Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars 9781350021747, 9781350021778, 9781350021761

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Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars

SHAKESPEARE IN THE THEATRE Series Editors Bridget Escolme, Peter Holland and Farah Karim-Cooper Published titles Patrice Chéreau, Dominique Goy-Blanquet The American Shakespeare Center, Paul Menzer Mark Rylance at the Globe, Stephen Purcell The National Theatre, 1963–1975: Olivier and Hall, Robert Shaughnessy Nicholas Hytner, Abigail Rokison-Woodall Forthcoming titles Cheek by Jowl, Peter Kirwan The King’s Men, Lucy Munro Peter Hall, Stuart Hampton-Reeves The Other Place: The RSC and Studio Theatre, Abigail Rokison-Woodall and Lisa Hammond-Marty Shakespeare in Berlin, 1918–2018, Holger Schott Syme Trevor Nunn, Russell Jackson

Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars Ayanna Thompson

THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK BLOOMSBURY, THE ARDEN SHAKESPEARE and the Arden Shakespeare logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2018 This paperback edition published 2020 Copyright © Ayanna Thompson, 2018 Ayanna Thompson has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on pp. x–xi constitute an extension of this copyright page. Series design by Dani Leigh Design by Irene Martinez Costa Cover image: Othello from the Vienna Festwochen-production © Armin Bardel: www.arminbardel.at All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Thompson, Ayanna, 1972- author. Title: Peter Sellars / Ayanna Thompson. Description: London ; New York : The Arden Shakespeare, 2018. | Series: Shakespeare in the theatre | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2018012376 (print) | LCCN 2018019254 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350021754 (epub) | ISBN 9781350021761 (epdf) | ISBN 9781350021747 (hb : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Sellers, Peter--Criticism and interpretation. | Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616--Dramatic production. Classification: LCC PN2287.S347 (ebook) | LCC PN2287.S347 T46 2018 (print) | DDC 792.02/33092--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018012376 ISBN: HB: 978-1-350-02174-7 PB: 978-1-3501-4006-6 ePDF: 978-1-350-02176-1 eBook: 978-1-350-02175-4 Series: Shakespeare in the Theatre Typeset by RefineCatch Ltd, Bungay, Suffolk NR35 1EF To find out more about our authors and books, visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

This book is dedicated to Samuel Yates and Emily Lathrop, who represent the future of performance studies

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations  viii Acknowledgements  x Series Preface  xii Introduction  xiii

1 Sellars in Context 

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2 Purpose, Process, Technique 

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3 The Colour of Classics: Casting  4 Innovation and Accessibility  5 Conclusion 

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Appendix: Chronology of Peter Sellars’s Shakespeare Productions  135 Works Cited  137 Index  147

ILLUSTRATIONS

0.1 Page 46 of Peter Sellars’s copy of Coriolanus

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0.2 Page 55 from Peter Sellars’s copy of Macbeth

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0.3 Julie Delpy, Leos Carax and Peter Sellars in Jean-Luc Godard’s film King Lear (1987)

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2.1 Page 53 of Peter Sellars’s copy of A Midsummer Night’s Dream

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2.2 Page 70 of Peter Sellars’s copy of Coriolanus

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2.3 Page 30 of Peter Sellars’s copy of The Merchant of Venice

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2.4 Rokia Traoré as Barbary and Tina Benko as Desdemona in Desdemona at the Barbican Centre in London. Photo: Mark Allan

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2.5 John Ortiz as Bassiano and Elaine Tse as Portia in The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago and the Barbican Centre in London. Photo: Donald Cooper

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2.6 Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago, John Ortiz as Othello and Jessica Chastain as Desdemona in Peter Sellars’s production of Othello. Photo: Armin Bardel

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3.1 Saidah Arrika Ekulona as Bianca Montano and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago in Peter Sellars’s Othello. Photo: Armin Bardel

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3.2 Sarah Afful, Dion Johnstone, Mike Nadajewski and Trish Lindström in Peter Sellars’s production

ILLUSTRATIONS

of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Photo: Michael Cooper

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4.1 From Sellars’s 1983 production of Pericles at the Boston Shakespeare Company. Photo: Courtesy of The Heights

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4.2 Rokia Traoré as Barbary, Tina Benko as Desdemona, Fatim Kouyaté (vocals) and Marie Dembelé (vocals) in Desdemona at the Barbican Centre in London. Photo: Mark Allen

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4.3 Mamah Diabaté (Ngoni), Toumani Kouyaté (Kora), Rokia Traoré as Barbary, Fatim Kouyaté (vocals), Marie Dembelé (vocals) and Tina Benko as Desdemona in Desdemona at the Barbican Centre in London. Photo: Mark Allan

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5.1 Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and John Ortiz as Othello in Peter Sellars’s production of Othello. Photo: Armin Bardel

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is hard to express how much I have enjoyed getting to spend time with Peter Sellars’s work, words, philosophies and presence. Thank you, Peter, for being inspiring, challenging and incredibly generous. It has been an honour and a privilege to write this book about you! Needless to say, there is no way a book can live up to your art. So apologies in advance for any inadvertent errors, omissions, over-­simplifications, etc. Thanks too to Peter’s amazing and wonderful colleagues and collaborators. Julia Carnahan is a model of graciousness. I could not have completed this book without her help. Thanks also to Diane Malecki for her assistance tracking down some key people. I was incredibly fortunate to have institutional support for this project from The George Washington University, Columbian College of Arts and Science’s Dean’s Research Chair. Without the support of time and money, this project would have taken much longer to complete. Thank you, Dean Ben Vinson, for supporting my research. And thanks to everyone at Arden, especially the incomparable Margaret Bartley. I also owe thanks for the patience and diligence of Mark Dudgeon and Susan Furber, and to Bridget Escolme for serving as my incredibly supportive series editor. I feel very fortunate to have worked with Arden on this project. I have many lovely colleagues who have sustained and supported me with long-­standing, thought-­provoking conver­ sations about theatre. First and foremost is P.A. Skantze. Thank you, P.A., for being the best person to go to the theatre with. You have taught me so much about spectating and life. I am also immensely grateful that I have the smartest, funniest and most bad-­ass office-­mates in the world: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Holly Dugan. You two make me want to be a better

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scholar and person. Thank you, Farah Karim-Cooper, for being the best friend a woman, scholar and theatre-­goer could ask for. And a special thank you to Jonathan Hope not only for talking to me about this project, but also for being willing to go to so much theatre with me. You are lovely and amazing in every way. I am overwhelmed!

SERIES PREFACE

Each volume in the Shakespeare in the Theatre series focuses on a director or theatre company who has made a significant contribution to Shakespeare production, identifying the artistic and political/social contexts of their work. The series introduces readers to the work of significant theatre directors and companies whose Shakespeare productions have been transformative in our understanding of his plays in performance. Each volume examines a single figure or company, considering their key productions, rehearsal approaches and their work with other artists (actors, designers, composers). A particular feature of each book is its exploration of the contexts within which these theatre artists have made their Shakespeare productions work. Thus, the series considers not only the ways in which directors and companies produce Shakespeare, but also reflects upon their other theatre activity and the broader artistic, cultural and socio-­ political milieu within which their Shakespeare performances and productions have been created. The key to the series’ originality, then, is its consideration of Shakespeare production in a range of artistic and broader contexts; in this sense, it de-­ centres Shakespeare from within Shakespeare studies, pointing to the range of people, artistic practices and cultural phenomena that combine to make meaning in the theatre. Series editors: Bridget Escolme, Peter Holland and Farah Karim-Cooper

Introduction

In 1994 Peter Sellars was hired by the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, to direct a production of The Merchant of Venice. At thirty-­six years old, Sellars had already established himself as the wunderkind and enfant terrible of the theatrical world, having won the MacArthur Fellowship (or ‘Genius Grant’) just over a decade earlier in 1983, and being hired as the Artistic Director of the newly created American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in 1984. Sellars was the talk of the theatre world, and the artists at the Goodman were excited to work with him. They were hoping his Merchant of Venice would be the theatrical event of the year. Because he was busy directing another production up until rehearsals began, Sellars faxed a one-­page document to the Goodman, outlining his conceptual approach to this production of Merchant of Venice. In it he wrote: Four centuries ago, at the moment that modern capitalism was being invented, Shakespeare wrote a play that remains the most astute and shockingly frank analysis of the economic roots of racism that we have. He called it, not insignificantly, ‘THE MERCHANT OF VENICE.’ Shakespeare’s Venice is an international city whose trading partners include China, Africa, the Americas, and the Arab world. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 299

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Sellars then explained that his production would explore the continued impact of economic racism by setting the play in contemporary Venice, California, a location that was meant to evoke the Los Angeles ravaged by race riots only two years prior in 1992. He continued his letter, writing: By inviting black actors to take the roles of the Jews, Asian actors to play Portia and her court, and Latinos to play the Venetians, I can begin to touch the texture of life in contemporary America, and the metaphor and the reality of anti-Semitism is extended to include parallel struggles and their related issues. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 299–300 With the renowned black American actor Paul Butler cast as Shylock, the Goodman advertised the production to black Chicagoans as a Shakespeare production that would speak directly to contemporary American racial politics. And it did, but the production also did so much more that was unexpected. For the most part the audiences at the Goodman reacted with confusion, many leaving the theatre during the intermission. As David Richards wrote in his review in the New York Times: Delivered at a glacial pace, with only tables and chairs for a set, the production lasts four daunting hours. At one recent performance, two-­thirds of the audience bolted at intermission and those who held out to the end had the glazed look of hit-­and-run victims. RICHARDS, ‘Sellars’s Merchant of Venice Beach’ The unpopularity of the production became a type of running joke for reviewers and critics, many re-­hashing the exact same narrative about audiences running from the Goodman during the intermission.

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In hindsight, though, Sellars’s production of The Merchant of Venice has been treated as both unflinchingly reflective of the early 1990s and eerily prescient of what was soon to come in the early twenty-­first century. It not only reflected back the recent horrors of the Rodney King beating, the police officers’ acquittals and the subsequent widespread racial uprising in Los Angeles, but also anticipated the Black Lives Matter era of the early twenty-­first century, when activists organized to fight systemic racism and the killing of innocent black Americans. Although largely critical of Sellars’s Merchant, James Loehlin presciently wrote: ‘When Shylock warned of the danger to the city if justice was denied him . . . he addressed the audience directly, and the battering of Rodney King appeared on the video screens. It was a devastating moment, true to the play, to Sellars’s vision of contemporary America, and to the actual situation of an upper-­class white audience confronted by black anger’ (Loehlin, ‘Review’, 94). Sellars’s production anticipated an historical-­cultural landscape in which white Americans are forced to confront expressions of black American rage – a rage that is provoked by long-­ enduring structural inequalities. This anecdote about Sellars’s Merchant of Venice tells in miniature the strange polarizing effect Peter Sellars’s approach to Shakespeare has had on audiences, critics and scholars. In the moment, Sellars’s Shakespeare productions frequently divide audience members into those who are enraged and those who are enraptured. And over time, public opinions of Sellars’s productions often change and migrate to reflect more positive views, as if viewed with an intellectualized hindsight his productions appear both insightful and more pleasurable. When one reads about Peter Sellars in the popular media, however, one inevitably discovers that certain tropes and narratives constantly get recycled about him as if knowing them imparts anything about him as a person or an artist. Here’s a typical example from an early profile written in 1984 in the Washington Post:

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At 26, he has been called ‘a Wunderkind,’ an ‘enfant terrible,’ an ‘upsetter of apple carts,’ and ‘the most outrageously exciting director on the American stage today.’ Even when his unorthodox productions hurtle up against critical disapproval, it is generally accepted that a ‘boy genius’ is at work. His mind is astonishingly hyperactive. But then, just take a look at his person. He stands only 5 ½ feet, although he rarely stays put long enough for anyone to go get a tape measure and check. His hair swoops back in an elongated brush cut that suggests he is speeding along behind the wheel of a 1950s convertible. The elfin sparkle in his eyes registers somewhere between zeal and hilarity. If he always seems to be running late, it’s because he is. RICHARDS, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’ Two years later in 1986, the same reporter would go on to write: ‘ “Iconoclastic” seems to be the adjective most frequently employed’ to describe Peter Sellars (Richards, ‘ANT & the Adventures of Peter Sellars’). From these profiles we gather that Sellars has wild hair that defies gravity by spiking upwards; he is diminutive in stature and youthful in energy; he greets the world and almost everyone in it with a joyful familiarity which almost always expresses itself through a hug; and his zany appearance – frequently sporting colourful shirts that are paired with matching bead necklaces – mirrors his zany approach to theatre. A boy genius with a MacArthur ‘Genius’ award to prove it. A modern-­day Amadeus, or a real-­life Peter Pan. An egomaniac with monomania. A polarizing figure who cares for nothing so much as himself. Like most commonly circulated tropes and narratives, there are some bases in truth to the ones ascribed to Peter Sellars (although not the egomania!). Yet their constant recirculation often serves as a substitute for a more thorough and thoughtful engagement with his work on conceptual, artistic and aesthetic grounds. This book seeks to offer that corrective by systematically

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working through Sellars’s unique approach to Shakespeare, analysing the historical, social and aesthetic culture out of which he emerged, the purpose, process and techniques he has developed for his classical productions, his approach to casting with regards to race, and finally his attitude towards audiences with regards to artistic accessibility versus provocation. There are many contemporary Shakespearean directors who inspire controversy through their avant-­garde productions featuring seemingly revolutionary interpretations, stagings, castings and/or mise en scène. Peter Brook’s 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the Royal Shakespeare Company, for example, was immediately disarming in its simplistic staging; the stage was essentially a white box without any set pieces except wires that allowed the actors to float and hang above the stage. In the intervening years, it seems as if every actor, reviewer and scholar who claims to have seen that production also claims to have been influenced by it. Brook’s revolutionary style almost always inspires expressions of love and adoration. Sellars’s style, on the other hand, often inspires expressions of derision or dismissal. A review published in the Harvard Crimson in 1979 could almost stand in for all the negative reviews over the course of Sellars’s career. ‘Assaulted by Sellars’ sound and fury, we feel confused, trapped, and embarrassed’, asserted Katherine P. States, then an undergraduate writing for the university paper. ‘Why does Peter Sellars have so much contempt for his audience that he goes so far out of his way to make things inaccessible?’ (States, ‘Full of Sound and Fury’). Reviewers who have struggled with Sellars’s productions often claim that his iconoclastic approach creates theatrical experiences that are by and large inaccessible to normal audiences, and these reviewers then tend to assume that the production’s inaccessibility reflects the director’s narcissism and/or monomania. Unlike the generative assumptions that are ascribed to Peter Brook – reviewers assume Brook is attempting to expand theatrical experiences – caustic assumptions are often ascribed to Peter Sellars.

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And yet, I will argue that Sellars’s impact has been just as significant and influential as the beloved avant-­garde directors like Peter Brook. Sellars’s approach, vision and final productions seem to operate as cultural litmus tests, ones that delineate the borders for acceptable versions of avant-­garde theatre. At these borders reside tensions between the classical and the political, technique and process, casting and race, and accessibility and innovation. These faultlines will serve as the organizing principles for this project, with chapters devoted to each one. But first we must address the man.

Biographical Background Peter Sellars was born on 27 September 1957 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, a blue-­collar American city known as the ‘Steel City’ because of the numerous steel mills and steel-­related businesses that operate there. It is also a vibrant city for the arts. On growing up in Pittsburgh, Sellars says: ‘Pittsburgh is interesting: Martha Graham, Gertrude Stein, Andy Warhol. It’s a very interesting cultural scene. That is what I grew up with’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 54). Nonetheless, Sellars has said that his very early childhood was not one filled with theatre. His mother was an English teacher, and his father worked in a radio station. In fact, the young Sellars was more interested in herpetology than anything else as a youngster: he had numerous pet snakes and other reptiles and amphibians. Yet in the sixth grade, at the age of ten, Sellars asked to work as an apprentice in Pittsburgh’s Lovelace Marionette Theater because an older friend he admired was doing the same. Sellars worked for a year at the concession stand and gift shop. ‘My first job,’ Sellars said, ‘was mastering the total popcorn cycle. I packed it, sold it, I cleaned it up off the floor’ (ANT, ‘Fact Sheet’). Sellars continued, ‘After awhile [sic] the Lovelaces made me a curtain puller, which is where I learned the lesson of curtains . . . it can totally change the effect of a performance. Finally, my last year

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in junior high school I was allowed to work a puppet’ (ANT, ‘Fact Sheet’). An experimental puppet company that marketed its productions to adults as much as to children, the Lovelace Marionette Theater had a profound effect on Sellars’s artistic sensibilities. Margo Lovelace, the founder of the Lovelace Marionette Theater, became a mentor and friend to Sellars. Lovelace introduced Sellars to the French surrealists and avant-­garde theatre in general. In 1984, Sellars told a reporter for the Washington Post: I remember, when I was 12, Margo handed me a book on the set designs of Josef Svoboda – this is in Pittsburgh! – and said you should know about him. That’s not your traditional notion of set design right off the bat, but it was for me. Or she’d tell me, ‘There’s this production of The Good Woman of Setzuan at La Mama, directed by Andrei Serban, that I think you should see.’ So I got this slant on things early on. Beckett was normal for me, not Arthur Miller. If it was unlike Beckett, it was weird. quoted in RICHARDS, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’ The slant against the typical kitchen-­sink dramas so popular in mid-­century American theatre made Sellars’s interests and approaches stand out from an early age. The Brechtian distance that Lovelace maintained in her marionette productions influenced Sellars’s ideas about how audiences should engage theatre in profound and indelible ways. In addition, through his puppet training he learned to edit pre-­recorded vocals for the puppet routines. Therefore, Sellars claims that ‘splicing is part of my aesthetic and it seemed perfect for Shakespeare with his use of surprising juxtapositions’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). After a few years working at Lovelace, Sellars formed a touring puppet theatre company with his younger sister, and they performed for five summers at the Elitch Theater in Denver,

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Colorado, ‘the largest and oldest summer theater in the country’ (ANT, ‘Peter Sellars’, 1). Sellars’s puppet company gave him the freedom to explore all aspects of a theatrical production. ‘It was an amazing education,’ he recalls. ‘I wrote the script, painted the scenes, carved puppets, pulled the curtain and sold popcorn. In short, I did it all’ (quoted in Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). As he started experimenting with different scripts and texts for his puppet shows, Sellars began including some Shakespearean productions in his repertoire, starting with The Tempest. A gifted student, Sellars was admitted to Phillips Academy Andover (1971–5), a highly selective boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts, where he hoped to continue working in puppetry. He was frustrated, however, when he ‘realized it was going to take too long to train the students how to work marionettes’, so he turned to directing his classmates in experimental plays instead (quoted in Richards, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’). Nonetheless, he did continue to do a bit of puppetry work, including a production of The Tempest that he performed at Andover. Sellars has said that he directed over 40 productions during his high school years (Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). And in his senior year at Andover, he made a vow to himself that he would ‘do one Shakespeare a year. It was a goal I’d set in my last year in high school: Mozart and Shakespeare, one a year’ (quoted in Drake, ‘Boy Genius Sellars and “Zangezi” ’). After graduating from Phillips Academy Andover, Sellars took a gap year (1975–6) before going to college. During this time, he lived in Paris and took an extended trip to Moscow. Because he had grown up in Pittsburgh knowing one of Gertrude Stein’s nieces, Sellars explains that when he first got to Paris, ‘my first week there, my mother, sister and I stayed in Gertrude Stein’s house in Garches with one of the last of her relatives. In fact, Gertrude Stein is very much a part of my direct heritage’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 54). While in Paris, Sellars has said that he watched several long form productions that helped him grow accustomed to

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and fond of longer running times. For instance, he saw a Bread and Puppet Theater production that ran over four hours long on six different occasions (Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 269). Likewise, he began to develop his sense that audiences do not need to enjoy a performance for it to make and have a profound impact on them. Sellars relates how he saw Patrice Chéreau’s 1974 Paris Opera production of Jacques Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman. Famously, Chéreau’s production ‘drew boos and cheers in equal measure as he did away with the work’s traditional romantic ideals; instead of depicting Hoffman (Nicolai Gedda) as a sensitive poet for whom love is beyond reach, Chéreau cast him as a drunken loser’ (‘Patrice Chéreau’). Sellars said that he was so angry when he saw the production that he wanted his money back, but that even forty years later he can remember everything about the production. ‘The destination is not opening night; the destination is the rest of the life’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Equally important for Sellars’s development as an artist in Paris was the time he spent going to see avant-­garde film. He often describes spending the majority of his time in Paris ‘going to the Cinamatheque’ (Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). He became ‘enthralled with Jean-Luc Godard’, and started to think about ways theatrical productions could be ‘approached in a cinematic way with an emphasis on juxtaposition, the jump cut, the unexpected flashback’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Already familiar with the art theory that was pouring out of the Eastern Bloc during this period from his time working with Margo Lovelace, Sellars arranged to take a trip to Moscow during his year in Paris. The trip was transformative in many ways, especially for Sellars’s thoughts about the relationship between art, memory and politics. In the published version of the Avenali Lecture that Sellars delivered at the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1997, he said: I always remember going to the Soviet Union in the bad old days. One of the things that I remember from my fabulous experiences in Moscow was dodging my KGB Colonel host

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and spending an afternoon with a poet in Moscow who would take me to a certain neighborhood and say, ‘You see the third window to the left in that apartment? That’s where this painter lives. This apartment building over there – that’s where that poet lives.’ All these people had become non-­ people, who had been air-­brushed out of books and out of photographs, yet the actual history was still alive with people in the neighborhood who knew who lived in what building . . . So artists become actively engaged in the creation of alternative histories, and with the type of permanence that art has: the way a tune tends to live longer than lots of other things, the way poems are memorized and handed down on note paper, the way a memory lives, what it takes to keep something alive. That is, of course, the process of the arts. SELLARS, Getting Real, 9–10 Art, then, is always political for Sellars. Art is never merely entertainment; art should enable a productive, collective struggle: ‘the fact that people leave those works having a lot to talk about is very, very important to me. And, in fact, this is our task’ as artists (Sellars, Getting Real, 23). In autumn 1976, Sellars entered Harvard University as a freshman brimming with ideas for studying and producing theatre. ‘I picked Harvard intentionally,’ he told a reporter from the Washington Post, ‘because there was no theater department, so there was nobody who could say no. I just did what I wanted to do, when I wanted to do it with whomever I wanted to do it’ (quoted in Richards, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’). Thus, Sellars created his own major, which gave him the flexibility to study whatever he felt he needed: ‘so if I wanted a course in space perception, Cezanne’s late watercolors, Renaissance dramatic theory, psycho-­acoustics, they gave it to me’ (quoted in Elsasser, ‘A National Theatre, No Less’). His introduction to structuralism and its impact on theatre practice had a lasting impact on his approach. ‘Once you realize the way we take in the world is based on our preconceptions’, he

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explained to a reporter in 1984, ‘drama then calls to mind to people their most cherished notions’ which then can be challenged precisely because theatre by nature is multi-­vocal (quoted in Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). Sellars approached the theatre scene at Harvard much like he did at Phillips Academy Andover, with an eye for deepening theatrical experimentation. During his years at Harvard, Sellars directed classical pieces, operas and modernist works. Notably, Sellars’s first production at the Loeb experimental theatre at Harvard University was in January 1977 (just five months after arriving), and it was a production of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Working from a 1956 Pelican paperback edition by Harry Levin, with whom Sellars would go on to study, Sellars’s earliest script shows a mixture of interpretative notes and production notes: black ink for interpretation, red pencil for line cuts and regular pencil for production highlights. While Shakespearean productions remain a staple in Sellars’s repertoire to this day – remember the promise he made to himself in boarding school to do one Shakespeare play a year – Shakespeare was never his sole focus. Rather, Shakespeare provided a regular touchstone for his aesthetic, conceptual and political interests. Later in his first year at Harvard, Sellars became the first (and only to this day) freshman to direct a production on the main stage (i.e., professional) at the Loeb Theater – a production of the 1922 music/poem performance piece Façade by Edith Sitwell (poems) and William Walton (music). Fascinatingly, the production bombed. Sellars likes to joke that that early critical failure afforded him even more artistic freedom at Harvard because he was forced to form his own theatre company when no one else would work with him (‘Even the Gilbert and Sullivan Society didn’t want me’ [quoted in Richards, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’]). In his sophomore year at Harvard, Sellars found an unused trunk room in the basement of Adams House, one of the residential dormitories at Harvard, and asked the House Master, Robert Kiely, a professor in the Department of English

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FIGURE 0.1  Page 46 of Sellars’s edition of Coriolanus, including interpretive notes (black ink), line cuts (red pencil) and production highlights (regular pencil).

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and American Literature, if he could use the space for performances. Sellars named his company ‘Explosives B’ after a sign he found in the trunk room. Writing in the alumni magazine for Adams House, Kiely recalled: A jolly personage came smiling up to me, shook my hand vigorously, introduced himself as Peter Sellars ’80, and asked for twenty-­five dollars from the Master’s Fund to clean up and paint an old basement storage room so that it could be used as a theater. At first, I thought he was kidding, but it quickly became clear to me that despite deferential giggles and guffaws, he was in earnest. So I figured twenty-­ five bucks, what can I lose? But little did I imagine what Adams House and the College were about to gain! Within days, the dungeon-­like space was cleaned, painted, and lighted. Not very well lighted, but there were a light bulb and two small dirty windows looking out at people’s feet passing up and down Plympton Street. Soon those feet were headed to Explosives B, the new Adams House theater, seating capacity a comfortable twenty or an uncomfortable forty sitting on mattresses left over from storage. KIELY, ‘A House Remembered’ The popularity of Explosives B ushered in a new era of theatre at Harvard University, with students explicitly looking to recreate the excitement of Sellars’s shows there. Writing in the Harvard student newspaper in 1987, Aline Brosh notes, ‘This semester, about 40 plays have gone up and it seems every nook and cranny on campus hides a cast and crew. Kiely speculates that Sellars introduced the concept at Harvard: if a space can hold more than 20 people, it’s a theater’ (Brosh, ‘All the College’s a Stage’). Although Sellars did not inaugurate Explosives B with a Shakespeare production (instead it was a Russian play), he did direct Macbeth a few months later in Adams House. Kiely writes, ‘Peter liked moving his audiences around, so it began in Explosives B, then, with the director leading us on like Puck

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. . . Other classics followed in various unlikely places: a thirty-­ five minute Macbeth with three actors in the tunnels [of Adams House]’ (Kiely, ‘A House Remembered’). Sellars’s script from the production shows the radical cuts he made for the production. Also during his second year at Harvard, Sellars took a sophomore tutorial with Harry Levin. Four years after graduating, Sellars said about that experience, ‘Harry Levin was my sophomore tutor at Harvard, so I cut my teeth with one of the world’s leading Shakespeare scholars’ (Holmberg, ‘From Lectern to Stage’). But it was Sellars’s production of Antony and Cleopatra during his third year at Harvard University that really made waves, both literally and figuratively, for him. Staged in the pool in the basement of Adams House in December 1978, Sellars’s production of the play garnered both large audiences and positive reviews. Writing a review in the Harvard student newspaper, David Edelstein notes, First the pool, with the audience distributed in a horseshoe around it: at one end floats Cleopatra’s sturdy raft; at the other, the diving board extends over the water like an erect phallus. Don’t laugh – that’s the intention. The board clearly conveys the perils of Antony’s passion; the longer it gets, the more wobbly and precarious the position – man at his tallest and most triumphantly masculine, may in a second topple into the waves and be lost forever. EDELSTEIN, ‘Floating Shakespeare’ The water became a character in the production, with messengers being dunked in it, Enobarbus drowning in it, and the audience being splashed with it at various moments. Even at this very early stage in his career, Sellars’s critics noted that he had clear concepts worked out in his head, even when they did not always translate clearly to the audience. Again, Edelstein reviewing the production in 1978 notes:

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FIGURE 0.2  Page 55 of Sellars’s edition of Macbeth which highlights the heavy cuts Sellars made for the production at Adams House while he was at Harvard.

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But even if the play has been heavily cut, many scenes transposed, some themes unexplored, others smashed over your head, the trappings of this production are never less than fascinating: Sellars never lets his audience go . . . And I can’t discern much directorial interpretation of the forces compelling Antony’s fall, . . . [but] [t]hat doesn’t mean that Sellars hasn’t worked these things out in his own head – his synopsis in the program is full of cryptic notes EDELSTEIN, ‘Floating Shakespeare’ The success that Sellars had in these productions in Adams House propelled him back to the Loeb Theater during his final year at Harvard for two more Shakespearean productions: one a small-­scale production of Much Ado about Nothing in the summer of 1979, and the other a large-­scale production of King Lear in February 1980 on the main stage. Sellars once again explored the possibility of radically editing the script and combining characters in his Much Ado, and that production garnered harsh reviews. The nature of their critique, however, eerily echoes criticisms that Sellars will receive throughout his career. ‘Watching Peter Sellars’ Much Ado About Nothing is like walking across a room blindfolded – it’s easy if you’re well acquainted with the terrain but painful and confusing if you’re not’ (Rosenberg, ‘Dons, Dummies, and Directors’). The reviewer in the Harvard student paper, The Crimson, continues: For Sellars has brutally mashed Much Ado About Nothing’s script to fit the limits of his acting company and his own self-­indulgent desire to buck conventionality. His innovations in staging are often clever and amusing, like his use of several mannequins to fill various roles for which he lacked actors; but the merging of more important roles, the cutting and chopping of important scenes, and the self-­ consciousness of each departure from Shakespeare unnerve the audience and often make the play’s plot incomprehensible. ROSENBERG, ‘Dons, Dummies, and Directors’

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Early in his career, then, Sellars’s critics were challenged by what they assumed to be a trade-­off between theatrical and interpretive innovation on the one hand, and audience accessibility on the other. The critical view that this is necessarily a trade-­off, moreover, is a critique that still plagues Sellars. Sellars’s final Shakespearean production at Harvard, King Lear, went up in February 1980, and revealed several of what would become ongoing theatrical interests for him: the employment of conceptually driven diverse casts; long performance running times; and the incorporation of filmic technologies. Sellars cast Brother Blue, a well-­known black street performer in Cambridge and Boston, Massachusetts, to play the titular role. The mise en scène was transposed from medieval England to contemporary Los Angeles, California and Brother Blue as King Lear was blocked to arrive onstage in a Lincoln Continental – the car most associated with black social and economic aspiration in the late 1970s. Unfortunately, Brother Blue did not feel he had enough rehearsal time to perform the role adequately, so Sellars himself went on as Lear at the last minute. Running over four hours long, the production incorporated many filmic techniques including the use of television monitors, microphones and speakers. Moreover, Sellars edited the text and blocked the scenes to highlight juxtaposition as a way to mimic filmic scene splicing. One reviewer noted, ‘The notorious storm of Act III wails for an hour amidst pendulous light bulbs, harsh spotlights, rolling rocks, flickering candles, blinking headlights of a sleek Lincoln Continental, and the disturbing whine of steel cellos. Yet Sellars wants more. On comes a snake of worklights, four television sets and two Polaroid cameras with flash bulbs’ (Frankel, ‘A Tragedy of Excess’). In this production, Sellars was attempting to employ a type of sensory overload that was often incorporated within experimental films. While the reactions to King Lear were somewhat more temperate than those for Much Ado about Nothing, certain patterns of criticism were already emerging. Once again, the review in The Crimson is revealing. David Frankel railed:

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Peter Sellars has balls. His King Lear drives Shakespeare’s poetry to a North Hollywood parking lot, yanks it from the back seat and stabs it helter-­skelter while the gods guffaw. But Sellars’ production fails because it attempts too much, his ambition exceeds his grasp. Far from letting the play breathe, he beats it about the neck with a crowbar, adding abrasions and welts until he obscures his own intentions. By any interpretation, Lear should not be an interminable, mired melodrama set in a tempest of technology. Sellars’ Lear is a tragedy of excess. FRANKEL, ‘A Tragedy of Excess’ Here, in this early review, a student reviewer identified one of the critiques that Sellars would go on to face during much of his theatrical career – that his concepts are so bold as to be both excessive and at the expense of the play depicted. Furthermore, the reviewer lands on what will become another common critique – that Sellars alienates his audiences: ‘But four hours of mechanical torture does not turn us into Lears. . . . Instead, this Lear alienates us, erects a barrier between the stage and the audience, makes us struggle to stay in our seats. We throw up our hands’ (Frankel, ‘A Tragedy of Excess’). Even as an undergraduate, Sellars was not interested in directing and providing a Shakespearean production that was easy. Even then he strove to create a theatrical experience that was challenging enough that the audience could grapple with it over time – theatre as an experience as much in the recasting and remembering as it is in the moment. Sellars graduated from Harvard University in 1980 and was inducted into Phi Beta Kappa, the honours society that recognizes students with the highest grade-­point averages. He also won one of Harvard’s Sheldon Fellowships, an award given to students who have detailed plans to further their education through extensive travel. Sellars proposed to travel and research theatre in China, Japan and India. Arguing that his theatrical education was largely Western in scope, Sellars wanted to experience the diverse theatrical traditions in

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non-Western countries. Needless to say, this fellowship, his travels and his research on non-Western theatre had a lasting impact on his work. He was able to study Noh and Kabuki techniques in Japan (where his mother was living and working at the time as an English teacher) and extended his puppet training through the Japanese art of bunraku. When Sellars returned to the United States, his star was clearly on the rise because he had established a national reputation by directing two huge hits at the American Repertory Theater during his final year at Harvard: Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector General and George Handel’s opera Orlando. Thus, in 1981, Sellars was hired to direct a new Broadway musical, My One and Only, a revival, with a new book, of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1927 musical Funny Face, starring Tommy Tune and Twiggy. During final rehearsals for the show’s previews in Boston in January 1983, Sellars was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Fellowship, a five-­year monetary award that comes with no strings so that artists and thinkers can pursue their work unencumbered by financial worries. Despite this significant award and the positive press it engendered, just five days before the opening of My One and Only, Sellars was fired by the producers for ‘artistic differences’. Writing a lengthy article in the New York Times about the forces that conspired against the success of My One and Only, Don Shewey wrote: The teaming of Peter Sellars and Tommy Tune seemed particularly auspicious, for both are brilliant, iconoclastic innovators. But while his academic background made Mr. Sellars’s directorial approach intellectual, Mr. Tune’s central point of reference was show business . . . It became a struggle, as Mr. Sellars later put it, ‘between the forces of Brecht and the forces of The Pajama Game’. SHEWEY, ‘How My One and Only Came to Broadway’ The producers were alarmed when they saw the first full run-­ through of the show because it became apparent that Sellars was attempting to incorporate into the musical ‘such notions

