarthShakes Alliance

Species only survive if they learn to be in community. How can we, future ancestors, align ourselves with the most resilient practices of emergence as a species? —adrienne maree brown (2017, 14) Shakespeare’s greatest possibilities for becoming our eco-­contemporary lie not in academic discourse but in performance. Part of this potential comes from Shakespeare’s extraordinary global reach and seemingly inexhaustible capacity for reinvention…His plays wield affective and imaginative power for shifting personal convictions and behaviors in ways that pioneering ecologists such as Aldo Leopold recognized were essential for stirring up environmental complacency and motivating progressive action. —Randall Martin (2015, 167)

When German zoologist Ernst Haeckel coined the term ‘oecologie’ in the late nineteenth century, he created the prefix out of the ancient Greek word oikos, meaning house or dwelling. Haeckel’s word is defined now as ‘the branch of biology that deals with the relationships between living organisms and their environment’ (‘Ecology’). To think ecologically, therefore, is to think about living creatures dwelling in community. Ecology: consideration of where we dwell. What does it mean to study Shakespeare where we dwell, in our ecosystems, our biological communities of interacting organisms, water, and air? © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8_5

221

222 

K. S. BROKAW

Where we live, our planetary home, is in serious peril. Ice caps are melting, global famine looms as droughts and floods disrupt agriculture, and every day, hundreds of species that have exquisitely evolved over millions of years become extinct. As corporations clear-cut more forests and eject more carbon and methane into the atmosphere and as governments and courts gut environmental protections, the feedback loop of biodiversity loss, global warming, and the suffering of the most vulnerable human and non-human beings accelerates. The fact that those least responsible for creating environmental problems—children, people in poverty, people of color, the Global South, the non-human—are the most likely to endure the ill effects of air pollution, water contamination, drought, and flood is what is known as environmental injustice. My oikos, where I dwell, is the San Joaquin valley of California, and it is home to some of the worst environmental injustices in the US. Toxic pesticides and pollution from the San Francisco Bay Area get trapped in the valley between the coastal and Sierra Nevada mountains, causing high rates of cancer, asthma, and other diseases including one called ‘Valley Fever’. Summers are scorching hot and getting hotter, and the entire state of California is running out of water. Wildfires burn out of control every summer and autumn across the American West, making air quality in the valley even more dangerous while contributing to climate change. University of California Merced, where I teach and study Shakespeare, opened its doors in 2005 as the tenth campus of the University of California, and the US’s first new research university of the twenty-first century. Our campus was intentionally placed in the San Joaquin valley: a large part of our university mission is to address the area’s health, economic, educational, and environmental disparities. Our student body demographically reflects the state’s future: 90% of the students are people of color, 55.5% of them identify as Latine, and 75% are the first in their families to attend college. Many students began experiencing environmental injustices—pesticide exposure, air and water pollution, extreme heat—at a young age. UC Merced is also two hours from an icon of natural beauty: Yosemite National Park, which is part of the US National Park Service (NPS). Like all public lands, Yosemite is a crucial protected wilderness whose ecosystems are under threat from climate change, pollution, over-tourism and understaffing, and resource extraction: logging, fracking, drilling, and

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

223

uranium mining cause biodiversity loss and destruction in many public lands across the US.1 As a scholar, teacher, and theatre artist embedded in a public institution in the heart of the agricultural and heavily polluted San Joaquin valley and two hours from a beloved national park that’s repeatedly shut down due to fire and flood, how do I respond to environmental crises both close by and around the world? How do any of us who teach, research, and produce Shakespeare make this playwright’s work matter in the 2020s, or better yet, how can we leverage Shakespeare to lend a hand, in some way, to the most urgent issues facing our human—and non-human—planetary community? This chapter describes my attempt to answer these questions, by detailing the methods and practices my collaborators and I use to create productions for Shakespeare in Yosemite, an annual weekend of free, outdoor Shakespeare plays in Yosemite National Park, co-founded by myself and Paul Prescott. Since 2017, we have been staging shows each April for Earth Day and Shakespeare’s birthday, which are sponsored by UC Merced, the NPS, and Yosemite Hospitality.2 Our reach has expanded as we have added high school field trips, and stories in the LA Times and on California NPR stations have increased statewide visibility, bringing people to the park specially to see the shows. The majority of the spectators, though, are Park visitors who see our posters and flyers or happen to stumble upon free Shakespeare while hiking through the woods. Our 2017 proof-of-concept production spliced ecologically inflected scenes from Shakespeare with quotations from John Muir, the nineteenth-­ century naturalist whose writings and advocacy helped lead to the founding of the NPS.3 In 2018, our adaptation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream addressed consumption and trash and, with 1000 attendees, was our most successful production to date in terms of audience numbers.4 In our 2019 As You Like It, we worked with student and community actors, park rangers, and my colleagues in the Natural Sciences to create a piece of 1  The Washington Post’s ‘Postcards from Earth’s Climate Futures’ represents Yosemite’s possible future in stark graphics (Steckelberg et al. 2022). For Yosemite’s air pollution problems, see Rudee (2017). A Guardian article about the ‘dismantling’ of National Parks by a former NPS director and a career parks advocate explains the issues facing many of the parks (Jarvis and Jarvis 2020). 2  For more on the company, see our website (Shakespeare in Yosemite 2022). 3  This show is described in Brokaw (2017) and Brokaw and Prescott (2019). 4  This show is analyzed in Brokaw and Prescott (2022).

224 

K. S. BROKAW

eco-theatre highlighting threats to ‘Ardens’ like those in America’s public lands, which are often both literally and metaphorically under fire.5 After a COVID-induced hiatus in 2020, in 2021 we made the on-location film Imogen in the Wild, an adaptation of Cymbeline that linked misogyny and land abuse.6 Our 2022 Love’s Labor’s Lost honored the youth movements of the late 1960s that led to the first Earth Day in 1970 (it had originally been intended for 2020, as a 50th anniversary of Earth Day celebration), and the show commemorated early 1970s governmental action on the environment. In 2023, our sixth project, Romeo and Juliet in Yosemite, focused on biodiversity and environmental justice, and ended not with suicide but with lovers closely escaping devastating fires similar to the ones that have been recently ravaging the park and the North American West. Six years of collaborative work on Shakespeare in Yosemite leads me to propose the following: • Environmental injustices affect most communities and need to be engaged by those communities. • Performance—including heavily adapted Shakespeare—offers one way of engaging communities in our current environmental problems, imagining more just futures, and finding solidarity across generational lines, national borders, and political divisions. • Several of Shakespeare’s comedies particularly invite ecological adaptation because of their attention to a dynamic and influential natural world and to community repair between generations, and between the human and non-human. • The combination of intentionally adapted theatre, an outdoor environment, and a gathered crowd—the conditions under which many Shakespeare plays are performed around the world—lends themselves well to drawing spectators’ attention to their relationship to the non-human world around them and their role in destroying or protecting precious local ecosystems. • Making Shakespearean performance—particularly performances inflected by attention to critical issues affecting student lives—builds  In addition to describing it in this chapter, I also discuss this production in Brokaw (2021).  Video is available on YouTube (Brokaw and Prescott, dirs., 2021). With a focus on student collaborations, I detail the making of this film in Brokaw (2023). 5 6

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

225

community between students in a way that can mitigate mental health crises and eco-grief and can forge collaborative creativity that students need in an increasingly atomized and perilous world. • Shakespeare theatre-making can therefore be a form of what adrienne maree brown calls ‘emergent strategy’. Inspired by the natural world, the strategy describes a way of accounting for constant change while relying on the strength of relationships in order to adapt and survive. It is ‘a way for humans to practice being in right relationship to our home and each other’ (2017, 23–4). I weave evidence that supports these propositions throughout the chapter, which first describes how Shakespeare in Yosemite’s performance and research are grounded in eco-dramaturgy and Practice as Research (PaR). I then explain the collaborative creative processes, performed adaptations, and evaluative methods of As You Like It and Love’s Labor’s Lost. For As You Like It, I focus on the show’s interdisciplinary and inter-institutional collaborations and on our evaluative methods for assessing the show’s audience impact. When discussing Love’s Labor’s Lost, I emphasize student reflections and insights regarding the show’s community-building capacities for both student participants and audiences. To conclude, I discuss collaborative efforts to create community among eco-focused Shakespeareans around the world, including the EarthShakes Alliance, a global collective of Shakespeare organizations who pledge to center ecological concerns in their operations and programming. Shakespeare is a renewable cultural resource. Unlike fossil fuels or animal species—whose disappearance is irrevocable—Shakespeare’s texts are practically invulnerable, so long as there are people alive to read and perform them. They cannot be exhausted for future generations, but they can be infinitely adapted to portray the challenges faced by any number of ecosystems—our many fragile homes. And if Shakespeare’s texts can in any way lend a hand to the kind of storytelling that our planet so urgently needs, then they must.7 To paraphrase the Music Declares a Climate Emergency activists, there’s no Shakespeare on a dead planet.

7  For two recent pieces on the urgency of powerful—and hopeful—climate storytelling, see Okri (2021) and Solnit (2023).

226 

K. S. BROKAW

Eco-dramaturgy Let us hold a giveaway for Mother Earth, spread out blankets out for her and pile them high with gifts of our own making. Imagine the books, the paintings, the poems, the clever machines, the compassionate acts, the transcendent ideas, the perfect tools. The fierce defense of all that has been given … Whatever our gift, we are called to give it and to dance for the renewal of the world. —Robin Wall Kimmerer (2015, 384)

Theatre can call attention to the natural world: its beauty and its desperate fragility. Shakespeare’s works—because they are frequently performed outdoors, because of the plays’ attention to the environment, and because of their ability to be radically adapted—are particularly capable of taking part in what Theresa J. May calls ‘ecodramaturgy’, which is theatre-­ making that puts ecological reciprocity and community at the center of its theatrical and thematic intent (2017, 1).8 Shakespeare in Yosemite is part of a growing number of Shakespeare theatres committed to this idea, agreeing with Randall Martin and Evelyn O’Malley’s claim that ‘far from shying away from Shakespeare’s canonicity, it seems worth trying to exploit it for whatever (limited) potential it may contain’ (2018, 386). As the Potawatomie writer and botanist Robin Wall Kimmerer implores, it is time to give our gifts to the world. Shakespearean theatre might not be the gift that will be gratefully or helpfully received by all people, but it can, perhaps, be made to ‘dance for the renewal of the world’. That is what my collaborators and I attempt to do when we perform in Yosemite. Our project takes advantage of both Shakespeare’s texts and the environment in which we perform. Theatre scholar-practitioner Sally Mackey argues that as ‘the fragility and mutability of place has become an increasingly global issue … there will surely be an increasingly important role for participatory, applied performances of place, responding to, initiating or critiquing environmental change and its impact on our understandings and animations of place’ (2016, 124). Shakespeare in Yosemite, explicitly designed to call attention to the threatened natural world in one of its most naturally dramatic locations, heeds this call. Feedback from the production team and audiences alike indicates that the experience of being in a protected wilderness—or any environment—is deepened by intentional, site-specific theatre and that an outdoor environment can in turn be an essential element of a 8

 See also Arons and May (2012), and Angelaki (2019).

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

227

theatrical experience.9 We accentuate the ecosystem in which the audience is experiencing the production by adapting plays to be site-specific: names of places, flora, and fauna are localized to Yosemite; plots are often reworked to highlight specific ecological issues; and actors are often dressed as hikers or wearing their own ranger uniforms. Calling on John Dewey’s aesthetic ethics, Bruce McConachie argues that ‘all artistic practice that successfully foregrounds body-environment interactions is always already ecological’ (2012, 93). Our productions, in content, aesthetic, and site, foreground such ecological interactions: they are about our relationship to the non-­human—to animals and plants, water and air, weather and climate—but also about the ways in which environmental degradation harms vulnerable members of our human community. Performing ecologically allows us to dwell and dream in community with all of Earth’s inhabitants, learning their own lessons of survival. Brown draws inspiration from scientists ‘who are realizing that natural selection isn’t individual, but mutual—that species only survive if they learn to be in community’. She thus asks: ‘How can we, future ancestors, align ourselves with the most resilient practices of emergence as a species?’ (2017). Shakespearean texts are not alone in inviting the sort of capacious thinking that encompasses the interdependence of all life on Earth; brown herself came to the philosophy and action plans that define emergent strategy after articulating the leadership values she finds in Black science fiction writer Octavia Butler’s novels. But my collaborators and I have found that many of the plays, when intentionally adapted, can prompt this kind of thinking. In all our productions, we try to evoke both Yosemite’s local ecosystem (and sometimes nearby ecosystems, like the San Joaquin valley’s) and the Earthly community on which we all find ourselves, no matter where we roam. In order to assess the success of these ecological aims, we survey audiences after every show. We have found that having a charming park ranger request that folks fill out surveys ends up yielding a high return rate. Many audience members comment on how our shows make them feel more resolved to take better care of their home community, or Yosemite, or both. My student Michael McNanie, in a reflection he wrote after seeing Love’s Labor’s Lost in 2022, eloquently expresses what we hear from many spectators:  For more on open-air performance of Shakespeare, see O’Malley (2020).