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as the rise of the corporation, the colonialization of the Third World and the oppression of women’ (Shewey, ‘How My One and Only Came to Broadway’). Lewis Allen, the supervising producer of the show, was quoted in the New York Times as saying, ‘But musical theater is a specific genus. It’s not like a book or a painting that can be enjoyed over a period of time; the audience demands instant gratification. Peter wanted to enlarge the scope of the musical theater, and he was trying to say more in the text than a musical book can allow’ (quoted in Shewey, ‘How My One and Only Came to Broadway’). This tension between the producers’ desires for ‘instant gratification’ and Sellars’s desire to expand the horizons of gratification is one that would haunt Sellars into future productions. But in 1983, Sellars landed well, immediately being named as the Artistic Director of the Boston Shakespeare Company. Founded by Bill Cain, the Boston Shakespeare Company had just moved into a new 360-seat theatre on St Botolph Street in Boston, Massachusetts, and hiring Sellars propelled the little-­ known theatre into a much larger spotlight (‘Shakespeare Troupe Names Sellars’). Writing in the Village Voice, Don Shewey was full of praise: The miracle is that Sellars has, with a single production, transformed the Boston Shakespeare Company from a post-­ collegiate amateur company that no one took seriously into a vital art theater for the Boston community. Taking over this theater was a calculated gamble – why should anyone else in the world care what goes on at the Boston Shakespeare Company? Nevertheless, his bold work . . . has already established him as one of the handful of American stage directors who automatically commands attention, in no small part because it is always inspiring to watch a talented young artist tackle and reinvigorate a classical art form. SHEWEY, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’ Thus, Sellars’s attempt to resurrect his reputation after the failure of his Broadway project was intimately tied to his use

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of Shakespeare, and his reviewers were invested in his ability to ‘reinvigorate’ the classics. Sellars’s inaugural production in October 1983 was Pericles, and it was attended by ‘an audience packed with Boston cultural luminaries’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’). Garnering reviews in national publications, the production was extremely successful. Christopher Swan raved that the production ‘was something akin to a comet streaking into our pedestrian orbits’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’). Swan went on to contextualize Sellars’s artistic framework in ways that Sellars himself would have appreciated – as cinematic. Swan wrote: Producer-­director Mike Nichols has compared Sellars to Orson Welles. But the simple truth, so evident in the dinner scene [2.3 of Pericles], is that we are dealing more with a Luis Bunuel here. (I haven’t seen anything that so organically balances symbol and event since the Last Supper scene in Bunuel’s film Viridiana.) And, while we are talking about film directors, an apt comparison can be drawn between Sellars’s structural brilliance in assembling this work and that of Akira Kurosawa’s in The Seven Samurai. SWAN, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’ With a minimalist set, Sellars’s Pericles was nonetheless modern in its mise en scène. The reviewer in the Harvard Crimson summarizes, ‘For [Sellars] Pericles symbolizes modern American man. His character becomes a latter 20th-­century well-­to-do Everyman in the odyssey of life. Pericles’s court [is] the corporate boardroom and his nobles its directors’ (Stone, ‘Beyond Interpretation’). While many of the reviews note the cast members, none note Sellars’s intentional use of non-­ traditional casting, an element that would become central to much of his work in the future. Gower was played by Brother Blue, the black American storyteller whom Sellars initially wanted to be his King Lear in 1980, and Pericles was played by Ben Halley Jr, a classically trained black American actor who

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frequently performed at the American Repertory Theatre in the 1980s and 1990s. Then in 1984, at the Boston Shakespeare Company, Sellars directed Play/Macbeth, a mixing of Samuel Beckett’s and Shakespeare’s respective plays. The production began with Beckett’s Play in which three characters, a man and two women, repeatedly retell their history as lovers. Onstage Sellars had three large funeral urns out of which the heads of the characters emerged. The urns were then used as the pot out of which Shakespeare’s witches arose. Running for just eighty minutes, Sellars’s Macbeth was ‘as divorced from the actual events of Shakespeare’s play as Beckett’s heads are from the sexual stew of their past lives’ (Clay, ‘From Here to Eternity’). Despite the fact that reviewers noted that ‘those not on intimate terms with the play will not fully understand it’, they praised its ‘ravishing image of disembodied evil growing rampant across “our country” and our mind’ (Clay, ‘From Here to Eternity’). Explaining how immediate comprehension is not a goal for which he strives, Sellars included a quote in the programme from Kunio Komparu’s 1983 book The Noh Theater: Principles and Perspectives: Noh plays take place in a dimension of fantasy that transcends the normal bounds of time and space, so one cannot become absorbed in a Noh play if one is attempting to make what is happening conform to logic and common sense. By extinguishing momentarily the bright flame of realistic consciousness and darkening the mind, one will enable the deeper consciousness to surface. KOMPARU, The Noh Theater, xxiii–xxiv The production had a dream-­like quality that challenged its viewers to experience the mash-­up of Beckett and Shakespeare in the ‘territory of time and space where the nonrealistic consciousness of Noh dwells’ (Komparu, The Noh Theater, xxiv). By the end of the eighty-­minute Macbeth, ‘[David] Zoffoli’s Macbeth meets [Henry] Woronicz’s Macduff almost

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serenely without skirmish or clanking of swords, as [Sandra] Shipley [as Lady Macbeth] glides slowly across the upper stage in flickering light, a bare branch of Birnam massive in her hands to the inexpressibly lovely strains of Mozart’s Quintet in G minor’ (Clay, ‘From Here to Eternity’). Despite the fact that Sellars was returning to a concept he had developed earlier at Harvard University – a radically shortened three-­person version of Macbeth – the concept evolved dramatically to incorporate what he learned about Noh theatre in Japan – that theatre should offer ‘a kind of separation from reality’, to quote Komparu again (Komparu, The Noh Theater, xxiv). During his first season as the Artistic Director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, Sellars directed Pericles, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Macbeth (two of which he had directed at Harvard University as a college student). In addition, he directed the US premiere of Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera, The Lighthouse; he produced Timothy Mayer’s uncut production of Bertolt Brecht’s Mother Courage; and he invited the experimental New York-­based theatre company The Wooster Group to premiere their new production, L.S.D., at the Boston Shakespeare Company. Needless to say, the Boston Shakespeare Company gained significant notoriety under Sellars’s direction. A critic in the New York Times wrote, ‘The [Boston] Shakespeare Company [was] a fledgling group whose productions were often amateurish until Mr. Sellars was hired last year’ (Butterfield, ‘5 Resignations Shake Arts in Boston’). Quoting the ‘perspicacious Jack Kroll of Newsweek’, the infamous gossip columnist Liz Smith wrote, ‘Not since Orson Welles has there been an explosion of precocity as in the case of Peter Sellars’ (Smith, ‘Peter Sellars’). Sellars was garnering a lot of national attention, and Smith’s gossip column about him was devoted to the fact that ‘the dynamic director’ had been ‘nabbed’ by Creative Artists, ‘the hot talent agency’, to make big-­budget films in the future (Smith, ‘Peter Sellars’). It was also at this point that Sellars was tapped to create the US’s first national theatre company when he was appointed

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Artistic Director of the newly established American National Theater that would be housed at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC. Explaining why he was leaving the Boston Shakespeare Company after only one year as its AD, Sellars told the New York Times that ‘the Shakespeare Company’s operating budget of $840,000 in the 1983–4 season [was] “peanuts,” and indicated that the company’s board had turned down his request to raise it to $1.2 million for next year’ (Butterfield, ‘5 Resignations Shake Arts in Boston’). The New York Times article continued, ‘In fact, said Jack Thomas, director of marketing for the [Boston] Shakespeare Company, the budget had been doubled for Mr. Sellars last year, but the board felt his proposed budget was beyond their resources from box-­office sales and donations. At the Kennedy Center, he will have a guaranteed budget of $2 million’ (Butterfield, ‘5 Resignations Shake Arts in Boston’). The American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) was established by an unfunded Congressional mandate in 1935. In a document labelled a ‘Brief History of ANTA’ from the Kennedy Center’s archives, an unidentified author (although I suspect it is Peter Sellars himself) writes, ‘In 1946, ANTA began to fulfill this purpose under the leadership of such people as Brooks Atkinson, Clarence Derwent, and Helen Hayes. To bring in money, they produced several ANTA benefits’ (ANT, ‘Brief History of ANTA’). ANTA produced numerous theatrical productions, ran two major New York theatres, a training programme and international exchanges. Then by the early 1960s, ‘ANTA was instrumental in the formation of the Lincoln Center Repertory Company’ (ANT, ‘Brief History of ANTA’). In 1981 the remaining ANTA theatre on 52nd Street in New York was sold, and the profits were used to establish the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center. In the official press release dated 6 June 1984, the Kennedy Center and the American National Theater and Academy announced the formation of a ‘new corporation which will take the first steps towards the foundation and development of

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an American National Theater Company’, and that ‘Sellars would function as both the company’s Artistic Director and chief operating officer’ (Kennedy Center, ‘ANTA and Kennedy Center Announce Appointment of Peter Sellars’). The press release continues: According to ANTA trustees Roger L. Stevens, who is also Kennedy Center chairman, Donald R. Seawell and Alfred De Liagre Jr., the company expects to be developing, producing and presenting a wide range of theatrical work in the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater, Terrace Theater and Theater Lab by the spring of 1985. In addition to major productions of classics of American and world drama, the long-­range plans include a playwrights’ wing for the support of new plays and American playwrights; an expanded media studio for collaborative projects involving art, music, dance and technology; and an exchange program that will present significant work from theaters across America and abroad. KENNEDY CENTER, ‘ANTA and Kennedy Center Announce Appointment of Peter Sellars’ The trustees indicate that they hired Peter Sellars precisely because he represented ‘new talent’. Roger L. Stevens is quoted in the press release as saying, ‘We feel that Peter Sellars and the promise that this company holds will provide an infusion of imagination and talent welcome in the American theater today’ (Kennedy Center, ‘ANTA and Kennedy Center Announce Appointment of Peter Sellars’). Thus, at age twenty-­six, Sellars went from running the Boston Shakespeare Company, which produced five shows a season and seated 360 audience members, to running a national theatre ‘corporation’ with the following specifications: (1) The Eisenhower Theater: . . . seating 1100 . . . for a 52-week season

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(2) The Terrace Theater: . . . seating 513. A 20-week season . . . (3) The Theater Lab: to be renamed The Free Theater . . . and can accommodate anywhere from 50 to 500 spectators . . . Number of weeks to be determined. ANT, ‘Current Specifications’ Financially, ANT was given $2 million for its first year in operation, half paid by ANTA and half paid by the Kennedy Center. ‘The sale of [ANTA’s theatre in New York] netted $5 million, which ANTA is turning over in five yearly installments to the American National Theater’, a reporter in the Washington Post noted in 1985 (Richards, ‘Peter Sellars’). In that same article, it was reported that Sellars ‘put his budget for the first season at $6 million’ (Richards, ‘Peter Sellars’). In one year, then, Sellars went from being Artistic Director of a theatre with an annual budget of $840,000 to being an Artistic Director of multiple theatres with a budget somewhere between $2 million and $6 million annually. Sellars’s vision for the American National Theater (ANT) was as large as his proposed budget. The artistic focus was to present American classics, world classics, newly commissioned works and the best productions from other theatre companies. In a document labelled a ‘Statement of Purpose’ from the Kennedy Center’s archives, an unidentified author (once again I suspect it is Peter Sellars himself) writes: In 1985[,] we hope for a theater that has a buzz, a hum, a spirit of inquiry, and demands attention in the city where the future of the country and the fate of a world are being discussed and decided. We hope for a theater that is a training ground for citizenship, a preparation for jury-­duty, and a primer in international affairs, where the importance of a single human gesture and its potential massiveness can be felt. We hope for a theater of difficulty, delight, and drastic measures, [and] philosophical convolutions . . . that

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puts the American public in direct contact with the culture that they own and must care for and the history that is instantly their lives and eventually the story of a nation. ANT, ‘Statement of Purpose’, 1 Furthermore, Sellars articulated an aesthetic vision that was deeply tied to a racially and socioeconomically progressive one. Another early document from ANT states, ‘as many aspects as possible of American life and geography must be honestly represented if the American National Theater is to live up to its name’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). The document then goes on to explain that ‘Of course, all hiring of all productions at the ANT will be color blind’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). And that a special effort would be made to find, support and produce plays by ‘Black, native American, Hispanic, Asian, handicapped, and other groups with a distinct experience of American life’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). With a wholly revised pricing system for tickets (radically lowered ticket prices, membership plans that allowed audiences to attend any show in a given season, and a space that always provided productions for free), Sellars’s ANT was envisioned to be as inclusive as possible both in terms of who and what was represented onstage and in terms of who was seated in the audience. Central to Sellars’s vision for a theatre as ‘a training ground for citizenship’ was William Shakespeare. The first production of the American National Theater was Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, directed by Timothy S. Mayer; in the press release Sellars said, ‘I can think of no more auspicious opening for a national theater than the reclamation of Shakespeare as an American playwright’ (ANT, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I’, 2). Seizing upon the original congressional mandate’s emphasis on education, the ANT stressed that Shakespeare would be key to their productions and educational outreach. The document stresses, ‘Especially prominent in our Congressional Charter is the charge to concern ourselves with education and the status of drama in the schools. There is a lot to be done here . . . We see Shakespeare reread as also an American experience. One of

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our main objectives is to affect the secondary school curriculum in America. These kids are our audience in ten years’ (ANT, ‘The Future’). In an interview with Bill Moyers a few years later, Sellars expanded his view that Shakespeare is ‘a great American playwright’, saying to Moyers: [O]ur audience has been taught that Shakespeare is not theirs. Our audience has been taught that Shakespeare belongs to the British and to the Royal Shakespeare Company . . . What is maddening in America is most people have been separated from their culture. They’ve been told there’s a special privileged class of artists – they have a special insight – [and] a normal person doesn’t have this insight and is not on the inside track of the world. That is a monstrous lie and it is hideous . . . quoted in MOYERS, ‘Peter Sellars’ For Sellars, then, it was essential that Shakespeare was the first playwright staged by the ANT precisely because he was attempting to realign the notions of authority, ownership and belonging. Shakespeare marked all the problematic dividing lines between high culture and popular culture, and Sellars envisioned a production that would help heal those cultural rifts. After all, Sellars would also claim that the use of the King James Bible in many black American churches helped to keep Shakespeare’s language alive. The power of the Black church, which, in my view, has actually kept Shakespeare alive, is our direct connection to the Elizabethan theatre. It is the power of the language of the King James Bible as transmuted in the Black church. Keeping the rhythms of Shakespeare alive and rolling and powerful, and the idea of that expressive language being itself an act of liberation. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 45

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Shakespeare has always been central to Sellars entire artistic, political and ethical ethos, and, therefore, the socioeconomic and racial make-­up of the audiences and artists for the ANT came into stark relief for Sellars. Speaking to a reporter for the New York Times, Sellars explained, ‘We need in America a subsidized theater’ (quoted in Molotsky, ‘Kennedy Center’s Chief Seeks Wider Audience’). This, according to Sellars, would help diversify the theatre. In the same article, Irvin Molotsky began, ‘One of the first things Peter Sellars noticed when he took over last summer as Artistic Director for theater at the Kennedy Center was that although Washington is predominantly black, there are few blacks in the audience on any night’ (Molotsky, ‘Kennedy Center’s Chief Seeks Wider Audience’). Sellars said, ‘I really want a large black audience to feel at home here . . . I have them in mind in programming’ (quoted in Molotsky, ‘Kennedy Center’s Chief Seeks Wider Audience’). Thus, Sellars had a goal to subsidize the theatrical experience through donations by patrons, ‘I am on the lookout for patrons’ (quoted in Molotsky, ‘Kennedy Center’s Chief Seeks Wider Audience’). Unfortunately, the inaugural production for the ANT of 1 Henry IV was panned by the press and ‘was drawing an average of 400 people a performance to the 1,100-seat Eisenhower Theater’, causing the production to close two weeks ahead of schedule (Molotsky, ‘Henry IV Closes Early in Capital’). While Sellars admitted in a letter to the membership of the ANT that the production had problems, he focused on the fact that ‘important seeds were planted’ (ANT, ‘Dear Member’). Speaking with the New York Times, Sellars repeated that line, claiming, ‘A lot of seeds are being planted that will grow in two or three years’, and later in the same article he emphasized again, ‘I think it’s going to be years before people come here and it sells out every night’ (Molotsky, ‘Henry IV Closes Early in Capital’). Sellars went on to say, ‘I did the most avant-­garde thing – I opened with a conservative play – and that was the last thing anyone expected’ (quoted in Molotsky, ‘Henry IV Closes Early in Capital’).

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That was the only Shakespeare that Sellars got to stage at the ANT, and he never got to direct any Shakespeare there himself. For while there were ‘16 productions employing some 165 actors in [the] year – the first year’, and several of those productions were successes that were performed before sold-­out houses (e.g., The Count of Monte Cristo and The Iceman), Sellars was let go from the ANT by August 1986 (ANT, ‘ANT’s First Year’, 3). Speaking to the Los Angeles Times, Donald Seawell of the American National Theater and Academy said, ‘Peter is an absolute spellbinder as a person. But we weren’t pleased with the shows. And the lack of attendance indicated the public wasn’t either. We were hoping for at least 60% and we didn’t even get that. Perhaps, we should have put Peter on the stage, instead of the shows’ (quoted in Sullivan, ‘Peter Sellars’). Seawell stressed that the problem was that the ANT had ‘taken a beating artistically as well as financially’ (quoted in Sullivan, ‘Peter Sellars’). And Charles C. Mark noted that many in the Washington, DC, arts world were experiencing a bit of schadenfreude over Sellars’s failure: ‘Other theatre people in D.C., not known for their benevolence toward their colleagues, are beginning to ask whether Sellars is the boy genius he claims he is, or merely a boy with an expensive toy’ (Mark, ‘ANT Crawls On’, 1). Sellars for his part was quite circumspect, noting that audiences and critics were not given enough time to adjust to his style. Instead, he argued, ‘There was a tendency to review me and not my work. Some reviews didn’t have that much to do with what was happening on the stage. Or were based on superficial values, because they just hadn’t seen enough of my work. But that’s something I’m going to have to face over the next few years. When people get used to my work, they won’t find the language so strange’ (quoted in Sullivan, ‘Peter Sellars’). Even at this relatively young age, then, Sellars readily admitted that there was a specific style and ‘language’ to his productions. And like the world-­traveller he was, Sellars hoped that neither would seem strange when experienced more than once.

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Officially Sellars was given a year’s leave from the ANT, and he planned to direct a film version of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road for Francis Ford Coppola’s film company and to write a book about the theatre because ‘this is a difficult time for theatre . . . I want to work through the issues’ (quoted in Dyer, ‘Sellars Looks at Past, Future and Caesar’). After leaving the ANT, Sellars directed opera almost entirely. He mounted Mozart’s Così fan tutte at the Pepsico SummerFare in Purchase, New York; ‘a production of Don Giovanni in Purchase; Nixon in China, a new opera by John Adams that will open the new opera house in Houston next fall; a new opera for Glyndebourne . . .; [and] a triple bill of 20th century works starring Jessye Norman at the Metropolitan Opera’ (Dyer, ‘Sellars Looks at Past, Future and Caesar’). As Sellars told the reporter from The Boston Globe, ‘The important thing is to put the productions of older operas into a different context the context of new work’ (quoted in Dyer, ‘Sellars Looks at Past, Future and Caesar’). Around the same time, Sellars told another reporter, ‘I must say I’m not interested very much by something that’s “official culture.” Basically the Royal Shakespeare Company is not exactly what I need when I get up in the morning. Thank God, that’s done; people have seen it’ (quoted in Michaelson, ‘Director Sellars’). Thus, the only Shakespeare Sellars worked on between 1985 and 1994 was Jean-Luc Godard’s 1987 film version of King Lear. Although Norman Mailer was hired to write the script, Godard did not actually use Mailer’s version. Sellars and Tom Luddy rewrote large swaths of it, and Sellars played the part of William Shakespeare, Jr. the Fifth, a descendant of the playwright who must restore the world’s great works of art after a nuclear disaster at Chernobyl. Eschewing the typical styles of both adaptation and Hollywood filmmaking, Godard’s King Lear explores some of the themes from Shakespeare’s play very loosely (virtue, power, parental relationships) while also being an exploration of filmmaking itself. Richard Brody, writing in 2014, summarizes, ‘my favorite movie of all time is

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FIGURE 0.3  Peter Sellars as William Shakespeare Jr. the Fifth in Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear (1988). Sellars also worked on the final script for the film.

Jean-Luc Godard’s King Lear, which gets to the marrow of the play with a minimum of direct performances of its text’ (Brody, ‘What Would Have Saved Saving Mr. Banks?’). Like Richard Brody, Sellars claims that Godard is his favourite director and that Godard is one of the largest artistic influences on his approach to Shakespeare (Sellars, phone interview 1). Until his 1994 production of The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theater that I discuss at the start of this chapter, Sellars did not do any other Shakespeare. Instead he directed a lot of operas and then assumed the position of director of the Los Angeles Festival (1987–94), a biennial (or triennial) event that brings together artists from all over the world. The 1990 Festival, the first under Sellars’s direction, was a huge success. One reviewer gushed, ‘I saw God. That’s my one-­line review of the 1990 Los Angeles Festival, the 16-day extravaganza that brought 1,300 artists from more than 25 countries to Los Angeles in September for what was billed as a celebration

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of the music, dance, theatre, film, video, visual art and literature of the Pacific Rim’ (Shewey, ‘Hidden in Plain Sight’, 15). Sellars went on to direct the 1993 festival, which focused on home, place and memory in the wake of the 1992 riots in Los Angeles, and once again the reviews were glowing. Thus, when the Goodman hired Sellars to direct The Merchant of Venice in 1994, the theatre managers may not have remembered his exact approach to Shakespeare, but they should have known about his approach to theatre in general. He was never going to direct an apolitical piece of theatre; Sellars had demonstrated time and again his belief that theatre should be challenging, stimulating and an event that may take years to reveal its full impact on the audience. In many respects, the long-­term reception of Sellars’s The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman has borne out his desire: critics and scholars tend to assess that production very favourably in hindsight. While the opera world materially embraced Sellars’s iconoclastic style with a steady stream of work around the world, theatre companies were loath to hire him; Sellars did not direct Shakespeare again for well over a decade. Thus, his next professional Shakespeare production was not until 2009 when he directed Othello, a co-­production between The Public Theater and the LAByrinth Theater Company, both in New York. This production, starring John Ortiz as Othello, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and Jessica Chastain as Desdemona, was conceived from the start as a joint production with a new play, a rewriting of Othello from a female perspective. The new creation, Desdemona, was a collaboration between Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize-­winning black American novelist, Rokia Traoré, an award-­winning Malian musician, and Peter Sellars. As I have written elsewhere: The story goes that Desdemona was initially conceived [in 2007] when Peter Sellars and Toni Morrison were sharing a meal together. When asked what he would work on next, Sellars responded that it would not be Othello because he had no interest in working on a play with such simplistic

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racial representations. Morrison, to his surprise, objected and said he had to find a way to make it work by digging into the language. After many hours of discussion and debate, Sellars acquiesced and agreed to direct the show if Morrison agreed to write a response play. THOMPSON, ‘Desdemona’, 495 Despite the all-­star cast of the 2009 production of Othello in New York, the reviews were largely negative. In fact, the reviewers seemed confused and surprised by Sellars’s multicultural cast. A typical response was that Sellars’s casting choices revealed his fundamental mis-­use of Shakespeare: ‘By casting blacks, whites and Latinos, Sellars is attempting to make a statement about race; instead, he sucks the soul out of this tragedy of jealousy’ (Lash, ‘Review’). Yet Sellars’s Othello was asking the audience to rethink narratives about race and racism, challenging them to explore how the cultural legacies of racism persist even in a twenty-­first-century, multicultural American world. Many reviewers declared that this challenge was un-Shakespearean. For example, Ben Brantley ended his stinging review in the New York Times by claiming that by the fifth act, ‘you’ve started thinking that Mr. Sellars has written his own play about love and war, and that Shakespeare’s words mostly just get in the way’ (Brantley, ‘The General in his HighTech Labyrinth’). The reviewers’ staunch sense that Sellars was not interested in Shakespeare – or worse, that he was violating Shakespeare in some way – revealed as much about contemporary reviewing practices as it did about the production itself. If Sellars’s aim is to challenge audiences to think deeply over time about complex issues, then contemporary reviewing practices cannot do justice to his work. After all, reviewers often have to write their copy very quickly after seeing a production on a special preview night. While some reviewers attempt to see certain productions twice, this is not standard practice. Sellars’s desire for deep and sustained grappling in dialogue with others is fundamentally at odds with the standard theatre review. This,

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I think, is part of the reason he has not been embraced by the New York theatre world. In fact, one reviewer noted that Sellars’s ‘provocative career has been unfairly kept outside the conservative barriers of New York theater’ (Winer, ‘Philip Seymour Hoffman Shines in Othello’). Desdemona, however, fared much better in the popular media. Commissioned and co-­produced by numerous arts organizations in the US, UK and Europe, the performance piece premiered in Vienna, Austria, on 11 May 2011. The published version was released in 2012, and the performance piece is periodically revived when Rokia Traoré and Peter Sellars can coordinate their schedules. I am calling Desdemona a performance piece rather than a play because it is as much about Traoré’s music as it is about Morrison’s text or Tina Benko’s performance. Set in the afterlife, Desdemona explores what happens when characters have the luxury of time to ponder, explore, and discuss love, life and forgiveness. The stage was primarily black, with the performers all wearing white shifts made from Malian linen. While the performers are on the extreme downstage, on the wall behind them are projected the words of the text and the lyrics of the songs (translated into the vernacular of the show’s location; that is, English in the United States and French in France). The performance alternates between speeches by Desdemona (primarily), Othello, the mothers of Desdemona and Othello, Emilia, and Barbary (whose birth name is revealed to be Sa’ran), and songs sung in Bambara by Traoré. In addition, the actress who plays Desdemona performs all the characters’ voices using different registers and accents for each character. The only characters she does not play are Cassio, whose voice is projected from offstage because his character is still alive, and Barbary, whose part is performed by Traoré. As Morrison describes it, Desdemona is a multisensory experience that nonetheless does not rely on action. THOMPSON, ‘Desdemona’, 498–9

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Running just over two hours with no intermission, the production garnered primarily positive reviews. Noting that not all critics reviewed Desdemona positively, the classical music critic from the Los Angeles Times argued, ‘Cultural and spiritual and social divides do not bridge easily, seamlessly or gratefully. Beauty from ugliness is not trusted. But, trust me, this is a great, challenging, haunting and lasting work’ (Swed, ‘All the Arts, All the Time’). Classical music reviewers, however, had grown accustomed to Sellars’s style from his years directing opera. It is interesting to note that they tended to review him and Desdemona more favourably than did theatre reviewers. Then in 2014 the Stratford Festival in Canada invited Peter Sellars to direct a ‘chamber version’ of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Antoni Cimolino, the Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival, designed the 2014 season to explore ‘Minds Pushed to the Edge’ and thus scheduled two different productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to appear simultaneously – one directed by Chris Abraham and the other by Peter Sellars. As one critic noted, ‘There was nothing particularly reverent about Chris Abraham’s production of Dream’, because it was jokingly referred to as ‘my big fat gay Shakespearean wedding’ (Kidnie, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 12). Yet, Sellars’s production of Dream became identified as the more experimental and challenging one; first, Sellars decided that he wanted a ‘non-­ traditional venue’ off-­site from the Stratford Festival grounds (the Masonic Concert Hall in a mixed-­use neighbourhood); second, he cast only four actors (two male, two female, two black, two white); and third, he deemed it ‘A Chamber Play’. Thinking through August Strindberg’s notion of a chamber play, Sellars was using Dream to explore very intimate portraits of marriage. ‘For Strindberg, as for Sellars, the goal was to devise a method – and devised space is necessarily caught up in this project – able to capture the defining qualities of chamber music’ (Kidnie, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 19). Sellars asked his four actors to play all the parts, but the actors were asked to unify the many different voices/parts into a coherent character. Thus, speaking in an interview with the

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Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), each actor explains: ‘I’m Trish Lindström, and I play Titania, Hermia, Lion and Wall as one individual’; ‘I’m Mike Nadajewski, and I play one person, but with the words of Oberon, Lysander, Peter Quince and a touch of Theseus’; ‘I’m Sarah Afful. I play as one person Hippolyta, Puck, Helena, Starveling the Tailor and Thisbe and – am I missing one? – Flute. And Fairy’; ‘I’m Dion Johnstone, and combined into one person I’m playing Bottom, Theseus Demetrius’ (Kennedy, ‘Bottom’s Dream’). As Carol Mejia-LaPerle writes: Sellars’s chamber play – constructed outside the usual parameters of Stratford’s stage offerings yet constituted by Stratford’s material history – calls into question conventions of spectatorship in a festival context by exposing the ‘darkest recesses’ of desire percolating under the play’s comic surface and in doing so withholds the one thing we can usually expect from a comedy: laughter. Sellars defies audience expectations of A Midsummer Night’s Dream and heightens the way private emotions shape social identities by imposing upon the marquee festival comedy the aesthetics of a chamber play. It is precisely by means of the chamber play’s emphasis on the interior motivations of desire – a motivation marked primarily by cruelty – that the appropriation calls attention to audience expectations. MEJIA-LAPERLE, ‘Thou Art Translated’, 7 Sellars’s Dream, then, was translated from a comedy into a domestic tragedy. During the rehearsal process, the actors and Sellars edited down the play-­script, stripping away anything that was unnecessary, including large swaths of the plot because the story/plot was less important than the characters and their emotions. Kidnie astutely writes, ‘One would imagine that as a spectator one would eventually let go of the traces of Shakespeare’s plot that for the duration of this production exist only in memory, but my experience of it was that these

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plot points remained, ghosting the action playing onstage’ (Kidnie, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 20). And many reviewers noted how challenging and rewarding this ‘ghosting’ theatrical experience was. For example, Charles Isherwood wrote in the New York Times, ‘I emerged stunned and disoriented, partly stimulated and partly exhausted. Theater rarely makes you feel any of these things consistently, let alone simultaneously. I can’t say I enjoyed the production – providing pleasure doesn’t seem to be the point – but I will certainly never forget it’ (Isherwood, ‘Beyond Shakespeare’s Wildest Dream’). Likewise, the reviewer in Now Toronto opined, ‘given my frustration with some of the production, I’ve rarely experienced its combination of intelligence, bravery and adventure at Stratford’ (Kaplan, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’). Once again, part of the challenge that Sellars set up for his audiences was an underlying narrative about race, desire and the social impacts on identity. With the four actors creating characters out of the many voices represented in Shakespeare’s Dream, the social implications for racialized sexual desire became all too apparent. As Carol Mejia-LaPerle astutely notes: Keeping in line with the chamber play’s preoccupations with infusing the drama of domestic relationships with the profundity of collective anguish, the scene’s changeling boy [as played by Dion Johnstone] represents the couple’s conflict beyond a petty quarrel. When Oberon, played by Mike Nadajewski, desperately wrenches the boy from Titania [as played by Trish Lindström], his pleas permeate with the hysterics of one reacting to the optics of miscegenation. MEJIA-LAPERLE, ‘Thou Art Translated’, 11–12 Constantly pushing his audiences to grapple with the socio-­ political issues that are most pressing at the moment, Sellars used his time at the Stratford Festival to challenge the colour-­blind casting traditions that dominated the festival’s

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performance history. Without a shred of the warming blanket of humour, his chamber play presented a world in which race is always visible, relevant and socially constructed. At the moment of writing, Sellars’s 2014 chamber play version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was his last Shakespearean production. Despite being employed steadily to direct and create new operas (Girls of the Golden West, his newest opera, another collaboration with John Adams, debuted in San Francisco in November 2017), Sellars has not had a major theatrical production in New York or London. And despite the fact that Sellars has won some of the most prestigious awards for artists, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 1983, the Erasmus Prize in 1998 (Mary Robinson, the President of Ireland, won that award the following year in 1999), and the Polar Music Prize in 2014 (Yo-Yo Ma, the world-­famous cellist, won in 2012), his Shakespeare work has been largely neglected critically. If one thinks about the huge success the experimental theatre director Ivo van Hove has had on Broadway and the West End, one realizes there is a commercial appetite for experimental theatre outside of Continental Europe. So whither Peter Sellars? And what is it about his Shakespeare productions that have been so challenging? This book will begin by placing Peter Sellars in context with other avant-­garde and experimental directors of theatre and film. Too often Sellars and his theatrical productions are discussed in a vacuum as if he and his creations were not intimately tied to the cultural and artistic landscapes surrounding him. One cannot properly understand Sellars’s work without also thinking through the work of Peter Brook, Joseph Papp, Elizabeth LeCompte and others. Thus, Chapter 1 sets the cultural and artistic stage for Sellars’s Shakespearean work. Chapter  2 moves to an in-­depth analysis of Sellars’s theatrical purpose, process and technique when directing Shakespeare. Unique in his focus on language, Sellars loves to plumb the depths of the incomprehensible, inviting his artists to create their own layers of meaning. From there the book moves to an examination of Sellars’s approach to casting and

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race. As will have become clear from this opening chapter, Sellars has been attentive to the social meanings race imparts in performance since he was a student at Harvard University. Chapter 3 provides a thorough analysis of how and why this is central to his understanding of Shakespeare. Chapter  4 analyses the tensions that Sellars’s productions inspire between innovation and accessibility. If, as I have argued in this introduction, time is a major component to understanding Sellars’s works, does accessibility in the moment matter? If so, how and when? A thinking person’s director, Peter Sellars challenges his audiences to grapple, struggle and wrestle with Shakespeare collectively in the moment of the production and individually as the production both deepens and recedes in one’s memory. This type of approach can render writing about his productions an unusual challenge; perhaps this explains the lack of deep engagement with his work. His work does not invite linearity or even full intellectual comprehension. This book attempts to engage with Sellars’s Shakespearean productions in the complex ways they invite and deserve.