9

228 

K. S. BROKAW

After the play concludes, the audience has no choice but to walk through the winding walkways of Yosemite, becoming overwhelmed by the thousand-­ foot rock walls of Half Dome, the beautiful redwoods, and the breathtaking grass valleys, and the moral and teachings of the play burn ever deeper into one’s brain as they think one collective thought: we must save this place. (2022)

It is our ability to prompt such thinking that assures our NPS colleagues that this project supports their mission, which is not only to preserve many of America’s wildernesses but also to inspire visitors to take collective environmental action. Our collaborator Ranger Scott Gediman, who has been with the park service for 32 years, reflects that people come to Yosemite and appreciate it, but sometimes we take the parks for granted and it’s important for people to realize that preservation in national parks is not permanent, or a given. Anything we can do as a ranger helps, and live theatre incorporating environmental themes is another way of expressing the importance of conservation and places like Yosemite. So Shakespeare in Yosemite gets this message out. (2021)

For many who are familiar with Yosemite, including Gediman and other NPS staff with whom we have collaborated and other locals who attend our shows annually, the experience of pairing time in the park with theatre transforms their relationship to a beloved place. Connie Stetson, who has lived near the park for decades and has been in our 2017, 2018, and 2021 productions, reflected on how ‘profoundly the words of Shakespeare intertwined with the pine-breath of our magnificent Yosemite have affected my consciousness’ (2018). But while we have many collaborators and audience members who call Yosemite home or visit it frequently, several of our student performers and crew members—as well as high school and UC Merced students who have attended shows on field trips—are in the park for the first time when they come to our shows. They, too, reflect on how performance married with time outside leaves a lasting impression. Mahea LaRosa, who was a designer on Love’s Labor’s Lost, wrote that it is quite hard to express my impression of Yosemite in a few words, but the magic in that wonderful park is tangible: I can feel it when I breathe in, and this sense of wonder was only heightened by the gorgeous songs and the voices of the play echoing off the rock walls. (2022)

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

229

LaRosa’s sense of wonder, of the inexpressible, is echoed by Lisa Wolpe, who has collaborated with us in 2018, 2019, and 2021; see Chap. 3 for more on her own pioneering work. After playing Puck in our Dream, she reflected that Puck is a goblin of the forest, and you couldn’t really talk about the forest more effectively than being on this spongy grandmother earth and being so far away from artificial light and being reminded how small we are in connection to this place. (2018)

Feeling connected to a place and being humbled into remembering one’s smallness are both effects of feeling awe, a feeling that has been studied by several social scientists, many of them at UC Berkeley. A series of ‘awe studies’ have come to define experiences of awe as ‘self-­ transcendent’ in that they ‘shift our attention away from ourselves, make us feel like we are part of something greater than ourselves, and make us more generous toward others’ (Allen 2018b, 2). Feelings of awe, according to psychologists Dacher Keltner and Jonathan Haidt, come from an experience of ‘perceived vastness’ that  can be prompted by observing something physically large and impressive—like Yosemite’s granite faces and waterfalls—or from being presented with something theoretically or artistically complex or prestigious—like a Shakespeare play (quoted ibid., 2–3). Various studies suggest that these feelings, in addition to improving mood, mental health, and critical thinking, make people feel smaller and humbler, more generous and cooperative, and more connected to other people on the planet (Allen 2018a, passim). Shakespeare in Yosemite is a unique project, but many performing arts organizations—from theatres to local bands—can stage their performances outside, giving people the opportunity to feel humbled by a night sky or grove of trees while feeling connected to fellow humans who are creating and experiencing art together. As one spectator who attended Dream wrote on their feedback form, ‘Our little family needed this: our own transformation that only being together in nature can bring’ (Midsummer audience survey, 2018). This is not to say that all outdoor performance holds transformative power for all people, but it is to say that psychological research on the experience of awe is of a piece with the many experiences that Shakespeare in Yosemite casts and spectators have described, and suggests that outdoor performance has the ability give people a stronger and more urgent sense of our responsibility to our communities both

230 

K. S. BROKAW

local and global. It need hardly be said that such a sense of connectedness, in an endangered world torn apart by political divisions and atomized by COVID and social media, is as crucial as ever. Many kinds of art—and many different landscapes—can prompt the experience of awe. But as this book and the project at hand focus on Shakespeare, it is worth pointing to the growing field of Shakespearean ecocriticism that attends to how these plays script the natural world in its beauty and distress (and, of course, critics and producers have long noted the green worlds and storms in Shakespeare’s texts).10 The fact that Shakespeare—a long-dead and seemingly politically neutral writer—documents such things has been a perennial advantage to our shows, giving us the ability to address hot-button environmental issues in a way that, it seems, is more inviting than alienating. Folks may show up to a Romeo and Juliet who would not come to a play about native species and indigenous knowledge: but if they come to Shakespeare in Yosemite’s 2023 version, they’ll get those eco-messages along with the tale of star-crossed lovers. In other words, Shakespeare has the capacity to be an eco-messaging Trojan horse. When federal government employees, including park rangers, were forbidden from speaking about anthropogenic climate change during the Trump administration, Ranger Jess Rivas, a UC Merced alumna who has been involved with our 2018, 2019, and 2021 productions while an employee of the NPS, reflected that while she had been unable to breech the subject of climate change unprompted, Shakespeare provided a way in: For myself, the conversations I’ve been able to have with people, I’ve been able to put words to the experience of climate change that aren’t the same words we hear in the media. I get to be like “Shakespeare’s fairies, you know, they are explaining this distemperature and climate, even four ­hundred years ago.” Titania talks about how the humans have lost their winter cheer. That hurts because it’s not just that we are creating these bad things in the world, but we are also all negatively affected. We feel bad that we can’t enjoy winter, we feel bad that it’s hot in the middle of January—it’s a hard reality. So I like that the play allows us to talk about these issues in a new way, a way that can include everyone. (2018)

Crucial to the kind of inclusion Rivas speaks of is that we adapt the plays to be comprehensible to as many spectators as possible. 10  For an updated list of Shakespearean eco-critical books and articles, see the EarthShakes website (EarthShakes 2022).

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

231

While eco-critical readings of Shakespeare by learned academics are able richly to discern ecological meanings out of the texts as printed in the seventeenth century, when it comes to performance, radical adaptation is needed to make the plays accessible to audiences who tend to not be theatregoers (let alone Shakespeare fans). It’s also crucial to make shows site-­ specific so that they prompt reflection on the place of performance and world at large. Adaptation is essential for the survival of all animal and plant species, human life included, and it is essential to making these plays relevant. Brown writes of ‘intentional adaptation’, defined as ‘the process of changing while staying in touch with our deeper purpose and longing’ (70). Inspired by bird murmuration, intentional adaptation is collective and resilient in the face of challenges and loss. Prescott and I have written elsewhere about our adaptive process, which involves radically reducing the play to what is essential to the adapted context; augmenting the text with music, words from other plays, and even new dialogue; and doing so collaboratively, with students, rangers, and other cast members (Brokaw and Prescott 2022). As Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill write, ‘[a]dapting Shakespeare is a process at once creative, contextual, ethical and political’ (2022, 1). Indeed, in collaborating with Shakespeare’s text, we are creatively suiting it to the ecological contexts in which we perform, raising the ethical and political stakes of performance.

Practice as Research The arts are not secondary reflections of experience; imaginative engagement in the arts provides real experiences that change who we are and can motivate progressive change in the world. —Bruce McConachie (2012, 98)

For all Shakespeare in Yosemite shows, we try to practice and model the kind of civically engaged art-science collaborations needed to create sustainable cultures and creative solutions, using cooperative and research-­ informed methods to stage our performances and track their impact on audiences. The work is a form of practice-based research, which is variously called Practice as Research, or PaR (primarily in the UK), and Performance as Research, or PAR (primarily in North America); this method is described in more detail in Chap. 1. Baz Kershaw defines this method as ‘the uses of practical creativity as reflexive enquiry into significant research concerns (usually conducted by “artist/scholars” in

232 

K. S. BROKAW

universities)’ (2009, 4). Our entire creative process—adaptation, rehearsing, staging, gauging audience feedback—is itself a form of research, an exploration of Shakespeare’s ecological capacities and of performance in particular communities and ecosystems. Working as scholar-practitioners means that all the adaptations are research-informed: collaborative adaptive processes were informed by extensive research on Muir’s relationship to Shakespeare for our first show, on Southern Sierra Miwuk words for Yosemite placenames and the park’s trash problems for our Dream or, as will be described in more detail below, on trees as carbon sinks for As You Like It. The research continues when rehearsals begin, and students and other cast members bring their own knowledge—social, scientific, personal, artistic—to the script and to the staging. Working as a scholar-practitioner means that I am better able to understand the processes of production undertaken by any group of theatre-­makers; I would like to think it makes me a more attuned scholar of contemporary Shakespearean performance. This kind of work also opens the texts to me in new and relevant ways, as my collaborators and I seek to relay the stories and poetry so that they resonate with contemporary auditors. Crucially, I work in this context as not only a scholar-practitioner but also a scholar-practitioner-teacher. My students are engaged as scholar-­ practitioners, too, and join as co-creators of both knowledge and theatre. Ecological catastrophes demand nothing less than full engagement with these issues. As Lynne Bruckner argues, Teaching Shakespeare eco-critically requires something new from us … a willingness to take risks and break rules, a commitment not only to examining our own historical, material, political selves as we really live in the world, but also to asking our students to do the same. (2011, 224)

There are of course many ways to do this, but I have found that, as Bruce McConachie suggests, creative engagement—making Shakespeare, not just reading it—is transformative and motivating. Through the years, students have collaborated on Shakespeare in Yosemite as practice-based researchers in several capacities: as actors, songwriters, musicians, stage managers, costume and prop designers and builders, film editors, translators and dramaturges, on-site interviewers and archivists, audience survey data tabulators, and more. As will be described in more detail below, these PaR collaborations give students opportunities

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

233

to complete their own research projects, projects which for some of them have in turn led to honors theses, graduate school acceptances, related internships, and even careers in the performing arts. The social benefits of this work are as important as the intellectual benefits. With increasing frequency, students report that co-creating in a community makes a substantial, positive difference to their mental health. Working as a film editor on Imogen in the Wild during a fully online academic year due to COVID-19, Brandon Cooper reflected that ‘the fact that people have been able to come together and still make inspiring experiences has been a marvel to see and experience. This project has reminded me that the human spirit can surmount almost all obstacles’ (2021). Then student actor Andrew Hardy explained that ‘it is very emotionally fulfilling to work on something larger than yourself and so potentially impactful’, suggesting that the benefits of awe extend not only to consumers of art but to makers of it (2021). In university settings, PaR is increasingly recognized as a valuable method of inquiry. Nonetheless, Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter explain that while performance practices have always contributed to knowledge, the idea that performance can be more than creative production, that it can constitute intellectual inquiry and contribute new understanding and insight is a concept that challenges many institutional structures and calls into question what gets valued as knowledge. (2009, xv)

Indeed, I have found that there is as much sympathy for this kind of work among the sciences as there is in the humanities, and I often speak of the rehearsal room as a laboratory, of performing in and seeing shows as field work. Given the importance of scientific knowledge to our ecological shows, collaboration across disciplinary lines has been productive and important. Because of UC Merced’s relative proximity to Yosemite, from its opening the university has formed partnerships with and conducted research in the park. The university has a research field station in Yosemite—the Sierra Nevada Research Institute—and several of my Earth Science and biology colleagues have co-published papers with park scientists. For our 2019 As You Like It, we decided to feature some of that work.

234 

K. S. BROKAW

As You Like It (2019) Hang there, our science, in witness of the fires we face, of the warming of the great globe itself. Tell of what we must do to save these trees, the inhabitants of this world, ourselves, too. —As You Like It (Brokaw and Prescott, dirs., 2019)

We knew early on that the physical and social properties of Arden would be central to our As You Like It. The play’s Arden is not unlike Yosemite: a wild place for playfulness, bravery, and transformation. In late 2018, as we were preparing our production, parts of Yosemite’s heavily wooded wilderness were on fire. As such, we tried to be responsive to what was happening in the Sierra: the park was shut down for days because of flames around the entrance and unbearable smoke in Yosemite Valley; smoke from the fires blackened skies and made air quality unsafe in Merced, too. A firefighter from nearby Mariposa lost his life, as did countless animals. At the same time, late 2018 saw the first worldwide climate strikes, led by Greta Thunberg and many other youth activists. As we drafted the adaptation, we knew we wanted to be as responsive as possible to the local fires and to ongoing global crises and youth-led responses. We worked on our initial adaptation in winter 2018–2019, knowing that the script would continue to evolve once we had our cast. Auditions yielded a group of nine women, one non-binary person, and seven men; 10 of the 17 cast members are people of color, and several identify as queer. Considering the historical exclusion of non-white people and women from the Shakespearean stage as well as from national parks and outdoor activities and professions, the makeup of our casts is a political statement. These cast demographics are to be expected in Merced, but it is nevertheless important to us that audiences think of people who look like our performers when they imagine a Shakespearean actor, ponder who belongs in national parks and in jobs like park ranger or fire fighter, or consider who is at the forefront of climate catastrophes and climate solutions. We had pre-cast LA-based equity actor Lisa Wolpe (see Chap. 3) as Frederick (whom she played as a man) and Jaques (whom she played as a woman). Lisa has likely played more male Shakespearean roles professionally than any woman in the world, and her presence in our company as a ‘ringer’ elevated the entire show and provided excellent role modeling for our students. We also worked with Devon Glover, AKA the Sonnet Man, a hip-hop artist who turns Shakespeare into rap, doing school shows and

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

235

Fig. 5.1  As You Like It being performed in Yosemite’s Lower River Amphitheatre in 2019. (Photo credit: Shawn Overton)

theatre projects around the world. We had five community actors in the As You Like It cast, but the rest of the players were associated with UC Merced as students, staff, or alumni, including UC Merced alumna and Yosemite park ranger Jessica Rivas, who played Audrey in her uniform. I directed the show, greatly assisted by Prescott and then University of Warwick graduate student William (Billy) Wolfgang. Throughout the five-week rehearsal process, the script went through many alterations, most of them prompted by the cast, who also developed the show’s music and had countless ideas about movement, characterization, and design. I’ll now describe salient highlights of a typical show in the order in which they were performed. When audience members approached the Lower River Amphitheater (Fig. 5.1), where all productions of As You Like It took place,11 they did so by walking through a grove of pines and oaks hung with pieces of paper. Our 11  We also regularly do one performance on campus for Merced students, staff, and community members who cannot make it to the park. In 2022, we moved all our Yosemite shows to the amphitheater in Curry Village.