1 Sellars in Context

Perhaps because Peter Sellars has been working professionally since he was in junior high school in the early 1970s, the narratives about him are more often about his person, persona and assumptions about his public presence than they are about his work. It is almost as if critics get trapped by the first yarns that were spun about him – tall tales about his youth, zeal and energy. Therefore, reviews and profiles in the popular media continue to be filled with the same regurgitated phrases, even though they are clearly not applicable: ‘boy genius’, ‘wunderkind’, ‘enfant terrible’, ‘elfin’ and ‘hyperactive’ (all these terms are used in Richards, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’, but the article is not unique; it is representative). When critics do move beyond recirculating these adjectives about Sellars’s persona to address his actual theatrical work, they also tend to get stuck in a quagmire of rehearsed and repeated stories about his ‘aggressive creativity’ (Loehlin, ‘Review’, 94). For instance, it is common to read that Sellars’s productions are ‘more flash than clarity’ (Brustein, ‘Reworking the Classics’). Or, that any given production is ‘much more about Peter Sellars than it is about Shakespeare or his play as written’ (Lazare, ‘Review’). Or, that Sellars traffics in ‘juvenile and self-­advertising direction’ (Henahan, ‘A Tale of Two Operas’). Again, it is as if there is a centripetal force that pulls critics towards discussing ‘Peter Sellars’ the man, even when they are ostensibly discussing his work. In many ways, these

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recycled narratives end up treating Peter Sellars as if he were sui generis, wholly unique, a thing of and unto himself. But, of course, Peter Sellars did not spring fully formed out of the head of Zeus. His approach to Shakespeare, theatre and the arts was influenced by specific artists, artistic movements and theories. In an interview in 1998, Sellars spoke about his artistic inheritance from Vsevolod Meyerhold in the following conflicted way: To me it’s one of the problematic elements of our inheritance. I, of course, was trained, and trained myself, to be one of these dinosaurs – the great visionary director. It’s taken years of growing up to learn that none of us are that . . . I think that’s the worst of the Meyerhold legacy . . . The press likes to write about [Meyerhold as] a single individual, creating a personality profile rather than getting into the dynamics of a working system. That ends up being repeated by historians who are interested in the Great Man. Gradually a cult of the exceptional figure is created, when in fact, directors’ work is only good because there are exceptional performers, and exceptional writers, and exceptional musicians. quoted in BATES, ‘Directing a National Consciousness’, 90 According to Sellars, then, only ‘dinosaurs’, long-­extinct creatures from the past, would conceive of their theatrical work as products that stem from the singular mind of the ‘Great Man’. While as a teenager Sellars approached directing as if his Phillips Academy Andover classmates were puppets in his travelling show, as he grew into a professional director he recognized that the best theatre was both synthetic and collaborative. In other words, Sellars’s approach to both theatre and directing evolved and changed. First, Sellars began to realize that great theatre is synthetic in the sense that it needs other art forms to inform it. Sellars explains:

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Theatre can only exist in close connection to the literary scene, and close connection to the dance scene, or in close connection to the music scene. Then theatre begins to share the vitality of what’s around it because theatre is a synthetic art and requires an interesting mix or blend of elements in order to become great. quoted in TROUSDELL, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 71 Far from springing from the brain of one person, great theatre, according to Sellars, is necessarily informed by the artistic world around it. This is a portrait of theatre as a deeply integrative form – one that cannot exist in a vacuum from other art forms. Moreover, great theatre, according to Sellars, is collaborative in the sense that the worlds created onstage only exist in multiple dimensions when multiple voices contribute to the process and are represented onstage. For instance, Sellars has praised the designers with whom he works because, ‘If the audience gets an impression of theatre as three dimensions, as something that impinges on the lives of real people, it’s the designers who are responsible for that’ (quoted in Delgado, ‘Making Theatre, Making a Society’, 214). Sellars often works with the same designers because he relies on their voices and visions; he creates art in a collaborative environment through a collaborative process. In order to understand Sellars’s approach to Shakespeare, then, one must work to place him within the full technicolour context in which he actually lives, thinks and works. The narratives that repeat adjectives about his persona lazily ignore the myriad ways Sellars is a product of his artistic upbringing and collaborative endeavours. This chapter begins by tracing some artists with whom Sellars has been compared. Usually these comparisons are employed to shore up the narratives about Sellars as a singular genius. Moving beyond that reductive stance, I analyse the artists who have influenced Sellars’s approach to theatre, and I end by thinking about the artistic

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movements Sellars has moved between. A complex thinker and artist, Sellars deserves to be positioned, seen and understood within the rich tapestry of artists, artistic movements and artistic theories that surround him and his work.

Common Comparisons Gossiping about the young director’s big contract with Creative Artists, the ‘hot talent agency’ that was the ‘envy and exasperation of its competitors’, Liz Smith quoted Jack Kroll, the famed drama and film critic at Newsweek, who said to Smith, ‘Not since Orson Welles has there been an explosion of precocity as in the case of Peter Sellars’ (Smith, ‘Peter Sellars’). The comparisons of Peter Sellars to Orson Welles began to emerge during Sellers’s final year at Harvard University, when he directed two main-­stage shows at the new American Repertory Theatre (ART). The comparisons to Orson Welles seem incredibly apt at first glance. After all, Welles achieved national notoriety by the age of twenty, when he was directing shows for the Federal Theatre Project in New York City. Welles was also known for his ‘intellectual brilliance, inexhaustible energy, love of film and popular culture, and a daring imagination in framing classical works in contemporary terms’ (Trousdell, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 70). Welles was also at the forefront of non-­traditional casting, particularly with his 1935 Federal Theatre Project production of Macbeth, starring an all-­black cast, that played to sold-­out houses at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, New York; and ‘Promotional material from the Federal Theatre boasted that 150,000 people saw the play in its New York run alone’ (Rippy, ‘Black Cast Conjures White Genius’, 84). Moreover, Welles was invested in creating a national theatre when he started the Mercury Theatre with John Houseman in 1937. Although Welles was ultimately unsuccessful in his bid to make the Mercury Theatre into a national theatre company, he demonstrated that innovative

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theatre could be popular, successful and critically acclaimed (like his wildly popular 1937 production of Julius Caesar which was set in a contemporary fascist milieu). And Welles managed to accomplish all of this by the time he was only twenty-­two years old: an enfant terrible indeed. The comparisons between Peter Sellars and Orson Welles, however, make much of the narrative of the man of singular genius. Welles, after all, was fiercely independent and wanted total control of all of his creative work. This was most apparent in his film work for which he struggled to retain creative control when he was working within the studio system and did not dissipate later when he secured private funding. Welles was also not an artist who discussed his work in terms of collaboration; rather, he often told tales that aggrandized his abilities, including many tales that could never be verified after-­the-fact. Marguerite Rippy writes about how Welles even went so far as to ‘recount with pride how he performed the role [of Macbeth] so convincingly in blackface that no one noticed that it was a white actor, much less Orson Welles, performing Macbeth’ in his all-­black production that went on tour after its run in Harlem (Rippy, ‘Black Cast Conjures a White Genius’, 83). When Peter Sellars blazed onto the professional directing scene as an exuberant artist, also at the age of twenty-­two, it was too tempting not to make the connections between him and Orson Welles. Yet, in point of fact, they are actually quite far from each other in terms of aesthetic, process and end result. While Welles’s productions were striking in terms of their casting, lighting and design, his aesthetic was always popular and populist. He wanted to create art that gripped the audience immediately; he wanted to create art that could be understood in the moment; and he wanted to create art that inspired political dialogues instantaneously. Welles, in other words, always sought to create art that was immediate. Sellars, on the other hand, talks about his art as working through time; he abjures the instantaneous. And Welles’s desire to train the focus on himself could not be further from Sellars’s ethos.

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While the young Sellars was often pegged as being a self-­ promoter, he constantly asked critics to engage with the work itself; and Sellars certainly never trafficks in fabulous tales about his own singular abilities to create art on his own. Rather, he always talks about the work as being singularly collaborative. The other two common comparisons that critics make when writing about Peter Sellars, Joseph Papp and Peter Brook, are perhaps a bit more apt, and rather closer to home, but they are still not as contextual as one might think. While never deemed a wunderkind or enfant terrible, Joseph Papp, the renowned American theatre producer and director who founded the Public Theater and the New York Shakespeare Festival, was known for his vitality, civic mindedness and forward-­looking theatre. Papp, for instance, fought to integrate the theatres when he was working at the Theatre Lab in Los Angeles, California, in the late 1940s. When a critic derided one of the Lab’s integrated events in 1948, Papp (still using his birth name Papirofsky at the time), responded in the L.A. Daily News: ‘There were no back doors or separate entrances for Negroes. In the best tradition of theater and democracy, there was no discrimination against fellow human beings. We, as a theater, are part of the tremendous struggles being waged by Equity and the Dramatists’ Guild against segregation in theaters’ (quoted in Epstein, Joe Papp, 68–9). Then when Papp moved to New York in 1951 and started the Elizabethan Theater Workshop, he employed lots of black actors because they were available and otherwise under- (or un-)employed. In an interview with James Day on CUNY TV in 1973, Papp stated that he ‘began to use black actors but only because there were so many black actors available, and they weren’t being employed, and very talented ones [like] Roscoe Lee Browne was one of the early actors in [his] company’ (quoted in Day, ‘Day at Night’). But it was not merely expediency that formed Papp’s casting practices. He decided early upon his return to New York that theatre should be a public art form as readily accessible as public libraries and

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not merely in the financial sense. As the Elizabethan Theatre Workshop morphed into the Shakespeare Workshop and then the New York Shakespeare Festival, Papp honed his aesthetic interests to be in line with his political ones: ‘If you present Shakespeare to American high school kids in British English, you convey the message that the Bard is something strange, for the elite and out of their ken. You do Shakespeare a disservice if you worship him. You have to see him as you would see a contemporary writer: someone who’s speaking to you’ (quoted in Epstein, Joe Papp, 93). Central to his vision of making Shakespearean productions that spoke to the diversity of his New York audience was the casting of actors of colour who looked and sounded like New Yorkers. Like Orson Welles, Joseph Papp was also interested in creating a national theatre company. But Papp’s vision for a national theatre company emerged in the late 1970s just as he was turning away from colour-­blind casting and towards colour-­conscious casting (for more on casting practices, see Chapter 3). Disturbed by the June 1978 United States Supreme Court ruling in the ‘Regents of the University of California v. Bakke’ case, in which the white Allan P. Bakke sued for admission to the University of California, Davis, medical school and was eventually admitted because the court argued that specific spaces (sixteen out of 100) could not be reserved for minority applicants, Papp reevaluated his work as a producer. Envisioning a national theatre company that would be comprised of black and Hispanic actors, Papp hired the white British director Michael Langham to do a three-­month workshop on Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar and Coriolanus – the two plays Langham suggested because of their prescient comments on democracy and leadership. While the productions were unsuccessful, Papp’s contribution to debates about casting and race are immeasurable. He helped to change the way Shakespeare looks and sounds on the professional American stage. Sellars, then, clearly comes out of Papp’s tradition in terms of casting. Sellars’s productions from the beginning of his

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career at Harvard University have featured multiracial and integrated casts. Coming to the professional stage in the late 1970s and early 1980s, Sellars almost always cast in a colour-­ conscious way; never assuming that audience members can or should be blind to race. And yet the big divergence between Papp and Sellars is Papp’s utter devotion to the popular in theatre. While Papp helped to usher in many innovative theatrical practices, his artistic focus was always on commercial success. It would be inconceivable to Papp to create theatre that was not immediately accessible to the audience, and this position is fundamentally in opposition to Sellars’s; Sellars has no real interest in measuring theatrical success by box office sales. The other artist who often figures into comparisons with Peter Sellars represents the other end of the spectrum from Joseph Papp: Peter Brook. The British theatre and film director achieved early fame through his productions at the Royal Shakespeare Company. And like Sellars, Brook has moved seamlessly between classical theatrical productions by William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe and others, classical opera, and new theatrical and operatic works. Brook’s theatrical aesthetic is much more experimental than Joseph Papp’s, and he is well-­known for creating art that is informed by arts from other countries, languages and art forms; Brook creates worldly art. Brook, however, has also been successful transferring his popular stage works into films; this has always been an aspiration of Sellars’s but one that has not been fully realized as of yet. Brook’s wildly popular Shakespeare productions were influenced by artists and their theories with whom Sellars’s also traces his artistic lineage: Antonin Artaud’s theatre of cruelty, Bertolt Brecht’s theatre of alienation, and Jerzy Grotowski’s theatre as laboratory, to name just three. But Brook, unlike Sellars, got to hone his vision, craft and approach by working with repertory companies. First, he worked for several years with the Royal Shakespeare Company with whom he directed his most famous Shakespeare production,

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the acrobatic A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970 (starring Frances de la Tour and Ben Kingsley in the initial RSC run). Then in 1970, Brook founded the International Centre for Theatre Research with Micheline Rozan in Paris. This company was formed to be a multinational group of actors, dancers and musicians, and initially they travelled widely in Africa and the Middle East, exploring different traditions in art. These explorations helped inform the creation of his long-­form theatrical adaption of the Indian epic poem The Mahabharata that was first performed in 1985. Brook also brought this international influence to his later Shakespeare productions, including his award-­winning production of Hamlet in 2000 starring the black British actor Adrian Lester. Moreover, Peter Brook’s 1968 book The Empty Space, which was based on a series of lectures he delivered in England starting in 1965, has always loomed large in Peter Sellars’s imagination. The Empty Space outlines four modes of theatre – Deadly, Holy, Rough and Immediate – and from these modes or points of view Brook argues that the best theatre can occupy any space in the world; that money and resources are not what is required to make great art. In fact, Brook rails that productions of Shakespeare most often produce the worst kind of theatre, the Deadly or dull variety: Of course[,] nowhere does the Deadly Theatre install itself so securely, so comfortably and so slyly as in the works of William Shakespeare. The Deadly Theatre takes easily to Shakespeare. We see his plays done by good actors in what seems like the proper way – they look lively and colourful, there is music and everyone is dressed up, just as they are supposed to be in the best of classical theatre. Yet secretly we find it excruciatingly boring – and in our hearts we either blame Shakespeare, or theatre as such, or even ourselves. BROOK, The Empty Space, 10 For Brook, the Immediate Theatre, the one to which he aspires, is vastly different from Deadly Theatre in that the audience is

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intimately involved. He writes, ‘This is how I understand a necessary theatre; one in which there is only a practical difference between actor and audience, not a fundamental one’ (Brook, The Empty Space, 134). When there is only a ‘practical difference between actor and audience’, Brook argues, Immediate Theatre is ‘out of tune with society – not seeking to celebrate the accepted values, but to challenge them’ (Brook, The Empty Space, 134). In 1986, when Peter Sellars was fired from his role as Artistic Director of the American National Theater at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, he signed a book contract with Harper & Row. In a 1987 newspaper profile in The Washington Post, Sellars made explicit the connections between his contracted book and Brook’s The Empty Space: ‘“It will be about the theater. It’s my version of The Empty Space”, he said, referring to Brook’s influential work. Sellars, who does a lot of his writing on planes, said it will include chapters on Soviet director Lyubimov, an early influence on his career; The Wooster Group, the avant-­garde New York company he brought to the Kennedy Center; and film director Alfred Hitchcock’ (Richards, ‘Sellars, At Full Speed’). Not organizing his proposed book thematically, Sellars conceived of his version of The Empty Space as tackling different artists working in different media. Although Sellars has returned to the idea of this book project at various times throughout his career, he has not published it to date. Clearly, Peter Sellars’s career would not have been shaped in the way it has, moving between opera and classical theatre, without Peter Brook existing first. Likewise, Sellars’s incorporation of vastly different performance traditions from different cultures and countries would be harder to sell if Brook had not done it first. And Sellars’s approach to non-­ traditional casting would not have existed in exactly the same way without Brook’s productions. But these comparisons once again elide the extreme differences between these two artists’ work. On the most fundamental level, Brook creates art in the way he does because he has a highly trained company that can

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work through his methods and approaches. It is inconceivable that he could create art as complex and layered as it is without that international company of artists. Aside from his opera work in which he frequently employs the same artists, Sellars has not had a company or even a steady group of actors with whom he works (outside of his Harvard University days). Rather, he is constantly working with new artists, training them to his approach in a matter of weeks or, if the production has international backing, months. Brook has almost always been treated reverentially by critics in the popular and scholarly media. Even when his productions draw criticism (for example, his Mahabharata has drawn significant criticism from post-­colonial critics over the years as an act of cultural appropriation [Bharucha, Theatre and the World, 69–88]), Brook is not the focus of the criticism. There is a considerable cult of personality that surrounds Peter Brook perhaps because he has always been slightly aloof and distant, successfully foregrounding his work as pieces that should stand on their own. Peter Sellars, on the other hand, seems perennially cursed by the youthful, exuberant persona that he presented to the popular media in his early twenties. While he hoped his enthusiasm for his art would translate into critics engaging more deeply with his theatrical productions, critics instead got fixated on him – or at least fixated on their fantasies of ‘Peter Sellars’. Brook’s emotional distance from the media could have provided Sellars with an entirely different model of performance of self and engagement with the media.

Extraordinary Comparisons Peter Sellars’s 1987 description of his planned book on theatre, however, reveals a great deal about the artistic context within which he placed himself. Specifically, Sellars mentioned Yuri Lyubimov of the Taganka Theatre in Moscow, Elizabeth LeCompte of The Wooster Group in New York and Alfred Hitchcock, the popular film director, who incorporated

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avant-­garde film techniques into his commercially successful films. The way that Sellars positions himself among both avant-­garde theatre practitioners and popular filmmakers speaks volumes about the ways he thinks about his craft and art. Of course, the first and most significant influence on Peter Sellars was Margo Lovelace, with whom he worked at the Lovelace Marionette Theatre when he was a pre-­teen. While the Lovelace Marionette Theatre catered mainly to children during the day and on weekends, they began experimenting putting on shows for adults, and Lovelace’s choices were truly experimental, including ‘Giraudoux’s The Apollo of Bellac, performed in 1972, Molière’s Love’s the Best Physician (1973), and Jean Cocteau’s The Wedding on the Eiffel Tower (1967, 1970 and 1977)’ (Conner, Pittsburgh in Stages, 174). Because of Lovelace’s puppeteering training, she was familiar with the vanguard of theatre coming out of Eastern Europe in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. She even ‘traveled to Russia to teach and perform, was in residence at the Smithsonian Institution, and collaborated with Mabou Mines, Lee Breuer’s avant-­garde troupe’ (Conner, Pittsburgh in Stages, 174). Sellars told a reporter from the Pittsburgh Press, ‘At Lovelace we’d do one adult play a season, and I’d be exposed to those and to the worlds of James Joyce and Martin Buber, who became more normal to me than popular playwrights like Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee’ (quoted in Elsasser, ‘Pittsburgh’s Peter Sellars Has No Regards for Broadway’). Sellars also reveals that Lovelace gave him a book about Josef Svoboda’s lighting designs when he was twelve years old, and then began to inform him about shows in New York that he needed to see. In fact, Sellars’s aesthetic and artistic approach to theatre was formed in those formative years. He studied Svoboda’s designs; he went to see Andrei Serban’s production of The Good Woman of Setzuan at La Mama in 1975; and he also visited Mabou Mines and The Wooster Group by the late 1970s. Moreover, Sellars designed a gap year after his secondary school education and before his college entrance in

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which he lived in Paris and visited Moscow; a gap year that could have been designed by Margo Lovelace herself. Even Sellars’s devotion to avant-­garde filmic techniques can be traced to the Lovelace Marionette Theatre, whose productions frequently included edited bits of sound effects, music and dialogue. Sellars says that the sound editing he learned to perform at Lovelace made him want to learn more about film techniques – something he studied informally while on his gap year in Paris, where he spent the majority of his time ‘going to the Cinamatheque’ (Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). If Margo Lovelace set Sellars on the path to avant-­garde theatre and directing, then the theatre companies and directors he experienced in the mid- to late-1970s helped to forge both his style and approach. For instance, Andrei Serban, the Romanian-­ born theatre director, was one of a handful of new directors in the 1960s who were interested in creating theatre as spectacle. For Ellen Stewart, the founder of La Mama, ‘Serban’s work, in particular, came to epitomize her dream of a truly international theatre dependent on sound, spectacle, and music rather than the English language’ (Bottoms, Playing Underground, 338). Yet, Serban was deeply invested in creating his spectacular theatre from classical texts; he started his career in his home country with an extremely controversial production of Julius Caesar in the Japanese Kabuki style. As became clear to Stewart, ‘Serban’s strengths, as these pieces indicated, lay in using classic texts as malleable raw material for creating his own theatrical visions . . . sensory and essentially antiliterary theater’ (Bottoms, Playing Underground, 338). Although Sellars always approaches the classics with the text foremost in his mind, the idea that the classics are ‘malleable’ comes from Serban, Robert Wilson (the American experimental director and designer) and Richard Foreman (the American experimental playwright). During his gap year in Paris and Moscow, Peter Sellars also encountered two other hugely influential artists and companies: Peter Schumann’s Bread and Puppet Theater and Yuri Lyubimov’s Taganka Theatre. Schumann, a Polish-­born, German-­educated sculptor and dancer, founded the Bread and

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Puppet Theater in New York in 1963, and their shows are participatory, politically charged and decidedly non-­ commercial. As Schumann explains on the Bread and Puppet website: ‘Bread and Puppet is based on bread baking and the not-­for-sale distribution of bread at moments created by art, and these moments are created in opposition to capitalist culture and habit. Therefore the puppet show is not only a puppet show, but an eating-­bread-together event’ (Schumann, ‘Peter Schumann on 50 Years of the Bread and Puppet Theater’). Avoiding most aspects of commercial theatre, Schumann’s shows often run very long. In fact, Sellars notes that he saw a four-­hour Bread and Puppet production on six different occasions when he was living in Paris. He learned from that production that audiences can be expected to adapt to non-­commercial running times. The Russian-­born director Yuri Lyubimov became the Artistic Director of the Taganka Theatre in 1964. His direction was known for being carefully attuned to the poetics of a piece, often building entire worlds around certain poetic metaphors. Nonetheless, there was also a strong ‘AGIT-PROP element in his work, an attempt to bridge the gap between the stage and the audience and to address the issues of his day’ (‘Lyubimov, Yury (Petrovich)’, 656). And like many of the other directors to whom Sellars was attracted in this time period, Lyubimov had a special interest in the classics. He ‘eschewed Soviet drama for the more imaginative worlds of poetry and narrative fiction, which he dramatized, and the classic, which he broke apart, reconstituted and presented from a pronounced critical perspective’ (‘Lyubimov, Yury (Petrovich)’, 656). Finally, Lyubimov worked with Vsevolod Meyerhold early in his career, and developed complex ‘machines for acting’ in his productions. Although Sellars was unable to see a Lyubimov production when he visited Moscow, he did go to the Taganka Theatre and he did get to meet with several Soviet artists. Like his influence by Schumann and the Bread and Puppet Theater, Sellars took from Lyubimov the sense that theatre can and should both resist commercial pressures and stand in opposition

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to large governmental forces. Despite the fact that he fought in the Red Army during the Second World War, Lyubimov became increasingly critical of the totalitarian nature of the Soviet regime. Because his productions frequently reflected this political stance, in 1980 all of Lyubimov’s productions were banned by the Soviet government and he was eventually stripped of his citizenship in 1984. Sellars’s interest in Lyubimov led him to discover Vsevolod Meyerhold, an avant-­garde director whom Lyubimov met and worked with in the 1930s. Sellars’s interest in Meyerhold became so intense that he even went on to write his Harvard University senior thesis on him. Meyerhold, a Russian actor-­ turned-director, who trained with Konstantin Stanislavsky early in his career, essentially turned away from Stanislavsky’s emphasis on naturalism and moved Russian theatre to a more stylized approach. As Jonathan Pitches explains: [Meyerhold] like Bertolt Brecht, did not want his spectators to focus their ‘eyes on the finish’ . . . but instead to engage in the material of the production in a consciously enquiring manner. For this reason, Meyerhold delighted in revealing the mechanics of the theatre. He filled his productions with self-­conscious theatricalities, arranging the order of the scenes in such a way that they might collide against one another rather than seamlessly fuse together. We might conclude from this that, in Meyerhold’s thinking, people’s lives are similarly unpredictable. They do not unfold in a smooth, organised way (as the naturalistic repertoire often suggested), but are multifaceted, problematic and surprising. PITCHES, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 3 The element of surprise in Meyerhold’s approach appealed to Peter Sellars immensely. He, too, wanted to make theatre that would proceed in unpredictable ways that could neither wash over the audience nor be ignored. Sellars loved the idea that the problematic nature of life (and human nature) could best be explored through problematic theatre.

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It is also easy to trace Sellars’s approach to theatre through Meyerhold’s promotion of specific aspects of stylized theatre. Meyerhold liked theatrical art forms in which: The emphasis is on the actor, working with minimal props and scenery. The spectator is compelled to use their imagination. The actors rely on physical plasticity and expression. The words of the playwright may be transformed by the director. Rhythm becomes uppermost in the director’s and the spectators’ minds. The look of the work is carefully constructed, like painting a picture. PITCHES, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 52 And finally, according to Meyerhold’s approach, a stylized theatre works on any playtext ‘from Aristophanes to Ibsen’ (Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 53). It is entirely possible to read almost all of these dictums as if they are describing one of Sellars’s Shakespearean productions. Sellars frequently works on a near bare stage; the audience is asked to do a lot of imaginative work; his productions are highly choreographed; Sellars approaches the work of the director as if he is a translator; and the productions are highly constructed in terms of a visual aesthetic (often with stark lighting that is akin to an early avant-­garde film technique). I would not necessarily describe Sellars’s final productions as rhythmic; this is his one large departure from Meyerhold’s approach. Nonetheless, it is easy to argue that Sellars soaked in Meyerhold’s dictums and has employed a stylized approach to Shakespeare throughout his theatrical career. Meyerhold is probably most well-­known for creating ‘biomechanics’, a process of actor training that focuses on technical mastery. As one of his students described,‘Biomechanical training might be compared to a pianist’s studies, to the practice of technique with Hanon exercises and Czerny études. Mastering

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the technical difficulties of the exercises and études does not provide the student with a prescription for the lyric energy necessary, let’s say, to perform a Chopin nocturne . . . yet he must master the techniques in order to master his art. Techniques arm the imagination. Biomechanics are Hanon exercises for actors’ (Garin,‘Working with Actors’, 41). According to Jonathan Pitches, Meyerhold asked his artists to ‘break down’ every piece of blocking ‘into its constituent parts’ in order to ‘eradicate anything superfluous’ so that ‘these actions [are performed and repeated] as if they are a reflex’ (Pitches, Vsevolod Meyerhold, 73). Sellars, especially early in his career, directed his actors in an extremely choreographed way. I think in those early days, Sellars worked as closely as he ever would with adopting a version of Meyerhold’s biomechanics. As a director who never strays far from music, especially the opera, Sellars was attracted to the way Meyerhold broke everything down into musical terms. Sellars said: Meyerhold turned for most of his life to music to solve the problem of how an abstract and choreographic stage also has the tremendous emotional resonance that Stanislavski was looking for but was sometimes elusive. Meyerhold called it ‘musical realism.’ quoted in TROUSDELL, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 73 But one needs an acting company to plumb the depths of the biomechanical process thoroughly; it is extremely challenging to employ a biomechanical approach if one is working with new actors on each new production. Again, it is interesting to think about the impact – at times very stark – of Peter Sellars’s lack of access to a steady company of actors. Sellars said that his approach to technique changed dramatically when ‘facing a different cast every two months’ (quoted in Jenkins, ‘Peter Sellars’, 48). Without a company that works collectively and over time on specific techniques and processes (and this makes

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me wonder what might have been if the trustees of the American National Theater had given Sellars more time to develop a company at the Kennedy Center in the early 1980s), Sellars has not been able to explore fully his indebtedness to and/or unique distinctions from Meyerhold. Rather, I think one must view Meyerhold’s influence on Sellars in slightly broader strokes. As Richard Trousdell argues: In fact, many would argue that the basic elements of Sellars’ directing style, including the provocative contrast he draws between text and setting and his use of nonpsychological gesture to advance ideas and themes, parallel Meyerhold’s pioneering work. It is Meyerhold’s example as an outspoken advocate of theatre’s social responsibility and aesthetic freedom in the face of repression and literalness that moves Sellars most deeply and offers him a healing model . . . TROUSDELL, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 73 Sellars saw in Meyerhold, who was eventually tortured and executed by the Soviet authorities when he was just sixty-­six years old, a model for the engaged arts. While it may seem extremely foreign to Westerners today, theatre has frequently been deemed a subversive art form that poses dire threats to governmental authorities. Meyerhold knew this and did not relent, and Sellars took that message to heart and it continues to inform his approach to theatre. Aside from Margo Lovelace, the artists that I have outlined as influences on Peter Sellars were dead or extremely distant, but this provides an extremely distorted view and potentially adds to the myth of the Man of Singular Genius. Yet, that is extremely far from the truth. In fact, Sellars frequently talks about the immense influence Elizabeth LeCompte had on him, and she became one of his collaborators. Speaking in 1984, Sellars said, ‘My favorite group working theatrically in America is The Wooster Group at the Performing Garage’ (quoted in Jenkins, ‘Peter Sellars’, 49). When Sellars was Artistic Director at the Boston Shakespeare Company, he invited The Wooster

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Group to preview their new work L.S.D. in April 1983 before its New York premiere in October. This residency was in part to help smooth over the legal tangles The Wooster Group were experiencing with Arthur Miller, who requested that they excise the portions of The Crucible that were incorporated into the show (Freedman, ‘Play Closed After Crucible Dispute’). Impressed with LeCompte’s work, Sellars even named her as one of his two Associate Directors at the American National Theater, and established a residency for The Wooster Group at the Free Theatre at the Kennedy Center. Reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post noted that this residency signalled the ‘theatre’s [new] ties with the avant-­ garde’ (Freedman, ‘Kennedy Center Has Plan for a National Theatre’) and ‘introduced a heady whiff of adventure to a city that has tended in the past to be theatrically conservative’ (Richards, ‘ANT & the Adventures of Peter Sellars’). By 1985, Sellars was working offsite with The Wooster Group on North Atlantic, and his praise for them at the time speaks volumes. Robert Andrews reported that the prospect of working with The Wooster Group was enough to make Sellars rub his hand and cackle with glee . . . ‘The Wooster Group, for my money, is really doing theater of the future,’ he says. ‘I always think I’m an old fogey, that my work is really old-­fashioned and washed up, whenever I see one of their shows, which I love. They spend a year working on each new piece, and so it has much more rehearsal than any show you’ve probably ever seen, which means it’s incredibly meticulous and carefully worked out. There are eight things to look at, at any given moment. There’s sound and there’s lights and it’s this total multimedia thing at the same time.’ Also, he says, there are ‘some shocking lapses of taste. Some of it’s so vulgar and obscene, just atrocious . . . the notion there’s a theater company that can still shock people, I think, is very impressive.’ ANDREWS, ‘Sellars Busy Plotting Guerrilla Warfare Against Bored Theatergoers’

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Sellars’s attraction to Elizabeth LeCompte’s work with The Wooster Group, then, was multifaceted. He was attracted to their avant-­garde approach; he was attracted to the fact that the group is actually a company that has the luxury of long-­ rehearsal periods (unlike commercial theatres); he was attracted to the way their productions ask the artists and audiences to work through many layers of media and meaning; and finally, he was attracted to their willingness to explore the obscene (again, unlike the content of shows in many commercial theatres). Richard Schechner started The Performance Group, a collective of performers, in 1967 in New York. In 1968 The Performance Group purchased The Performing Garage on Wooster Street in SoHo, New York. Elizabeth LeCompte joined The Performance Group in 1970 as Assistant Director for Schechner’s production of Commune (1971), and she assisted him on a number of productions, even performing in a few as well. LeCompte’s experiences with Schechner’s approach led her to develop a style that was distinct from his. ‘Schechner’s methodology primarily placed an emphasis on the performer’s emotional and psychological state as a mode of communication’, and through his ‘Environmental Theater’ he ‘sought to break through what he considered to be the illusory and aesthetic condition of theater itself in order to make contact with the more real experience that might arise through a genuine social exchange between performer and spectator’ (Quick, The Wooster Group Work Book, 9). LeCompte, in contrast, was beginning to think about the performer as someone who must work through an ‘architectonic structure’ in which the ‘audience is always spatially separated from the scenic landscapes that she constructs’ (Quick, The Wooster Group Work Book, 9). She conceived works as being built within ‘a shifting array of frameworks in which autobiography, found materials, documentary and fictional texts, [and] improvised and reconstructed action’ (Quick, The Wooster Group Work Book, 9). And she employed multiple media at once – video, recorded sounds, pictures and various

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choreographies – to explore the mediated nature of both life in general and performance in particular. Along with Spalding Gray, Ron Vawter, Libby Howes, Willem Defoe, Jim Clayburgh, Peyton Smith and Kate Valk, Elizabeth LeCompte formed The Wooster Group within The Performance Group in 1975. And when The Performance Group formally disbanded in 1980, the ownership of The Performance Garage passed to The Wooster Group. David Savran begins his seminal book on the group by arguing,‘Among producers of experimental theatre in the 1970s and 1980s, the Wooster Group is unique for its combination of aesthetic and political radicalism with intellectual rigor’ (Savran, Breaking the Rules, 1). The Wooster Group has become most well known for the way their productions re-­imagine classical texts (by Gertrude Stein, Arthur Miller, Francesco Cavalli, William Shakespeare and others), juxtapose them with various texts from the popular media (lesbian S&M films, blackface minstrelsy, Electronovision, John Wayne films and many others), and interweave personal narratives into a performance that is highly mediated. The members of The Wooster Group now routinely wear ear pieces into which various sound inspirations are played, including directions from Elizabeth LeCompte. Frances McDormand, the American film actress, told a reporter in 2007, ‘She’s always talking through it, keeping at you, throwing you off balance, which is how she likes you to be, onstage’ (quoted in Kramer, ‘Experimental Journey’). And LeCompte confirmed, ‘When I direct, it’s not natural; it’s a performance’ (quoted in Kramer, ‘Experimental Journey’). The Wooster Group’s production of Hamlet in 2007, for example, was described as an archeological ‘reconstruct[ion of] a hypothetical theatre piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film’. Here’s the programme note in full: Richard Burton’s Hamlet, a 1964 Broadway production, was recorded in live performance from 17 camera angles and edited into a film that was shown for only two days in 2000 movie houses across the United States.

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The idea of bringing a live theatre experience to thousands of simultaneous viewers in different cities was trumpeted as a new form called ‘Theatrofilm,’ made possible through ‘the miracle of Electronovision.’ Our Hamlet attempts to reverse the process, reconstructing a hypothetical theatre piece from the fragmentary evidence of the edited film, like an archeologist inferring a temple from a collection of ruins. Channeling the ghost of the legendary 1964 performance, we descend into a kind of madness, intentionally replacing our own spirit with the spirit of another. The Wooster Group, ‘The Wooster Group Hamlet’ As Thomas Cartelli argues, the massive edits that the group performed on the Burton film precludes the staging of a side-­by-side dialogue with the Burton film by (literally) opening the film up for the Wooster actors themselves to displace, enter into, colonize, speak over and re-­inhabit . . . the Group more often than not surrogates its rehearsal of the 1964 Hamlet to its re-­edited version of that film, thereby doubly displacing the 1964 Hamlet and making ghosts of the actors it sets out to channel. CARTELLI, ‘Channeling the Ghosts’, 150 In my estimation, though, this was part of the intent of the production; it was part of the ‘madness’ into which the group was inspired to traverse by LeCompte. The Wooster Group, therefore, asks a great deal of its audience. We are expected to understand Hamlet, and its themes of displacement, through a massive remediation that is performed before us with both the Burton film and the live Wooster actors visible (and at times aurally) available. As Jane Kramer writes in her profile of Elizabeth LeCompte in The New Yorker, such a complex bit of theatre does not

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happen in the normal five-­week rehearsal period that commercial theatre allows. Rather, The Wooster Group routinely works for years on projects. Kramer admits, ‘I started following [The Wooster Group] in the spring of 2006, hoping to catch a full cycle of the LeCompte process, [but it] had actually begun two years earlier’ (Kramer, ‘Experimental Journey’). What has truly enabled The Wooster Group’s complex approach to experimental theatre is their collective ownership of Performance Garage. Andrew Quick explains: On simple economic grounds, it would be commercially impossible to rent spaces for the lengthy rehearsal periods that the methodology of constructing the work demands . . . The everyday use of the space permits the Group to pursue a form of practice that is based on problem solving, on being able continually to layer and re-­organize the material over the required time it takes to complete a work. It allows LeCompte to gather a core group of collaborators that can participate and share in a history of making performance that can run for years . . . QUICK, The Wooster Group Work Book, 10 Richard Schechner had amazing foresight to purchase the Performance Garage as a collective in 1968 when real estate in the downtown neighbourhood of SoHo was cheap, and this foresight has enabled The Wooster Group, the only surviving party of that collection, to survive, thrive and innovate. I have taken the liberty to linger on the extraordinarily unique processes and productions that The Wooster Group stages not only because Peter Sellars was an early admirer and collaborator, but also because their situation offers such a stark contrast with Sellars’s. The Wooster Group has had a fairly consistent group of core members since its inception. It is a stable company that works together almost daily – with several members, including LeCompte, living across the street from the Performing Garage. LeCompte can get the actors to do extraordinary things – like listening to two different aural/

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verbal feeds while performing lines from Shakespeare – because they consistently hone their craft and work towards creating new productions day after day, year after year. Sellars frequently wants to stage productions that are as intellectually inventive and technically difficult as The Wooster Group’s productions, and I think his Merchant of Venice in Chicago in 1994 is an excellent example, with its use of multiple video monitors and actors who frequently performed in stylized ways, but his rehearsal time was limited. Despite the fact that Sellars built in a two-­week workshop in New York before the actors convened at the Goodman in Chicago, and despite the fact that the actors were encouraged to read passages aloud from Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Eduardo Galeano, Manning Marable, Adrienne Rich and Xavier Villaurrutia, the actors were not a company; they did not have wells of experience working with Sellars and/or each other to draw upon; most had not performed in any professional productions of Shakespeare before; and most had not been asked to think through the riots in Los Angeles, California, contemporary capitalism and the writings of Franz Fanon either! In other words, Sellars sought to create a production that was as technically layered and intellectually complex as the ones The Wooster Group produces, but he was attempting to achieve their craft, intellectualism and social, political and personal investment in a matter of weeks. This was a large task to take on, and it was also a large ask to make of itinerant actors who are working in commercial theatre. Fascinatingly, the Artistic Board that Peter Sellars assembled for the American National Theater in Washington, DC, contained many artists, like Elizabeth LeCompte, who created avant-­garde theatre companies: Liviu Ciulei, the Artistic Director of the Tyrone Guthrie Theatre in Minneapolis, Minnesota; Richard Foreman, the Founder and Director of the Ontological-Hysteric Theater in New York; Ellen Stewart, the Founder and Director of La Mama Experimental Theater Club in New York; and Gary Sinise, the Co-Founder and Co-Artistic Director of the Steppenwolf Theater in Chicago, Illinois (ANT,

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‘Artistic Board’). It was clear that in 1984, when Sellars became the Artistic Director of the American National Theatre, he was looking to fellow artists who created physical spaces for companies of artists in which they could both practice the craft of performance and create new forms of theatrical expression. Since the loss of that position, Sellars has not had the opportunity (and perhaps not the desire either) to work with a steady company of artists.

Categorizing Sellars? Artistic Movements The Nobel Prize-­winning black American novelist, Toni Morrison, introduced Peter Sellars when he delivered the Belknap Lecture at Princeton University in 1996 in the following way: His work has always displayed both safety and danger, both a haven of the recognizable and the uncharted terrain of the defamiliarized . . . His deeply held conviction that profound art, whatever its date or origin, is always contemporary, permits us fresh access to that nostrum where he chips away at the encrustations of time and exposes the nostrum’s truth. quoted in DELGADO, ‘Making Theatre, Making a Society’, 204 Morrison’s introduction, while beautiful, evocative and accurate, is stunning and provocative in its refusal to name, categorize or identify Sellars’s work with a specific artistic style or movement. So how does one categorize the artist and/or aesthetic movements that Peter Sellars’s Shakespearean work traverses? Is he avant-­garde, like the artists he so admires? Does the fact that all of his Shakespearean productions have taken place in

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commercial theatres and art festivals matter? Interviewing Sellars for the influential collection Directors/Directing, Christopher Innes claims that, ‘Sellars has his roots in the modern American avant-­garde’, but unlike many avant-­garde artists Sellars’s inspiration for any given production almost always begins with a ‘specific political reference’ (Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 206). While his work can at times touch on naturalism, Innes argues, ultimately ‘Sellars’s use of naturalism is a form of social commentary, being openly incongruous or deceptive’ (Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 207). Despite the fact that many critics, especially early in his career, attempted to pigeon-­hole Sellars into one artistic camp, usually the experimental or avant-­garde, he consistently refers to his work as ‘multivocal’. For instance, when asked about his ‘eclecticism’, Sellars says: The things I love: Wagner and Symbolist theatre and all the theatre that I like to imagine from the 1890s to about 1910: that strange, eerie, nocturnal, Symbolist theatre; and the early work of Bob Wilson, which I grew up with – this beautiful sense of time, of space, of care of walking, care of a small gesture, in fact, holding a large secret. All of that can be seen in Noh – and I was particularly interested in the temple performances [in Japan] – in the performances that were part of a larger ritual. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 211 And after Sellars visited China, he also became interested in Kunshu opera performance styles, in which singing, dancing, stylized movement and acrobatics merge together. From this, one might be tempted to label Peter Sellars as a postmodern director, one who mixes references and styles from high culture and low culture, Western traditions with ancient Eastern ones, classical texts and contemporary mise en scène. Yet, it is safe to argue that the element of pastiche that is so prevalent in postmodernist productions is almost entirely

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absent from Sellars’s aesthetic; his productions are earnest explorations of the multivocal. And he is interested in the precise moments when the multivocal nature of eclecticism fails. As he explains about his production of Don Giovanni that was set in Spanish Harlem (first performed at the Pepsico SummerFare in Purchase, New York in 1987): But . . . one thing people didn’t quite understand was that I was deliberately using television images and filtering Mozart through them; and, at a certain point, they can no longer bear the strain and they explode. I love that. I love taking these images that we’re surrounded by and really testing them and pushing them to an extreme where we realise these images aren’t capacious enough for everything we’re feeling, everything we’re thinking, everything we’re hoping for. And they need to be exploded, and we have to go beyond that. That’s the hope. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 221 Like Peter Brook before him, Peter Sellars has been accused of appropriating the performance styles and approaches of other cultures (i.e., there have been postcolonial critiques of Sellars’s approach). But I think this critique misses the mark precisely because Sellars is asking the audience to interrogate the cultural collisions that occur on his stages. He never presents different cultural traditions in a seamless, appropriative fashion. Rather, he shows juxtaposition for exactly what it is – the rubbing together of different styles, voices, and cultural traditions that sometimes combust. Yet what truly sets apart Peter Sellars’s approach to his work from most avant-­garde and experimental directors working in the US and the UK is his unwavering belief that theatre is a place for two specific lofty aspirations: political transformation and spiritual transformation. Sellars routinely explains that he believes that theatre 1) trains audiences to be citizens in a democracy, and 2) invites audiences to experience

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‘moments of illumination and enlightenment’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 47). In terms of democracy, Sellars has periodically returned to staging Greek dramas because, ‘Every Greek play is about women, children, and foreigners [i.e., non-Greek citizens]. So the idea [is] that you’re actually creating this special sound space, listening space, for the voices that are not heard in the senate, for exactly the voices that have been ignored in the corridors of power’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 37). In the preface to Emma Cox’s 2014 book Theatre & Migration, Sellars writes, ‘The act of making theatre is the act of recognizing, affirming, extending, imagining, and re-­affirming a community, or, possibly, communities. Metaphorically at first, and then literally and tangibly, theatre is the creation of newly shared space on Earth’ (Sellars, ‘Foreword’, Theatre & Migration, xii). The multivocal nature of theatre is something that Sellars cherishes not simply as an aspirational ideal, but rather as an attainable function of the art form itself. The fact that theatre forces one to hear multiple voices and see multiple viewpoints, for Sellars, enables audiences to be informed voters, jurors and citizens. He says of theatre: Maybe there has to be something else in order to sustain a democracy: the idea of what it takes to cultivate a voice, the idea of what it takes not only to cultivate a voice, but multiple voices, the idea of what happens when you have multiple voices . . . you end up somewhere you couldn’t have imagined because of all the participation. SELLARS, Getting Real, 5 For Sellars, the great frustration is that so many other artists choose not to seize the political nature of theatre. A deeply religious man, Sellars also places himself and his theatrical work outside the traditional secular borders of avant-­garde artists and art works because he wants his theatre to invite spiritual reflection and spiritualism itself. For Sellars,

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theatre is tied to the religious tradition of extending the moment of realization. He explains: In theatre, we have those two time frames. We have the time frame of generations, of centuries, of voices of ancestors, and we have the time frame of this instant. Sanskrit theatre really has a whole poetics of the instant of realization: that in your life, the most important things that have ever happened to you, whether it’s falling in love, or suddenly understanding something in the world, in fact, is an instant. It’s a single moment of realization. What spiritual practice is, all over the world, is how to sustain that instant. The practice of theatre is so connected to spiritual practice. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 50 If one believes that theatre – like all spiritual practices – can actually extend the ‘single moment of realization’, then the political is not far off either; the spiritual and the political can become deeply entwined. The theatre becomes a place of the highest aspiration. In fact, the courses Professor Peter Sellars teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles, often explore these twin practices. Looking at different historical moments, Sellars has his students trace ‘these moments where illumination and enlightenment are part of the culture’, asking ‘In what way is the culture transformed through a moment of spiritual aspiration and accomplishment which creates a body of art that leaves its mark and creates a culture where these questions can be opened?’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 47). The artist that takes this stance may produce work that looks postmodern or avant-­garde, but his/her inspiration and aspiration will be wholly distinct from the artist whose stance is a secular one. Sellars sees his art as offering new forms of agency. He eschews art that ‘deprives everyone of that Martin Luther King ability to do the impossible. We are called

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to this planet to do the impossible, every day’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 50).

Conclusion Don Shewey, an astute critic of Peter Sellars who has engaged with Sellars’s work over the course of his career, argues that Sellars should be viewed as a post-­avant-­garde artist. Shewey reads the generation working just before Sellars (‘the Michael Bennetts and the Tommy Tunes, the JoAnne Akilaitises and Elizabeth LeComptes, all in roughly the same age and talent bracket’ [Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 265–6]) as having to decide whether they would do commercial theatre or avant-­ garde theatre; and he reads Sellars’s eclecticism as a reaction against that artificial split. Shewey writes, ‘His career is littered with mixed signals and multiple ambitions, a sense of two roads travelled at the same time’ (Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 267). I agree with Shewey’s assessment that Peter Sellars’s work is marked by an eclecticism that is non-­binary, but I want to push his argument a bit further to claim that Sellars’s political and spiritual vision for theatre points to something other than an artist working in ‘an era of consolidation’, as Shewey suggests (Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 265). While Shewey aligns Sellars with Mark Morris in dance and the Kronos Quartet in music (and those artists are wonderful company to be counted among), I think Sellars is working in a longer tradition. Sellars is actually a Renaissance Man, who like Shakespeare believes it is important to juggle the sacred and the profane, the political and the passionate, the modern and the mystical. Like Shakespeare’s late plays, the Romances, Sellars’s productions invite illogical explosions of styles, belief systems, and content, performed in a non-­naturalistic stylized manner, in the hopes of exploring the transcendent. But unlike Shakespeare, and many of Sellars’s avant-garde contemporaries, Peter Sellars has not had the benefit of

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working with a stable acting company that could help him realize these lofty theatrical aspirations consistently over time. And this also means that Sellars has not had the benefit of a stable audience that could partner with him in multivocal responses that occur over time. After all, we now believe that Shakespeare’s innovations in his late plays – Cymbeline, Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest – occurred through collaborations with new and younger writers, a mature acting company, and an audience that had grown up on the thing he helped create – secular theatre. Peter Sellars has not had these benefits; nonetheless, he and his theatrical work remain hopeful, forward-­looking, and deeply engaged politically and spiritually.

2 Purpose, Process, Technique

As early as 1984, when Peter Sellars was only twenty-­seven years old, he joked with a reporter that he could no longer be considered a ‘wunderkind’ both because he was too old and because ‘Most of my productions are not innovative at all . . . most of my ideas come from five productions back’ (quoted in Elsasser, ‘A National Theater, No Less’). A year later, he confirmed that he had a ‘definite, identifiable Peter Sellars vocabulary that won’t change’ (Sullivan, ‘Peter Sellars’). So, what exactly is the performance language of Peter Sellars, and how does that manifest itself in the theatrical purpose, process, and techniques he employs for staging Shakespeare? While the previous two chapters worked to contextualize Peter Sellars within the historic moments and artistic movements he lived and worked within, the next three chapters provide a more in-­ depth analysis of his stage language and craft. This chapter, in particular, analyses Sellars’s views on theatrical purpose, process and technique from inception to production. In his 1991 article, Don Shewey identifies several key components that frequently appear in a Peter Sellars production: the significant role of music, non-­traditional casting, ‘translation, both as a literary form and as a method of critical interpretation’, expressionistic lighting, referential density, religiosity, and an ‘insistence that everyone – including

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the director, the performers, and designers, and especially the audience – rise to the challenge a work of art poses’ (Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 269–75). To this list, I will add that Sellars’s productions are frequently media saturated with longer-­than-average running times (typically four hours). I have pulled out some of these components for extended analyses (non-­traditional casting will be explored in Chapter 3, and Chapter 4 looks closely at the challenges posed to audiences), but I have not organized the remaining chapters according to these components. Rather, as this is a project that zooms in to focus on Sellars’s work with Shakespeare, I begin with an examination of Sellars’s views on the purpose of theatre. From there I analyse Sellars’s relationship with Shakespeare, which naturally leads to an analysis of his dramaturgical work on Shakespeare’s texts. As Sellars’s approach to the Shakespearean text is unique, I also look closely at the way he works with his actors on building both the meaning and the technique. Finally, I conclude by looking at Sellars’s recent turn to creating paratheatrical experiences that extend the performance event.

Why Theatre? Richard Pettengill, the dramaturg at the Goodman Theatre in Chicago, Illinois, recounts asking why Peter Sellars chose to direct The Merchant of Venice at his theatre in 1994. Sellars, who had moved to California in the late 1980s, witnessed the horrors of the beating of Rodney King by four white police officers, the subsequent acquittal of those police officers, and the racial uprising that occurred from 29 April to 4 May 1992, in which over fifty people were killed, 2,000 injured, 11,000 arrested, and $1 billion of damages were sustained throughout the city (Los Angeles Times Staff, ‘The L.A. Riots’). The physical, emotional and psychological scars on the city of Los Angeles and its inhabitants were unprecedented, and Peter Sellars could not turn away from that. Thus, he explained:

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The level of rhetoric was so high on all sides [in the LA arts community], and I remember the real need to search for somebody who used words with a certain level of precision. I think that’s when I felt ‘Okay, let’s do Shakespeare’, because he is somebody who uses words with a kind of exactitude that one rarely encounters. But also Shakespeare has this amazing gift of being head-­on for most violent and dysfunctional elements of society, of presenting them not groomed or scaled back. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 301–2 I start with this anecdote because it reveals so much about Peter Sellars’s approach to theatre. First always for Sellars is the world and the current events around him. He does not begin with an idea, nor does he begin with a burning desire to direct a specific play. Rather, his approach is responsive; he uses theatre as a way to respond to the most pressing issues he sees in the world. In 1994, the violent destruction of South Central Los Angeles and the economic underpinnings of racial disparity in the United States were the issues that he wanted and needed the arts to explore. Shakespeare, as Sellars explains it, provided the ‘exactitude’ that he found missing in the arts community’s response. Peter Sellars, then, never approaches theatre as entertainment. One of Sellars’s core beliefs is that theatre is a site for political engagement – that theatre itself is political. Moreover, he intends for all of his theatrical productions to be explorations in the unique experience of American life; his works respond to the culture, history, politics and embodied experiences of those living in the United States. He claims: All of my projects rehearse initially in America. Even if we can’t show them in America I have to make them there because they’re American. Everyone in the cast is an American, even though they come from many different

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places. These are Americans dealing with their own future and the issues in their own lives. All of my shows are about that. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 39 Deeply invested in exploring and healing American cultural dilemmas, Sellars approaches each of his Shakespearean productions as being rooted in that experience. Although written in 1985, the ‘Statement of Purpose’ released by the American National Theater reveals Sellars’s ongoing, deeply held belief that theatre is vital to the cultivation of American democracy. As I mentioned in the introduction to this project, the penultimate paragraph of the statement reads: In 1985[,] we hope for a theater that has a buzz, a hum, a spirit of inquiry, and demands attention in the city where the future of the country and the fate of the world are being discussed and decided. We hope for a theater that is a training ground for citizenship, a preparation for jury-­duty, and a primer in international affairs, where the importance of a single human gesture and its potential massiveness can be felt. We hope for a theater of difficulty, delight, and drastic measures, philosophical convolutions, one-­liners, triple entendres and tentative ententes, that puts the American public in direct contact with the culture that they own and must care for and the history that is instantly their lives and eventually the story of a nation. ANT, ‘Statement of Purpose’, 1 Although this document does not officially have an author listed, it seems clear to me that these words are Peter Sellars’s own. The paragraph contains so many of the ideals that Sellars continues to hold dear. First, the ANT’s ‘Statement of Purpose’ espouses the idea that theatre is a place that contains and enables ‘a spirit of

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inquiry’. It is not a place for answers. Sellars actually eschews theatre that is overly didactic, theatre that provides a ready-­ made answer. He would rather his audiences leave challenged, annoyed, and even confused as long as the theatrical experience provides the impetus for deeper reflection. In a 1997 lecture, Sellars explained: [O]ne does the work [of theatre] in order to generate discussion, you know, not to conclude a discussion. So the fact that people leave those works having a lot to talk about is very, very important to me. And, in fact, that is our task. I do deliberately create a set of things that are not only open ended, but in many cases mutually contradictory, so that they do create a set of tensions that are unresolved by the audience as of final curtain. SELLARS, Getting Real, 23 Sellars’s unwavering belief that theatre should challenge and unnerve, of course, sits in direct opposition to the impetus behind most commercial theatre, which is to entertain, both in the sense that it is light-­hearted and in the sense that it is a bubble in which one escapes from the ‘real’ world. Escapism in theatre is anathema to Sellars, who sees theatre’s raison d’être as providing a place for collective inquiry. The belief that theatre should facilitate collective inquiry is closely tied to the second ideal espoused in ANT’s ‘Statement of Purpose’: that theatre should be a ‘training ground for citizenship’. If theatre is collective inquiry, then it also provides an excellent location for training and testing democracy, a system in which every voice can and should be heard. Sellars argues that one of the most important things about Greek theatre is theatre as part of government, theater as part of a democracy, theatre as one of the primary cornerstone institutions of democracy. Trying to give citizens both the information they

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need to vote in a way that has some depth of perception and at the same time has them hear voices they don’t normally hear . . . One of the most powerful images of Greek theatre is this giant ear carved into the side of a mountain – a listening place. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 36–7 In fact, Sellars takes this argument one step further by arguing that theatre is central to training citizens for voting, jury duty and/or public service because theatre contains complexity, while American politicians have largely forsaken complexity for simplistic soundbites. He argues, ‘Theatre really is the only place left for politics. In politics now, candidates really can’t speak with much complexity. Everybody’s simplifying the issues and pretending they’re a little simpler than we all really know they are. Everything gets boiled down to a slogan. And what I can do in theater is present a political idea in its complexity again. I don’t have to hope everybody loves me’ (quoted in Michaelson, ‘Director Sellars’). For Sellars, then, theatre should provide a condition in which the audience is encouraged to develop a greater facility with complexity. Another of Peter Sellars’s ideals expressed in ANT’s ‘Statement of Purpose’ is that theatre creates the situation in which ‘the importance of a single human gesture and its potential massiveness can be felt’. Sellars explains that he was highly influenced by the early works of the American avant-­ garde dancer-­turned-director, Robert Wilson, who explored the ways that stylized movement could be made to contain larger cultural, political and even spiritual meanings (‘this beautiful sense of time, of space, of care of walking, care of a small gesture, in fact, holding a large secret’ [quoted in Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 211]). As I wrote in the previous chapter, Sellars’s belief that theatre should open the audience to larger spiritual revelations is always at the forefront of his artistic work. Talking about his work with

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Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré on the response play to William Shakespeare’s Othello, Sellars invokes the spiritual states that can be achieved in séances or meditation. When the world is filled with ‘fake political theater’, one needs to be allowed to meditate on the relationship between a single human gesture and the potential massiveness it may invite. ‘One of the roles of theater at the moment is actually to make a place where there isn’t drama . . . Where finally you can breathe, you can think, you can reflect and you can feel’ (quoted in Brower, ‘Othello is Re-Imagined’). And finally, the ANT’s ‘Statement of Purpose’ ends with a rejoinder that theatre should make visible to the American audiences ‘the history that is instantly their lives and eventually the story of a nation’; that is, theatre should invite a type of spiritual state of mind that allows the revelation of the instant to extend over a much longer timeframe. In Sellars’s approach, theatre operates in both time frames (‘We have the time frame of generations, of centuries, of voices of ancestors, and we have the time frame of this instant’), and theatre should invite the audience to meditate on both time frames (‘What spiritual practice is, all over the world, is how to sustain that instant [of revelation]. The practice of theatre is so connected to spiritual practice’) (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 50). Ultimately, this theatrical invitation to ponder the instant alongside the epic, as Sellars sees it, is both political and spiritual, and is, therefore, of vital necessity. ‘The solutions will have to be creative solutions. And humane solutions . . . It is hopeful and humbling to see creative people engaging the question. The act of making theatre is the act of recognizing, affirming, extending, imagining, and re-­affirming a community or, possibly, communities’ (Sellars, ‘Foreword’, Theatre & Migration, xii). Theatre, then, should operate from an assumption that our sense of community, belonging and even humanity can expand. This is not empty rhetoric for Peter Sellars. He practises the art of theatre-­making because he wants to change the world.

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Why Shakespeare? Keeping in mind the ideals espoused above – that theatre should be a space for inquiry; that theatre should be a training ground for participating in a democracy; that theatre should invite the audience to access and ponder the massive from the small gesture; and that theatre should operate in both the instant of revelation and the longue durée of history – one can see why Peter Sellars has been so attracted to the works of William Shakespeare. According to Sellars, in fact, Shakespeare provides a yardstick for measuring the ‘epic’ in the everyday. He explains the difference between Shakespeare and most playwrights working in the twenty-­first century in this way: I think the prevalence of film and television [has] created a certain type of writing, and a certain view of a human being, what it means to be a person, and what the measure of a man or woman is. Someone like Euripides or Shakespeare [is] using a very different yardstick. So the measure of a single human being is immense. It’s, in fact, epic. We have very few writers right now that are responding to the epic level. Meanwhile, human beings’ lives are epic. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 49 As an artist who is attracted to revealing, exploring and representing the moments of the epic in the everyday, Sellars sees Shakespeare as one of the writers who represents that most palpably and, in fact, pressingly. Sellars argues that Shakespeare’s plays have endured after 400 years precisely because Shakespeare uncovers the epic moments, situations and decisions that all of humanity faces on a daily basis. One of the narrative styles that Sellars admires and adapts from Shakespeare is his use of juxtaposition and anachronism. While Sellars is often praised for updating the classics, it is clear that he sees the impetus for this style as something that is

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already always written into Shakespeare’s plays. Sellars explains: I have a genuine appreciation for the concept of novelty, of a novelty act, of what novelty means, how a huge part of art history and theater history is novelty. The notion that people come and expect something wild, and you have it waiting for them. You make sure that there’s going to be something for them to talk about, some aspect of novelty. And Shakespeare wrote that into the plays. Each play has its surprises. And usually in Shakespeare its anachronistic. There is something that strikes his audiences as a weird thing to have in the middle of a Roman play. Clocks in Julius Caesar is a famous example. There is a deliberate slip made that undercuts the notion that we’re talking about something that is long ago and far away. quoted in JENKINS, ‘Peter Sellars’, 49 Sellars finds enough experimentation in Shakespeare’s plays to see them as being inspirational and as providing a type of theoretical frame for his own approach to audiences. As someone who was steeped in Bertolt Brecht’s theories and practices, it is not surprising that Sellars looked to William Shakespeare for inspiration. Brecht himself was well versed in Shakespeare, wrote a great deal about his understanding of Shakespeare, and most often referred to Shakespeare’s work as ‘epic’ and ‘dialectical’ (Heinemann, ‘How Brecht Read Shakespeare’, 228). These are precisely the terms that Sellars would appreciate and go on to employ about Shakespeare. Don Shewey also argues that Sellars was attracted to Shakespeare’s work precisely because his plays hinge on narrative. Positioning Sellars against the avant-­garde artists who abstained from narrative, Shewey writes that Sellars’s ‘need/desire for Shakespeare is the search for a new voice/ eloquence/articulation in response to the anti-­narrative, non-­ linear work of the great avant-­gardists of the 1970s ([Richard] Foreman, [Robert] Wilson, Mabou Mines, Wooster Group)’

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(Shewey, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 278). This argument, I think, is compelling precisely because of what Sellars finds attractive in Shakespeare, as I demonstrate above; Sellars looks to Shakespeare for the epic in the everyday. This desire cannot be fulfilled by anti-­narrative pieces. It is built on the supposition that narratives are necessary, important, powerful and potentially life- and history-­altering. This is why the young Peter Sellars pledged that he would direct at least one opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and one play by William Shakespeare each year in his life. For Sellars, Mozart and Shakespeare both understood and manipulated the transformative power of a good narrative. Yet Sellars has a uniquely American take on William Shakespeare – an American take that renders William Shakespeare as a uniquely American playwright. This is an idea that Sellars has espoused throughout his career. For example, in a 1998 interview, Sellars explains his belief in pragmatic terms – Shakespeare has always been popular in the United States so, therefore, he should be understood and approached as an American author. ‘Shakespeare is still the most produced playwright in America, so I consider him an American author, because clearly there’s something there that America responds to very deeply, and always did – in the 19th century these touring companies were doing Shakespeare in the mining camps’ (quoted in Bates, ‘Directing a National Consciousness’, 87). In fact, Sellars’s most recent opera, Girls of the Golden West (music by John Adams with a libretto by Peter Sellars), which is set in the 1850s Gold Rush in California, contains a scene with a touring Shakespeare company in a mining camp (San Francisco Opera, ‘Press Release’). The American fascination with Shakespeare extends back to its colonial days, and Sellars uses this long history to bolster his argument that Shakespeare is American. As Lawrence Levine argued, Americans approached Shakespeare as a form of popular, even low-­brow, culture until the middle of the nineteenth century, and this argument has influenced Sellars’s thinking about and approach to

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Shakespeare significantly (Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 13–81). In many ways, one could interpret Sellars’s approach to Shakespeare as a type of reclamation of that popular/populist past. He has made this stance explicit not only in his rhetoric about the playwright and the plays, but also in the ways he directs Shakespeare. For instance, as we have seen, he told Bill Moyers that ‘our audience has been taught that Shakespeare is not theirs. Our audience has been taught that Shakespeare belongs to the British and to the Royal Shakespeare Company’, and Sellars interprets that lesson as both misleading and dangerous (quoted in Moyers, ‘Peter Sellars’). Sellars has also said, ‘the Royal Shakespeare Company is not exactly what I need when I get up in the morning’ (quoted in Michaelson, ‘Director Sellars’). This stance comes from the fact that he is ‘not interested very much by something that’s “official culture” ’ (quoted in Michaelson, ‘Director Sellars’). Thus, his desire to reclaim William Shakespeare as an American author stems from a belief that Shakespeare’s populism was always based in opposition to the authority and ‘official’ status of British Shakespearean interpretations and productions. Understanding this, one can see why Sellars was so adamant about making Shakespeare a centrally positioned author within the American National Theater that he led in Washington, DC. In the ANT materials the verbs that Sellars used to describe why Shakespeare would be included in a national American theatre are revealing: he was going to ‘reread’, ‘reclaim’, and ‘reestablish’ Shakespeare as ‘an American playwright’ in the ‘American experience’ (ANT, ‘The Future’; ANT, ‘Shakespeare’s Henry IV Part I’; ANT, ‘ANT’s First Year’). For Sellars, this reclamation is a political stance that sets itself up in opposition to ‘official culture’. Peter Sellars’s 1980 production of King Lear on the Mainstage at the Loeb Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for instance, exemplifies his approach to theatre and to Shakespeare. When Sellars arrived at Harvard University in 1976, the Boston area was in the grips of all-­out crisis, which frequently erupted into violent street riots, over the

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court-­ordered desegregation of the Boston public schools. Just a few months before Sellars began studying at Harvard, the Pulitzer Prize-­winning photograph by Stanley Forman, ‘The Soiling of Old Glory’, was featured first on the cover of the Boston Herald American and then ran in several national newspapers the following day. The image shows the white teenager Joseph Rakes attempting to impale a black man in a three-­piece suit, the civil rights lawyer Ted Landsmark, with the American flag on a full-­length flagpole. Forman’s image from the street riot in Boston on 5 April 1976 came to emblematize the city’s racial tensions in the 1970s and 1980s (Masur, The Soiling of Old Glory). The image visually captured the sense that white Bostonians could not see black Bostonians as Americans; to white Bostonians, theirs was a flag to bludgeon out difference. Sellars lived in and among these tensions during his four years at Harvard University, and he wanted to find a way to explore and process the dysfunctional ways Americans addressed race and class at that time. King Lear may not seem like the most obvious choice, but Sellars’s production forced the audience to face a scale of empire that was smaller and uniquely American. King Lear, who (according to Sellars’s original plan) was to be performed by the black street-­ performer Brother Blue, entered the stage in a Lincoln Continental, an American car that symbolized the desire for upward mobility and the largesse of American luxury, wearing a full-­length fur coat and sunglasses. While Lear’s ‘court’ looked like a type of Wall Street coterie at the beginning of the production, Lear’s world shrank as the production went on so that he was left with only his car. Sellars’s idea was that the audience would have to rethink the myriad black homeless men they encountered on their way to the theatre; some of those men might have stories similar to Lear’s; some of those men’s lives might be as tragic as Lear’s; and some of those men’s stories might be as universal and epic as Lear’s. In fact, Sellars’s production invited the audience to wonder what would have happened to the black lawyer in the

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photograph ‘The Soiling of Old Glory’ if his white assailant had succeeded in impaling him with the American flag. Might his life have spiralled in ways that end with him living in a Lincoln Continental on the streets of Boston? Why do we not instinctively see black homeless men as King Lears? Sellars’s drive to direct, then, always stems from a political impulse. Sellars does not begin by choosing a play; instead, he begins by asking a question and then searching for a play that allows that question to be explored in interesting and complex ways. Another of Peter Sellars’s uniquely American approaches to Shakespeare is his focus on the sound of Shakespeare’s language and poetry in American mouths with various American accents. Part of what makes Shakespeare an important American author in Sellars’s mind is the relationship between the sound of the Shakespeare’s poetry, the poetry of the King James Bible, and the black American churches that have used, and continue to use, the King James Bible. It is precisely the juxtaposition of an older Elizabethan and Jacobean poetic rhetoric and the black American poetics of liberation that fascinates Sellars. While there is much to praise in Shakespeare’s poetry in and of itself, Sellars believes that the poetry is heightened and complexified when placed within an explicitly political, liberationist context. So Sellars claims that the black church ‘has actually kept Shakespeare alive’ through its use of ‘the language of the King James Bible as transmuted’ in black American English and accents (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 45). He continues: Keeping the rhythms of Shakespeare alive and rolling and powerful, and the idea of that expressive language being itself an act of liberation. Those are the actual lines to trace in American culture: the profound liberation of white culture by its interaction with black culture. That is where the rhetoric is lifted and transformed to another place. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 45

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American culture, then, is a type of funhouse hall of mirrors in which various populations borrow, appropriate, and politicize older forms. The black church appropriates ‘the rhythms of Shakespeare’ into its poetics of liberation; white culture experiences ‘expressive [poetic] language’ as an act of liberation from black preachers like Martin Luther King, Jr; and Americans save Shakespeare from being a museum piece about the dustbin of history by lifting and transforming his language into something political, relevant and of the moment. Thus, Sellars makes it clear that his Shakespearean productions should sound American. Forswearing Received Pronunciation (RP), otherwise known as Standard English in the United Kingdom, Sellars wants to hear his Shakespeare in a mixture of American accents (for a good introduction to RP, see Crystal and Crystal, You Say Potato). Sellars says that his productions don’t have a uniform sound because we don’t live in a period when people have uniform lives. The whole point is that somebody is right next to you in the subway who’s not like you, doesn’t think the way you do, doesn’t have your body rhythms, doesn’t listen to the same music you listen to etc. And so what’s interesting in theater is not to have everybody speak Shakespeare the same way, but in fact, to have a whole cast, in which no two people speak Shakespeare the same way at all across the evening. quoted in BATES, ‘Directing a National Consciousness’, 88 Once again, we can see that Sellars begins with the American world around him, and he sees the complexity and diversity of the inhabitants of that American world. His productions are filled with actors whose accents are their own – New York, Dominican, Malian, etc. Sellars says that he often looks for actors who are not trained to read Shakespeare so that he does not have to ‘cut away that training’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). He argues that performing ‘Shakespeare is not about fluency because the texts

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are disruptive’ in their poetry, metre and rhetoric (Sellars, phone interview 1). Instead, he looks for actors who can perform Shakespeare’s lines with their own ‘memories’ and ‘personal lives’ imparted to them. He wants to hear a Shakespearean speech delivered in such a way ‘as only they can say it; how are they uniquely able to communicate this speech’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). That necessarily requires the actors who work with Sellars to use their own voices, accents and American cadences. Some critics have reviewed Sellars’s Shakespearean productions negatively precisely because the actors do not use RP. Reviewing Sellars’s 2009 production of Othello, John Simon objected to everything about the production but returned three times to the sound of Sellars’s Shakespeare. Simon spewed, ‘Sellars has reduced the cast to seven actors . . . none of whom has the faintest inkling of how to speak verse and most of whom do not even manage anything passing for stage English’ (Simon, ‘Megalomaniacal Director Sellars Dumbs Down Othello’). Simon then goes on to object to specific actor’s accents, such as the ‘short and overweight Liza Colón-Zayas [who has] a pronounced Latino inflection’ and the fact that ‘Saidah Arrika Ekulona [sounded] exactly like the African madam she played in [Lynn Nottage’s] Ruined’ (Simon, ‘Megalomaniacal Director Sellars Dumbs Down Othello’). Some critics, then, find Sellars’s interpretation of Shakespeare as an American author who should be performed by actors who sound American in all its aural diversity jarring and, therefore, un-Shakespearean. But, of course, this says as much about the critics as it does about Sellars.