236 

K. S. BROKAW

‘tongues on trees’ were not just poetic: we wanted to use tree publishing as a medium for broadcasting science, too. I contacted several of my science colleagues at UC Merced, asking them to provide me with abstracts of some of the papers they’d written about the Sierra Nevada’s ecosystems. James McIntyre, a recent UC Merced biology graduate who played LeBeau and a forester-firefighter, distilled this scientific research into bullet points we printed and hung from the trees. As they were getting ready to see the show, audience members could read about, for example, Emily Mohan’s research on the effects of drought on Sierra Nevada seedlings or Asmeret Behre’s work on soil erosion after the 2013 Yosemite Rim Fire. We highlighted that this research was often conducted with NPS scientists through UC Merced’s Sierra Nevada Research Institute. As a scholar-practitioner working in a research university, I take seriously my access to this research and take heed of Jonathan Heron’s claim from his own scholar-practitioner work that ‘contemporary PaR projects [can] also demonstrate ways in which the arts and humanities can enrich science and philosophy through creative practice’ (2015, 238); the reverse is also true. The research hung cheek by jowl with poems and quotations about trees by the likes of Robert Frost and Rachel Carson, as well as a few snippets about poems on trees, books in the running brooks, and the beauty of a woman named Rosalind (Fig. 5.2). We also hung up some original watercolors illustrating the scientific research, painted by student intern Rosa Reyna-Secaida. The research and ‘Poet-trees’, we hoped, suggested the connections between art and science, a point further elucidated for audience members if they then read our program notes: As You Like It reveals that Ardens like Yosemite and the woods near Shakespeare’s English hometown save us by nurturing (and naturing) love and self-discovery. But, as this production tries to highlight, this is also true biologically: trees themselves are carbon sinks that mitigate the encroaching warming of our planet, and protected wildernesses like Yosemite harbor the water, soil, and ecosystems that keep earth’s creatures fed and alive. Ardens allow all animals—including humans—to eat, drink, and breath. (Brokaw 2019)

For those feeling poetic themselves, cast members were wandering among the audience collecting poems we’d asked willing spectators to write, either homages to Yosemite or their cheesiest attempt at a love poem. These were collected for later use in the show.

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

237

Fig. 5.2  Andrew Hardy as Orlando in As You Like It. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton)

Before the show began we were also distributing copies of a Spanish language synopsis of the play, which had been written by Ángel Nuñez, a student intern who played Silvius the Firefighter. Thanks in large part to Nuñez’s work making As You Like It more accessible to Spanish speakers, in summer 2020, he worked with William Wolfgang and two other student members of the As You Like It cast, Maria Nguyen-Cruz and Cathryn (Cat) Flores, on a new bilingual adaptation of Ricardo II produced by the local Merced Shakespearefest. Nuñez, Wolfgang, and Flores collaborated on a bilingual Don Quixote de la Merced in 2021, and in 2022, Nuñez was as hired as Executive Director of Orangemite Theatre in Pennsylvania, where he continues to produce bilingual and eco-inflected Shakespeare, as well as theatrical film projects; he is one of many students for whom work on Shakespeare in Yosemite has opened new doors. As the preshow concluded, Ranger Rivas, acting as both a cast member and an NPS employee, took the stage to welcome the audience to the show and to acknowledge the native lands on which Yosemite National

238 

K. S. BROKAW

Park sits.12 The show itself then began with ‘foresters’ singing the opening of ‘What a piece of work is man’ from the musical Hair. When Orlando, played by then student actor Andrew Hardy, lamented that ‘this brave o’er hanging firmament’ was nothing more than a ‘foul and pestilent congregation of vapors’, several of the singers on stage began coughing while Ángel/Silvius and James, dressed to look like wildland firefighters, entered as if from fighting the flames, replicating a scene familiar to locals and those who follow California news. Meanwhile, on the stage itself, a dramatic scene was mimed as a business-suited Frederick (Wolpe) and his assistant Oliver, played by then student actor Alejandro Serrano, fired Frederick’s sister ‘Sierra’ (our version of Duke Senior, played by community actor Traci Sprague). She left the stage with a box of her belongings, and Oliver hung up a sign reading ‘Frederick Energy’. When the full cast exited, they left Orlando alone on stage to address the audience (we cut Adam): ‘here begins my sadness’ (based on 1.1.5). The opening act’s costuming—with Frederick, Oliver, and LeBeau in business suits; Charles in a T-shirt that read ‘Frederick Energy’; and Orlando in one that said ‘Save the Planet’—established the battle lines: Frederick was an energy exec, Orlando an environmentalist. The backstory was further elucidated by Rosalind’s added opening soliloquy, written to contextualize the adaptation and mirror Orlando before the entrance of Celia. We revised some of Charles’s 1.1 lines to have Rosalind (played by community actor Bethy Harmelin) explain: Here begins my sadness. My mother Sierra is banished, cast out of her company and home, by her younger brother, my uncle Duke. Her plans with the late Professor Rowland to harness energy from the sun and not the deep earth, abandoned. And, her own lands and revenues now enrich Uncle Duke. My mother is in the forest of Arden, and many merry folk with her.

12  Ranger Rivas’s words: ‘These granite walls have been an amphitheater where people have lived for thousands of years. Before it was a park it was home to the Ahwhaneechee people and the surrounding seven associated tribes including the American Indian Council of Mariposa County, Inc. (aka Southern Sierra Miwuk Nation), Bishop Paiute Tribe, Bridgeport Indian Colony, Mono Lake Kutzadikaa, North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians of California, Picayune Rancheria of the Chukchansi Indians, and the Tuolumne Band of Me-Wuk Indians. Today descendants of the Ahwahneechee people still live and continue practicing their cultures and care-taking responsibilities.’

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

239

They say young people flock to her every day, and pass the time as they did in the golden world.13

A spectacular wrestling match featuring handstands and flips was entirely choreographed and self-rehearsed by Andrew and our Charles (then UC Merced arts lecturer Tawanda Chabikwa, who also choreographed the show); both have martial arts training. When working on the adaptation, I originally made Rosalind and Celia’s alias names Ansel (as in Adams, the most famous photographer of Yosemite) and Sequoia, but our witty-in-­ real-life Touchstone, then student actor Maria, rightly suggested at the first read through that we call the pretend brother and sister ‘Ansel and Gretel’. After LeBeau, a Frederick energy employee with a conscience, encouraged Orlando to flee to Arden, the foresters emerged, singing ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’. Silvius the Firefighter was among them, passing flowers to Phoebe the Climber (then student actor Simone Kastner), who carelessly passed each bouquet to a friend. Audrey the Ranger was among them too, as was Sierra, who addressed her ‘sisters and brothers in exile’ as the song ended. Realizing that many of our actors, most of whom did not know the play before rehearsals began, were confused by Sierra/Senior’s line about being ‘exempt from public haunt’, we decided to amend it so that those who had themselves journeyed from town to the woods of Yosemite could understand the sentiment: And this our life, outside the busy town, Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, Sermons in stones and good in everything. (based on 2.1.15–17)

Audiences deserve to not just hear but understand Shakespeare, and if that means changing a famous line here or there so that the sense is clearer, so be it. Shakespeare is a renewable, resilient resource; Ardens are much more fragile. Following Shakespeare, a discussion of the forest’s deer ensued, with Sierra complaining that it ‘irks’ her that 13  The Shakespearean text reads: ‘The old duke is banished by his younger brother the new duke, and three or four loving lords have put themselves into voluntary exile with him, whose lands and revenues enrich the new duke … They say he is already in the Forest of Arden, and a many merry men with him … They say many young gentlemen flock to him every day and fleet the time carelessly, as they did in the golden world’ (1.1.98–102, 113–17).

240 

K. S. BROKAW

the poor dappled fools, Being native citizens of this wild city, Should in their own confines with forked heads Have their round haunches gored. (based on 2.1.22–5)

In more than one performance, native mule deer were nearby when the lines were spoken, and once a bear showed up (but kept her distance from the audience). We brought Jaques herself on stage after the foresters’ discussion. Working with Lisa and the rest of the cast, we developed this character into a woman whose occasional melancholy comes from travelling the Earth and seeing its destruction, but who in the end doesn’t sit out from the final dance (or climate march, in our case), choosing to find hope in human connection and community resilience. When the audience first met this Jaques, she carried her lamentation about being ‘mere usurpers, tyrants’ into words adapted from Richard II: This sceptered isle, This earth of majesty, This other Eden, demi-paradise—the Yosemite!— This fortress built by Nature for herself This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this parkland, This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land, Dear for her reputation through the world, Is now leased out, I cry pronouncing it. (based on 2.1.55–65)

If audience members saw the Frederick underneath the Jaques (though many didn’t, so skilled is Wolpe’s acting), they were assisted in making the connection between the fictional Frederick Energy and those real companies to whom demi-paradises like Yosemite are ‘leased out’. During the rehearsal process it emerged that Sonnet Man (Glover) had previously written a hip-hop song about fracking and other environmentally destructive processes. After Jaques’s lament, he and the other foresters performed it, rapping: ‘This is an ad to educate the mass/on the attack on our land to take gas;/Another way for the higher ups to make cash/ Like they don’t give a frack ’bout the damage that it hands out.’ This and all the show’s musical numbers were primarily arranged and rehearsed by the cast, which featured two guitarists, two drummers, and many strong singers.

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

241

Then first-year English major and guitarist Cat Flores was instrumental in developing the music, and during the course of the rehearsal process she became interested in studying the impact of theatrical music. That led to her writing original bilingual songs for the local Merced Shakespearefest’s Ricardo el Segundo (2020) and Don Quixote de la Merced (2021), and then for Shakespeare in Yosemite’s Love’s Labor’s Lost in 2022. Composing and performing for these shows was the practice part of Flores’s summer 2020 PaR project on Shakespeare, bilingualism, and music, which was sponsored by UC Merced’s exemplary Undergraduate Research Opportunity Center’s (UROC) humanities research grants, a faculty-­ sponsored summer training and research program for students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in academia. She then wrote an honors thesis on the topic in academic year 2021–2022, the same year in which she released her first Extended Play album (EP) on Spotify and Apple Music. At the end of her four years at UC Merced, on the strength of her practice-based research, she gained admission to several PhD programs in both English and music. We incorporated more environmental music after Orlando dined with the foresters: as he lay on the ground sleeping, foresters sang parts of Marvin Gaye’s ‘The Ecology’; ‘things ain’t what they used to be’ indeed. Both this song and Glover’s fracking song were, in earlier drafts of the script, put later in the play, but the cast realized that we needed the show— a comedy after all—to get increasingly hopeful, and together we reworked many of the Arden scenes to incorporate the music in the most effective order. We heavily rewrote Touchstone and Audrey, giving them time to get to know each other (unlike many of the play’s other lovers; Fig.  5.3). We assigned Audrey some of Corin’s lines from 3.2, and she became a tour guide to a city-dwelling Touchstone. This rewriting was done collaboratively: Ranger Rivas and Maria as well as Lisa (the latter two identify as queer) determined much of the characterization, blocking, and lines, and came up with the idea that Lisa’s Jaques would become, after the Martext scene, a mentor figure to the couple. When the audience first encountered the duo, they were still getting acquainted. Touchstone asked: ‘Have you any philosophy in you, Ranger?’, with Ranger Audrey replying:

242 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 5.3  Jess Rivas and Maria Nguyen-Cruz as Ranger Audrey and Touchstone. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton) I know that the property of rain is to wet and fire to burn; that great cause of too much fire is man’s greed; that a great cause of man’s greed is not enough nature; that too much greed will destroy this nature.14

Their discussion was interrupted by the entrance of Rosalind reading one of Orlando’s tree poems (as written by Shakespeare). When Celia (played by community actor Rachel Rodrigues Battisti) entered, she read one of the ‘cheesy’ love poems that had been collected from audience members before the show; Jaques read another when entering with Orlando later in the scene, ad-lib mocking ‘his’ verse to his face. The audience-written Yosemite poems, many of which were surprisingly beautiful, were read out by Audrey and Touchstone upon their re-­ entrance to discuss poetry, though in this production, Audrey admired the 14  The Shakespearean text reads: ‘I know the more one sickens, the worse at ease he is, and … that the property of rain is to wet, and fire to burn; that good pasture makes fat sheep; and that a great cause of the night is lack of the sun …’ (3.2.23–28).

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

243

audience writer’s skill before saying to Touchstone, ‘truly I wish the gods had made you poetical’ (based on 3.3.20). A brief interlude from one of the foresters, dressed as a scientist in a Sierra Nevada Research Institute polo, allowed the scene to transition and for us to again highlight the show’s ecological themes. Carrying extras of the research sheets we’d hung on trees, singer-actor Nicole Terry said: Hang there, our science, in witness of the fires we face, of the warming of the great globe itself. Tell of what we must do to save these trees, the inhabitants of this world, ourselves, too. (based on 3.2.1)

In a later scene, this scientist character addressed Rosalind and Jaques directly, explaining her work. ‘Tree speech!’, Rosalind cried out, with a line that the actor, Bethy, came up with in rehearsal. It became one of the touchstones (as it were) of the play and a phrase repeated on many feedback forms. The punny phrase encapsulates this show’s desired to speak for our Ardens. The rest of the play carried on roughly as written: Ansel taught Orlando how to woo, Gretel and Oliver fell in love at first sight, and all were to be married. When identities were revealed in the final act, celebrations were interrupted by an out-of-breath LeBeau, who announced that Duke Frederick, in meeting with a kind park ranger, After some question with him, was converted Both from his enterprise and from the world, His company bequeathing to his banished sister, And all the lands restored to her again, To be returned to the public. (based on 5.4.158–63)

This was cause for further celebration, which led into the final song and dance. We used folk band Sons of the Never Wrong’s song ‘I’ve Got You’ for the finale, which summed up the show’s desire to celebrate love for each other and passion for the planet: You’ve got a flag, let’s start a revolution I’ve got some history, if you’ve got the time You’ve got an anthem, I wanna march next to you Let’s all go together, ’cuz baby I got you. (2017)

244 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 5.4  The final climate march that ended As You Like It. (Photo Credit: Shawn Overton)

The song moved into the chorus of civil rights-era anthem ‘We shall not be moved,’ at which point the entire cast began waving signs with slogans taken from recent climate marches  (Fig. 5.4). Singing in English and Spanish, in a tree-encircled space a few feet from Yosemite’s Merced River, it was a fitting conclusion to the show: No no no no no nos moveran Como un árbol firme junto al rio Just like a tree that’s standing by the waters We shall not be moved.