The Shakespearean Text Jenny Cornuelle Krusoe, an actor who attended Harvard University at the same time as Peter Sellars, and who appeared in many of his Shakespearean productions including Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra and King Lear, has said of Sellars’s process that he ‘created a blurry world of the piece in his mind’s

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eye, and then, after that, his focus was a laser making real what his imagination had mapped out’ (Krusoe, email correspondence). The sense that Peter Sellars directs Shakespeare as if he were ‘making real’ a vision that was already fully ‘mapped out’ in his imagination is oft repeated by his collaborators and reviewers. One of the early reviews of Sellars’s theatre work in the Harvard student newspaper articulates this position. Writing in 1978 about Sellars’s Antony and Cleopatra that was staged in the Adams House pool, the reviewer claims, I can’t discern much directorial interpretation of the forces compelling Antony’s fall . . . That doesn’t mean that Sellars hasn’t worked these things out in his own head – his synopsis in the program is full of cryptic notes like ‘A Nixon cameo,’ and ‘Enobarbus is Shakespeare,’ and, frankly, I don’t have the vaguest idea what some of them mean. Maybe nothing and maybe everything . . . This Antony and Cleopatra can make no claims to greatness; the people who put it together had something less on their minds, and something more: a vigorous, probing, playful approach to college theater. EDELSTEIN, ‘Floating Shakespeare’ This student reviewer could see in Sellars’s Antony and Cleopatra not only a degree of messiness and incoherence that one might expect in an undergraduate production, but also the vision for the production that lurked in Sellars’s mind; Sellars was not aiming for ‘greatness’ but instead for a night of ‘vigorous’ theatre that would probe the audience. Likewise, some audience members have reacted to Sellars’s direction as if he were uncovering a text that lies hidden beneath the surface of the familiar Shakespeare text. Peter Brook, talking about his own process for directing Shakespeare, describes this phenomena as the ‘secret play of Shakespeare’. In a public event in New York, Brook explained: In every play there is the inner play. When we were doing Midsummer Night’s Dream with the actors we called it the

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secret play. It can’t be analyzed, it can’t be described, it can only be experienced . . . It’s why we bother to do Shakespeare instead of any given modern story: The secret play of Shakespeare is deeper, finer, more important to us than any other writer. quoted in ROSENBAUM, The Shakespeare Wars, 373 Responding to Ron Rosenbaum’s meditations on the way Peter Brook’s Midsummer revealed the ‘secret play’ to him, a classmate of Peter Sellars’s claimed that Sellars’s December 1983 production of Midsummer at the Boston Shakespeare Company also revealed the play’s hidden depths to her. She explained, ‘it was as if Sellars, like a Puck, had let drops of magic potion into the waters of the play which turned them utterly clear, and you could see clearly down, down, down, and you could see that, indeed, it had no bottom. The sensation of watching this was like flying, or like reeling in infinitude’ (Rosenbaum, ‘Open Letter to Director Peter Sellars’). For both Rosenbaum and Sellars’s unnamed classmate, the secret play may be inherent to the Shakespearean text itself, but it is the director who uncovers it, reveals it and releases it. I have dwelt on the notion of the ‘secret play’ within Shakespeare’s plays because Peter Sellars seems to approach the texts in that manner. Although he always begins by thinking about a contemporary political, cultural or social issue that he wants to explore through a production, once he has chosen the text for this exploration, he works very closely on the text itself. He does this on his own at first, reading the play multiple times, and reading as much about the play and the context he wants to explore. Sellars explains, ‘You have to immerse yourself deeply in the material, and there’s always a stack of books about everything that I’m involved with, and I love research. I’ve never worked with assistants. I love imagining things. I love somehow touching the texture of things’ (quoted in Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 225). Operating

FIGURE 2.1  Page 53 of Sellars’s edition of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, highlighting Sellars’s engagement with and alterations of Shakespeare’s text.

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as his own dramaturg, Sellars digs deep into any research materials that can inform his production. And frequently the paratextual documents that Sellars discovers will end up being shared with his cast. For example, in his 1994 production of Merchant of Venice, Sellars had his cast reading – alone and out loud collectively – portions of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Noam Chomsky’s Necessary Illusions, Eduardo Galeano’s Open Veins of Latin America, Xavier Villaurrutia’s Nostalgia for Death, Manning Marable’s How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America and Adrienne Rich’s poetry (Pettengill, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 304). Even though Sellars has often studied the Shakespearean text thoroughly on his own before the rehearsal process begins, he makes it clear that the text is not rendered as fixed or determined for him or by him. On the contrary, Sellars creates an environment in which the text only has meaning through a collective process of reading, rereading and the sharing of personal narratives and paratextual documents. Shakespearean meaning, in other words, is established through a collaborative process that often takes the actors far from the Shakespearean text itself. Sellars says that in the first week with the actors, they will read the text aloud, and ‘the focus is on the language and how to create shared and layered levels of meaning’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). He continues, ‘for Merchant of Venice, which had a large cast, we went through every line of the play, and each actor told a story about what the line meant to him/her personally. Therefore, the cast created layers of meaning and association that were shared with each other’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Part of Sellars’s process fosters community building because every single line will be ‘discussed and debated by every person’; part of the process deliberately challenges the core of commercial theatre because ‘by the time the actual performance shows up, it’s not the usual consumer production. It has a whole set of layered meanings’ (Sellars, Getting Real, 13); and part of this process decenters the notion of the director as auteur. Far from being the ‘megalomaniac’ director who forces

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his vision and will on the cast, Sellars aims to ‘disappear’. He says: As an author I do disappear, of course, because of my cast. What’s interesting is not my ideas, but the range of ideas that are in the room. And what you’re seeing is not just unilaterally something I’ve thought of, but is actually the result of a series of discussions across a period of time with a group of people. And that’s rather interesting for me, and I prefer that to a kind of basic, flat notion of authorship . . . SELLARS, Getting Real, 25 Authorship and authority are always challenged by Peter Sellars’s Shakespearean productions because he does not assume that they reside with Shakespeare, the text or the director. Rather those powers are redistributed to the cast collectively, and meaning is established by the group as a whole through these layers of personal narratives and paratextual documents. These subtexts, of course, may not be readily apparent to the audience. In fact, the audience may only catch glimpses of the personal layers – often audiences feel as if we are missing something. This is central to Sellars’s vision and process because ‘what we think we are saying may not be heard by anyone else’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Richard Trousdell, writing about Sellars’s approach to opera, notes that ‘Sellars often speaks of taking the work deeper, of finding more levels. For this reason his productions tend to develop so radically over time that he wonders aloud if an observer like me will even recognize anything from one set of rehearsals to the next’ (Trousdell, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 82). Trousdell goes on to summarize the challenges to Sellars’s goal: A layered, open-­ended search for meaning is taken for granted in criticism, philosophy, and science, but it is a risky business in theatre where tight schedules and even tighter budgets make fixed goals and predetermined solutions the

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norm. One strategy Sellars uses to avoid the trap of a prepackaged production is to surround his work with a show of amateur informality, to gesture what cannot be fixed, and to accept unevenness as a preferable alternative to instant mechanical perfection. TROUSDELL, ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro’, 82 When it comes to working with a Shakespearean text, this means that Sellars allows his cast to edit the text with him. Yet Sellars sets clear parameters for the edits: ‘Anything that is repetitive, any impossibly obscure language, or any speeches or dialogues that seem to be structured in a roundabout fashion become the CENTRE of the production. Therefore, anything that provokes initial resistance should be the focus of the production’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Likewise, Sellars is adamant that ‘little is large, and large is little’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). In terms of the Shakespearean text, this means that short scenes with servants are viewed as revealing more than many of the bigger scenes with the principal characters: ‘The bigger scenes with the so-­called important speeches are often less important than the little scenes’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Because Sellars believes that ‘little is large’, he often encourages his actors to slow down and linger for challenging lines. Speaking with Richard Pettengill about his rehearsal process for his 1994 The Merchant of Venice production, Sellars explains that he frequently gave his actors notes to slow down. He indicates that these notes stem from the ways that readers encounter and experience poetry and prose differently. With poetry, one is encouraged to linger because a destination is not necessarily the goal; rather, the goal may be in the moment of the sound, image, allusion or metaphor employed. Sellars explains: It’s that I’m not interested in going anywhere with this. I don’t want to know what’s next. I’m not on this line so that I can get to the next one; I’m on this line because I’m interested in just what this line is. So frequently we will put

FIGURE 2.2  Page 70 of Peter Sellars’s copy of Coriolanus. Here, Sellars explores the idea that ‘little is large’ in a scene between two officers.

FIGURE 2.3  Page 30 of Peter Sellars’s copy of The Merchant of Venice. Again, Sellars places importance on seemingly unimportant or ‘small’ scenes, like this one between Gratiano and Antonio.

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the [breaks] on and stop and create a way in which it’s not about flow, it’s about this moment right now. How completely can we deal with this moment right now, not this moment as a stepping-­stone for the next moment, but this moment for what it is? And if we can be in that, then you arrive at the next moment carrying something completely different. So the way this works with actors is that it’s a lot about delay of responses, it’s about responses that were denied all night long. So you get all this repressed emotion that explodes in all kinds of different ways later. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellars’s Merchant of Venice’, 312 Because of this process and technique, Sellars’s Shakespearean productions are often emotionally surprising and often jarring. They linger on unfamiliar passages and explode in unexpected moments of tension. For example, in his 2009 production of Othello, Sellars lingered on a scene that is often radically edited down in modern productions: Act  2, scene 1, in which Iago, Cassio, Emilia and Desdemona wait on the shores of Cyprus to see if Othello’s ship has survived the storm. Because Desdemona is anxious about Othello’s safety, Iago attempts to humour her by telling her jokes about women. While Desdemona says, ‘I am not merry, but I do beguile / The thing I am by seeming otherwise’ (2.1.122–3), most modern productions do not linger on Desdemona’s anxiety or sadness. Yet Sellars’s Desdemona, played by Jessica Chastain, wept openly, unable to contain her sorrow, and the characters were allowed to linger in their anger, sadness and disconnection. It was wholly unexpected and rendered the scene very new. While many critics chafe when they experience scenes that challenge their own interpretation of a play (e.g., ‘Lines meant to be playful – as when Iago flirts knavishly with Desdemona and his wife Emilia – are delivered with snarls and curled lips’ [Brantley, ‘The General in His High-Tech Labyrinth’]), others embrace Sellars’s labours to make the familiar new and surprising

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(e.g., ‘But though we hear Shakespeare’s words, they emerge from a different world than we’ve seen’ [Kaplan, ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’]). This process of lingering, of course, results in productions that have much longer running times than the typical ones in the US or the UK. Sellars’s Shakespeare productions almost always run between three and a half and four hours. Sellars does not shy away from the fact that sitting and watching anything, let alone a Shakespeare production, for four hours can be challenging. He likes to think about the audiences who stay as ‘survivors’ (quoted in Richards, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’). Returning to Sellars’s rehearsal process and the notion that the ‘little is large’, I want to touch for a moment on choreography and movement. Unlike Elizabeth LeCompte’s work with The Wooster Group, Peter Sellars is not known for his complex, intricate choreography and movement. In fact, I have not come across any reviews that even mention choreography. Yet Sellars does have a specific approach. As Jenny Cornuelle Krusoe revealed about working with Sellars in his productions at Harvard University, ‘The blocking was almost choreography. Spoken words were timed like a musical piece and often were accompanied by music’ (Krusoe, email correspondence). While Sellars’s approach to choreography has loosened a bit since his days as an undergraduate director, he still values the structure that choreography provides. He does not do a lot of movement exercises with his actors in rehearsal, but he likes to think of his productions as ‘tightly choreographed’ in such a way that his actors are free to experience different ‘chance encounters, working to revelation’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). He explains: Choreography is very important because I like structure. I want the audience to perceive structure. At the same time, for me, what the choreography does is that it leaves the performer psychologically and spiritually open, because I’m not telling him how to interpret meanings. The move is just a move. It could be executed with any emotion. It’s just a

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gesture and the gesture doesn’t limit the meaning, just focuses it. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 228 In other words, Sellars approaches blocking his productions through a series of choreographic movements that provide ‘a structure that grounds everybody and a set of relationships that insists that people have got to deal with each other’, but that does not forestall or determine meaning: ‘the beauty of the choreography is always that it’s an empty vessel’ (quoted in Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 228). For Sellars, ‘theatre is meant to foster randomness and surprise’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Part of the process that Sellars sets up so that his Shakespearean productions are ‘working to revelation’ insists on the necessity and value of randomness. Sellars explicates that, in theatre, You do not want the same thing to happen two nights in a row, ever. So you’re actually setting up structures that insist upon something random, where every night the performers are in the midst of discovering something they never knew before. Because what theatre does is privilege the moment of discovery where we and the actors are all discovering something new at the same time. And if somebody’s telling you something that they already know, and we already know, it’s not interesting. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 228–9 Having seen many of his Shakespearean productions multiple times, I can attest to the fact that Sellars’s structure of choreography does permit the flexibility for randomness. In his 2012 collaborative piece Desdemona, I could detect the choreographic blocking beats, and yet the production was

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radically different in terms of energy, character interaction and overall affect from night to night. For example, the choreography for Tina Benko, who played Desdemona and several other characters, was structured in such a way that she was standing, lying down and interacting with Rokia Traoré, who played Desdemona’s nurse Barbary, whose real name is revealed to be Sa’ran, at very specific moments in the performance. That structure was firm. Yet, the ways Benko shifted from one character to the next changed dramatically each night, and her interactions with Traoré varied immensely. There were surprising differences each night in terms of affect, physical expressions of intimacy and/or distance, and pacing. While all live theatre is ephemeral and unique with each performance, Sellars’s structure allows a greater amount of randomness and flexibility than is traditionally built into commercial theatre. Finally, Sellars’s complex process, which prizes collaboration, collaborative meaning-­making and the structures that enable ‘the absence of predictability’, requires both extremely talented

FIGURE 2.4  Barbary (Rokia Traoré) and Desdemona (Tina Benko) in Desdemona. Benko switched in and out of multiple characters throughout the production.

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and open actors and a longer rehearsal period so that the cast can become a community that trusts itself. While rehearsal periods in most commercial theatres in the US have shrunk to five weeks (at most), Sellars’s process requires much more time. Christopher Innes notes that Sellars’s operas ‘are striking for their high degree of precision, texturing and intellectual depth, achieved through the extremely long rehearsal times that Sellars has managed to gain through his extensive use of co-­ development between companies in the United States and Europe’ (Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 209). Unfortunately, Sellars has found it difficult to replicate this in his Shakespearean productions. While Desdemona, which in many respects is closer to a musical piece than a Shakespearean one (as Katherine Steele Brokaw wrote, ‘If Othello is about sight, Desdemona is about sound’ [Brokaw, ‘Review of Desdemona’, 361]), did have a longer rehearsal period, that was because it was a co-­produced by several companies in Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. But this is an outlier for Sellars’s Shakespearean productions. In fact, Sellars notes with chagrin that the commercial acting system in the United States makes longer rehearsal times virtually impossible to achieve even if everyone involved desires them. He says: theatre is hard to do in America because most actors are involved in television and in film. So it’s very hard to keep a cast; and the way I like to work in theatre is across months, and professionally that’s unheard of . . . Making a show, you can never get a Meyerhold rehearsal time, or a Stanislavsky rehearsal period. The only way you do it is to do it in five cities, and then we really are spending six months on one text. So I have to do it with support of European festivals, usually which means making the work in America, bringing it to Europe, and then, finally, taking it back and showing it in America. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 223

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This is precisely the process Sellars used for Desdemona, but his other Shakespearean productions have not had the benefit of transferring from a European festival to the American stage. While Sellars has been moderately successful extending the rehearsal time for his Shakespearean productions by hosting workshops ahead of the official rehearsal period, he still has not been able to achieve the much longer development process he believes his work requires.

Mediated Shakespeare Peter Sellars reads William Shakespeare’s plays as texts that were written quickly. Since Shakespeare was writing for the early modern commercial theatre in which shows had very short runs, he needed to write a lot of material so that he could stay afloat as a shareholder in The Lord Chamberlain’s Men/ The King’s Men. Sellars argues, ‘You can feel the speed in the writing; they are not calculated texts. Instead, they have an emotional flow that reveals a lot of things’ (Sellars, phone interview 2). Believing that Shakespeare had an ‘emotional availability’ that we should emulate, Sellars argues that the ‘military culture of iambic pentameter’ should be stripped away from actor training (Sellars, phone interview 2). Therefore, he argues that productions of Shakespeare’s plays should not march us through each line in fully audible and accessible ways. Part of what makes Shakespeare’s texts so great, Sellars argues, is the fact that Shakespeare was ‘not a smooth author, but a chunky and angular one’, who frequently creates characters that ‘deliberately hide the truth’ from others and themselves (Sellars, phone interview 2). Seeking for a way to inhabit Shakespeare’s ‘emotional flow’ and textual angularity, Sellars landed on employing highly mediated productions. From his earliest Shakespearean productions when he was a teenager working with puppets, he employed voice-­overs, edited sound clips, and carefully timed musical underscores. These mediated techniques, however, were

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not employed to create greater clarity; rather, they were employed to mimic the unevenness that Sellars detects in Shakespeare’s works. Sellars has continued to use these techniques in almost all of his Shakespearean productions. In fact, the mediated staging for his 1994 Merchant of Venice and his 2009 Othello were quite similar, with both featuring several television monitors onstage, microphones on stands and on the actors, and stark white, expressionistic lighting. While both productions employed extremely minimalist sets – with only a few chairs and tables onstage – they both also used portions of the extreme upstage in such a way to deliberately conceal action from the audience.

FIGURE 2.5  Bassanio (John Ortiz) and Portia (Elaine Tse) embrace, captured by a camera upstage, in Sellars’s production of The Merchant of Venice.

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FIGURE 2.6  Othello (John Ortiz) and Desdemona (Jessica Chastain) embrace, in front of television monitors and witnessed by Iago (Philip Seymour Hoffman) upstage, in Sellars’s production of Othello.

In both Merchant of Venice and Othello, Sellars blocked his actors so that they could not always be seen or heard. Responding to the criticism that not all the characters could be heard in Merchant despite the fact that they were all microphoned, Sellars said: It’s a tricky piece. Some nights you lose some lines and you get some others, you know? Particularly with the sound, it’s very tricky, because it’s complex chamber music. There are two things happening: one is that, you know, we’re not bankers and we’re not trying to make an account of any kind and so you lose a few, big fucking deal. My deeper sense is that finally what people get is not what they get consciously. In fact, Shakespeare is this massive

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invasion of your unconscious and that’s actually the way it’s operating. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellar’s Merchant of Venice’, 311 Sellars goes on to explain that obfuscation, inaudibility, obscurity, and inaccessibility are necessarily built into his production. He continues: A lot of what we worked on in this production is things you can’t see. A lot of the staging, a lot of the stuff that I do with the actors, is completely invisible. I know that, and yet everybody feels it. Or it’s inaudible and I know that but what we’re dealing with is that the theatre is actually emotions . . . And sometimes when it comes flooding, you know, yes, you miss a few words. Or if an actor paraphrases, if it’s John Ortiz [Bassanio] . . . when John gets going, John takes it to a whole other place. And yet, something connects so profoundly, deeply, you know, more deeply than most things in life from people who of course are lying. quoted in PETTENGILL, ‘Peter Sellar’s Merchant of Venice’, 311–12 The goal for Sellars, then, is not 100 per cent accuracy, visibility or even audibility, because he stages a Shakespearean production in an attempt to connect with the audience on unconscious emotional levels. Sellars pushes his audience to experience life in a mediated fashion, and he accomplishes this by also employing various images projected onto the television screens and sounds piped throughout the theatre. In many of his Shakespearean productions, including his 1980 King Lear, his 1994 Merchant of Venice and his 2009 Othello, numerous televisions and/or monitors were prominently featured onstage, flashing images from the popular media, including commercials, close-­up images of the actors onstage and images from obscure avant-­garde art. At times, the images amplify and clarify what is going on on

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stage, such as close-­up shots of the action that may occur in the extreme upstage, but just as often the images are tangential, evocative but not exactly on point. Many critics of the 2009 production of Othello, for example, discussed the distracting nature of the images on the monitors (e.g., ‘a bed built from TV screens aglow with what appear to be becalming home-­office screensavers’ [Brown, ‘It’s Lost Its Moorings’]). Likewise, Sellars saturates the theatre with sound, frequently ranging from well-­ known classical pieces, to more modern soundscapes, to natural and animalistic sounds. Sellars also argues that he uses high powered microphones so that he can capture the smallest amount of sound and breathing. He says: Some nights, torture victims can barely say anything. That’s why I use these very high quality microphones to pick up the slightest quality of people’s breath, what’s between the words; the difficulty of speaking about certain things, which as Beckett said, must remain unspeakable in our lifetime. quoted in MARRANCA, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 53 Sellars wants to create theatre that allows the audience to experience their cultural, political and social world on deeper, one might argue, non-­verbal levels. Sellars explains: The high-­tech interface has been appealing to artists because it does have the potential to fragment and diversify the master narrative, offering simultaneous multiple perspectives, freshly negotiated interdependent vocabularies, and the direct experience of ambiguity, the ineffable, and a sensory and mental landscape that lies above, below, and beyond ideology . . . The performative possibilities continue to take us into more and more dizzying levels of inherent contradiction, again tending towards a more democratic play of multiple perspectives and the yin-­and-yang dynamic of the universe itself. SELLARS, ‘Foreword’, Entangled, x–xi

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And again, Sellars returns to Shakespeare over the years because he finds him to be the author that taps into those ambiguous, contradictory, democratic experiences the most trenchantly.

Conclusion To conclude this examination of the ways Peter Sellars thinks about the purpose, process and techniques for theatre, I want to highlight a change in his approach over the years. While Sellars has always written fascinating programme notes that work to contextualize his productions politically, he has started including what I will call ‘paratheatrical’ events. Many theatres in the US and the UK host this type of programming. It has become a common way to extend the theatrical experience, and these events are frequently organized by the theatre’s educational or community outreach departments. What makes Sellars’s use of paratheatrical events unique is his personal involvement in their curation. He is deeply involved in the cultural, political and/or historical contexts he wants to create for his productions. For example, when he staged Othello in New York in 2009, Sellars included a series of events around the production that had to do with women in the military, post-­traumatic stress disorder, education, the history of racialized casting in Shakespeare and others. In other words, the paratheatrical events may seem random, unrelated, and at times at odds with each other. These free events, which occurred immediately before performances (although the forum on education occurred the day before), served as a way to extend the dialogues and debates that Sellars hoped his production would foster. In fact, the panelists were the authors of the paratextual documents that Sellars and/or his cast read during rehearsals. And that is precisely why the programming seemed unusual. I end highlighting this development in Sellars’s Shakespearean productions because I think it emblematizes both his interest

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in Shakespeare and his approach to Shakespeare. Sellars finds in Shakespeare’s plays an immediacy that reveals its unevenness, contradictory terms and stances, and complexity. He argues: The complications of texture that characterize our historical moment of global unease, with its potential for both confusion and unprecedented solidarities, are best represented in a world theater that is technically informed and brilliantly wired. SELLARS, ‘Foreword’, Entangled, xi His approach, as I have shown throughout this chapter, is one that attempts to replicate that immediacy. While the text is always primary for Sellars, that does not necessarily translate into a production that is coherent, even, or comprehensible. Instead, it will be raw, contradictory and unresolved so that the audience is invited to gain a greater facility with complexity.

3 The Colour of Classics: Casting

Writing the foreword to Emma Cox’s 2014 book, Theatre & Migration, Peter Sellars opened by discussing the purpose of theatre in explicitly racialized terms. He wrote: None of us are the picture in our passport. When a border guard looks at us for ten seconds or for ten minutes, who do they see? . . . There is a contribution to the necessity of deepening those ten seconds of vision and revealing the inadequacy of the documentation . . . The urgent and timely imperative is to mount a direct challenge to the ingrained and totalizing gaze of white supremacy, which has determined that people who look a certain way and come from certain countries have the right to travel and an unlimited economic horizon, while people who look another way and come from other countries have no right to travel and will never be allowed to participate on an equal economic footing. SELLARS, ‘Foreword’, Theatre & Migration, vii–viii According to Sellars, then, one of the enormous benefits of theatre, and in fact one of its central purposes, is its ability to challenge the ‘totalizing gaze of white supremacy’. Writing about the ways many black American women ‘actively chose

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not to identify’ with racist filmic representations of black women ‘because such identification was disenabling’, bell hooks theorized this spectator position as one that held an ‘oppositional gaze’ (hooks, Black Looks, 122). Sellars wants his theatrical creations to invite and enable various oppositional gazes; ones that can identify, challenge and disrupt the systems of white supremacy. As I discussed in the previous chapter, Sellars sees theatre as a political form, and race, colour, ethnicity and physical ability play an important part in his political creations. This chapter provides an in-­depth look at Peter Sellars’s approach to casting with regards to race and representation onstage. Known for his non-­traditional approach to casting, Sellars has consistently employed colour-­conscious techniques, thereby asking his audiences to notice, comment and debate the significance of race, colour and ethnicity onstage. In order to understand the particularity of Sellars’s approach, I will begin by providing a history and overview of non-­traditional casting, beginning in the early nineteenth century with the African Grove in New York and tracing it through Joseph Papp’s New York Shakespeare Festival. From there I examine Sellars’s 2009 production of Othello and his 2014 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream as two case studies to analyse the theories behind, and practices of, Sellars’s non-­traditional casting. I feel compelled to state at the outset of this chapter, that the history of non-­traditional casting and the debates the theories and practices have inspired are the reason I came to be familiar with Peter Sellars and his work. He asked me to provide a pre-­show lecture on the history of casting Othello when he was working on the play in New York in 2009. I had published the edited collection Colorblind Shakespeare in 2006, and naively I thought that collection had thoroughly addressed the controversies and provided some thoughtful ways forward. In other words, I thought I was done thinking and writing about non-­traditional casting. The strong reactions Sellars’s production of Othello inspired, however, made me realize how

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much work was yet to be done about issues of race and representation. The reviews demonstrated in visceral and palpable terms that it is extremely hard for Americans to think and talk about race in anything other than simplistic binaries. As I write this in the summer of 2017, the debates continue to rage (see Eyring, ‘Standing up for Playwrights and Against “Colorblind” Casting’, for an excellent example of the terms). Thus, the terms are still not set; the theories are still debated; and the theatrical practices are still in flux. Are we post-­race, anyone?