The signs were painted by the actors themselves, and some of them have since been re-used for real climate marches in the Merced area. Ending with a moment of harmonious solidarity, we hoped to convey the undogged determination of scientists, activists, and artists, both young and old, who are working to salvage a habitable planet. As You Like It was research-informed and, in line with the iterative nature of PaR, produced further research. After each show and at the

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

245

persuasive behest of Ranger Rivas, most of the audience remained to fill out short feedback forms. Then student Maria Nguyen-Cruz (also Touchstone) worked with Wolfang as a researcher, collecting and tabulating the surveys; they also conducted interviews with the cast to measure the show’s impact. The audience questionnaire was short (one side of a half-sheet) and featured the following questions: . How did you hear about the show? 1 2. How familiar with Shakespeare were you before today’s show? 3. How many times have you been to Yosemite? 4. Please share any thoughts about how today’s show may have changed the way you think about any or all of the following: Shakespeare, Yosemite National Park, and public lands. 5. What environmental messages, if any, were your ‘take-aways’ from this production? 6. Anything else you’d like to say about the production? In the limited space we had, our main concern was to steer the respondents to reflect on impact: to see which elements of the show were the most able to move them toward reflection or even action. We found in our Dream surveys in 2018 that many audience members said that the show’s music—particularly its ecologically themed songs—was thought-­ provoking, and so we included even more music in As You Like It. The response rates tend to be very high: about 37%, and that is not accounting for the fact that most couples and families filled out one form for multiple people. We learned that 35% of our As You Like It audience (or those who filled out the forms, who are probably going to skew toward this statistic) considered themselves ‘very’ familiar with Shakespeare, but 16.2% say that are ‘a little’ familiar, and 8.5% ‘not at all familiar’. While many of our spectators said they had been to the park ‘many times’ (18%) or ‘too often to count’ (31.7%), and 4.2% of them live and work in the Park, 20.4% were in Yosemite for the first time the day they saw the show. Answers to both of these questions help us calibrate how to pitch both the Shakespearean- and the Yosemite-related content of our adaptations. Several respondents noted that the show changed their sense of Shakespeare’s relevance, writing for example that ‘this shows how [Shakespeare] can be relevant and applicable to today’s situation’, and many commented directly on how they are newly considering Shakespeare’s

246 

K. S. BROKAW

‘attitudes towards nature’ or similar language (As You Like It survey 2019). We also got many comments suggesting that one aspect of our show led to a new love of the other: ‘I love Shakespeare, now Yosemite (first time here!)’ is a typical comment, as is the reverse, from Yosemite-­ lovers discovering a new appreciation for Shakespeare. Some say things like ‘I don’t love Shakespeare but I do love nature and appreciated this show’, and if we are going to have our audiences come away with an appreciation for nature or Shakespeare, we would certainly rather it be the former (ibid.). More importantly, we were glad to note that people’s takeaways often resonated with the messages we tried to convey, particularly regarding the significance of trees to the biosphere, the importance of listening to scientists, and the need for collective action rather than despair. A few typical comments: Trees provide us with oxygen and we need to take care of them. The forest was as important in Shakespeare’s time as it is in ours. Global warming is harming trees. Science is the foundation of wise action. Protecting the natural world, considering the cost of human profit at the cost of the world, and taking action by sticking together and uniting can create change. We need to continue to support the arts. Nature is important for a variety of reasons from science to inspiration. We could be very selfish as humans. We should have more compassion and empathy towards our Earth. We act now! Glad to see that this generation is carrying the environmental message! Keep trying, work together, share the joy. We have power to secure the planet with community. (ibid.)15

Such comments were encouraging, but we know that they were all written immediately after the show. We have not yet done follow-up surveys to measure longer-term impact, though we plan to do this in the future. We do hope that the very process of reflecting on the performance after seeing it deepens the experience for audience members who fill out these forms.

15  We also received two (out of hundreds) of negative comments, ‘PREACHING AND PUSHING AN AGENDA THAT HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH SHAKESPEARE OR NPS’ and ‘Please don’t distort Shakespeare.’

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

247

Nguyen-Cruz used these As You Like It survey responses and notes taken at several Californian productions they saw in summer 2019 to inform their training in an Undergraduate Opportunities Research Center (UROC) research project called ‘Social Justice Bard: Grassroots Shakespeare as Activism’, in which they argued that ‘grassroots Shakespearean performances both portray and combat divisive movements’ and explored the way these productions can be ‘vehicles to speak against fascism, racial and sexual prejudice, and mankind’s isolation from a rapidly depleting nature’ (2020). After graduating, Nguyen-Cruz began working as a middle school English teacher, where they often teach Shakespeare and other texts via ecology and have gotten their eighth graders to create climate march posters.

Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022) Let’s go, why wait? To fall in love, to fall in love in Yosemite. Maybe this time we will stay, to fight for another day. —Cat Flores, ‘Falling in Love in Yosemite,’ composed for Love’s Labor’s Lost (2022)

In late June 2022, two months after Shakespeare in Yosemite’s return to live performance in the park to stage Love’s Labor’s Lost and while I was drafting this chapter, the US Supreme Court decided that the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) could not enforce limits on carbon in order to combat global warming. The ability of life on Earth—the only life in the known universe—to continue carrying on into the next century was deemed, by Chief Justice John Roberts, ‘the issue of the day’, and this ‘trendy’ topic of planetary survival could not be legally addressed within the framework of the 1970 Clean Air Act. The decision was a major blow to the US’s ability to curb emissions and persuade other countries to do the same. It was also a bitter but invigorating coda to our 2022 Love’s Labor’s Lost, which was set in 1969 and 1970 and honored the youth movements of the late 1960s that led to the first Earth Day in 1970, the establishment of the EPA and updating of the Clean Air Act later that year, and the Clean Water Act (1972) and Endangered Species Act (1973). As with the overturning of Roe v. Wade the week before, progress made 50 years ago in the US had been imperiled.

248 

K. S. BROKAW

We had planned to stage Love’s Labor’s Lost in April 2020 for the fiftieth anniversary of that first Earth Day. Rehearsals began, COVID arrived, and we feared our labors might well be lost. In 2021, as part of the Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project directed by Randall Martin, we filmed the aforementioned Imogen in the Wild, which involved over thirty students, six park rangers, and a handful of professional and community artists in a project designed to tell the story of environmental injustice and land exploitation while also building a creative community in the midst of continued isolation and remote learning (Cymbeline in the Anthropocene 2022; Brokaw and Prescott, dirs., 2021). In 2022, we returned to the park with, in the words of the play, ‘honest plain words [that] best pierce the ear of grief’ (5.2.828). Our Love’s Labor’s Lost reworked Shakespeare’s comedy to imagine two bands on songwriting retreat in Yosemite during the late summer of 1969 who fall in love with each other and with a world in urgent need of protection. While in Shakespeare’s original play, a King and his lords swear off women for three years to focus on their studies, in ours, the ‘Kings of Navarre’ bandmates swear off love for three months to focus on their music. At a park orientation held by Ranger Marion (real-life Ranger Marion Roubal) and her charming intern Custard (student Anne Schwartzberg), the men meet a band of women, the Sierra Girls, who have retreated to Yosemite to write songs about the calamities they’ve been reading about in the news, like the Cuyahoga river fire and Santa Barbara oil spill of 1969; both events helped catalyze environmental protests that year. Our pared down adaptation focused on the two bands and Marion and Custard (an homage to Shakespeare’s Costard but a distinct creation)— gone were Don Armado, Jacquinetta, and the rest. Our young actors, most of them students, learned about the music of 1969 as we discussed the Harlem Cultural Festival (documented so beautifully by Questlove in Summer of Soul) and Woodstock, and how the music of Joni Mitchell, Marvin Gaye, Bob Dylan, and Sly and the Family Stone gave voice to the horrors of the Vietnam War, environmental degradation, and continued struggles for civil rights. I was teaching a Theatre and Ecology class that spring and gave my students the option of working on Love’s Labor’s Lost as their creative project. Half of them signed on and took part in acting, songwriting, social media, photography and graphic design, and costume and prop design and construction. In that class, in rehearsals, and in production meetings, we talked about how the youth movements of the late 1960s—fueled by music, anger, and hope—catalyzed that first Earth Day in 1970 and prompted President Nixon to establish the EPA later that year, followed

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

249

by crucial environmental legislation. We drew connections between the movements led by the Boomer generation and the many battles their own generation was waging, from Black Lives Matter to Trans rights to climate justice to citizenship for young immigrants. As we explained in the program notes: This was also an era when Latino and Filipino farmworkers were protesting pesticide exposure and low wages, when Black Americans continued fighting for their rights, when LGBTQ Americans rioted at Stonewall Inn (1969) and organized the first Pride parade (1970), and when people across the globe cried out for peace. These were labors of love, for each other and for the planet: our show is inspired by the youth of yesterday, the “Boomer” generation. We also honor the youth of today, who march and sing and organize for a safer and more just future for us all. May their labors not be lost. (Brokaw 2022)

Our challenge and joy were to recreate the community spirit of that legendary summer, channeling at once the energy of 1969 and 2022. Over the course of two months, the team wrote and arranged music, tweaked the draft script to better respond to the cast’s ideas and talents, thrifted for flowered dresses and bell bottoms, and created animal masks out of scraps. The opening scene featured band leader Ferdinand Franks (UC Merced post-doctoral fellow Christian Michael Smith) cajoling Barry Berowne (former UC Merced student and Yosemite-based musician Tonatiuh Newbold) and Danny Dumain (recent alumnus Andrew Hardy) into signing a pact to focus only on their music for three weeks. In an interpolated second scene that stole several lines from Portia and Nerissa’s talk of suitors (Merchant of Venice 2.1), action moved to the four Sierra Girls miming a car journey to Yosemite while they teased Rosaline (then student Sofia Andom) about her hapless wooers and asked Princess (Bethy Harmelin) if there was any word from her brother, stationed in Vietnam (see Fig. 5.5). Then student musician Cat Flores played Katharine, and community member Bella Camfield was Maria. The park orientation scene that followed reintroduced the bands to each other (as in Shakespeare’s play, the couples all had a bit of previous) and introduced them to Marion, Custard, and the visiting scientist Lou Holfernes (Tawanda Chabikwa). Conveniently enough, Dr. Holfernes was also a drummer happy to join the Kings of Navarre while he conducted his research on the Sierra’s endangered creatures. Ranger Marion scripted her

250 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 5.5  Cat Flores, Bella Camfield, Sofia Andom, and Bethy Harmelin as the Sierra Girls, miming their car journey on the Curry Village stage. (Photo Credit: Grace Garnica)

own lines, giving park safety and wildlife guidelines in rhyming iambic pentameter (see Fig. 5.6). The ensuing scenes showed the bands working on their music and sending Custard as a go-between who delivered to Rosaline a recording of Berowne’s love professions on cassette and was cajoled into bringing an armful of handmade love tokens to the women. The women’s growing feelings for the men were revealed primarily through song, including a mash-up of Dylan’s ‘I Want You’ and Mitchell’s ‘All I Want’, and an original song by Flores, a bespoke love ballad called ‘Love in Yosemite’. Shakespeare’s words were again localized so that when the Kings discovered they’d all broken their oaths and vowed to woo the women after all, they spoke the following (Berowne’s famous love soliloquy was shared by all four men): DUMAIN For valor, is not Love a mountain lion, Still climbing trees in the high Sierras? Subtle as mule deer; as sweet and musical

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

251

Fig. 5.6  Marion Roubal as Ranger Marion and Anne Schwartzberg as Custard leading the park orientation. (Photo credit: Grace Garnica)

As a new world warbler. BEROWNE And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods Makes heaven drowsy with the harmony. Then fools we were these women to swear off.16

So resolved, the men dressed not as Muscovites or Worthies, but it being the summer of 1969, fashioned themselves as the three moon-­landing  Shakespeare’s lines read: ‘For valor, is not love a Hercules,  /  Still climbing trees in the Hesperides?  /  Subtle as Sphinx, as sweet and musical / As bright Apollo’s lute strung with his hair. /  And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods  /  Make heaven drowsy with the harmony / … Then fools you were these women to forswear …’ (4.3.334–9, 349) 16

252 

K. S. BROKAW

Fig. 5.7  The Kings of Navarre dressed as the moon and astronauts. (Photo Credit: Darah Carrillo Vargas)

astronauts and the moon, goofily recreating the Apollo landing for unimpressed Sierra Girls, who by then were wearing animal masks and had swapped the Kings’ wearable love tokens, which Custard had delivered in the previous scene (Fig. 5.7). After true identities were revealed (much as written by Shakespeare), all joined for an open mic night in Camp Curry, an homage to the long tradition of evening entertainments on the very stage in which we performed, which is amid the hundreds of tent cabins now known as Curry Village. Custard facilitated a raucous Battle of the Bands, asking the audience to adjudicate after the Kings’ lovesick rendition of the Four Seasons’ ‘Beggin” and the Girls’ sincere imploring to pay more attention to environmental destruction via the Grateful Dead’s ‘You Can Run’. Amid the applause, Ranger Marion appeared with a telegram for Princess: her brother had been killed in Vietnam. As ever with Love’s Labor’s Lost, joy turned to grief in an instant.