Non-Traditional Histories In many respects, the history of non-­traditional casting is tied to the history of Shakespearean performance. One could argue that the first non-­traditionally cast productions occurred in the early nineteenth century when black sailors were imprisoned. The historian Shane White writes: During the War of 1812, sailors confined in Number Four, the section of the British Admiralty’s Dartmoor Prison in Devonshire reserved for blacks, had performed plays for their own edification as well as for that of white prisoners. Some whites were impressed by what they saw . . . Others were less appreciative – one told of watching ‘a tall strapping negro, over six feet high, painted white, murdering the part of Juliet to the Romeo of another tall dark-­skin’ . . . after their release, hundreds of black inmates of Dartmoor returned to sea, and doubtless stories of these performances entered seafaring lore. WHITE, Stories of Freedom in Black New York, 75 If this story – of black prisoners performing Romeo and Juliet in whiteface in 1812 – seems too fantastical to be true, one must remember that William Shakespeare’s plays were incredibly popular in the nineteenth century. As Lawrence Levine explains,

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‘Shakespeare was performed not merely alongside popular entertainment as an elite supplement to it; Shakespeare was performed as an integral part of it. Shakespeare was popular entertainment’ (Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow, 21). Thus, the black prisoners may have assumed that their performance was unremarkable; Shakespeare, like all popular entertainment, belonged to everyone at that time. Shane White speculates that one of the people who heard the tales of the imprisoned black sailors was William Brown, a West Indian entrepreneur, who ‘opened an entertainment and tea garden called African Grove, designed specifically for African New Yorkers’ (White, Stories of Freedom in Black New York, 73). Because white New Yorkers were attempting to ‘avoid public contact with newly freed blacks’, most entertainment houses were becoming segregated throughout the United States. Brown’s tea garden therefore catered to these newly freed blacks, and Shakespearean performance became a central and controversial component of the African Grove. As White narrates: On the evening of Monday September 17, 1821, in New York City, a newly formed drama company staged its first public performance. The circumstances of the debut seemed far from auspicious (the venue was a makeshift theater in a private dwelling in Thomas Street, a less than salubrious part of town), but the house was full, and as the actor playing Richard III limped out onto the stage, the audience erupted into wild cheering. An even greater burst of applause greeted the conclusion of his first speech . . . [V]irtually all present, whether members of the cast or of the audience, had either been born into slavery or at the very least were children of former slaves, and few among them could have been unaware that they were witnessing a bold black intrusion into the world of acting . . . WHITE, Stories of Freedom in Black New York, 68

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These freed blacks in New York were testing the limits of the American notion that Shakespeare was for all. As theatre historian Marvin McAllister notes, ‘On a base level, black Shakespearean productions illustrated Afro-America’s natural identification with an English heritage and American popular culture. More strategically, Brown’s deliberate decision to perform the Bard ushered his company and its blackened versions of the beloved dramatist into the center of the majority culture’s public space’ (McAllister, White People Do Not Know How to Behave, 54). This intrusion into ‘the majority culture’s public space’ was noted in the white press, with several reviewers reviling the black actors. But out of the African Grove grew the first black American Shakespearean celebrity – Ira Aldridge, who travelled to England in the hopes of finding fame on the London stage but who eventually found fame throughout Eastern Europe. Born in New York in 1807, Aldridge was educated at the African Free School and performed as a teenager at the African Grove. Krystyna Courtney argues that while Aldridge’s race made him ‘unworthy to perform Shakespeare’s roles in the legitimate London theatres, in Continental Europe his presentations were received with enthusiasm and admiration. He played in the most prestigious theatres, and he was received with adoration by both the social-­cultural elites and the common people’ (Courtney, ‘Ira Aldridge’, 105). Aldridge’s performance history is particularly important in the history of non-­traditional casting because he was extremely conscious that his black skin signified a racialized meaning when he was on stage. Thus, he experimented with whiteface makeup when he was performing parts in Macbeth, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear and Richard III. In England this performance technique was greeted with derision (‘not all the whiteness in the kingdom will transmogrify the unseemly nigger into the shadow of a genius’ [quoted in Courtney, ‘Ira Aldridge’, 114]), but in Eastern Europe Aldridge’s performance innovation was praised for showing ‘that he could subdue his passion and display a more sophisticated acting technique’ (Courtney, ‘Ira Aldridge’,

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115). The white makeup allowed Aldridge’s Continental audiences to see his ‘acting technique’, as opposed to what was assumed to be the natural ‘passion’ of his blackness. In the early twentieth century, Orson Welles created one of the most popular and well-­known non-­traditional Shakespeare productions with his all-­black Macbeth at the Lafayette Theatre in Harlem, New York. Being funded by the Federal Theatre Project, the artistic arm of the Works Project Administration which sought to create American jobs during the Great Depression, Welles hired a large cast of black actors, including a drumming group from Sierra Leone, to transpose medieval Scotland to nineteenth-­century Haiti. Welles’s concept was clear: ambitious Macbeth was likened to that of Haiti’s Henri Christophe, a former slave and key leader in the Haitian Revolution. It is reported that over 10,000 people showed up for the premiere on 14 April 1936, with over 150,000 people seeing the production in its New York run alone (Rippy, ‘Black Cast Conjures White Genius’, 84). Many theatre critics and scholars point to Paul Robeson’s performances as Othello in 1930 in London, 1943 in New York, and 1959 in Stratford-­upon-Avon as watershed moments in the history of non-­traditional Shakespeare. Many proclaimed that seeing an actual black man play the role of Othello made it feel as if they were ‘seeing the tragedy for the first time . . . because the fact that he was a true Negro seemed to floodlight the whole drama’ (Wilson, ‘Introduction’, x). Writing the introduction to the Cambridge edition of Othello in 1957, John Dover Wilson revealed, ‘Everything was slightly different from what I had previously imagined; new points, fresh nuances, were constantly emerging; and all had, I felt, been clearly intended by the author. The performance convinced me in short that a Negro Othello is essential to the full understanding of the play’ (Wilson, ‘Introduction’, x). Writing in Variety in 1943, Rudolph Elie Jr. enthused, ‘Robeson playing opposite a white girl’ was ‘electric’ and that ‘no white man should dare presume to play [Othello] again’ (Elie, ‘Robeson Gives Othello Great Power’). Audiences and critics experienced Shakespeare

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differently when they encountered the black American Robeson onstage, even though he was limited to playing the Moor of Venice as opposed to Hamlet, Lear, Macbeth, Richard III, etc. While these early examples of non-­traditionally cast productions are an important part of the history of Shakespearean performance, the systematic practice of non-­traditional casting did not begin until the 1950s when Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Festival. Arguing that Shakespeare’s plays were originally created for and by the people, Joseph Papp envisioned creating a Shakespeare festival that would reflect the diversity of New York through its casting. Thus, the New York Shakespeare Festival was started by Papp in 1955 as a festival that would be free to the public, a festival that would enable the integration of the theatres, a festival that would cast without regard to race, and a festival that would promote a more naturalistic approach to acting (as opposed to the older declamatory style that was still popular in the 1950s). Explaining his reasoning further, Papp said, ‘If you try to reproduce a play the way it was done originally . . . it becomes a museum piece. You have to draw from what exists. What exists in New York, and all throughout the world are different colored people’ (quoted in Gaffney, ‘In the Dark’, 39–40). Moreover, Papp promoted the notion of Shakespeare’s universality to bolster his non-­traditional approach. If Shakespeare’s plays were about all of humanity, Papp argued, then it made no sense to cast his plays with white actors only. As I have written elsewhere, ‘Turning the racist focus on Shakespeare’s language on its head, Papp appropriated the perceived aural problems: he promoted the idea that Shakespeare’s language became natural and living in the mouths of people of color’ (Thompson, ‘Practicing a Theory/Theorizing a Practice’, 5). Papp became a champion of colour-­blind casting. Ellen Holly, a light-­skinned black actress who often found herself deemed too light to play black and too dark to play white, remarked about Papp, ‘The most remarkable thing about Joe was the color-­blind casting he practiced as naturally as breathing, decades before it became the chic thing to do . . . For

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anyone to cast this way, not just once or twice as a matter of political posturing but as a matter of routine over the course of a career, was unprecedented’ (quoted in Epstein, Joe Papp, 169). Papp became known for his integrated casting, in which actors of colour were woven into the fabric of every production; and most of his early productions espoused colour-­blind casting, in which the colour, race and/or ethnicity of the actor is not supposed to impart any semiotic meaning onto the production. By the late 1970s, however, Papp began to change his approach to Shakespeare, racial casting and even integration. After taking on the directorship of the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts from 1973–7, Papp was frustrated by the conservative nature of theatre audiences (many of whom cancelled their subscriptions to the Lincoln Center in protest at his appointment there). Papp also declared that he was frustrated with integrated casting. On the local access cable show Barbaralee Diamondstein and . . ., Papp said: For years we’ve been mixing our company. I was the first one to use black actors in Shakespeare. . . . But I found myself, I said, ‘I don’t like this because it’s like token casting’, even though it wasn’t just one sometimes. You have to develop an idea about how to use blacks, and certain groups, and so forth, and Hispanics, in a certain way. And I felt, I’m tired of that. And I thought integration can be very boring on the stage. And I decided integration is fine for society, but not so great on the stage. quoted in DIAMONDSTEIN, ‘Barbaralee Diamondstein and Joseph Papp’ Thus, Papp turned away from producing colour-­blind and integrated productions, and he turned towards developing new plays by artists of colour for artists of colour. He also attempted to form a black and Hispanic theatre company that would also produce classical plays (he started with Julius Caesar and Coriolanus). While the predominantly white audiences at Lincoln Center protested Papp’s seeming radicalness with

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regards to casting and new play development, black critics began to criticize Papp for 1) bowing to the pressure from those white audiences; 2) ceasing to include black actors in integrated productions of Shakespeare; and 3) developing plays about ‘stereotyped ghetto images . . . in contrast to the variety and experimentation with forms and styles that Papp offers to White playwrights’ (quoted in Epstein, Joe Papp, 353). In other words, Joseph Papp, the man who began the systematic practice of non-­traditional casting, found himself being accused of being both too radical/race-conscious and too regressive/racially-insensitive.

Non-Traditional Definitions So what exactly is non-­traditional casting? As must be clear from the section above, there are many different terms and practices, and they are all built on different assumptions about how audiences impart any meaning to colour, race and/or ethnicity onstage. Ana Deboo provides a short history of the formation of the Non-Traditional Casting Project (NTCP) which set out to define the practice of non-­traditional casting in late 1980s. She writes: in January 1986, Actors’ Equity completed a survey which showed that during the four years covered, over 90 percent of all professional theatre in the U.S. was performed by all-­white casts. In response to those findings, a one-­day conference was held from which developed the Frist National Symposium on Non-Traditional Casting held for two days in November 1986. DEBOO, ‘The Non-Traditional Casting Project Continues into the ’90s’, 188 Out of that symposium, the founders of the NTCP published a book in which non-­traditional casting is defined as ‘the casting of ethnic, female or disabled actors in roles where race,

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ethnicity, gender or physical capability are not necessary to the characters’ or play’s development’ (Davis and Newman, Beyond Tradition, n.p.). Furthermore, four ‘kinds of non-­ traditional casting’ are outlined as such: Societal Casting ethnic, female or disabled actors are cast in roles they perform in society as a whole. Cross-­cultural Casting the entire world of the play is translated to a different cultural setting. Conceptual Casting an ethnic, female or disabled actor is cast in a role to give a play greater resonance. Blind Casting all actors are cast without regard to their race, ethnicity, gender or physical capability. DAVIS AND NEWMAN, Beyond Tradition, n.p. As Deboo notes, the executive director of NTCP said ‘the four “types” of non-­traditional casting were originally outlined by Harold Scott. They were intended as guidelines and never meant to be definitive’ (quoted in Deboo, ‘The Non-Traditional Casting Project Continues into the ’90s’, 191, n.1). These guidelines, in fact, have not been definitive at all for theatre practitioners. Despite the fact that I have taken the time and space to print these ‘guidelines’, I want to make it clear that theatre practitioners do not use these terms. As I have written elsewhere, ‘terms like multicultural, nontraditional, interracial, integrated, colour-­blind, race conscious, and race free are often used interchangeably’ despite the fact that ‘they signify dramatically different approaches to how one constructs the semiotics of race, color, and ethnicity onstage’ (Thompson, Passing Strange, 81). More disturbingly, ‘It is rare for theatre

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companies to identify in either their mission statements or program notes the exact type of nontraditional casting they employ in general or for a particular production (indeed, I have not been able to find any that do this explicitly)’ (Thompson, Passing Strange, 81). Yet I think it is safe to argue that non-­traditional casting is still regarded as the overarching umbrella category for the practice of casting actors of colour in roles that were not conceived to be characters of colour. Under that umbrella, a split occurs between two basic approaches to casting and race: one is colour-­blind; the other colour-­conscious. In the UK today, the predominant casting mode is a colour-­blind one in which the actor’s colour, race, ethnicity and/or ability are not supposed to impart any semiotic meaning onto the production. For example, in a production of Hamlet, if there is a white actress playing Gertrude, a white actor playing Hamlet, a white actor playing Claudius, and a black actor playing the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the audience is not supposed to interpret the relationship between Gertrude and her first husband through the lens of an interracial marriage. The assumption is that audiences can and will become adept at not imparting a semiotic significance to colour, race, ethnicity and/or ability onstage. While many regional and amateur theatres in the United States also practise colour-­blind casting, many of the larger professional theatre companies have moved to the colour-­ conscious approach. In this model, it is not assumed that audiences can, will or even want to be blind to bodily differences on stage. In fact, this model is predicated on the assumption that colour, race, ethnicity and/or ability always signify semiotic meaning(s) on stage. Thus, it is the practitioners’ job to understand, harness and – at times – challenge audience assumptions about those semiotic meanings; a colour-­ conscious theatrical production, then, will always allow for the fact that meaning-­making occurs not only through the story being told, but also through the bodies telling it. There are different ways to practise colour-­conscious casting. For instance, conceptual casting, in which the entire

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world of the play is transposed to a different location (like Orson Welles’s Macbeth set in nineteenth-­century Haiti with an all-­black cast), is one colour-­conscious approach. But there are approaches that one might term less radical or less all-­ encompassing than conceptual casting that also fall under the umbrella of colour-­conscious casting. For example, to return to Hamlet again, a production that employed an all-­white cast save for the actors playing Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, might invite the audience to think through the implications of the expendability of black male lives. Even college-­educated black men, who are close to people in positions of power, can be treated as both interchangeable and disposable. There are, of course, objections to both non-­traditional casting approaches. While the practitioners of a colour-­blind approach espouse that colour, race, ethnicity and ability should not matter on stage (‘Shouldn’t we strive to employ talented actors, regardless of bodily type, in the best roles?,’ colour-­blind practitioners ask), there are critics who retort that this desire is both naïve and potentially dangerous (racist neo-­conservatives, after all, espouse the value of colour-­blindness). And while the practitioners of a colour-­conscious approach espouse that colour, race, ethnicity and ability always matter on stage (‘Shouldn’t we acknowledge the elephant in the room?,’ colour-­ conscious practitioners ask), there are critics who retort that this desire is both distracting and potentially dangerous (many stereotypes may be reaffirmed in this approach). When Peter Sellars was coming to theatre in the 1970s, these debates were broiling among theatre practitioners, theatre reviewers and performance scholars. He saw colour-­ blind productions, colour-­conscious productions, and many, many avant-­garde productions that were 100 per cent white (in fact, Hilton Als, the theatre critic for the New Yorker, claims that ‘racism’ frequently ‘infects the white-­oriented theatrical avant-­garde’ in New York [Als, ‘The Black Man Cometh’]). Fascinatingly, in the internal documents for the American National Theater in Washington, DC, which Peter Sellars helmed from 1983–5, it is stated as a given that the

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company will employ a colour-­blind approach. In a document labelled ‘Representation: The Fifty States and Special Interest Theaters’, the anonymous author (I suspect that Sellars authored many of the internal documents) declares, ‘Of course, all hiring of all productions at the ANT will be color blind’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). While the ‘aesthetic’ purpose of theatre is espoused, a diversity of representation is valued: ‘as many aspects as possible of American life and geography must be honestly represented if the American National Theater is to live up to its name’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). The document goes on to specify that diversity of representation can be achieved through ‘the subject matter of the play, or the biographical history of the originating theater, or the author, director, or one or a group of actors from a given production’ (ANT, ‘Representation’). Despite the rhetoric used at the American National Theater, Sellars settled firmly with colour-­conscious casting, always assuming that the colour, race, ethnicity and ability of his actors will and should impart semiotic meaning(s) for the audience. For instance, his production of King Lear in 1980 was supposed to star Brother Blue as the titular hero so that audiences could ponder the intersections of race, class and power. Likewise, his 1983 production of Pericles starred Brother Blue as Gower and Ben Halley, Jr as Pericles, and the audience was invited to think about the fragility and ultimate endurance of black masculinity. Although not Shakespearean, Peter Sellars’s 1985 production of Ajax, starring the deaf actor Howie Seago, helped start dialogues about casting and physical ability; Seago has gone on to have an impressive Shakespearean career at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Then in 1994 Sellars’s Merchant of Venice provided a cross-­ cultural interpretation of the play, with the entire world of Venice being transposed to the contemporary, racially divided Venice Beach, California. His 2009 production of Othello, with a multiracial cast, asked audiences to ponder if we are, or will ever be, post-­racial, and the 2011 response play Desdemona asked how long it would take to move beyond violence that is

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perpetrated on sexual and racial grounds. Finally, Sellars’s 2014 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was all about psycho-­sexual encounters that are disturbed by race. I have taken the time to list all of these productions to emphasize the fact that colour, race, ethnicity and physical ability always play into Peter Sellars’s concepts for his Shakespearean productions. At this point, though, I want to explore two productions in more detail to reveal and analyse Sellars’s specific approach to non-­traditional casting.

Case Study Othello Peter Sellars began thinking about directing Othello in 2007 when he had dinner with Toni Morrison, and she urged him to look closely at the text, to explore its rhetoric and politics. Sellars and his cast started rehearsing the play in September 2008, and a few months later when Barack Hussein Obama was elected the 44th President of the United States of America, Sellars realized he could use Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play to ‘def[y] the usual racial profiling of the play, and . . . [sharpen] the issues of race and [introduce] a new set of stereotypes to confront within the scope of the play’ (Willis, ‘Othello Rehearsal Diary’). Sellars specifically asks, ‘Can we make a production of Othello that sheds the trappings of our forebears’ racial hierarchies and assumptions and that addresses the realities and possibilities of the Obama generation in a new century’ (Sellars, ‘On Othello’). At the heart of Sellars’s interest in Othello is the racial baggage the play carries with it from its violent, poetic rhetoric, its blackface performance history and its socio-­ political uses. Far from eschewing that baggage, however, Sellars wanted to place it onstage next to something seemingly incongruous – the early twenty-­first century world in which ‘the youngest guy in the room is a black man, and he is the President’ (Sellars, ‘On Othello’). Sellars loves to explore what happens when there is contradiction and collision on stage.

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The 2009 production had a cast of eight and starred three black actors, Gaius Charles (Duke), Saidah Arrika Ekulona (Bianca Montano) and LeRoy McClain (Cassio), three Hispanic actors, Julian Acosta (Roderigo), Liza Colón-Zayas (Emilia) and John Ortiz (Othello), and two white actors, Jessica Chastain (Desdemona) and Philip Seymour Hoffman (Iago). The mise en scène was contemporary with everyone dressed in twenty-­first-century business, military and/or personal clothes and with communication delivered via BlackBerry devices and/ or cell phones. The Duke was designed to resemble President Obama and delivered his orders to Othello in a recognizably modern, dispassionate, political tone. In typical Peter Sellars fashion, the stage was minimalist with harsh expressionistic lighting at times. The only set piece was a large bed composed of forty-­five digital screens, designed by Gregor Holzinger. At times the bed was used as a type bench for characters to sit on in scenes that take place in public settings (e.g., Act 2, scene 1 on the shores of Cyprus), at other times the bed is a bed in private settings even though the audience can see what is happening (e.g., Act 2, scene 3 when Desdemona and Othello retire to bed in Cyprus), and at other times the bed functions as a bed that blurs the boundaries between the private and the public (e.g., the final scene of the play). Holzinger says of the bed, ‘The bed is a window projecting into space, into a blurred distance, a baffling parallel reality, abstract half-­dreamscapes of a sleepless night. An eye composed of many eyes – 45, to be exact – like the eyes of a dragonfly, an eye that sees itself, reflects itself, and the over-­ observed of the bed’ (Holzinger, ‘Screen-Bed The B-Sides’). The various images shown across the screens ranged from imagistic blurry close-­ups of indeterminate objects to extremely clear images of bloody hands, airplanes, knives and others. Holzinger explained that the world of words and rhetoric was the A-side of the play, while the dream-­state of sleeping and the unconscious was the B-side, as represented by the bed. Occasionally, black plastic chairs and standing microphones were used in scenes that took place in public settings (e.g.,

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Act  2, scene 3 during the night in Cyprus when Cassio gets drunk). The sound amplified by the microphones ranged from crystal clear, like the delivery of a character’s inner-­most thoughts, to a staticky crackle, like the sound received from a pilot’s plane’s death-­spiral. The only other set piece was featured in the far upstage, and it was a Santería shrine with flowers, candles, religious icons and food. At times this shrine was obscured by the lighting, and at other times it was lit from above revealing Emilia’s labours on the shrine. In terms of alterations to the text, the largest change was the collapsing of several characters (the Clown, Montano and Bianca) together into a new figure, Bianca Montano, who is both the governor of Cyprus and the lover of Cassio. This new figure is at once both powerful and vulnerable. She appears in military uniform and is in control of Cyprus, but she is also a woman who has been victimized by her male colleague. In terms of gender, Sellars explains, ‘of course there are now highly placed women in our new military, and finally, women in leadership positions all over the world. Cassio’s drunken attack on [Bianca] Montano becomes an attempted rape, and Montano’s long journey towards healing is at first sharply profiled in the Clown’s stinging and resistant rejoinders, and then elevated by Bianca’s lines of difficult forgiveness’ (Sellars, ‘On Othello’). In terms of race, Sellars explains that the Duke, Cassio and Bianca, as the three black characters in his Othello, ‘begin to represent not isolated figures, but an emergent and diverse community with its own issues and complications’ (Sellars, ‘On Othello’). The other large interpretive change (although textually nothing was altered) was Sellars’s belief that Iago’s suspicions about Othello having an affair with Emilia are correct. Thus, we see Emilia and Othello share a few intimate scenes together. Likewise, Desdemona is allowed to have a sexual history as well; she and Cassio exchange several meaningful glances that speak to a past which no one explicitly addresses. Thus, Iago’s decision to use a flirtation between Cassio and Desdemona to anger Othello makes more sense in this light.

FIGURE 3.1  Bianca Montano (Saidah Arrika Ekulona) and Iago (Philip Seymour Hoffman) in Sellars’s production of Othello. Sellars combined the characters of the Clown, Montano and Bianca into one, Bianca Montano, and explored the various meanings that occur when a black woman holds a position of power, and is at the same time victimized.

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In other words, the production upended many long-­held assumptions about Othello. First, that Othello needs to be the only person of colour, or at the very least one of only two or three, in order to explain both the society’s racism and Othello’s own self-­loathing. Second, that Desdemona is young, innocent and virginal (in fact, many productions of Othello make it clear that not even she and Othello have had sex). And third, that a military context explains the close relationship between Iago and Othello in terms of homosocial, often bordering on homoerotic, ties. On the contrary, Peter Sellars wanted to make it clear that our contemporary world is not black and white, and that we should not look to productions that give us that vision because that disarms our ability to see, understand, and fix our complicated social and political problems. Multicultural worlds with people of colour in positions of power have not eradicated racism and sexism. Sellars writes in the programme note for Othello: The Obama era has thrust the world into a new search for language to describe race and relationships. Does this new language reflect a power shift or a shift in perception? Are those related? And the pushback to the age of Obama, the open disgrace of the [Sonia] Sotomayor confirmation hearings, in which a series of ignorant, intemperate, aging white men treated a distinguished legal scholar like their maid, and she was forced, in public, for purposes of entering the power structure, to accept it – where do we find ourselves now? What does it mean to all of us as we watch this woman of dignity publicly repudiate the phrase ‘a wise Latina,’ and everything it might stand for, including her own being? SELLARS, ‘On Othello’ For Sellars, the questions we must face collectively stem from the problems in a society in which a young black man is president, and he appoints a young Latina woman to the Supreme Court, but the white male members of Congress, who are tasked with confirming or rejecting the nomination, publicly

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ask her to repudiate the idea that her racial and ethnic heritage help her to reach ‘a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life’ (quoted in ‘Sotomayor Explains “Wise Latina” Comment’). It is important to remember that in 2009, the public rhetoric in the United States around colour, race and ethnicity often painted a portrait of colour-­blindness; that is, the rhetoric espoused the notion that the generation that had elected Barack Obama was a ‘post-­racial’ one for whom race no longer registered or mattered. This was the cultural-­political tinderbox into which Peter Sellars threw his 2009 production of Othello. His production was never meant to be safe, comfortable, familiar or even welcoming. Rather, the production was meant to inspire controversy, debate and dialogue. He explicitly asked if a 400-year-old text can support and hold up issues unique to the early twenty-­first century. Almost universally, the critics said no, but the terms of their objections reveal their discomfort with complexity, especially complexity around colour, race and ethnicity. Some critics clearly had fixed ideas about what Othello, the play by William Shakespeare, really means, and they objected to Peter Sellars’s production because it did not confirm their understanding of the truth. For instance, the reviewer in Variety claimed, ‘Sellars is attempting to make a statement about race; instead, he sucks the soul out of this tragedy of jealousy’ (Lash, ‘Review’). Othello = jealousy. Another opined, ‘Othello, the Venetian general, is, as a black man, an outsider. And that explains a lot, including an insecurity that leads to the irrational jealousy he directs at his blameless wife, Desdemona’ (Feldberg, ‘Wondrous Pitiful’). Recognizing that Sellars’s intent was to present a ‘more American-­contemporary’ world, he continued, ‘This robs the play of an essential element, which is Othello’s unique place in his society, while rendering Shakespeare’s lines singling him out as “the Moor” exceedingly bizarre’ (Feldberg, ‘Wondrous Pitiful’). Othello = outsider = insecure. My personal favourite explanation of the meaning of Othello comes from another reviewer who claims, ‘This

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Othello (John Ortiz) is Latino – not, as Othellos usually are, African American’ (Bernardo, ‘Othello’). Sounding a lot like my undergraduate students, this reviewer conflates Moors, blacks and African Americans, but for her that was essential to the meaning of the play. Othello = African American. Many other critics complained that Sellars’s production, with its multiracial cast, was post-racial in some sense. You can hear the critics struggling to explain why this is a problem. For instance, one critic wrote that the production is ‘obsessed only with its own “post”-ness. It is “postracial,” in that Othello is no longer a black man in a white world, but a light-­skinned, racially indeterminate man in a casually multiracial Venice’ (Brown, ‘It’s Lost Its Moorings’). What does it mean for the critic to think of Othello, let alone the actor John Ortiz, as ‘racially indeterminate’? Is that only a problem for his interpretation of Othello, or is that a problem in life in general? And does racial indeterminacy negate racism? For another critic, Ortiz was not racially indeterminate enough; he was ‘white and puny’, and this was one of the reasons he decided the production ‘offends Shakespeare, common sense and decency’ (Simon, ‘Megalomaniacal Director Sellars Dumbs Down Othello’). Yet another critic bemoans that Sellars has ‘given the production a post-­racial sheen, celebrating diversity rather than having the Moor stand out because of his blackness’ (Kuchwara, ‘Lengthy, High-Concept Othello Falters Off-B’Way’). Unless Othello is the only person of colour on stage, the critic implicitly argues, the production must be celebrating diversity. Another was outraged that the production had ‘politically correct racial elements that feel opportunistic (we’re in the age of Obama, in case you’d missed it) and random (Othello is played by Latino John Ortiz)’ (Vincentelli, ‘New Shakespeare Tragedy’). Is political correctness the same as racial opportunism? And how can we recognize when someone is practising them onstage – by hiring more than one actor of colour? I am lingering and labouring over these reviews because they reveal just how challenging Peter Sellars’s production of Othello was in terms of contemporary understandings of Shakespeare,

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race and performance. Audiences were highly reluctant to accept his invitation to have more complex dialogues about race, sex, power, multiculturalism, multiracialism, older cultural-­historical legacies and newer socio-­cultural formations. By and large audiences and critics wanted to retreat to a narrative form that was simpler to understand, digest and regurgitate. ‘[T]hey did kind of gut the whole racial dynamic of the original play which is a powerful part. The whole point is kind of diminished’ (quoted in Pulos, ‘Skirball’s Othello Director Tries to Fill Empty Seats at Crappy Show’). His colour-­ conscious approach, a conceptual casting model, was interpreted as being lazy (casually post-­racial) and/or wrong (not Shakespeare’s Othello). Few if any critics were able to engage with the frisson Sellars was deliberately creating.

Case Study A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play In the programme note for his 2009 production of Othello, Peter Sellars wrote that with a small cast ‘we have concentrated these roles and made this production of Othello into a chamber play’ (Sellars, ‘On Othello’). Perhaps because the Strindbergian elements of Othello were not fully explored and realized in that production, Sellars returned to the idea of creating a Shakespearean chamber play in which extremely intense portraits of psycho-­sexual relationships would be thoroughly explored onstage. Returning to a production idea he hatched in 1983 when he was the Artistic Director at the Boston Shakespeare Company, Sellars devised a four-­person production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Once again Sellars provided a very colour-­conscious approach to casting – casting two black actors and two white actors – that opened up the text to intense explorations of love, identity, race, violence and the complicated social pressures on romantic relationships. And

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once again critics struggled with these issues, more often than not opting not to mention the racial elements in their reviews. In order to mark and celebrate the 450th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Antoni Cimolino, the Artistic Director of the Stratford Festival of Canada, decided to mount two radically different productions of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, one directed by Chris Abraham on one of the main stages at the Festival, and one directed by Peter Sellars at an off-­site venue, the Masonic Concert Hall. The Stratford Festival with four stages onsite rarely if ever stages events under its rubric in other venues, but Sellars, according the Festival’s press release, was adamant: ‘The idea of presenting the show in a non-­traditional venue was central to the vision of director Peter Sellars. He feels that the venue’s location in a combined commercial-­residential neighborhood makes it a perfect choice and he is delighted that the Masons are enthusiastic about making improvements to the building for its future use’ specifically ‘renovations to make the building accessible’ (Stratford Festival, ‘Community-Based Venue Confirmed’). The Stratford Festival’s 2014 season was conceived and advertised as ‘Minds Pushed to the Edge’, and the two productions of Midsummer were seen as inviting audiences to experience the play in radically different ways in radically different venues. The Masonic Concert Hall seats a much smaller audience than the smallest theatre at the Festival (168 seats, as opposed to 260) because Sellars required a more intimate space for the chamber play he wanted to create. First, it should be noted that the space has a very small, three-­sided stage with the audience on risers on the sides. Normally a concert hall, the risers were added for this production, and the rows in the risers were such that the audience could not easily leave once the production started. Opting for minimalist set as usual, Sellars hired the black American visual artist Abigail DeVille to create an installation piece that hung from the ceiling of the Masonic Concert Hall. DeVille has ‘a long-­standing interest in marginalized people

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and places’ and ‘creates site-­specific immersive installations designed to bring attention to these forgotten stories’ (Art21, ‘Abigail DeVille’). In 2014 she was interested in working with found objects, particularly rubbish. In a video called New York Close Up: Abigail DeVille’s Harlem Stories, DeVille claims ‘trash is the record of existence’ (quoted in New York Close Up: Abigail DeVille’s Harlem Stories). Thus, for Sellars’s A Chamber Play DeVille filled the ceiling with rubbish from two junkyards in Ontario and objects from the Stratford Festival’s props storage. Evoking a dream-­state and/or life inside a tornado, DeVille filled the ceiling with chairs, hollowed out televisions, mattresses, brooms, mops, a ceramic sink, doors, and various pieces of scrap wood, corrugated metal and lots of folded, crushed and shimmering aluminum. The lighting designer James F. Ingalls, a long-­time collaborator of Sellars’s, flooded the installation piece with different colours at different points in the production, ranging from cool greens and blues to hot reds and oranges. In fact, the lighting in the installation piece was the main form of stage lighting, sending the stage into complete and near darkness at various points in the production. He accomplished this by weaving strings of lights throughout DeVille’s art work. The back of the stage was painted in dark colours that blended together – browns, maroons and deep oranges – so there was not a great deal of light that could bounce on the actors unless the lights in the installation piece were glowing. Ingalls’s lighting made it clear the production was dealing with the darkness of dreamscapes, nightmares and unresolved histories. The sound designer and composer was Tareke Ortiz, the Mexican-­based composer/performer, and he created a continuous soundscape that ranged from extremely quiet and evocative to vibratingly loud and hammering. There were moments when the sounds evoked the internal rushing of blood or the beating of a heart, there were times when the sounds evoked natural elements like waves and thunder, and there were times when the sounds evoked the din of feedback at rock concerts. The soundscape was tied to the emotional

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states of the characters at different points in the production. As Margaret Jane Kidnie writes, ‘the hall’s interior shell created a kind of sensory bath into and around which spectators walked. It was an immersive – almost an oppressively immersive – space, and the festival encouraged spectators to arrive early to partake of it, blurring the lines between gallery and theatre, installation and performance’ (Kidnie, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 16). I have described Sellars’s creative team at some length here because it was clear they were working as collaborators, building this immersive experience together. While this creative team was often mentioned in reviews, it was never discussed in terms of the diversity of the personnel nor their personal investments in exploring identity through their work. Moreover, the diversity of this creative team, I think, reflects the issues that Sellars wanted to explore within the production itself. As Sellars has made clear to me, he is always involved in the casting of his productions because he wants actors who can bring part of themselves to the character and because he has always believed it is important ‘to make what is onstage look like the world offstage’ in terms of diversity (Sellars, phone interview 1). Thus for A Midsummer Night’s Dream, he held ‘four days of intensive auditions with all the younger members of the acting company’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). He asked them all to prepare short monologues, but he found this exercise unhelpful. So he quickly moved to one-­on-one conversations with the actors to learn about their personal lives: ‘frequently these discussions unearthed painful memories and lots of tears get shed’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). And what Sellars learned in those revealing conversations, he used to help shape the chamber play he wanted to create from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. In other words, race and personal narratives about identity were central to the way he cast the production. As a chamber play with only four characters that fall into two couples, Sellars collapsed many of the roles together. Thus, Sellars cast the Toronto-­based actress Trish Lindström to play Titania, Hermia, Lion and Wall as one character. Mike

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Nadajewski, another white Canadian actor, played Oberon, Lysander and Peter Quince as one character. The GhanaianCanadian actress Sarah Afful combined Hippolyta, Helena, Puck, Starveling and Thisbe. And finally, the black Canadian actor Dion Johnstone combined Theseus, Demetrius and Bottom into one character. In rehearsal Sellars asked the actors to work with him to edit the script, and they decided collectively to do away with Egeus and the superstructure of the plot. In the end, the script was cut in such way that the total running time was one hour and forty-­five minutes. By the second week of rehearsals the script that was presented to the actors had their own names as speech prefixes (Trish, Mike, Sarah and Dion) instead of the various character names. Having interviewed the actors, Margaret Jane Kidnie explains: This reinvention of character went hand in hand with Sellars’ treatment of narrative. The actors, guided by Sellars in rehearsal, were led on intensive, and intensely personal, journeys of discovery, as they sought out the emotional through-­line that for each of them could hold together the particular grouping of characters to which they had been assigned. KIDNIE, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 18. Frequently the journeys involved exploring the narratives that are allowed, encouraged or completely forestalled because of race. Revealing that romantic and sexual desires and encounters are never free from social constructions, Sellars’s colour-­ conscious production allowed the actors to explore the darkest recesses of psycho-­sexual encounters. Thus, Dion Johnstone began the production as the Theseus part of his character with Sarah Afful as the Hippolyta part of her character, and it was clear that she was rebuffing his sexual advances. Thus, he turns to Trish Lindström, who seems eager to return his advances. Later Johnstone bellows almost violently in Bottom’s performance as Hercules, and Afful cowers under the weight

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of the violence. In other words, what Johnstone and Afful explored through their conflated characters was the violence between black men and black women, and the psycho-­ pathology that has erupted around the idealization of white femininity. Johnstone noted of his character: I’m getting the sense that this is a guy who’s done prison time, which has created a real fuck-­up in our relationship [his with Afful]. Maybe it was abuse that happened in the past, maybe you called the cops, maybe I’m just one more strike from, like, twenty-­five to life. And all my dallying with Trish’s character is putting me in a position where all that can go to hell, because all she’s got to do is phone the police and say this guy touched me, this guy fucking raped me, this guy, you know, killed my lover – anything. quoted in KIDNIE, ‘Proximal Dreams’, 22–3 As Carol Mejia-LaPerle argues, ‘Sellars appropriates audience expectations of Shakespeare and the aesthetics of the chamber play to heighten the way emotional interiors shape social identities’ (Mejia-LaPerle, ‘Thou Art Translated’, 12). And race is at the centre of this appropriation. While the reviews of Sellars’s 2014 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play were mixed, what was almost universal regardless of the reviewer’s stance was a reluctance to address race. Moreover, this reluctance to address the racial dynamics of the production occurred in both traditional print venues and in online blogs. For instance, Charles Isherwood, writing in the New York Times, notes: ‘I can’t say I enjoyed the production – providing pleasure doesn’t seem to be the point – but I will certainly never forget it’ (Isherwood, ‘Beyond Shakespeare’s Wildest Dreams’). He analyses the surprising emotional through-­lines that occur when the characters are combined into two couples, but he does not mention the races of the actors. Nor does he take up Sellars’s invitation to think through a Strindbergian chamber play that pushes race into the complex dynamics of relationships. Similarly, an online reviewer who

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‘hated’ the production noted that it was ‘provocative’ and that there are ‘many ways of interpreting a play’ (Slotkin, ‘Review’). And yet she has nothing to say about the production’s interpretation of the racial dynamics of sexual relationships; this despite the fact that she assesses the scene between Johnstone as Bottom and Lindström as Titania as ‘sexy’. There are two rare reviews that do engage with Sellars’s colour-­conscious casting, and they have radically different takes on the effect. In the first, the reviewer assumes, ‘Sellars has racially colour-­coded the situation to make it “easy” (socially dubious as that may be) to see who “belongs” with whom’ (Hoile, ‘Review’). The assumption that the production is providing an ‘easy’ colour-­coding is a strange one because, as almost every reviewer has noted, the production was anything but easy. Yet this reviewer contradicts his own assumption when he ponders the meaning of the colour-­coding at the end of the production. Sellars’ racial casting of the two couples now takes on connotations which one certainly hopes he did not intend. His reimagining of Dream looks unfortunately very like a parable defending anti-­miscegenation since peace is only restored when the two white actors and the two black actors pair up as couples again. HOILE, ‘Review’ Disturbed that the conclusion of the production sees the couples reunited as they initially began, the reviewer interprets the ending as providing a racial coding that is regressive – ‘a parable defending anti-­miscegenation’. Yet, what would it mean if the reviewer pondered that narrative seriously? What if the nightmare of the chamber Dream is that it is extremely difficult, often dangerous, and nearly impossible to reach out beyond one’s race? The reviewer’s earlier dismissal that the casting was ‘easy’ made it so that he did not have to engage with the production’s more challenging elements in terms of race.