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

253

Fig. 5.8  Berowne (Tonatiuh Newbold) addresses Rosaline (Sofia Andom). (Photo Credit: Grace Garnica)

When the women said farewell to their wooers, lines were adapted and they charged the men to spend the year doing something helpful for the environment (see Fig. 5.8). For example, Katharine told Dumain: For twelvemonth and a day Go do some good. For the children, Black, Brown and poor Choking on poisoned air. Help them. Then, if I have much love, I’ll give you some.17

And Rosaline asked Berowne to: this twelvemonth term from day to day Travel to reservations and neighborhoods neglected Where water runs poisoned and foul.  The Shakespearean text reads: ‘A twelvemonth and a day / I’ll mark no words that smooth-faced wooers say. /  Come when the King doth to my lady come; / Then, if I have much love, I’ll give you some.’ (5.2.899–902) 17

254 

K. S. BROKAW

Visit the speechless sick and still converse With these dying people; and your task shall be, With all the fierce endeavor of your wit To encourage those in pain to smile.18

They departed, and a shocked Berowne apologized to the audience: ‘Our wooing does not end like an old play,’ before shuffling off with the others. But as with all our productions, we wanted to leave the audience with a feeling of hope, and so we staged a sort of Love’s Labor’s Won as the production’s final scene. Ranger Marion re-entered announcing, always to applause, that it was ‘one year later’! Princess re-entered, joined a moment later by Ferdinand, and at this point, all words were co-scripted by me and Prescott with the team: PRINCESS In April 1970, the first ever Earth Day was celebrated across America. I helped organize a gathering and the Sierra Girls sang at it. We were some of the 20 million Americans who marched that day to call for the government to protect our planet. In December 1970, the Environmental Protection Agency was established. Ferdinand spent the year well, too. Oh Ferdinand! FERDINAND, entering I went to the Arctic like you said: those glaciers are shrinking. We don’t know why, but I hope by the end of this century we can reverse the trend, because if we don’t, we’re in some trouble. PRINCESS You helped. We all can help. (Brokaw and Prescott 2022)

The two then began singing Dylan’s ‘Time’s They Are a Changin”, the words as fresh in 2022 as in 1964 (or 1970). Each couple reported on progress, all true to history and related to the many environmental laws passed in the early 1970s. When Berowne asked if they could keep the momentum going—for there was still so much yet to do—Rosaline answered in song: ‘There’s nothing you can do that can’t be done.’ After the cast—and much of the audience—joined in singing that ‘all you need is love’, Rosaline clarified and the rest reflected on the momentousness of 1970 as well as the promise of the next 50 years:

 The Shakespearean version reads: ‘You shall this twelvemonth term from day to day  /  Visit the speechless sick, and still converse / With groaning wretches; and your task shall be, / With all the fierce endeavor of your wit, / To enforce the painèd impotent to smile.’ (5.2.923–7) 18

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

255

ROSALINE Yes, all we need is love … and will power and government action on endangered species and clean water and air and there is still so much to do! It’s 1970, friends, only 30 years until the millennium: we must do it. PRINCESS Our labors cannot be lost! MARIA And in 50 years, when it is 2020, who knows what the world will be like! BEROWNE We’ll have colonized the moon! CUSTARD bringing Grace on stage Maybe I’ll be able to marry my girlfriend! FERDINAND We’ll have given peace a chance! KATHARINE We’ll have cleaned the air and the rivers! ROSALINE And if we haven’t, my friends, we shall keep fighting. We will keep fighting until we die, until we have cleaned up the great globe itself!

While singing John Lennon’s ‘Power to the People’ (which was indeed sung at the first Earth Day), the cast waved recreations of signs from 1969 and 1970 environmental marches, made by student crew members who joined them on stage. The signs were reversible, and for the final verse were flipped to reveal messages from recent climate marches. For casts and audiences alike, the moment was complex, and no doubt memories of it have become even more so as the very progress we celebrated has been so cruelly undermined—so tragically lost—in recent years. The year 2022 was not the 50th anniversary of that first Earth Day, but it was the 50th anniversary of the landmark report The Limits of Growth, published in 1972 by the Club of Rome and arguing that ‘if people continue to over-extract finite resources, pollute on a massive scale, and balloon the human population in an unsustainable way, civilization could collapse within a century’ (Simon 2022). To mark that anniversary, WIRED magazine talked to Carlos Alvarez Pereira, vice president of the Club of Rome, who drew several parallels between eras while also discussing the many missed opportunities over the last 50 years to limit extraction, pollution, and uncontrollable growth. While Alvarez Pereira was disappointed in decisions made by governments and corporations, he was more optimistic when it came to cultural changes at the community level: But there are also good reasons for optimism of the will … We definitely think there is an ongoing cultural change often hidden in plain sight. Many are experimenting, often at the community level, trying to find their own pathways towards that balance of well-being within a healthy biosphere … And I would say that if you look at what’s happening with the younger generations, there is a big change as well … Culturally, below the line, my bet is

256 

K. S. BROKAW

that a lot of things are happening in a good direction. The human revolution is already happening—it’s just that we don’t see it. And maybe it’s good that we don’t see it yet, until the very moment where it makes a lot of things shift. (quoted in Simon 2022)

It is at the level of community and in the realm of making cultural change that Shakespeare in Yosemite hopes to make a difference, to help with a human revolution that will, we hope, lead to bigger shifts. Each time it was performed, the show created a temporary community out of hikers from around the world and locals and park staff, and the feeling of intergenerational solidarity and togetherness was striking to many. Speaking to student on-site interviewer Isaac Gallégos Rodriguez, our student sound director Will Darpinian reflected that the thing about Yosemite is you’ve got people from all over the world here. I can hear five languages just walking to the cabins. A lot of people, they’re here for the beauty of Yosemite, and we can also present this to them. That’s a unique offering, especially because it makes both their experience and ours more connected rather than just being a bunch of people who are here to walk around in the park on our own. (2022a)

Darpinian later wrote that the show was able to ‘invoke a genuine human community out of strangers’ which is ‘a rare and precious thing in a world where most all intentionality costs money and community tends to take place behind closed doors. The strange and wonderful alchemy of performance brought together the passion of the performing cast and the community around Yosemite’ (2022b). The show’s messages of community with each other and the natural world seem to have resonated with at least some of our audience members, too. In surveys, when asked about their favorite aspects of the show, most answers had to do with the site-specific contexts, the Earth Day 1970 adaptation, and the music. For example: The beautiful singing voices and passion within the message The 70s music and humor plus the environmental awareness How the show resonates 50 years after it was set The re-write to address the earth’s agenda LOVE—PEOPLE—POWER—CHANGE Joyfulness; young people singing songs from our era Hearing music float into the trees

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

257

Going back to the first Earth Day—inspirational—great memories. (Love’s Labor’s Lost survey 2022)

Asked if the show caused them to reflect on anything anew, some younger audience members mentioned that they were just learning about the first Earth Day and establishment of the EPA, and many older spectators were reinvigorated with memories from that era: Yes, excellent coverage of 1970s and reminds me of present state of the environment It just reminded me how important it is to protect our Earth Learned about some environmental policy and was a really awesome experience in the Park Have a jolt of renewed vigor and energy to change, and a deep calm resonance with the hum of life on this planet Always helps to be reminded that there’s so much more to do to protect the Earth It gave me some ideas on how to help Yes! Deeper appreciation for the past decades of environmental activists! A fun surprise as we were just visiting for the day. We used to work here and to see so many people in the audience get the messaging of conservation is heartwarming. (ibid.)

We felt, then, that at least for some, the show did one of the things we intended: in a time of ‘OK, Boomer’ jokes from the young and derision of Gen Z and Millennials as lazy smart phone addicts, we made explicit parallels between generations who need to work together in community if we are truly going to save life on Earth. Our student cast and crew members reflected on this quite a bit. Gallégos-Rodriguez, interviewing Andrew Hardy, had the following conversation with him: Isaac:

Productions like these combine a mixture of rhetorical appeals, like the music and just sympathizing with the whole audience. It’s interesting to see older people coming to this and then hear them talking about the Vietnam War. Andrew: I think it bridges the gap because obviously there’s a lot of issues between generations right now because of the housing

258 

K. S. BROKAW

market and the economy and such. But this reminds older people that we are going through the exact same shit. On the surface we express ourselves differently and we utilize different tools, but we’re still on the same Earth, we’re still dealing with the same problems, and we still need to do the same things. We need to do it together because we can’t otherwise make a difference. This show is a generational bridge. Isaac: Yeah, I feel it doesn’t incriminate the older generations, and it informs newer generations. Andrew: I’m sure people who were born recently will look at the show and be like, “wow! I’m doing that right now!” And then the people who were there are like “oh my God, that’s what we did.” And then they can realize that it still has to happen, we still have to fight … Literally the same things they’re saying in 1969 about needing clean water, oil spills, burning rivers just happened in this last year! (Hardy 2022) Or in the words of student photographer and graphic artist Darah Carrillo Vargas, the show ‘reminds ourselves that we did it [made policy changes] once, we can do it again. We could do it even better now’ (2022). In Shakespeare, intergenerational strife leads to tragedy, unless, as in some comedies and romances, there is forgiveness and hope for the future. But the ending wasn’t just about hope and solidarity for all who saw it. One of my scientist colleagues admitted that she found it both inspiring and depressing, because she knew how much the actions celebrated in the show have since been undermined. Student audience member Michael McNanie reflected: Throughout the play, the innocence—or perhaps naivety—of youth is portrayed. Is this portrayal of young lust, desire, and constant dreaming done to show the foolishness of youth to believe they could actually make a difference, or is it done to show that youthfulness is what will save the planet? While that is for the audience to decide, it does seem to be apparent as the play progresses that it is the coming generations that will save the planet from the destruction headed its way, as it is the elder generations who have failed it thus far. (2022)

McNanie encapsulates the dialectic Prescott and I often discussed with the cast: the complexities of honoring a generation who indeed fought in their

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

259

youth for progress, at times successfully, but during whose adulthoods untold amounts of environmental injustices have been done in the name of economic growth. The heaviness of the last 50 years’ destruction rests alongside the hope that the historical progress they once made can be replicated again. I am often struck by how environmental destruction and grim forecasts for the planet’s future affect my student collaborators, who speak openly about their eco-grief. As mental health crises continue to plague younger generations (and for good reason, I think), creative, community-building projects that reach beyond the self can be a balm. Then student designer (and English major and Global Arts minor) Mahea LaRosa explained how her feelings of anxiety about doing enough for the planet were somewhat assuaged while working on Love’s Labor’s Lost: I realized I need to be less critical of myself and others when it comes to doing enough, because introducing people to the idea that they are connected to the natural world around them, and trying to bridge the gap between generations and their need to change the world is so necessary and impactful in itself, it is completely enough, especially if these are new ideas for audience members. With this production, and with my assistance, we were able to impact people emotionally, make them really think about their own place in the world, even if it was only a fleeting thought, and I am so lucky to have been a part of this and been impacted in my own way. (2022)

Her design collaborator Grace Garnica concurred, reflecting that she learned ‘the power of theatre to forge friendships, connection, community, and appreciation for the natural world around us’ (2022). Working in a supportive community was important to the show team members. For many, the experience of feeling personally valued as a collaborator, after the isolation of the early COVID months and during a time of political and social upheaval, was particularly important. For Darpinian, ‘to be accepted and to have felt both belonging and purpose has been a blessing which I cherish whole-heartedly’ (2022a), while Sofia Andom (Rosaline, and Imogen in our Imogen in the Wild film) reflected that ‘feeling comfort and safety, especially as a plus-size woman, is something I always look for in every situation I encounter. This group constantly made me feel seen, heard, confident, beautiful, and worth it’ (2022). We hope that the kind of non-judgmental community we were

260 

K. S. BROKAW

able to collectively build models the sort of collaborative groups student may help create in future endeavors. Collaborative and imaginative work is needed to address ecological catastrophes, which require complex synthesis, deep listening, and creativity. Angus Fletcher, also thinking about John Dewey’s aesthetic ethics in ecological terms, writes about how when our minds are faced with the terrifying prospect of extinction, they may suddenly wish to be open-minded and cooperative, but such techniques can only be instilled by repeated use … [we need a reminder] that helps us practice problem-solving before it becomes a matter of life and death, one that lays and maintains the infrastructure for cooperation by encouraging diverse habits of thought and fostering open relations between them. It is in the service of this proactive ethics, Dewey suggests, that art becomes useful. (2011, 8–9)

My collaborators and I hope that the very process of working on Shakespeare in Yosemite helps us rehearse these crucial, life-saving cooperative skills. If art is useful in this way, perhaps there is no more useful art than theatre, requiring as it does the coordination of so many different people, skills, and aspects. For our students, though, being empowered in the moment to shift the minds and hearts of others is the most rewarding aspect of this work. Andom speaks eloquently about the importance of representation in this regard.19 She reflected that I’ve definitely put my identity into this show, being a mixed-race person, being half African and half Filipino. It’s something I never thought I could do especially as a plus-size person, being the main character, part of the main couple: it’s me, doing this on stage. It’s definitely a lot of pressure, but I’m just so glad that audiences get to visually see that on a stage like this and on camera. (2022)

Andom is also one of many students who connected their work on the show to what they learn in their science classes (UC Merced has a ‘sustainability’ General Education requirement for all students): 19  For Andom’s thoughts on portraying an ingenue in Imogen in the Wild and on entering the traditionally white space of the so-called American wilderness as a mixed-race daughter of Eritrean and Filipino immigrants, see Brokaw (2023).

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

261

I really like how with this production, we highlighted the issues of climate change and air pollution, which is something that I’ve luckily had the privilege to research a lot about this year and in other classes that I’ve taken at UC Merced. And there’s a lot of people that may be introduced to the issues of climate change or just the disaster of the environment, through ways that aren’t creative. And it could sound a lot more complex when it’s not communicated through how we’re doing it. I was reading one of the reviews that somebody left today about our show and they said it was so easy to understand. And that’s what we’re trying to do is to make climate change and that message easy to understand for everyone of all ages. (2022)

Randall Martin writes that he hopes Shakespearean performance might ‘wield affective and imaginative power for shifting personal convictions and behaviors in ways that pioneering ecologists such as Aldo Leopold recognized were essential for stirring up environmental complacency and motivating progressive action’ (2015, 167). Andom articulates how one way in which our shows might do that is to make the issues accessible, to invite everyone to understand so that they can be a part of the solution. Andrew Hardy suggested something else, too: that the shows might indicate that we are part of a wider community of people who care about the future. In his words, This show has definitely validated my feelings, and I just feel more strongly about conservation. There’s a really dumb stigma around caring about the environment that often stops people from being as vocal as they can be. Watching people on stage do it, and joining in these songs, really helps them be more willing to express it. (2022)

We know that Shakespeare in Yosemite is not alone in using performance to create these moments of solidarity around the environment and other social justice issues. In that spirit, Prescott and I, along with a few of my students, have joined forces with other like-minded Shakespeareans on a number of initiatives.