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FIGURE 3.2  Helena (Sarah Afful), Demetrius (Dion Johnstone), Lysander (Mike Nadajewski) and Hermia (Trish Lindström) in Peter Sellars’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The colour-­ conscious casting of the lovers divided a number a critics, some worrying it was too ‘easy’ a choice, while others focused on the social connotations brought about by the pairings.

Another reviewer, who also noted Sellars’s racial casting, provided an entirely different assessment. This reviewer declared, ‘Because they are thematically what they are physically, for ease of identification I will henceforth refer to [the characters] as, in order of speaking, the Black Man, the Black Woman, the White Woman, and the White Man’ (Minton, ‘It’s All in Your Head’). He then proceeds to take seriously what it means to think of the characters as inhabiting these subject positions – a black man, a black woman, etc. Because of this, he reaches a radically different conclusion about the characters and their relationships. He writes: By the players bundling their individual parts into single characters, we see common personality threads running

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through Shakespeare’s creations. The Black Man’s Theseus/ Demetrius/Bottom is a misogynistic, violent jerk. Puck’s line, ‘My mistress with a monster is in love,’ is no joke – especially as speaking that line is the Black Woman, who, as Hippolyta/Helena/Thisbe, is the chief victim of the Black Man’s abuse . . . This relationship takes another distressing turn when the Black Woman presents herself to the Black Man as his spaniel. MINTON, ‘It’s All in Your Head’ This reviewer concludes, ‘Some, depending on their own prejudices, might see racist overtones to these portrayals, but Sellars definitely is rubbing raw one social itch’ (Minton, ‘It’s All in Your Head’). In other words, the only two reviewers to comment on the racial casting of A Chamber Play leave little room for dialogue about race; one dismisses it as ‘easy’, and the other only notes that the production may be scratching a ‘social itch’.

Conclusion Since his earliest professional productions in the 1980s, Peter Sellars has been interested in colour-­conscious casting. While the casting for classical productions in both the US and the UK has become much more diverse in the intervening thirty years, the debates about what that casting can, should and does mean semiotically continue to rage on. Sellars, however, has never shied away from building those debates into the fabric of his productions. What the case studies of Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream show us, however, is how ill equipped many continue to be to discuss race in complex and multi-­dimensional ways. Sellars continues to challenge us with productions that are not clear-­cut and/or simplistic. He exposes the raw nerves we have around the nexus of race, sex, power and love, and many have found it too painful to watch. As

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someone who naïvely assumed these issues, at least in theatre practice and theatre reviewing, would have advanced much more significantly at this point in history, I appreciate Peter Sellars’s Shakespearean productions for their boldness and honesty. The unflinching gaze they provide into race is a model for a way forward, not necessarily with answers but with the right questions.

4 Innovation and Accessibility

I begin with two quotes from reviews of Peter Sellars’s productions: one from 2014 when he was directing at the Stratford Festival of Canada, and the other from the beginning of his career at Harvard University. The reviewers both respond negatively to Sellars’s art, and their negative appraisals stem from their assumptions about what theatre should be and do in terms of emotional accessibility. But theatre should not just be about presenting a play in a ‘clever’ new way, it should also be about connecting with the audience, and this Chamber Dream fails to do so on any emotional level. GODFREY, ‘Review’ Why does Peter Sellars have so much contempt for his audience that he goes so far out of his way to make things inaccessible? STATES, ‘Full of Sound and Fury’ In the first review, Robyn Godfrey assumes that theatrical art must enable audiences to connect emotionally in both an immediate and a direct fashion. For her, emotional accessibility equates to successful theatre, and emotional inaccessibility

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equates to failed theatre. In the second review, Katherine States assumes that a director must have a negative affective response to audiences if he/she makes theatrical art that is somehow challenging, which she labels as inaccessible. For her, accessibility equates to love and respect, and inaccessibility equates to hatred and hostility. What must be clear at this point in this book, however, is that Peter Sellars does not agree with these principles of theatre. In fact, it is fair to state that he believes in just the opposite. First, he does not believe that theatre should simply promote, foster and/or enable emotional connections. Working in an age in which mass marketing occurs on a global scale through multiple media platforms, Sellars is suspicious of emotional manipulation because of the ways affect has been commodified. He says: In theater, my line of work, presumably one of the things we’re trying to do is to get people to feel something and cry. But it’s AT&T who have perfected the ability to bring forth tears. In less than one minute you’re in tears. ‘Oh, mama, the train station,’ and they’ve done it! There is no emotion that has not been used to sell products. So, therefore, all of it becomes totally suspect, and you say, ‘Wait a minute. What is this guy trying to do to me?’ Then you really have to process it in a completely different way. SELLARS, Getting Real, 5 Accessibility is an affective state that marketers want to tap into because emotional availability happens to enable an availability and willingness to purchase and consume. As P.A. Skantze, the performance theorist, argues, ‘making things relevant to all [is] therefore challenging to no one . . . In these discussions I would suggest “accessible” veils its true meaning of “consumable” ’ (Skantze, ‘O-Thell-O’, 131). Like Skantze, Peter Sellars wants to disavow accessibility; ‘accessibility is demeaning to audiences’, he told me in an interview (Sellars, phone interview 1).

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Second, Sellars does not believe that challenging an audience is an act of hostility. Rather, for him it is an act of the utmost respect and hope. It is an act of respect in the sense that the theatrical creation is not didactic and does not deliver one unifying message: ‘one does the work in order to generate a discussion, you know, not to conclude a discussion’ (Sellars, Getting Real, 23). Sellars creates art to open discussions rather than ending them. And once again, he often discusses his work in theatre as being antithetical to the type of art that is created on television or film. He says: I deliberately have too many things happening at once – so unlike television or film where you’re always told where to look, there’s always at least four other things going on. To me, what’s satisfying is no two people looking at the same place, and so no two people see the same thing. It’s one of my favourite things about theatre . . . Again, I’m very fond of making things that none of us know how to describe because, to me, theatre is about experience and experience is beyond words, which is, I do recognise, why, frequently, I don’t fare very well with critics because they have got to sum it up in a few paragraphs. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 229–30 Opposing the camera lens in television or film productions, Sellars celebrates the multiplicity of gazes that theatre allows. He capitalizes on the theatre’s lack of one unifying perspective by creating productions that frequently have multiple actions occurring at the same time. Viewers, like myself, who have had the opportunity to see a Sellars production more than once, are often rewarded because we get the privilege of focusing on different spaces, characters, dialogues and actions. Moreover, Sellars aims to create art that moves audiences to experience ideas, thoughts and emotions that are beyond words. The goal, for Sellars, is for audiences to ponder, reflect and debate these experiences over time.

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Sellars also believes that his theatrical productions reflect his sense of optimism and hope for the future, especially when they are their most challenging and disruptive. He believes it is an act of hope to jolt audiences out of being mere ‘spectators’ in a ‘consumer position’ in which they can remain ‘anonymous in their seats’. Rather, Sellars wants to move the audience to become a ‘community’ of ‘participants’ (quoted in Marranca, ‘Performance and Ethics’, 38). The stakes in this position, for Sellars, are actually democracy, a political structure that is necessitated on the multivocal and the diverse becoming unified into a community that still prizes individuality. If affect comes into Peter Sellars’s thought processes about audiences and accessibility, it is through fury and not identification. Speaking about how Elizabeth LeCompte’s work influenced his approach to theatre, Sellars says: I think [Elizabeth LeCompte’s] work had the effect on me that my work probably had on many other people, which is to say, fury! When I first saw Route 1 & 9, I was so disturbed and so upset – just as I was when I first saw Patrice Chéreau’s work when I was eighteen years old. I felt cheated because the work refused to flatter my preconceptions and my desires, and I was furious, like when I first experienced the work of [Jean-Luc] Godard. And those are all for me good signs. You realise when something really stirs you, you’re forced to re-­examine everything. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 213 Sellars’s personal experiences seeing Patrice Chéreau’s 1974 production of The Tales of Hoffman and early productions by The Wooster Group, like Route 1 & 9, made him realize that deliberately refusing to provide what audience members expect and desire can be an incredibly productive theatrical stance. After all, when audiences experience fury and outrage because their preconceived ideas and interpretations have not been

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mirrored back to them, that often inspires debate and long-­ term, often unforgettable, reflections. If positive affects, like identification and even pathos, can be manipulated easily in a capitalist market, fury may be harder to harness. Fury and outrage, according to Sellars, lead to reexamination. As he says, ‘whether one likes the work or not is really rather beside the point – it constitutes an event, something that must be seen – it will be important to have been there’ (Sellars, ‘Foreword’, Breaking the Rules, xvi). It is interesting to note how Peter Sellars responds to claims that audiences flee when they find his productions inaccessible. Throughout his career reviewers have written about the fact that his Shakespearean productions can be difficult to follow if the audience members do not already know the stories and plots in advance, and these reviewers surmise that audiences leave at intermission because of those difficulties. For instance, as early as 1979 when he was still an undergraduate at Harvard University, a student reviewer noted that watching one of his Shakespeare productions was ‘like walking across a room blindfolded – it’s easy if you’re well acquainted with the terrain but painful and confusing if you’re not’ (Rosenberg, ‘Dons, Dummies and Directors’). A similarly dismissive review came in 2009, thirty years later: ‘I’ve only heard from one person who managed to sit through the entire show. He’d announced this particular feat with an air of disappointed triumph that one might use after finishing the last page of a Mitch Albom novel’ (Pulos, ‘Skirball’s Director Tries to Fill Empty Seats at Crappy Show’). A final example comes from 1994, when the reviewer pronounced, ‘At one recent performance, two-­thirds of the audience bolted at intermission and those who held out to the end had the glazed look of hit-­and-run victims’ (Richards, ‘Sellars’s Merchant of Venice Beach’). Fascinatingly, Sellars’s response is one of complete acknowledgement. He knows that many audience members leave, and he does not attempt to dismiss their decisions as ones based on incomprehension or anti-­aestheticism. Instead, he focuses on the ones who decide to stay. He says:

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My productions do tend to have a very, very strong effect; and, frequently, 70 percent of the audience leaves every night during the performance . . . The most powerful thing about theatre is not what people are thinking about during the show. I never worry about that – whether they applaud or don’t applaud at the end, it doesn’t matter to me. They can leave; I don’t want to know what they think. For me, theatre begins the next morning when somebody calls somebody who they care about, and they say, ‘I saw the most incredible thing last night. It was horrible’ or, ‘it was great’ – doesn’t matter – it’s them describing to somebody who was not there, what they saw. quoted in SHEVTSOVA and INNES, Directors/Directing, 215 In that act of description, Sellars argues, the audience members become thinkers and co-­creators of the art. It is in the reflection that the meaning of the art is created. He says, ‘one reason why people become frustrated with my shows [is] because I really am not telling people what to think, but trying to create a space in which thinking is possible’ (quoted in Shevtsova and Innes, Directors/Directing, 215). Thus, the audience members’ responses in the moment become both inconsequential and immaterial for Sellars because meaning-­making and co-­ creation necessarily occur after the fact when the space for thinking is opened. Over and over, Sellars argues that he is not creating innovative art. In fact, he frequently claims that his creations are not innovative at all in terms of style, technique or final product. As he said about himself very early in his career, he has a clearly identifiable style that has remained fairly consistent. Looking back over the first forty years of his career, I would argue that Peter Sellars’s true innovation comes from his approach to audiences. Ultimately, his goal is to re-­train the ways audiences watch and experience art: he wants to create active participants. In his 1991 article about Sellars, Don Shewey summarizes:

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A chief characteristic of any Sellars production is its insistence that everyone – including the director, the performers, the designers, and especially the audience – rise to the challenge a work of art poses. Conventional wisdom says that if you’re going to throw something difficult or scary at an audience, you have to give people something safe or familiar to cling to throughout the trip: a story, a star, recognizable furniture. Sellars tends to dispense with such niceties. His productions are sometimes like graduate seminars where the prerequisites might include a working knowledge of Russian culture of the revolutionary era, Shakespeare, Beckett, the Bible, Tantric imagery, and the landscape of downtown Los Angeles . . . [A]t a time when almost every kind of culture comes predigested for a demographically targeted audience . . . Sellars’ theater demands and rewards an active intelligence. SHEWEY, ‘Not Either/Or But And’, 275–6 Shewey is absolutely right in his assessment of Sellars’s approach to audiences; Sellars expects them to rise to the challenge of the art. His goal is to move audiences beyond any preconceived ideas they may have about a given Shakespeare play, especially ‘predigested’ plots, characterizations and stagings. In doing so, he hopes the audience will become active participants, ones who are willing to create meaning together. In other words, if one assumes that the meaning of a Shakespearean play exists in the text itself, then it becomes the director’s job to excavate that meaning and the audience’s job to receive that meaning. If, on the other hand, one assumes, as Sellars does, that meaning is only ever achieved contextually, socially and collaboratively, then it becomes the director’s job to create an environment in which meaning making is explored collectively and the audience’s job is to participate actively. Needless to say, this is not the standard approach to producing Shakespeare in most theatres operating today in the US or the UK. As early as 1984, Peter Sellars was attempting to explain this stance to reporters, telling them that he wanted audiences

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to get used to the idea that they needed to think beyond the surface of his theatrical creations. Life is not straightforward, human beings are not always honest with themselves or others, and thus theatre should not boil down complexity, indirection or mystery, according to Sellars, who said: I also build layers upon layers into my productions, and I would like audiences to go beyond the immediate sexy thing – you know, the dumb-­blond phase of theater appreciation – and discover my work on a deeper level. I like to think the surface is lively enough so that people are not going to get bored. But what they bring to the theater is three quarters of it. I leave huge room in my productions for the audience to enter and participate and make it happen . . . I like the idea of mysteries – in the medieval sense and the Agatha Christie sense. It’s also a part of theater. What most people call inaccessibility I prefer to think of as a mystery. You come to the theater and you want to figure something out about these people’s lives you’re watching. But you have to realize that you’re being misled over here, and that’s a red herring over there . . . I pose a series of problems for the audience. And I want to make the obstacle course as tricky and wonderful as I can. That makes the victory sweeter. By and large, I must say that the survivors of my productions seem to have a very good time. quoted in RICHARDS, ‘Theater’s Whirlwind Wunderkind’ If one views life as a mystery – a complex journey that is not experienced in a linear or direct sense – then theatre needs to reflect those mysteries. Sellars creates productions that resemble life’s mysteries, but only one-­quarter of the meaning of any given production is presented onstage. The majority of the sense and meaning must be supplied by the audience, and those who stay for the full Peter Sellars experience are labelled by him as ‘survivors’. That term implies the effort and struggle that Sellars expects his audiences to bring to his productions;

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they are not merely observers but rather contributors who must grapple, toil and endure the event. To the critics who complain that audiences not already familiar with the plots of his productions will find the theatrical work confusing, Peter Sellars retorts that plot should not reign supreme. In fact, he argues that plot is the least interesting and original thing about Shakespeare’s plays: What drives me nuts, for example, with so much theater that we see now, is the way that plot is allowed to reign. But writers like Shakespeare and Chekov and Sophocles weren’t that interested in plot. In fact, at the end of some of their plays I think we’d be hard-­pressed to say what the plot was. It’s the poetic life of characters, the inner life, that’s got to be allowed to bloom. quoted in SULLIVAN, ‘Peter Sellars’ Despite the fact that we know that Shakespeare liberally borrowed plots from many sources, hardly ever creating a new or original plot wholesale himself, this goes against the way William Shakespeare’s plays are taught in many secondary schools, in which students are frequently asked to regurgitate plot summaries (for a critique of this approach, see Thompson and Turchi, Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose, 14–17). Directly challenging this pedagogical approach, many of Sellars’s Shakespearean productions have educational outreach components with the goal of helping teachers move beyond teaching plot and into examining the delicious complexities (and contradictions) of the plays as a whole. Nonetheless, most Shakespeare productions staged today focus on making the plays accessible in terms of language, plot and characterization. Theatre companies, directors and actors frequently talk about how they strive for complete and utter clarity onstage in terms of diction, action and even interpretation. Peter Sellars strives for exactly the opposite. Sellars realizes that asking his audiences to move beyond the surface of plot and into the mysteries of the ‘poetic life’ and

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‘inner life’ of characters is no small request. This is not a transformation that will happen instantaneously or even overnight for audiences. Rather, Sellars has approached his productions as ones that will take time to digest, and that with time audience members will learn how to watch theatre differently. Thus, when he was the Artistic Director at the National American Theater in Washington, DC, Sellars said repeatedly that it would take at least ‘two years’ before audiences would get used to his style (Molotsky, ‘Henry IV Closes Early in Capital’). But Sellars was incredibly optimistic that theatre trends would actually change in the United States, that audiences would move away from the simplistic surface shows so popular in Broadway productions and towards appreciating more challenging artistic creations. In 1986, he expectantly wrote, ‘If theatre in the United States is to become large again, The Wooster Group is out there, up ahead, scouting the way. They are inventing theatrical vocabulary that ten and twenty years from now will become the lingua franca of a revivified American Theater’ (Sellars, ‘Foreword’, Breaking the Rules, xvi). At the heart of this optimism is Sellars’s belief that with time, audiences will adapt to a different and more challenging approach to theatrical creations. Even David Richards, the theatre reporter at the Washington Post at the time, agreed that Sellars needed and deserved time to build up and re-­train the audience for his ‘cheek, enthusiasm, ambition, and an endearingly reckless belief that anything is possible . . . If we put away the gavel now, we may be able to bring out the noisemakers later’ (Richards, ‘ANT & the Adventures of Peter Sellars’). Unfortunately, Sellars was not given that time at the ANT. Not only did that signal the death of a national theatre in the United States, but also it signalled the death of a collective, and nationally funded, attempt to re-­train American audiences in a theatre that would ‘become large again’. The Wooster Group’s ‘theatrical vocabulary’ has not become the ‘lingua franca of a revivified American Theater’, and Peter Sellars’s own theatrical vocabulary has not become widely known or accepted. In fact, reviewers continue to react with shock when his Shakespearean

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productions are not readily accessible in terms of diction, plot, characterization and/or meaning. This despite the fact that his productions have remained remarkably consistent in terms of style, casting and approach. As I have argued throughout this project, Sellars’s theatrical vocabulary is easily discernable. In the remaining portion of this chapter, I present two case studies, one of Sellars’s 1983 production of Pericles at the Boston Shakespeare Company, and the other of his 2011 production of Desdemona, to show how audiences and critics respond more positively to Shakespearean innovation. I have chosen to look closely at Pericles and Desdemona because they present unusual examples of Peter Sellars’s Shakespearean work. While they are both incredibly typical of Sellars’s style (conceptual pieces on a near bare stage, prominent music, non-­traditional casting, expressionistic lighting, referential density and elements of religiosity), they are unusual in the fact that they received positive responses from audiences, reviewers and critics. I argue that their seeming distance from Shakespeare – one is a rarely staged play and the other a new, response play – allowed audiences to engage with Sellars’s challenging artistry in ways that often get obscured by a desire to see and receive the proper and correct ‘William Shakespeare’. In the end, the collective fantasy about, and desire for, an accessible Shakespearean production may pose the largest stumbling block for Peter Sellars’s theatrical innovations.

Case Study Pericles For his debut production as the Artistic Director at the Boston Shakespeare Company in 1983, Peter Sellars selected Pericles. While Pericles has had a miraculous resurrection in the early twenty-­first century with professional productions being staged by the Public Theatre in New York (directed by Rob Melrose in 2014), the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (directed by Joseph Haj in 2015), the Stratford Festival of Canada (directed by Scott Wentworth in 2015) and Theatre for a New

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Audience (directed by Trevor Nunn in 2016), in the early 1980s the play was still considered to be William Shakespeare’s red-­headed step-­child: not quite good, and not quite good enough to be Shakespeare’s. Many reviews of Pericles, in fact, begin with the old quote from Ben Jonson that claims that the play is a ‘mouldy tale’ almost as a way of explaining the oddities of it as a text and performance piece. It is so clearly co-­authored; it is incredibly plot rich; it contains a deliberately old-­fashioned narrator in the form of the medieval author John Gower; and it culminates in a miraculous, goddess-­ produced ending in which a nuclear family is reunited. Don Shewey began his review of Sellars’s production in a typical vein, by explaining that the play is weird-Shakespeare: ‘Pericles is something of a cartoon, too – something of a joke, really, one of the most puzzling, uneven, and rarely performed texts in Shakespeare’s canon’ (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’). In other words, this is not the Shakespeare you know. Shewey continues in an incredibly shrewd way to explain why this would appeal to the 26-year-old Sellars: ‘Because the text is thought corrupt, a flamboyant director cannot be accused of desecrating a masterpiece’ (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’). Fresh from his fellowship year in Asia where he studied Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku extensively, Sellars was attracted to the idea of using masks, music and cast doubling to explore Shakespeare’s late play in which many characters seem more like types than actual human beings. In fact, all the cast members played more than one part except the actors playing Gower, Pericles, Thaisa and Marina. In the programme note, Sellars said Pericles fuses ‘the classical blaze of the late tragedies with the hard, bright glare of contemporary comedy and the flickering pageantry of the renaissance masque and the special illumination of the Christian Mystery play’ (quoted in Stone, ‘Beyond Interpretation’). The mixed, almost grab-­bag, style of Pericles is something that Sellars admired. In fact, I believe the bagginess of Shakespeare’s late romance play appealed to Sellars because it reflects a philosophical and aesthetic stance that Sellars tries to emulate in his productions. He believes that

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juxtaposition, contrast, counterpoint and anachronism invite reflection and debate. Shakespeare’s Pericles has all of these elements built into its unusual structure. John Gower, played by Brother Blue, started the production by imparting the sense that the past is blues-­infused, and multicultural. Thus, Pericles, played by the black American actor Ben Halley, Jr, began the production as a richly clad businessman who has to decipher the strange cultural differences in the various lands he visits. Up for debate in the production was how much Pericles’ confusion was the result of his racial and cultural differences from the white world around him. Needless to say, this was not a colour-­blind production; rather, Sellars invited the audience to ponder the weight of the semiotic significance of Pericles’ blackness. While Pericles and Gower are clearly tied together, it was unclear if their bond was racial, cultural, moral or circumstantial. Emphasizing the point that different audience members will view things differently, Sellars projected black and white perspectival-­architectural images from Sebastiano Serlio’s Five Books of Architecture (c. 1550) on the back wall. Perspective is key to interpreting Pericles’ life. Employing masks for all the characters except Pericles, Thaisa and Marina, Sellars made much of the types that anchor so many of the characters in the play. Towards that end, Antiochus and his daughter were styled as overly sexualized types: the father in a leather S&M harness, the daughter in a white-­lace lingerie set. When Pericles discovers their affair, he picks up a suitcase and flees back to the boardroom of Tyre in which his nobles are styled as board members. Thaisa’s suitors in Pentapolis also look like businessmen, but they are impersonalized because they wear hockey masks during the tournament for her hand. Simonides wears a large red nose and tuxedo, rendering him funny and completely non-­threatening. At the other end of the spectrum, the brothel scenes are filled with men in animal masks, and the effect was ‘eerie’ and ‘sinister’: ‘the masks, sometimes grotesque, sometimes animal, sometimes human, look frighteningly real’ (Stone, ‘Beyond Interpretation’).

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FIGURE 4.1  From Pericles, Sellars’s inaugural production at the Boston Shakespeare Company in 1983. Inspired by his studies in Noh, Kabuki and Bunraku during his fellowship year, Sellars utilized mask work and doubling in this production.

Like almost all of Sellars’s productions, the stage was nearly bare, but the aural landscape was fully saturated with music playing throughout much of the production. A Debussy piece was played on tape, and two Beethoven sonatas were played live on stage on a baby grand piano. There was also a healthy dose of the blues, including T-Bone Walker’s ‘Stormy Monday’ (for the storm at sea) and Elmore James’s ‘Shake Your Moneymaker’ (for the scenes in the brothel). Marina (played by Jeannie Affelder) also sang a song which one reviewer called ‘sweet and sonorous’ (Stone, ‘Beyond Interpretation’). The storm at sea was represented by a single lamp that swung wildly across the stage, and then a small bag of water descended from the ceiling. Gower seized the bag and emptied its small contents on Pericles’ head. After losing his wife in childbirth, Sellars’s Pericles grows dreadlocks and sleeps in an empty Amana refrigerator carton. Like his exploration of homelessness in his 1980 production of King Lear, Sellars was deliberately layering anachronistic images and concepts onto the 400-year-­old text. Ron Jenkins argued about the production:

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To compare Pericles’ confused condition after the loss of his wife and daughter to the despair of a homeless derelict in Ronald Reagan’s America is to give immediacy to Shakespeare’s vision of possible resurrection, at the same time that it lends dignity to our modern opinion of the men we have all seen sleeping in gutters, who may at one time have had loving homes destroyed by circumstances as capricious as those that befall Pericles. The possibility of resurrection moves from the realm of fairy tale to the desperation of reality. JENKINS, ‘Peter Sellars’, 52 Like the sentiment voiced in William Shakespeare’s play that is most interested in perspectival viewing, Richard II, Sellars invites the audience to experience his production of Pericles ‘Like perspectives, which, rightly gazed upon, / Show nothing but confusion; eyed awry, / Distinguish form’ (2.2.18–20). Like most of his productions, Sellars’s anachronistic layering was not intended to be seamless, even, consistent nor uncomplicated. Rather, he wanted the audience to ponder the tensions between Pericles’ biblical, Job-­like travails and the black homeless men who lost many government-­funded safety nets during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. The reunion of Pericles’ family at the end of production was staged in a highly stylized fashion with a Beethoven sonata played on the piano on stage, and the actors moving towards each other very slowly in the ‘stately stylized movement of a classical Noh drama’ (Jenkins, ‘Peter Sellars’, 51). Ron Jenkins writes: Marina kneels as she prepares to reveal her mother’s name. Pericles’ head looks up to the heavens when the word is uttered. It is a reconciliation of stark simplicity, but because the supercharged passions of the characters have been channelled into the trancelike gestures and music, the effect is one of overwhelming emotional catharsis, rather than the feeling of a contrived happy ending that might have resulted from a more realistic and unmusical staging. JENKINS, ‘Peter Sellars’, 51–2

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While avoiding realism, the ending did invite the audience to experience Pericles, Thaisa and Marina as complex human beings instead of types. The only characters not wearing masks, aside from Gower, this nuclear family visually belongs together. And the sight of an interracial family moving beyond pain and hardship to be together was powerful and powerfully charged in 1983 in the violently racially-divided Boston, Massachusetts (see Chapter 3). The reviews for Pericles were much more laudatory than the typical reviews for Sellars’s Shakespearean productions. While almost every critic noted that the production was very long, at over three-­and-a-­half hours, they often attributed the length to Sellars’s capacious vision and audacity. The reviewer for the Christian Science Monitor, for example, wrote that Sellars created ‘a Pericles that springs from word-­for-word searching through the text, a Pericles that cuts across time and goes to the heart of human tragedy and triumph’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’). And the reviewer for the Village Voice claimed, ‘Sellars’ productions always burst with conceptual ideas that in a lesser director’s hands would be called gimmicks, and Pericles was no exception’ (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’). Comparing Sellars’s Pericles to a big-­budget, Broadway-­bound production he saw the same weekend, the reviewer gushes, ‘I couldn’t help thinking that the success of Pericles . . . had everything to do with [Sellars’s] commitment to theater as art’ as opposed to commercialism (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’). Even though the reviewer in the academic journal Shakespeare Quarterly assessed the production somewhat negatively (‘It was an inauspicious beginning for Sellars’ BSC years’ [Hageman, ‘Shakespeare in Massachusetts, 1983’, 224]), she ended her review stating that in hindsight her feelings had evolved: ‘But as I write it is February of 1984, and I have seen more of Sellars’ work . . . Perhaps Sellars will win us old curmudgeons over to his side after all!’ (Hageman, ‘Shakespeare in Massachusetts, 1983’, 225). In fact, the only truly negative review of the Boston Shakespeare Company’s 1983 production of Pericles was the

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one published in the Harvard University student paper, The Crimson. The other reviews were either wholly celebratory, generally laudatory and/or filled with much praise. Every reviewer noted that Sellars was employing a conceptual approach, but few found that approach challenging, complicating and/or confusing. Some found the production self-­promoting in its cleverness – ‘Perhaps in the process of bringing it to life, Sellars makes us too conscious of his gifts, too aware of his precocity’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’), and ‘a conceptualist as penetrating yet literal-­minded as Sellars would notice that the play contains three resurrections, and he has just the sort of rascally arrogance that would celebrate his inauguration as Artistic Director of a nine-­year old theater company with a play about resurrection’ (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’) – but none found that the conceptual approach obfuscated Shakespeare’s play. In fact, the reviewers, aside from the one writing in The Crimson, all praised the production’s clarity. One claimed that the production’s employment of conceptual ‘trickery’ ends ups bringing Pericles ‘to life’ because ‘in the breaking down of plot’ Sellars ‘discovers the play’s inner life’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’). And almost all the reviewers noted that with this single production of Pericles Peter Sellars had ‘transformed the Boston Shakespeare Company’ (Shewey, ‘A Weekend Near Boston’). Looking back at the 25-year-­old reviews, it seems clear to me that Peter Sellars’s decision to stage Pericles spared him from the common critique he had already experienced as an undergraduate director – that his conceptual, multi-­layered, anachronistic approach to staging Shakespeare’s plays prevents clarity of plot and/or characterization, and thwarts accessibility in terms of emotion and understanding. Because Pericles as a play has not had a rich performance history that is bolstered by being a staple on secondary school and collegiate syllabi, audiences and critics did not feel as if Sellars was violating the text and its meaning. On the contrary, they lauded the production’s clarity and accessibility. As I have tried to make

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clear in this case study, though, Sellars’s staging of Pericles is remarkably representative of his Shakespearean theatre work on the whole: it is conceptually based, it is more invested in stylization than realism, it employs non-­traditional casting, it is referentially dense, a deep religiosity runs through it, music plays a central role, the lighting is expressionistic, and the stage is nearly bare. The key difference to the assessment of the accessibility of this production is the play itself; Pericles, unlike Macbeth, King Lear, Merchant of Venice, Othello and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, does not have much cultural baggage. Thus, the audiences and critics were not bothered by a meaning or interpretation that they believed Sellars should be imparting or revealing. His theatrical innovations, then, could be taken at face value, and they were positively reviewed as being ‘akin to a comet streaking into our pedestrian orbit’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’).