Shakespeare in our Planetary Community: EarthShakes Alliance and Beyond The Tempest asks us to examine the delicate balance in our personal relationships as well as with the fragile ecosystems around us. What damage do we do to each other—and to the natural world? In the end, young love brings

262 

K. S. BROKAW

hope for a better life: perhaps healing ourselves and mending the planet are one and the same thing. —Description of the Royal Shakespeare Company’s 2023 Tempest, dir. Elizabeth Freestone (The Tempest 2023)

In 2023, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) staged a Tempest, directed by Elizabeth Freestone, explicitly focused on climate issues. Sets, props, and costumes came from RSC stock or were fashioned out of upcycled trash. Garbage collected in Stratford and on British beaches littered the stage, Alex Kingston’s Prospero delivered the ‘our revels now are ended’ as a deeply felt meditation on the anthropogenic destruction that threatens to ‘leave not a rack behind’, and the play’s conclusion featured the characters walking into a more hopeful green world, as lush trees (real ones taken from sustainable thinning for the health of a local forest) filled the stage. That same spring, Shakespeare’s Globe announced that their summer season would be wholly focused on plays of the natural world. That announcement extended a shift that had already taken place at the Globe, one signaling that interest in eco-Shakespearean performance was beginning to reach an inflection point: what began in grassroots theatres was starting to go more mainstream. In April 2021, the Globe in London hosted Globe 4 Globe: Shakespeare and the Climate Emergency, an online conference that Prescott and I organized. Over two days, the symposium brought together scholars, activists, and theatre artists from around the world to talk about how Shakespeare’s plays might help us think through contemporary environmental problems and have been adapted to address local concerns (the conference was originally intended to be held in person in April 2020). At that event, we launched the EarthShakes Alliance, a global collective of Shakespeare-related organizations and individuals who pledge to put environmental concerns at the heart of their work. We had been working with then student intern Ying-Wei Zhang over the previous year to track international instances of eco-dramaturgy in Shakespearean performance and interview pioneering environmental practitioners of Shakespeare, which we put on our website (EarthShakes 2022). Zhang captured, for example, Stephen Burdman talking about incorporating the flora of Central Park into his productions with NY Classical and the phone-based programs that have saved reams of paper; Dawn Tucker talking about Flagstaff Shakespeare partnering with local ecological organizations to amplify their work around water in Arizona; and Gretchen Minton talking

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

263

about the Timon of Anaconda adaptation she dramaturged in Montana to address the ravages of strip mining in that state. Zhang also interviewed pioneering grassroots eco-Shakespearean Emily Fournier, founder of Maine’s Recycled Shakespeare Company, weeks before her untimely death (I give a brief account of her company in Chap. 1). Founded in Fairfield, Maine, as a fiercely accessible grassroots Shakespeare festival in 2013, Recycled Shakespeare Company’s practices are exemplary in terms of community-building, eco-dramaturgy, and green theatre-making.20 In fact, in an interview in 2020 I told Fournier that I wished the RSC in Stratford was more like the RSC in Fairfield, a wish that is perhaps starting to come true in 2023. Fournier relayed the story of seeing a smiley face balloon floating in the ocean on a whale watch and how that sickening image inspired her Tempest. She also gave details about the company’s eco-practices: We use almost all recycled and repurposed materials. So one of the things that we have as a rule in our company is the six-inch rule, which is my favorite thing. If it has six inches of usable space, we hold onto it and we use it. That includes fabric, paper, cardboard. We also have town cleanups, where we are actually finding material for upcoming productions. So rather than just throwing stuff around our town into a landfill, we sort through these things and find things that are useful. (Fournier 2020)

She also spoke about being part of a wider movement of theatres attempting to do this work: I think that it’s important that we continue to explore new options and work with our communities to create ecologically sound theatre and that’s something that I try to live every day of my life. I love the greening philosophy: we don’t need one person doing greening perfectly, we need millions of people doing it imperfectly. That’s something that we can continue to promote, working with other theatres in our areas: we encourage them also to build community because community theatre is not just a theatre made up of community members. It is that we are actually active with our communities. (ibid.)

The #EarthShakes Alliance builds on Fournier’s vision. It is creating a coalition to build collaborative momentum for environmental action in  For more on Fournier and Recycled Shakespeare Company, see also Wolfgang (2021).

20

264 

K. S. BROKAW

the Shakespeare world. It asks Shakespearean organizations to sign a pledge to do their best to: • care for the natural and built environments in which they work; • consult and amplify the voices of indigenous and local communities in this work; • reduce carbon footprints and minimize waste; • attempt, wherever possible, only to receive funding and sponsorship from companies that are environmentally friendly and have divested their interests in non-renewable energy; • reuse, rework, and upcycle costumes, props, and scenery, and to share these—where possible—with other local and regional theatres; • stage productions or create programs that highlight the current ecological crises and our collective responsibility to address them. As of 2023, we have organizations of all sizes signed onto our pledge and featured on the website, from the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust in Stratford-on-Avon and Oregon Shakespeare Festival to Shakespeare South Australia and Denmark’s HamletScenen. The creation of the #EarthShakes Alliance stemmed from a simple question: in the context of the climate emergency, how do we make the thing we love a thing that matters? The logic behind the Alliance is simple. Shakespeare is the most performed playwright on the planet with thousands of new productions made by hundreds of different companies each year, and two things follow from this: 1. There are hearts and minds to be won and awareness to be raised by creating productions that think seriously about the current climate emergency. We can use Shakespeare’s stories to highlight local environmental injustices and to get people to think deeply about how crucial biodiversity is to sustained life on Earth, often while they are sitting outside for outdoor performances. 2. And secondly, there are efficiencies to be made. Theatre-making can be a very wasteful business, and we can do better. We want to provide a network of support and inspiration and to collect and share information and advice that will be of help to theatre companies, educators, and anyone else. The website includes an extensive resources page including Zhang’s interviews with various theatre-makers about their

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

265

eco-practices; an annotated bibliography of academic books on Shakespeare and the environment, with descriptions and references to which plays are discussed in each; a similar list for articles and essays; and links to relevant websites, podcasts, news stories and films about Shakespeare and the environment. It also includes several links to resources for theatres looking to make their operations greener. There are also links to all the papers delivered at the 2021 Globe4Globe: Shakespeare and Climate Emergency symposium. We share ecological messages and production information from our partner theatres on our Instagram account (currently maintained by student interns) and send out quarterly newsletters. The EarthShakes Alliance is but one attempt at building communities across the planet who are committed to doing environmental or social justice work with Shakespeare. The early years of the 2020s have also seen Randall Martin’s Cymbeline in the Anthropocene project, of which our Imogen in the Wild was a part. It was funded by a grant from the Canadian government and brought together theatre-makers from the US, Wales, Canada, Argentina, Kazakhstan, and Australia to discuss the eco-­ possibilities of Cymbeline and to, in most cases, stage productions of the play in 2021 and 2022 that addressed the ecological crises facing our home communities. The work is well documented on their website and social media accounts (Cymbeline in the Anthropocene 2022). And, working with the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-on-Avon, Rowan Mackenzie, founder of the UK-based prison arts program Shakespeare UnBard, co-launched the Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance, bringing together academics and practitioners around the planet to share ideas and resources about Shakespeare and criminal justice, neurodiversity and education, social justice struggles, human rights abuses in the Ukraine and beyond, and indeed the environment (Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance Launch Event 2021). Adrienne maree brown talks about creative, community-driven work as ‘collaborative ideation’. As she explains, ‘what we pay attention to grows, so I’m thinking about how we grow what we are all imagining and creating into something large enough and solid enough that it becomes a tipping point’ (2015, 19). As artists and writers and teachers, we can help create that solid something. And we must. For, as brown asserts, ‘we are in an imagination battle’ (18). Elizabeth Freestone elaborates on how theatre, specifically, can take part in that imagination battle. It ‘can also be used to bear witness’: ‘artist-­ activists can inject the absurd and the visually disturbing into the received

266 

K. S. BROKAW

wisdom of well-made plays, a subversive energy built into traditional structures.’ The moment has come: Now is the time to cut loose and dream across all the imaginative planes: alter chronology, back into deep time or far into the future; go vertical, into the geological record or the fragile envelope of our skybound atmosphere; go ephemeral, into sensory shifts and absurdist break-throughs. The climate crisis demands collaboration and cross-disciplinary work that will more honestly and dynamically reflect the multiple assaults on body, sense and imagination that this moment in human history is unleashing. This is our new reality, whether we like it or not. Our culture must not just be reactive to fast-changing circumstances but lead the way and shape the narrative. (2021)

Freestone’s 2023 Tempest hearteningly led the more famous RSC to practices that mirror what Fournier’s grassroots RSC in Maine has been doing since its inception. Across the great globe itself, companies large and small can use Shakespeare as a collaborative resource that allows us to go ‘back into deep time’ in order to imagine more resilient futures for our Earthly community. Shakespeare alone will not win this imagination battle or save life on our planet, and his plays and poems will not inevitably make people kinder to each other. But they are adaptable, popular, and pervasive among this planet’s humans. And with the efforts of living artists and thinkers and learners, they have the capacity to forge communities and create improbable collaborations. They’ve done as much for artists and audiences in New  York and London, Los Angeles and Harlem, the Faroe Islands, Merced and Yosemite, and in countless other corners of the planet. There is, I think, no better use to which these old stories might be put in the twenty-first century than that.

Works Cited All quotations from As You Like It are from 2019. Folger Edition, eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster. All quotations from Love’s Labor’s Lost are from 2020. Folger Edition, eds. Barbara A. Mowat and Paul Werstine. New York: Simon and Schuster. Allen, Summer. 2018a. Eight Reasons Why Awe Makes Your Life Better. Greater Good Magazine. September 26. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/ item/eight_reasons_why_awe_makes_your_life_better.

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

267

———. 2018b. The Science of Awe. A White Paper Prepared for the John Templeton Foundation by the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. https:// ggsc.berkeley.edu/images/uploads/GGSC-­J TF_White_Paper-­A we_ FINAL.pdf. Andom, Sofia. 2022. Interview by Isaac Gállegos-Rodriguez. April 23. Angelaki, Vicky. 2019. Theatre & Environment. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Arons, Wendy, and Theresa J.  May, eds. 2012. Readings in Performance and Ecology. London: Palgrave Macmillan. As You Like It audience survey results. 2019. Conducted by Katherine Steele Brokaw and Paul Prescott. Yosemite National Park. Brokaw, Katherine Steele. 2017. Shakespeare as Community Practice. Shakespeare Bulletin. 35: 445–461. ———. 2019. As You Like It program notes. April 25–28. University of California Merced and Yosemite National Park. ———. 2021. Text-Based / Concept-Driven. In Shakespeare / Text: Arden Critical Intersections, ed. Claire Bourne, 245–263. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2022. Love’s Labor’s Lost Program Notes. April 22–24. University of California Merced and Yosemite National Park. ———. 2023. Shakespeare and Environmental Justice: Collaborative Eco-Theatre in Yosemite National Park and the San Joaquin Valley. In Situating Shakespeare in Higher Education: Social Justice and Institutional Contexts, ed. Marissa Greenberg and Elizabeth Williamson, 94–110. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Brokaw, Katherine Steele, and Paul Prescott. 2019a. Applied Shakespeare in Yosemite National Park. Critical Survey 31: 15–28. ———. 2022a. Reduce, Rewrite, Recycle: Adapting Shakespeare for the Environment. In The Arden Research Companion to Shakespeare and Adaptation, ed. Diana Henderson and Stephen O’Neill, 303–322. London: Bloomsbury. brown, adrienne maree. 2017. Emergent Strategy. Chico, CA: AK Press. Bruckner, Lyn. 2011. Teaching Shakespeare in the Ecotone. In Ecocritical Shakespeare, ed. Lyn Bruckner and Dan Brayton, 223–238. Aldershot: Ashgate. Carrillo Vargas, Darah. 2022. Interview by Isaac Gállegos-Rodriguez. April 23. Cooper, Brandon. 2021. Reflection on Imogen in the Wild. Unpublished essay. Cymbeline in the Anthropocene. 2022. cymbeline-­anthropocene.com. Accessed 28 June 2022. Darpinian, William. 2022a. Interview with Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez. April 23. ———. 2022b. Reflection on Love’s Labor’s Lost. Unpublished essay. EarthShakes Alliance. 2022. earthshakes.ucmerced.edu. Accessed 28 June 2022. ‘Ecology’. Oxford English Dictionary. Oed.com. Fletcher, Angus. 2011. Evolving Hamlet: Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy and the Ethics of Natural Selection. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Fournier, Emily. 2020. Interview by Ying-Wei Zhang. July 7. https://earthshakes. ucmerced.edu/resources/interviews-­theatre-­makers.

268 

K. S. BROKAW

Freestone, Elizabeth. 2021. Elizabeth Freestone on Plays to Change the World. The Bruntwood Prize for Playwriting. November 19. https://www.writeaplay.co.uk/elizabeth-­freestone-­on-­plays-­to-­save-­the-­world/. Accessed 3 March 2023. Garnica, Grace. 2022. Reflection on Love’s Labor’s Lost. Unpublished essay. Gediman, Scott. 2021. Interview with Monica Perales. May 30. Hardy, Andrew. 2021. Interview with Monica Perales. March 28. ———. 2022. Interview with Isaac Gállegos Rodriguez. April 24. Henderson, Diana, and Stephen O’Neill. 2022. Introduction. In Arden Handbook of Shakespeare and Adaptation, ed. Henderson and O’Neill, 1–22. London: Bloomsbury. Heron, Jonathan. 2015. Shakespearean laboratories and performance-as-research. In Shakespeare on the University Stage, ed. Andrew James Hartley, 232–249. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jarvis, Jonathan and Destry Jarvis. 2020. The Great Dismantling of America’s National Parks is Underway. The Guardian. January 10. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/jan/10/us-­national-­parks-­dismantling-­ under-­way. Accessed 20 July 2022. Kershaw, Baz. 2009. Performance Practice as Research: Perspectives from a Small Island. In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, ed. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, 1–13. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kimmerer, Robin Wall. 2015. Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. Minneapolis, MN: Milkweed Editions. LaRosa, Mahealani. 2022. Reflection on Love’s Labor’s Lost. Unpublished essay. Mackey, Salley. 2016. Performing Location: Place and Applied Theatre. In Critical Perspectives on Applied Theatre, ed. Jenny Hughes and Helen Nicholson, 107–126. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, Randall. 2015. Shakespeare and Ecology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Martin, Randall, and Evelyn O’Malley. 2018. Eco-Shakespeare in Performance: Introduction. Shakespeare Bulletin 36: 377–390. May, Theresa J. 2017. Tú eres mi otro yo—Staying with the Trouble: Ecodramaturgy and the AnthropoScene. The Journal of American Drama and Theatre 29: 1–18. McConachie, Bruce. 2012. Ethics, Evolution, Ecology, and Performance. In Readings in Performance and Ecology, ed. Wendy Arons and Theresa J. May, 91–100. London: Palgrave Macmillan. McNanie, Michael. 2022. Reflection on Love’s Labor’s Lost. Unpublished essay. Midsummer Night’s Dream audience survey results. 2018. Conducted by Katherine Steele Brokaw and Paul Prescott. Yosemite National Park. Nguyen-Cruz, Maria. 2020. Social Justice Bard: Grassroots Shakespeare as Activism. Unpublished essay.

5  ECOLOGICAL SHAKESPEARE: SHAKESPEARE IN YOSEMITE… 

269

O’Malley, Evelyn. 2020. Weathering Shakespeare: Audiences and Open-Air Performances. London: Arden Bloomsbury. Okri, Ben. 2021. Artists must confront the climate crisis. The Guardian. November 12. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/12/artists-­ climate-­crisis-­write-­creativity-­imagination. Accessed 20 July 2022. Riley, Shannon Rose, and Lynette Hunter. 2009. Introduction. In Mapping Landscapes for Performance as Research: Scholarly Acts and Creative Cartographies, ed. Shannon Rose Riley and Lynette Hunter, xv–xxiv. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Rivas, Jessica. 2018. Interview with author. April 22. Rudee, Alex. 2017. Yosemite’s Dirty Air Secret. National Parks Conservation Association. September 19. https://www.npca.org/articles/1640-­yosemite-­s-­ dirty-­air-­secret. Accessed 20 July 2022. Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance Launch Event. 2021. https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/shakespeare/events/2021/ shakespeare-­beyond-­borders-­alliance.aspx. Accessed 20 July 2022. Shakespeare in Yosemite. 2022. yosemiteshakes.ucmerced.edu. Accessed 28 June 2022. Simon, Matt. 2022. The Infamous 1972 Report That Warned of Civilization’s Collapse. Wired. July 6. https://apple.news/AwIFLz-­_WSKC4GDF0vJZCOA. Solnit, Rebecca. 2023. ‘If You Win the Popular Imagination, You Change the Game’: Why We Need New Stories on Climate. The Guardian. January 12. https://www.theguardian.com/news/2023/jan/12/rebecca-­solnit-­climate-­ crisis-­popular-­imagination-­why-­we-­need-­new-­stories. Accessed 20 Jan 2023. Sons of the Never Wrong. 2017. ‘I Got You.’ On Song of Songs. Waterbug Records. Steckelberg, Aaron, Sarah Kaplan, Brady Dennis, and Yutao Chen. 2022. Postcards from Earth’s Climate Futures. Washington Post. February 28. https://www. washingtonpost.com/climate-­e nvironment/interactive/2022/united-­ nations-­ipcc-­climate-­change-­postcards/ Accessed 6 Jan 2023. Stetson, Connie. 2018. Personal email correspondence with author. May 8. The Tempest. 2023. Royal Shakespeare Company Website. https://www.rsc.org. uk/the-­tempest/. Accessed 7 Feb 2023. Wolfgang, William Floyd. 2021. Grassroots Shakespeare: ‘I love Shakespeare, and I live here’: Amateur Shakespeare Performance in American Communities. Shakespeare Bulletin 39: 355–373. Wolpe, Lisa. 2018. Interview with author. April 23.

Productions Cited Brokaw, Katherine Steele and Paul Prescott, dirs. 2019b. As You Like It. Shakespeare in Yosemite. Katherine Steele Brokaw (Adaptor). Kim Garner

270 

K. S. BROKAW

(Associate Producer). Rachel Rodrigues Battisti (Costumer). William Wolfgang (Assistant Director and Researcher). Yosemite National Park Lower River Amphitheatre and University of California Merced. ———, dirs. 2021. Imogen in the Wild. Shakespeare in Yosemite. YouTube film. Shawn Overton (Director of Photography). Katherine Steele Brokaw, Paul Prescott, and William Wolfgang (Adaptors). William Wolfgang (Production Manager). Associate Manager and Boom Operator (Ángel Nuñez). Rangers Scott Gediman and Jamie Richards (Associate Producers). Brandon Cooper, William Darpinian, and Rilee Hoch (Film Editors). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=YMisTBZWgyI. ———, dirs. 2022b. Love’s Labor’s Lost. Shakespeare in Yosemite. Katherine Steele Brokaw and Paul Prescott (Adaptors). Shawn Overton (Filmmaker). Tonatiuh Newbold (Music and Sound Designer). Mahea LaRosa and Grace Garnica (Designers). Footage available on YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=Q66_7ErAWOE. Freestone, Elizabeth, dir. 2023. The Tempest. Royal Shakespeare Company. Tom Piper (Set Designer). Tom Piper and Natasha Ward (Costume Designers). Adrienne Quartly (Composer & Sound Designer). Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-on-Avon, UK.

Index1

A Access (to Shakespeare), 1–53, 63–65, 68, 71–74, 79, 84, 90–92, 104, 111, 113, 116, 117, 121, 129, 131, 135, 138, 140–143, 145, 155, 156, 160, 161, 211, 230, 231, 239, 263 Activism, 1–53, 62–64, 68, 73, 76, 79, 84, 86, 121, 131, 137, 139, 141, 155, 157, 263 Adaptation, 1–53, 62–64, 68–70, 75–77, 79, 83, 84, 86, 90–92, 94, 96, 98, 99, 101, 102, 105, 106, 146, 155, 183, 186, 188–199, 201–204, 206, 208, 209, 212, 213, 215, 217, 223–225, 227, 231, 232, 234, 235, 237–241, 243–246, 248–256, 262, 263, 266 Adebayo, Mojisola, 48

African American Shakespeare Company, 142 Aldridge, Ira, 141, 152 Allen, Summer, 229 Amateur theatre, 11–13, 64, 65, 68, 71, 80, 83, 96, 100, 101, 106, 112, 180, 182 Amerinda theatre, 29 Anderson, Erin, 114, 119, 123, 126, 132, 134, 139 Andom, Sofia, 51, 112, 114, 131, 160, 161, 249, 250, 253, 259–261, 260n19 Angelaki, Vicky, 226n8 Appiah, Kwame Anthony, 10, 215, 216 Applied theatre, 3, 5–7, 20–23, 32, 37–41, 62, 64, 67, 68, 72, 79, 103, 226, 260, 265, 266 Archer, William, 65, 66

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 K. S. Brokaw, Shakespeare and Community Performance, Shakespeare in Practice, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-33267-8

271

272 

INDEX

Arons, Wendy, 226n8 Awe, feelings of, 229, 230, 233 B Bahamas, the, 6, 28, 30, 40 Balme, Chris, 26 Barker, Roberta, 30 Barnes, Todd Landon, 42, 43 Barra, Guto, 79, 99, 102 Beckert, Cynthia, 114, 125, 126, 129, 131–133, 135, 137, 139, 160 Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey (play), 29, 112, 114, 158–159 Bennett, Fran, 120, 120n6, 121, 134, 135 Berry, Christopher, 47 Bethel, Nicolette, 28, 30, 31 Beverly, Trezana, 114, 145, 146, 153 Bisesti, Linda, 114, 122, 123, 125–127, 135, 137, 139 Blak, Sámal, 181, 183, 203 Boal, Augusto, 21 Booth, Wayne, 11, 96 Borgason, Tróndur, 180, 205 Bradbury, Jill, 30 Brokaw, Katherine Steele, 27, 32, 63, 98, 214, 223n3, 223n4, 224n5, 224n6, 231, 234, 248, 254, 260n19 Brown, adrienne maree, 225, 231, 265 Brú, Heðin, 178 Bruckner, Lyn, 232 Burleigh, Louise, 70, 71 Bush, Chris, 45, 50, 69, 77, 81, 83, 84, 86, 87, 91–93, 96, 102 Butler, Octavia, 227 Byrd, Debra Ann, 4, 29, 41, 46, 47, 51, 111–118, 133, 141–143, 145, 147–162

C Caliban in the Yellow Sands (pageant), 70, 71, 78 Capitalism, and resistance to, 9, 10, 12, 20 Carey, Alison, 49 Carrillo Vargas, Darah, 252, 258 Carson, Christie, 27 Césaire, Aimé, 28 Cinpoeş, Nicoleta, 16 Cohen, Leah Hager, 12 Cohen-Cruz, Jan, 11, 20, 21, 75, 76, 141 Community-based theatre, 6, 7, 11, 20–23, 49, 53, 62, 67–70, 75, 98, 103, 169, 211, 215, 263 Conquergood, Dwight, 33, 35, 37 Cooper, Brandon, 233 Cornerstone Theatre, 32, 49, 75–78 Cosmopolitanism, 10, 215, 216 Craiova, Romania, 18, 19, 38 Crawford, Kevin, 15 Curran, Leigh, 114, 120, 122, 127, 136 Cushman, Charlotte, 117, 118, 137 Cymbeline in the Anthropocene, 27, 248, 265 D Dam, Búi, 168, 169, 181–184, 186, 188–190, 189n9, 190n10, 193, 196, 198, 201, 202, 206, 209, 210, 212, 213, 215–217 Darpinian, William, 112, 256, 259 Davis, Fly, 83, 89, 92, 96 Day, Mike, 177 deBessonet, Lear, 70, 78, 82 Den, Celeste, 45, 114, 115, 119, 121, 125, 129, 131, 138, 145 Desmet, Christy, 27

 INDEX 

273

Det Ferösche Compagnie (DFC), 41, 51, 168, 170, 176, 178–186, 189, 190, 202, 203, 209n13, 212, 214, 215, 217 Dewey, John, 227, 260 Dionne, Craig, 27, 212 Dobson, Michael, 12 Dolan, Jill, 53, 102, 103 Dunn, Kaja, 47

Flores, Cathryn (Cat), 237, 241, 247, 249, 250 Flute Theatre, 22, 23 Fortune, Jim, 83, 84, 89, 91, 92, 96 Fournier, Emily, 9, 23–25, 24n5, 263, 263n20, 266 Freestone, Elizabeth, 262, 265, 266 Frías, Cristina, 46, 114, 116, 121, 129, 138, 160

E EarthShakes Alliance, 24n5, 52, 221–266 Ecodramaturgy, 221, 226, 230, 259–266 Ecology, 52, 221, 222, 226, 227, 231–233, 240–243, 246–249, 254, 255, 257, 260, 262–266 Ecott, Tim, 168n1, 170–173, 175–177, 189, 197, 209 Eivør, 179 Elliott, Kamilla, 44 Elsom, John, 66 Environmental justice, 31, 40, 52, 222, 224, 227, 232, 234, 238, 240, 248, 249, 252–257, 259–266 Escolme, Bridget, 112, 190 Ethnography, 5, 6, 32–35, 37, 41 Eustis, Oskar, 74, 78, 117 Evans, Daniel, 97, 104, 105

G Gállegos Rodriguez, Isaac, 51, 112, 114, 256, 257 Gardner, Lyn, 69n4, 86, 97, 99 Garnica, Grace, 250, 251, 253, 259 Gediman, Scott, 228 Gender on the Shakespearean stage, 14, 25, 30, 46, 47, 51, 111–113, 115, 117–129, 131, 133, 135–140, 145, 149, 151, 153–155, 160, 196, 201, 202, 234 Genette, Gérard, 212 Gillinson, Miriam, 82, 91, 105 Gioannotta, Donya, 120, 121 Global Shakespeare, 5, 25, 27, 51, 169, 181, 210, 211, 211n14, 213, 214 Glover, Devon, 114, 161, 162, 234, 240, 241 Graham, Robby, 83, 88 Granville-Barker, Harley, 65, 66, 72 Grassroots theatre, 9, 12, 20, 262 Greenberg, Marissa, 15 Grotowski, Jerzy, 21

F Fairfield, Maine, 24, 34, 263 Faroe Islands, 4, 26, 28, 41, 51, 167–218 Fernie, Ewan, 40 Fişek, Emine, 8, 26, 139 Fleishman, Mark, 35 Fletcher, Angus, 260

H Haeckel, Ernst, 221 Hall, Peter, 66 Hambley, Heike, 13, 14

274 

INDEX

Hansen, Kjartan, 184, 190–194, 199n12, 200, 202, 204, 206–210 Hansen, Mariann, 193, 194, 210, 217, 218 Hardy, Andrew, 233, 237, 238, 249, 257, 258, 261 Harlem Shakespeare Festival, 4, 29, 47, 51, 111–162, 202 Hartley, Andrew, 30, 47, 48 Harvie, Jen, 10, 38n8 Heinesen, William, 177, 178 Helguera, Pablo, 21 Henderson, Diana, 44, 231 Herold, Niels, 22 Heron, Jonathan, 236 Hetland, Lois, 48 Hewlett, James, 141 Hiejes, Coen, 29 Hill, Errol, 141n8 Hinton-Leaver, Beth, 98, 100 Hobart Shakespeareans, 42 Holdsworth, Nadine, 11, 65, 67, 68, 112 Homden, Carol, 67 Hughes, Jenny, 37 Hunter, Lynette, 233 Hytner, Nicholas, 67 I Illinois Shakespeare Festival, 16 Imogen in the Wild (film), 114, 224, 233, 248, 259, 260n19, 265 Intercultural Theatre, 7, 25–31 Issa, Tatiana, 79, 99, 102 Iyengar, Sujata, 27 J Jackson, Anthony, 168n1, 170, 172n3, 173, 174, 178 Jackson, Shannon, 21, 39, 40

Jacobson, Miriam, 27 Jarrett-Macauley, Delia, 29 Joe and the Shitboys, 179, 182 Joensen-Mikines, Sámal, 178 Johannesen, Urd, 183, 184, 189, 189n9, 193, 204, 207, 215, 217 Jones, Veralyn, 114, 119, 122, 123, 127, 128, 133, 136, 139 Joseph, Miranda, 8–10, 12 Joubin, Alexa Alice, 27 K Kapadia, Partita, 27, 212 Kemp, Sawyer, 30 Kershaw, Baz, 9, 20, 52, 231 Kilkelly, Anne, 21, 39, 75 Kim, Randall Duk, 116 Kimmerer, Robin Wall, 226 King-Farlow, Alice, 66, 82 Knowles, Ric, 26, 28, 29, 52 Kuftinec, Sonia, 32, 49, 62, 70, 75, 76 Kuppers, Petra, 20 L Lan, Yon Li, 27 Landa, Edgar, 45, 114, 115, 119, 129, 160, 161 LaRosa, Mahealani, 47, 51, 112, 115, 228, 229, 259 Lassen, Sunva Esturoy, 168n1, 173, 175, 176, 179, 195 Lehmann, Courtney, 112n3 Leonard, Robert H., 21, 39, 75 Lester, Adrian, 141 Lim, Emily, 44, 47, 50, 67, 69, 76, 80, 81, 83–89, 91, 96, 97, 99, 100, 104 Linklater, Eric, 139, 172 Little Amal, 61, 82 Littlewood, Joan, 67–70, 92

 INDEX 

Los Angeles, California, 7, 42, 75, 76, 119, 123, 128, 133, 138 Los Angeles Women’s Shakespeare Company (LAWSC), 4, 45, 51, 112, 112n2, 114, 118, 120n6, 121–134, 136–140, 149, 160–162, 202 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 95 M MacKaye, Percy, 70, 71 Mackenzie, Rowan, 22, 265 Mackey, Salley, 38, 211, 226 Madison, Soyini, 35 Mancewizc, Aneta, 27 March, Florence, 16 Martin, Randall, 27, 226, 248, 261, 265 Massai, Sonia, 27, 214 May, Theresa J., 226 McAvinchey, Caoimhe, 7, 48, 53, 69n3 McConachie, Bruce, 227, 231, 232 McNanie, Michael, 227, 258 Merced, California, 3, 12, 13, 34, 74, 114, 222 Merced Shakespearefest, 12–14, 34, 45, 237, 241 Merchant, Tarek, 83 Merrifield, Andy, 11 Milling, Jane, 11, 65, 112 Minton, Gretchen, 15, 262 Modenessi, Alfredo Michel, 27 Muir, John, 223, 232 Multicultural theatre, see Intercultural Theatre Muñoz, José Esteban, 29 Music on the Shakespeare stage, 73, 79, 86, 88–91, 93, 98, 100–102, 133, 148, 168, 180, 189–191, 194–196, 198–200, 205, 235, 239–241, 243–245, 248–250, 252, 254–257

275

N National Black Theatre (NBT) (USA), 141, 143, 144, 146, 153, 161 National Theatre (UK), 3, 22, 47, 50, 51, 61–67, 69, 71, 72, 80–82, 84, 87, 90, 92, 97, 101, 184 National Theatre (USA), 50, 72, 72n5 Native Earth Theatre (Toronto), 28, 29 Newbold, Tonatiuh, 249, 253 New York Shakespeare Festival, 15, 50, 72–74, 116 See also Public Theatre Nguyen-Cruz, Maria, 237, 242, 245, 247 Nicholson, Helen, 8n2, 9, 11, 22, 37, 39n9, 52, 65, 67, 79, 80, 83–85, 88–90, 96, 98, 99, 112, 135 Nielsen, Eva, 168n1, 172, 178, 186 1916 Shakespeare tercentenary, 65, 70–71 Norris, Rufus, 67, 80, 81 Nuñez, Ángel, 237 O O’Donovan, Mary Beth, 114, 119, 135, 136 Ohama, Natsuko, 46, 114, 116, 118, 120–123, 127, 130, 136, 138–140, 160 Okri, Ben, 225n7 O’Leary, Niamh, 15 Olivier, Laurence, 50, 66, 83, 97, 101, 184 O’Malley, Evelyn, 226 O’Neill, Stephen, 44, 44n10, 231 Orkin, Martin, 1 Ormsby, Robert, 27 Ougaard, Kristina Sorensen, 183, 191, 195, 196, 204, 205, 210, 211, 218 Outdoor performance, 34, 52, 71, 72, 74, 148, 226, 229, 264

276 

INDEX

P Packer, Tina, 122, 149 Paget, Derek, 68 Paley, Petronia, 114, 144–148 Papp, Joseph, 15, 71–74, 92, 112n1, 160 Parr, Philip, 17–19, 38 Parrabbola, 17–19, 45 Payo, Cynthia, 114, 119, 125, 130, 139 Performance as Research (PAR), see Practice as Research Performance studies, 31–41 Perinpanayagam, Yshani, 100 Porter, Lisa, 114, 119, 123, 125, 129, 136, 160 Postcolonial theatre, 25–31, 40, 185 Power, Terri, 117n5 Practice as Research (PaR), 5, 6, 32, 35–37, 35n7, 225, 231–233, 236, 241, 244 Prescott, Paul, 15, 16, 52, 223, 224n6, 231, 234, 235, 248, 254, 258, 261, 262 Public Acts (UK), 3, 36, 40, 44, 46, 47, 50, 62, 63, 79, 99, 102, 103, 106 Public Theatre (NY), 50, 62, 71–74, 76, 78–80, 116, 141 Public Works (NY), 3, 46, 47, 50, 74, 78, 78n11, 98, 99, 106 Purcell, Stephen, 12, 36 Q Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch (UK), 50, 51, 63, 81, 84, 98, 99, 101 R Race on the Shakespearean stage, 14, 25, 28–30, 40, 42, 45–47, 51,

71, 72n5, 73, 111–113, 115–117, 129, 131, 132, 135, 138, 139, 141–151, 153–157, 159–162, 234, 260 Read, Alan, 36 Recycled Shakespeare Company (RSC) (Maine, USA), 9, 23–25, 40, 45, 263 Regional theatre, 15, 16, 22, 30, 264 Ridout, Nicholas, 9, 12, 20 Riley, Shannon Rose, 35n7, 233 Rintoul, Douglas, 99 Ritual and theatre, 168, 169, 186–190, 198, 212, 213 Rivas, Jessica, 230, 235, 237, 238n12, 241, 242, 245 Robeson, Paul, 141, 152 Rogers, Jami, 30 Rosenthal, Daniel, 64, 65 Rouch, Búi, 191, 208, 210 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), 2, 24, 36, 66, 148, 262 Rubin, Brady, 114, 121, 123, 125, 127 S Said, Edward, 11 Saini, Sundeep, 100 San Joaquin Valley, 3, 13, 14, 222, 223, 227 Sayet, Madeline, 2 Selman, Chris, 94, 104, 105 Sexuality on the Shakespearean stage, 29, 30, 46, 113, 118, 120, 130, 135, 137, 159, 203, 241, 255 Shakespeare and Company (MA), 118, 139 Shakespeare and the Alchemy of Gender (play), 112, 114, 134, 137–140 Shakespeare Association of America (SAA), 40, 41

 INDEX 

Shakespeare Behind Bars, 3, 22, 40, 42, 74, 265 Shakespeare Beyond Borders Alliance, 267 Shakespeare festivals, 3, 4, 15–18, 27, 29, 47, 49, 51, 71–74, 77, 111–162, 202, 263, 264 Shakespeare in American Communities (NEA program), 77, 78n10 Shakespeare in Paradise (Bahamas), 28, 30–31, 40, 45 Shakespeare in Yosemite, 4, 36, 38, 41, 47, 52, 114, 115, 221–266 Shakespeare’s Globe (London), 17, 27, 36, 40, 212, 262 Shakespeare South Australia, 23, 264 Shakespeare Theatre Association (STA), 17, 147, 149, 154 Shakespeare, William, 1–53, 61–106, 111–162, 167–218, 221–266 As You Like It, 14, 50–52, 62, 63, 81, 82, 84, 97–103, 105, 106, 133, 223, 225, 232–247 Cymbeline, 14, 27, 34, 224, 265 Hamlet, 4, 26, 36, 41, 46, 51, 76, 106, 119, 122, 137, 138, 146, 167–218 Henry V, 67 King Lear, 118, 144, 153 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 31, 225, 247–257 Merchant of Venice, The, 12, 119, 131–134, 249 Midsummer Night’s Dream, 18, 19, 128, 129, 180, 223 Much Ado About Nothing, 127 Othello, 112n3, 117, 122, 134, 135, 141–144, 149, 152, 154, 158, 180 Pericles, 44, 50, 51, 62, 63, 65, 69, 80–99, 101–105 Richard II, 240

277

Richard III, 115, 119, 124, 125, 142, 152, 178, 218 Romeo and Juliet, 13, 19, 44, 115, 116, 120, 224, 230 The Tempest, 28, 30, 31, 40, 76, 78, 119, 126, 129, 130, 180, 181, 261–263, 266 Twelfth Night, 115, 118, 143 Shapiro, James, 70, 71, 72n6, 78n10, 117, 141n8 Shaughnessy, Robert, 22, 66, 104n13 Shepherd, Sam, 21, 69 Site-specific theatre, 17, 22, 38, 168, 169, 186, 187, 189, 191, 193, 198, 200, 201, 203, 211, 223, 224, 229, 256, 264 Smialkowska, Monika, 70, 71 Socially engaged performance, see Applied theatre; Community-­ based theatre Solnit, Rebecca, 225n7 Sorelius, Gunnar, 181 Southwest Shakespeare Festival, 114 Spry, Tami, 33n6, 35 Srigley, Michael, 185n7 Stetson, Connie, 228 Stickney, Timothy D., 114, 115, 142, 143, 145–147, 153, 155–157, 161, 162 Strine, Mary Susan, 33 Swain, Elizabeth, 69, 80, 85, 114, 118, 125, 137, 138, 146, 155 Syderbø, Guðrið, 168n1, 173, 175, 176, 179, 195 T Take Wing and Soar, see Harlem Shakespeare Festival Taub, Shaina, 50, 98, 99, 101 Taylor, Diana, 112 Taylor, Nancy, 122, 135

278 

INDEX

Taylor, Paul, 92, 94, 96, 97 Teaching Shakespeare, 3, 227, 228, 232, 233, 241, 247, 248, 258 Teer, Barbara Ann, 141, 143, 161 Theatre for Social Change, see Applied theatre; Community-based theatre Thompson, Ayanna, 29, 42, 43, 73, 78n10, 129, 141n8, 155 Tomalin, Nicholas, 66 Torgarð, Hans, 170, 178, 180, 181, 183, 185, 185n7, 190n10, 191, 192, 196, 197, 199, 199n12, 201, 204, 210, 211, 216, 218 Tórshavn, Faroe Islands, 51, 168, 169, 173, 175, 177, 180, 182, 184, 185, 187, 216 Touch of Greatness, A (film), 43 Trahey, Mary, 114, 119, 121, 124, 126, 136 Translation of Shakespeare, 18, 25–27, 46, 51, 168, 169, 178, 180–182, 180n6, 191, 192, 194, 196–199, 199n12, 206, 209–211, 237 Turan, Kenneth, 71, 73, 73n7, 74, 112n1 Turner, Victor, 8 Two Gentlemen of Verona (musical), 73 U Under the Greenwood Tree (film), 99 University of California Merced, 3, 114, 222, 236 W Walker-Kuhne, Donna, 141 Wall, Wendy, 40 Ward, Lolly, 114, 128, 137, 160

Waugh, Rosemary, 95 Weinberg, Mark, 32 White, R.S., 34 Whitworth, Geoffrey, 64–66, 72 Williams, Dathan, 46, 114, 116, 142–148, 152, 153, 155–157, 159, 162 Williams, Raymond, 7, 13 Williamson, Kenneth, 168n1, 170, 173, 179n5, 189, 198 Will Power to Youth (L.A.), 43 Wilson, Effingham, 64, 66 Witek, Kurba, 172 Wolfgang, William Floyd, 9, 12, 13, 15, 24, 74n8, 235, 237 Wolpe, Lisa, 4, 41, 45–47, 51, 111–115, 117–128, 117n5, 120n6, 130–138, 140, 147–158, 160–162, 229, 234, 238, 240 Woolery, Laurie, 47, 50, 77, 79, 98, 99, 101, 102 Worthen, W.B., 26, 33, 36, 63 Wright, Jeffrey, 116 Y Yeo, Jayme M., 15 Yosemite National Park, 4, 38, 52, 222, 223, 227–229, 233–237, 240, 242, 245, 248, 249, 252, 256, 257 Young, Harvey, 29 Young, Sandra, 214 Z Zhang, Ying-Wei, 262–264 Zysk, Jay, 187n8