Case Study Desdemona When Toni Morrison convinced Peter Sellars that he should direct a production of Othello, he agreed to do so only if she wrote a response play. The result is Desdemona, a literary and musical collaboration between Toni Morrison, Rokia Traoré and Peter Sellars that was commissioned and co-­produced by the Wiener Festwochen, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Cal Performances, the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, spielzeit’europa I Berliner Festspiele, the Barbican, the Arts Council London and the London 2012 Festival. In the foreword to the published playtext, Sellars explains the need for a response play to Othello, writing: Shakespeare’s Othello is a permanent provocation, for four centuries the most visible portrayal of a black man in Western art. It is a play seething with innuendo, misinformation, secrets, lies, self-­deception, cruelty, and strangely luminous

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redemption. It has been read by generations as a coded, indirect reference to the coded, indirect layers of justice and injustice that move across racial lines in Western societies. Because the play is so intricate and ultimately disturbing, much of its performance history has reduced it to a kind of puppet show of a brilliant but dangerously mad black man framed by a devil on his left (Iago) and an angel on his right (Desdemona). SELLARS, ‘Foreword’, Desdemona, 7 For Sellars the ‘permanent provocation’ stems from the way Othello’s intricacies have been reduced to a stereotypical ‘puppet show’ in its performance history. There is almost no way to experience Othello neutrally. As I have argued elsewhere, ‘seeing and/or discussing Othello in our post-­slavery and post-Civil Rights Era moment is both a rewarding and a challenging experience. It is useful to learn and discuss the historical moment in which Othello was composed, but it is just as important to review the historical moments Othello has passed through, affected and been affected by’ (Thompson, ‘Introduction’, 4). Wary of being trapped by Othello’s weird passage through history, Sellars wanted to create a new narrative, one in which women’s voices are represented more fully and one in which a passage beyond destruction could be revealed. Thus, he claims: In Desdemona, Toni Morrison has created a safe space in which the dead can finally speak those things that could not be spoken when they were alive. And finally, the women inside Shakespeare’s play and those in the shadows, just outside of it, find their voices: Othello’s mother and Desdemona’s mother meet, and hidden histories are shared and begin to flow. SELLARS, ‘Foreword’, Desdemona, 9 Thus, the play is set in the afterlife in which the characters from William Shakespeare’s Othello have the luxury of time to work through all that happened when they were alive.

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Morrison explained that her re-­vision of Othello was ‘not necessarily about reconciliation, which would be fine if it happens, but it’s not just that. It’s finally [about] knowing more than you did when you were alive . . . because now you have this time’ (Morrison, ‘Desdemona: Dialogues’). Like Sellars’s interest in creating theatrical pieces that enable reflection and understanding, Morrison wanted to create a piece that was about how one achieves knowledge. The creators of Desdemona also hoped to escape from the confines of Othello by composing a collaborative piece. While Peter Sellars and Toni Morrison were collaborators from the beginning, Sellars introduced Rokia Traoré to Toni Morrison because he thought the Malian singer ‘would add a layer of beauty, gravity, and intensity that Morrison’s post-­mortem play required. As Morrison was developing the script, she and Traoré would email back and forth, with Morrison supplying the “dialogue” and Traoré supplying music and lyrics in the Malian vernacular language Bambara’ (Thompson, ‘Desdemona’, 497). Both Morrison and Traoré were recovering from significant personal losses at the time, and Sellars thought the collaboration could prove redemptive for them all. Desdemona presented an intensely intimate look at race, gender, love, violence and transformation. On a near bare stage with only a scattering of glass jars, lamps and microphones arranged in four groupings as burial grounds, the set was incredibly minimalist. Peter Sellars designed the set himself and explained that it reflected ‘a Congo tradition of creating a shared space where the living and the dead meet. At each grave site is a high-­end microphone, the performers are dead and their voices are meant to be disembodied but of startling clarity’ (Swed, ‘All the Arts, All the Time’). The only performers in Desdemona are Tina Benko, Rokia Traoré, two or three female Malian back up vocalists and two male Malian instrumentalists. Rokia Traoré performs as Barbary, whose name we learn is really Sa’ran, and sings songs in Bambara; the lyrics to Sa’ran’s songs are translated and projected onto the back wall.

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FIGURE 4.2  Barbary (Rokia Traoré), Desdemona (Tina Benko) and the chorus (Fatim Kouyaté and Marie Dembelé) gather around the burial grounds composed of bottles, lamps and microphones in Sellars’s production of Desdemona.

Tina Benko plays all the other characters – Desdemona, Othello, Desdemona’s mother, Othello’s mother and Emilia – adjusting and manipulating the timbre, pitch and accent of her voice for each character. Most of the time she is standing speaking into a microphone that is either in a stand or hand-­ held, but she also lies down several times. Iago has been excised from Desdemona entirely, although he is mentioned by several of the characters. Cassio’s voice (performed by an unseen male performer) is piped in through a loudspeaker because he is still alive and therefore not present in the afterworld. There have been many feminists who have written response texts to Othello, including Ann-Marie MacDonald in her 1988 play Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet), Paula Vogel in her 1994 play Desdemona: a Play about a Handkerchief, Caleen Jennings in her 1996 play Casting

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FIGURE 4.3  Mamah Diabaté (on the Ngoni), Toumani Kouyaté (on the Kora), Rokia Traoré as Barbary, Fatim Kouyaté (vocals), Marie Dembelé (vocals) and Tina Benko as Desdemona perform one of Barbary’s songs in Bambara, while the lyrics are translated and projected onto the black back wall.

Othello, Djanet Sears in her 1997 play Harlem Duet, and Lolita Chakrabarti in her 2012 play Red Velvet. Morrison and Traoré were clearly working in that tradition, but the production had a distinct Peter Sellars ethos with the production deliberately disrupting audience expectations. Desdemona is not naïve and innocent. She is wise and reflective, and explains that she loved Othello precisely because she was enamoured with adventure. Othello is not an outsider who is easily duped. He was a child soldier who grew to be a scarred man, and his bond with Iago stems from a complexly brutal shared history. Othello explains that during one battle he and Iago raped two old women in a barn, and they discovered that a young boy witnessed the entire act. Acknowledging that their actions had been witnessed, Othello and Iago look at each other ‘in an exchange of secrecy’:

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              The look between us was not to acknowledge shame, but mutual pleasure. Pleasure in the degradation we had caused; more pleasure in leaving a witness to it. We were not only refusing to kill our own memory, but insisting on its life in another. MORRISON and TRAORÉ, Desdemona, 38 Desdemona responds by saying that Othello’s actions are ‘obscene, monstrous’ and that she cannot offer him forgiveness, ‘But I can love you and remain committed to you’ (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 39). Likewise, Emilia is not simply loyal. She harbours intense class resentments and explains that she had to ‘forge a secret path’ to get ahead. Yet the largest surprise and disruption to William Shakespeare’s Othello as a master narrative comes from Traoré’s portrayal of Barbary/Sa’ran. Perched on a chair next to Benko, Traoré’s songs provide a type of counterpoint to the action and plot. While her songs are related to the emotional arc of the narrative, Traoré’s strong presence necessarily challenges the notion that she cared for Desdemona. Finally, when Desdemona and Barbary/Sa’ran at last speak together, it is clear that Desdemona imagined a close relationship that was never there. Desdemona gushes, ‘We shared so much,’ but Barbary/Sa’ran scoffs, ‘We shared nothing . . . I mean you don’t even know my name’ (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 45). While Sa’ran admits that Desdemona ‘never hurt or abused [her]’, it is clear that she views her life and her afterlife as something separate from Desdemona’s (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 48). Sa’ran’s struggles are her own, and they remain largely unspoken. She tells Desdemona:           But I have thought long and hard about my sorrow. No more ‘willow.’ Afterlife is time and with time there is change. My song is new MORRISON and TRAORÉ, Desdemona, 48

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Sa’ran’s replacement song for the ‘Willow Song’ is about coping with mourning, loss and heartbreak. She tells of waiting and ‘longing to hear / Words of reason’, which never materialize. Eventually though ‘on my skin a sudden breath caresses / The salt my eyes have shed’, and a ‘clear’ voice says, ‘You will never die again’ (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 49). Sa’ran ends her song, stating, ‘What bliss to know / I will never die again’ (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 49). Owning her sorrows as her own, not needing or wanting to share them explicitly with Desdemona, Sa’ran experiences ‘bliss’ alone. In a typical Peter Sellars touch, however, Desdemona’s response is ambiguous. She declares, ‘We will never die again,’ and it is entirely unclear if Desdemona is still assuming a kinship that Sa’ran has explicitly rejected, appropriating Sa’ran’s narrative and words once more, or if she has accepted their differences and distance and merely recognizes the truth to Sa’ran’s statement (Morrison and Traoré, Desdemona, 49). The lack of clarity, the text’s refusal to flatten and resolve the complexity of Desdemona’s response, and the way different audiences will hear and interpret Desdemona’s line differently encapsulate Peter Sellars’s artistic ethos. We must grapple individually and collectively over that line. The critical response to Desdemona was overwhelmingly positive with critics raving about the power of Rokia Traoré’s music and presence on stage. In fact, the few negative reviews the production has received still include praise for Traoré. For example, one early review in the New York Times claimed that ‘the production did not convince’, but that ‘As a musical mood piece . . . the production was often affecting’, especially the musical numbers ‘by the exacting Malian composer and performance Rokia Traoré’ (Zinoman, ‘Othello’s Wife Gives Her Side of the Story’). More often than not, the positive responses to Desdemona praised both the music and the text with many reviewers thinking about William Shakespeare. In the French daily paper Les Echos, the reviewer declared that ‘Shakespeare doit être au paradis’ [Shakespeare must be in

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paradise] (Chevilley, ‘Shakespeare au Paradis’). The reviewer in the Los Angeles Times wrote, ‘In a ritual of spellbinding beauty, staged by Sellars, these two women, of different generations and continents, stand up to Shakespeare. Through Morrison’s use of words as magical sacrament and Traoré’s perplexed probing music, they drain, drop by terrible drop, the bile from an appalling play’ (Swed, ‘All the Arts, All the Time’). Another reviewer praised that the production made her rethink Shakespeare’s play, explaining, ‘this production was also about words we do not understand. Hearing Traoré’s music – particularly Barbary’s song of loss over the lover that forsook her – reminded me that, like Shakespeare’s Desdemona, we may “understand a fury in [one’s] words, but not the words” ’ (Brokaw, ‘Review of Desdemona’). What is interesting to note about these positive reviews, however, is the fact that they were often written by music critics. For instance, Elaine Sciolino, writing in the music section of the New York Times, claims Desdemona is ‘Part play, part concert, it is an interactive narrative of words, music and song about Shakespeare’s doomed heroine’ (Sciolino, ‘Desdemona Talks Back to Othello’). Likewise, the music reviewer from the Los Angeles Times acknowledged that theatre purists may not like Desdemona, but that ‘Cultural and spiritual and social divides do not bridge easily, seamlessly or gratefully. Beauty from ugliness is not trusted. But, trust me, this is a great, challenging, haunting and lasting work’ (Swed, ‘All the Arts, All the Time’). When Desdemona was produced at two festivals in Australia in 2015, Jane Cornwell, the music critic for The Australian, wrote a long profile about Traoré and labelled Desdemona ‘a concert cum multimedia event’ (Cornwell, ‘Desdemona’). Interestingly, a Shakespeare scholar who publishes a blog with performance reviews noted that she initially struggled with Desdemona because she was coming to it as a play instead of a musical event. She notes, ‘It’s possible as well that I am coming at this from the wrong angle entirely – Desdemona is at least as much about Traoré’s music as it is about Morrison’s words, with the

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Barbican situating the piece in its music programme and The Guardian sending along a music critic rather than a theater one’ (Sullivan, ‘Year of Shakespeare’). This scholar concluded, ‘Straddling theatrical performance and musical concert, Desdemona [is] staid’, but that ‘Desdemona’s reclaimed freedom looks like something altogether messier, rougher, and more fragile’ (Sullivan, ‘Year of Shakespeare’). Desdemona’s position as a hybrid music and performance piece allowed music critics to review Sellars’s work, and the music critics were both familiar with and open to his theatrical innovations. After all, Sellars’s operatic work and his unique approach to staging musical pieces are widely familiar to music reviewers; they were not surprised by what they saw on stage for Desdemona. It was innovative, yes, but not surprising. Moreover, because Desdemona is a response play, reviewers did not have to grapple with the perceived need to assess Sellars’s truthfulness to the Shakespearean text. In fact, several critics celebrated the fact that Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré found it necessary to set aside Shakespeare’s plot and characters. For instance, one review begins with a quote from Traoré stating that while ‘Shakespeare was a futurist’ because he was ‘courageous’ in writing a play about a black man in the seventeenth century, his knowledge of Africa and Africans was too limited to write a fully rounded ‘human being’: ‘So we’re redressing the balance’ (quoted in Cornwell, ‘Desdemona’). And Toni Morrison is quoted by another reviewer as saying, ‘Someone asked me if I was intimidated by Shakespeare’s language, and I said, “No, it has nothing to do with competing with Shakespeare” because she was creating something entirely separate’ (quoted in Sciolino, ‘Desdemona Talks Back to Othello’). Another critic concluded, ‘Like its protagonist, [Desdemona] becomes most alive when it leaves Othello behind’ (Zinoman, ‘Othello’s Wife Gives Her Side of the Story’). Desdemona was not reviewed in terms of its truthfulness to William Shakespeare’s Othello. Instead, it was afforded the right to viewed on its own terms, as wholly original.

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Conclusion Peter Sellars’s Shakespearean productions are critiqued for being both overly innovative and inaccessible when critics and audiences put William Shakespeare in the way. That is, if audiences come to a Shakespearean production with a desire for it to explain the text to them (through an absolute clarity of diction, characterization and plot), then they have constructed a ‘William Shakespeare’ that needs to be explained, pinned down and fixed. For those audiences, the only acceptable theatrical innovations will be those that work in the service of lucidity and transparency. I tend to think of this as a lock and key mentality: Shakespeare’s text is locked, and, therefore, it is assumed that it is the director’s job to provide the key that will unlock it. Peter Sellars, however, does not approach theatre in that manner. For him, theatrical innovation should work to reveal more locks, more puzzles, more complexity. Sellars says, ‘There needs to be something arduous in your theatrical experience. You won’t get something that you did not suffer for’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). Far from thinking that his theatrical work should provide a key, Sellars thinks that audiences should struggle and ‘suffer’. Additionally, what Sellars loves about Shakespeare’s plays are their complexity and messiness. Thus, his Shakespearean productions strive to innovate in terms of creating theatrical experiences that invite audiences to wrestle and labour with language, characters, emotions and ethics. For Sellars, the collective struggle provides ‘deliciousness, which is like a Caribbean stew’ with layers of complex flavous (Sellars, phone interview 1). The alternative is vanilla Shakespearean productions, tasty but one-dimensional.

5 Conclusion

When the editors at Arden Shakespeare, the publisher of this book, asked me to provide sample images for the book’s cover, I knew I wanted to include an image from Peter Sellars’s 2009 production of Othello. That production held a special place for me because that was where I first met Peter Sellars in person. Moreover, the production was incredibly arresting visually and it contained so many of Sellars’s typical theatrical elements: the near bare stage lit by expressionistic lighting visually captures Sellars’s minimalist aesthetic; the bed comprised of forty-­five digital monitors visually reflects the media saturation that occurs in most of his productions; and the principal actors – Philip Seymour Hoffman, John Ortiz and Jessica Chastain – visually reveal Sellars’s desire to challenge preconceived ideas about who can and should perform which parts in Shakespeare. The only problem I anticipated was narrowing down the options to just a few and eventually deciding on one. Easy. Because Sellars has been incredibly generous throughout the entire process of working on this project, I asked his advice on which photographers he liked best. Whom should I approach? He responded immediately saying that he thought Armin Bardel captured Othello best with images that showed the intimate connections between the actors/characters. Bardel, like so many of Sellars’s collaborators, proved equally generous, sending me all the photos he took at the world premiere at

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FIGURE 5.1  Philip Seymour Hoffman as Iago and John Ortiz as Othello in the temptation scene (3.3) of Sellars’s Othello. Armin Bardel captured this highly legible moment, which is not representative of the production as a whole.

Vienna’s Theater Akzent in June 2009. Thinking about how Sellars described what he liked about Bardel’s images, I quickly landed on the above image from the temptation scene in Act 3, scene 3. It was the perfect image because Hoffman and Ortiz are locked in an intimate gaze, their hands are clasped, and the shots on the bed of screens clearly show images of bloody hands. In fact, everything about the image is legible: it is clearly Othello, it is clearly the temptation scene, and it is clearly a Peter Sellars production. Proudly, I sent the mock-­up cover to Peter Sellars and waited for his praise. After spending so much time seeing his theatrical work, thinking about his approach, reading about him, speaking with him, and writing about him, I knew he would love it. And then I waited, which should have

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tipped me off because he normally responds freakishly quickly. But we were scheduled to do an event together in Los Angeles, so I thought he was waiting to commend my insightfulness in person. Needless to say, I was not greeted with unequivocal approbation. Sellars had mild praise for the mock-­up – he liked the colour scheme and general layout – but he thought I missed the point rather dramatically. The stunning image of Hoffman and Ortiz locked in a moment of homosocial tension was entirely too legible, Sellars told me, and did not accurately reflect the production’s ethos, artistry or aesthetic. This moment between Iago and Othello, which looks so familiar, so ‘Shakespearean’, occurred onstage fleetingly and happened to be captured quickly by the talented Bardel, but Sellars’s production was not familiar and/or ‘Shakespearean’ in that way at all. Sellars went on to say that the mock-­up was a book cover that a reader would look at once, understand, and therefore not feel the need to re-­examine in the future. His Othello, he hoped, was not like that in the least. He was absolutely right, of course, because it was a production that upended everything I thought I knew about Othello. I struggled with so much in that production, hating it the first night I saw it, loving it the second night, and feeling haunted by it and conflicted about it eight years later. Once Sellars got me to admit that, he said he wanted an image that would challenge the reader, making her return to the cover time and again. Like his production of Othello, he said, the cover should not be immediately legible or identifiable; rather, the cover image should reflect the mystery of the production and the complexity of life in general. Armin Bardel’s gorgeous image on the cover of this book does just that; it raises more questions than it answers; it invites deep and sustained reflection; and it registers differently for different people. I begin with this anecdote about my interactions with Peter Sellars about the cover of this book because it captures in miniature his attention to detail, the consistency of his aesthetic

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style, and his commitment to challenging the easily digestible and consumable in all artistic work. Operating from an entirely different set of principles than most commercial directors working in the US and the UK today, Peter Sellars has disavowed the notion that theatre should provide answers, reaffirm one’s beliefs, and/or be fully comprehensible in the moment. His goals are simply much loftier than that. His horizons for theatre and theatre’s impact are simply much further out. His views on humanity are simply much more generous and hopeful. Peter Sellars operates from a place of deep optimism and hope. I conclude with a lengthier passage from Peter Sellars about his attraction to William Shakespeare as an author and a playwright because I think it offers the sense of optimism and hope that Sellars feels about the political and spiritual aspects of theatre. In a follow-­up interview with me, he said: It’s always important to test yourself by what you didn’t get . . . I don’t think of Shakespeare as a smooth author. I think of Shakespeare as deliberately chunky, angular, cubistic, and again he has more to do with the avant-­garde I grew up with [than canonical authors] . . . It’s odd to deal with British people for whom Shakespeare is normal, natural, smooth, and completely comprehensible. My understanding of Shakespeare is the opposite; it is like all modern art; it is deliberately elusive; deliberately sends you down the wrong alley. Actually, [Shakespeare’s plays have] that trickster energy, or the sense that the truth is interstitial or is deliberately hidden, and the plays have the sense of the jump cut, the sense of the strange interlude, and obviously the sense of the human story, which is usually that the people who speak the longest are the least trustworthy. Most Shakespeare that you see in England and America has been cut to make it the length of a normal show, and to make that possible they cut all the little scenes with the servants. But Shakespeare is contrasting the delusional behavior of the scenes with the people who have long

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speeches with the working-­class people who could tell you a whole lot more of what is really going on. It is a level of truth-­telling that is extraordinary . . . Shakespeare invests in the little people. Shakespeare has an emotional availability that we should emulate. You can feel the speed in the writing . . . it’s not calculated, it’s not parsed out, it’s not considered. There is an emotional flow which ends up revealing all kinds of things. In that flow, a bunch of things you didn’t expect to say end up being said. It’s very important in Shakespeare [to note] where he just gets on a roll; some of those speeches come pouring out with this amazing availability and they say way more than the person who’s speaking imagines is being said. Or, what they are trying to reach for is so beyond their grasp that they are just putting themselves out there in this wildly experimental mode . . . That idea of just exposing yourself like that – just letting yourself be emotionally available and present even at the risk of not being able to control the conversation or the direction of the encounter – that is so exciting in Shakespeare and what makes his plays impossible to graph because they are not conceived of in graphic units. They are really these wild pathways through a landscape that is constantly littered with obstacles and discoveries . . . Most people are at pains to hide their emotional lives, or manage it, or use it to their advantage or when it is not to their advantage to censor it. What’s astonishing is you watch human beings behave in Shakespeare minus a lot of those editing functions, and then when you do get the Bolingbroke or someone who is highly self-­edited its extremely vivid and visible. What’s very annoying is the military culture of iambic pentameter, and the idea that all questions already have an answer. You will not be required to say what this speech means because you know where the word emphasis is, and, therefore, it only means one thing because that is the word you emphasize. To me, that is such a reductionist and embarrassing approach. The only thing you want to hear

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from an actor doing a Shakespeare speech is to take you into the Milky Way. So you say, ‘Oh my God, I’m in intergalactic space with a human being. These are the first shots being sent back through millions of miles from the left side of Pluto. These are the unknown ice mountains.’ I just want to feel that you are in some sort of cosmic dimension of imminence, possibility, multiple lives, and layered experience that doesn’t reduce meaning but opens meaning and creates meaning as part of an infinite flow. I think Shakespeare is a poet of infinity and what always interests him is infinity. And so the eternal and the infinite are constantly experienced in the immediate and the particular. His gift is his hyperbolic movement from some tiny little specific detail into some cosmic insight. SELLARS, phone interview 2 Part of what keeps drawing Peter Sellars back to the plays by William Shakespeare is their juxtaposition of the mundane and the mystical, the particular and the cosmic, the profane and the sacred. In Shakespeare, Sellars has found an author who invests in the multivocal, the layered, the contradictory and the complex that human beings must ‘chew on’ because there is not one easily identifiable answer or solution. Instead, there are just the right questions. Most directors working on William Shakespeare’s plays in commercial theatres in the US and the UK today strive for clarity over complexity, legibility over density, and intentionality over convolution. Peter Sellars, however, has always bucked those commercial trends. His approach and his work are inspirational if one believes that theatrical art should strive for communal, political and spiritual transformation. If one accepts that theatre should be a place for mutual, collaborative inquiry, then Peter Sellars’s Shakespeare productions provide benchmarks for complex pieces of art that are visually provocative, aurally distinctive and conceptually dense. If one believes that the bodies on the stage matter as much as the words and stories they are telling – even when there are stark

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contradictions between those diverse twenty-­first-century bodies and Shakespeare’s seventeenth-­century words – then Peter Sellars’s productions invite you to debate and grapple over the meaning and significance of those points of tension. Sellars has said about the immediate negative responses to his Shakespearean productions, ‘the destination is not opening night; the destination is the rest of the life’ (Sellars, phone interview 1). And this stance, as I have argued throughout this book, represents Sellars’s largest and most challenging theatrical innovation. Because Sellars values a diversity of experiences, he creates art that invites a multiplicity of responses that can and should evolve, change and mutate over time. He is asking his audience members to become active participants in the meaning making of Shakespeare’s plays, and he is inviting them to wrestle, grapple and struggle over that meaning collectively. Needless to say, this is an unusual invitation, and one that many audiences are not ready to accept. Audiences can be reluctant to change their habits of viewing, especially when they are not invited to do so frequently and with regularity in the spaces they visit habitually. Because Peter Sellars has not had a steady company of actors who work in a stable theatrical space, his Shakespeare productions have been seen as ‘something akin to a comet’ (Swan, ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company’). That is, theatrical events that blaze into our orbit infrequently and which burn a little too brightly to be stared at directly; not only beautiful and striking, but also arresting and terrifying. Sellars’s Shakespeare work is frightening to many because it is so destabilizing, counterintuitive and unfamiliar. His charge is for the audience to inhabit that off-­kilter position fully so that we can move into positions of deeper reflection, interaction, and transformation. Unfortunately, to date, Sellars’s theatre rhetoric has not become our lingua franca for Shakespearean performance. But this needs to happen if we are to experience the large-­scale collective changes that he imagines are possible. I, for one, want to live in the world that Peter Sellars envisions as achievable.

Appendix Chronology of Peter Sellars’s Shakespeare Productions

1971–5: Attended Phillips Academy Andover, Andover, Massachusetts 1975: The Tempest (a puppet version) 1975–6: Took a gap year in Paris with a trip to Moscow 1976–80: Attended Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1977: (January) Coriolanus at the Loeb Experimental Theatre 1977: (December) Macbeth at Explosives B in Adam’s House 1978: (December) Antony & Cleopatra at the Adam’s House Pool 1979: (July) Much Ado about Nothing at the Loeb Experimental Theatre 1980: (February) King Lear at the Loeb Mainstage 1980–1: Travelled to India, China and Japan on a Sheldon Fellowship 1983–4: Director, Boston Shakespeare Company, Boston, Massachusetts 1983: (October) Pericles 1983: (December) Midsummer Night’s Dream 1984: (March) Play/Macbeth 1984–6: Director, American National Theater, Washington, DC 1985: (April) 1 Henry IV, directed by Timothy S. Mayer 1987: King Lear, film, directed by Jean-Luc Godard (Sellars writes and stars in the film)

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1994: 2009: 2011:

2014:

appendix

(October) The Merchant of Venice at the Goodman Theatre, Chicago, Illinois (June) Othello at the Vienna Festival (May) Desdemona, written by Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, at the Akzent Theater, Vienna, Austria (a co-­production by Wiener Festwochen, Théâtre Nanterre-Amandiers, Cal Performances, Berkeley, California, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, New York, spielzeit’europa I Berliner Festspiele, and Barbican, London, Arts Council London and London 2012 Festival) (July–September) Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Stratford Festival, Masonic Concert Hall, Stratford, Ontario, Canada

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Savran, David. Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988. Schumann, Peter. ‘Peter Schumann on the 50 years of the Bread and Puppet Theater.’ breadandpuppet (10 July 2012). Accessed 7 June 2017. Sciolino, Elaine. ‘Desdemona Talks Back to Othello.’ New York Times (25 October 2011). Accessed 6 July 2016. Sellars, Peter. ‘Foreword.’ Emma Cox, Theatre & Migration. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014, viii–xii. Sellars, Peter. ‘Foreword.’ Toni Morrison and Rokia Traoré, Desdemona. London: Oberon Books, 2012, 7–11. Sellars, Peter. ‘Foreword.’ Chis Salter, Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2010, ix–xii. Sellars, Peter. ‘Foreword.’ David Savran, Breaking the Rules: The Wooster Group. New York: Theatre Communications Group, 1988, xv–xvi. Sellars, Peter. Getting Real: The Arts in Post-NEA America. Berkeley: The Regents of the University of California and the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities, 1998. Sellars, Peter. ‘On Othello: Director Peter Sellars Discusses Bringing Othello into the Age of Obama.’ Othello Briefing: Contexts & Commentary. New York: The Public Theater, 2009. Sellars, Peter. Phone interview 1. 29 December 2014. Published with permission. Sellars, Peter. Phone interview 2. 23 August 2015. Published with permission. ‘Shakespeare Troupe Names Sellars.’ Associated Press (12 April 1983). Accessed 29 June 2016. Shevtsova, Maria, and Christopher Innes. Directors/Directing: Conversations on Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Shewey, Don. ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Los Angeles Festival 1990.’ American Theatre 7.9 (December 1990): 15–21. Shewey, Don. ‘How My One and Only Came to Broadway.’ New York Times (1 May 1983). Accessed 3 May 2017. Shewey, Don. ‘Not Either/Or But And: Fragmentation and Consolidation in the Post-­modern Theatre of Peter Sellars.’ Contemporary American Theater. Edited by Bruce King. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991, 263–82.

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Shewey, Don. ‘A Weekend Near Boston.’ Village Voice (22 November 1983). Accessed 29 June 2016. Simon, John. ‘Megalomaniacal Director Sellars Dumbs Down Othello.’ Bloomberg (28 September 2009). Accessed 29 September 2009. Skantze, P.A. ‘O-Thell-O: Styling Syllabules, Donning Wigs, Late Capitalist, National “Scariotypes.” ’ Shakespeare Beyond English: A Global Experiment. Edited by Susan Bennet and Christie Carson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014,129–38. Slotkin, Lynn. ‘Review: A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play.’ The Passionate Playgoer (29 July 2014). Accessed 5 July 2016. Smith, Liz. ‘Peter Sellars: No relation, but brilliant in his own field.’ The Baltimore Sun (17 October 1984). Accessed 29 June 2016. ‘Sotomayor Explains “Wise Latina’ Comment.” CBS News (14 July 2009). Accessed 1 July 2017. States, Katherine P. ‘Full of Sound and Fury: The Bedbug by Vladimir Mayakovsky Directed by Peter Sellars ’80 At the Loeb, Aug. 3–4, 8–11.’ The Harvard Crimson (3 August 1979). Accessed 23 March 2017. Stone, Webster A. ‘Beyond Interpretation: Pericles Directed by Peter Sellars ’80 At the Boston Shakespeare Company through October 30.’ The Harvard Crimson (21 October 1983). Accessed 29 June 2016. Stratford Festival. ‘Community-Based Venue Confirmed for A Midsummer Night’s Dream: A Chamber Play.’ Press Release (24 February 2014). Sullivan, Dan. ‘Peter Sellars: Boy Wonder Grows Up.’ Los Angeles Times (24 August 1986). Accessed 29 June 2016. Sullivan, Erin. ‘Year of Shakespeare: Desdemona.’ Blogging Shakespeare (22 July 2012). Accessed 5 July 2016. Swan, Christopher. ‘Enter Peter Sellars and Shakespeare Company.’ Christian Science Monitor (20 October 1983). Accessed 29 June 2016. Swed, Mark. ‘All the Arts, All the Time.’ Los Angeles Times (28 October 2011). Accessed 6 July 2016. Thompson, Ayanna. ‘Desdemona: Toni Morrison’s Response to Othello.’ A Feminist Companion to Shakespeare, Second Edition. Edited by Dympna Callaghan. Chichester: Wiley, 2016, 494–506. Thompson, Ayanna. ‘Introduction.” William Shakespeare, Othello. Revised Third Edition. London: The Arden Shakespeare, 2016.

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Thompson, Ayanna. Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America. London: Oxford University Press, 2011. Thompson, Ayanna. ‘Practicing a Theory/Theorizing a Practice: An Introduction to Shakespearean Colorblind Casting.’ Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance. Edited by Ayanna Thompson. New York and London: Routledge, 2006, 1–24. Thompson, Ayanna, and Laura Turchi. Teaching Shakespeare with Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach. London: Bloomsbury Arden, 2016. Trousdell, Richard. ‘Peter Sellars Rehearses Figaro.’ TDR 35.1 (1991): 66–89. Vincentelli, Elisabeth. ‘New Shakespeare Tragedy.’ The New York Post (28 September 2009). Accessed 29 September 2009. White, Shane. Stories of Freedom in Black New York. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002. Willis, Avery. ‘Othello Rehearsal Diary: We Begin a Collective Re-Imagining.’ Othello Briefing: Contexts & Commentary. New York: The Public Theater, 2009. Wilson, John Dover. ‘Introduction.’ Othello. Edited by John Dover Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957, ix–lxix. Winer, Linda. ‘Philip Seymour Hoffman Shines in Othello.’ Newsday (28 September 2009). Accessed 6 July 2016. The Wooster Group. ‘The Wooster Group Hamlet.’ Playbill (November 2007). Zinoman, Jason. ‘Othello’s Wife Gives Her Side of the Story.’ New York Times (3 November 2011). Accessed 28 June 2016.

Index

ability, physical 70, 79–82 Abraham, Chris xlviii, 90 accessibility in theatre xvii, xviii, xxix, lii, 6, 8, 61, 64, 90, 99–125 Acosta, Julian 83 Adams, John xliii, li, 42 Girls of the Golden West li, 42 Nixon in China xliii affect, in theatre 59, 100–3, 122 Afful, Sarah xlix, 93, 94, 96 African Grove (New York) 70–3 Akilaitis, JoAnne 30 Aldridge, Ira 73–4 Allen, Lewis xxxii Als, Hilton 80 American National Theater (ANT) xiiv, xxxvi–xlii, 10, 18–19, 24–5, 36–9 American National Theater and Academy (ANTA) xxxvi–xxxviii American Repertory Theater (ART) xxxi, xxxiv, 4 anachronism 40–1, 111–15 Andrews, Robert 19 Artaud, Antonin 8 audiences xiv–xv, xvii, xix, xxi, xxix, xxx, xl–xlii, xlvi, xlix, lii, 3, 14, 16, 20, 22 changing views xv, xlv

as consumers 51, 100, 102, 130 leaving early xiv, xxii, 37, 90, 103–4 avant-garde xvii–xviii, xix, xxi, xli, li, 10, 12–13, 15–16, 19–20, 24–31 Bardel, Armin 127–9 Beckett, Samuel xix, xxxiv, 65, 105 Play xxxiv Beethoven, Ludwig von 112, 113 Benko, Tina xlvii, 59, 118–21 Bennett, Michael 30 Bernardo, Melissa Rose 88 Bible, King James xl, 45, 105 Black Lives Matter xv Boston Shakespeare Company xxxii, xxxiv–xxxvii, 18, 49, 89, 109–16 Brantley, Ben xlvi, 56 Bread and Puppet Theater xxi, 13–14 Brecht, Bertolt xix, xxxi, xxxv, 8, 15, 41 Brody, Richard xliii–xliv Brokaw, Katherine Steele 60, 123 Brook, Peter xvii–xviii, li, 6, 8–11, 27, 48–9 The Empty Space 9–10 Hamlet 9

148

index

The Mahabharata 9, 11 Midsummer Night’s Dream xvii, 9, 48–9 Brosh, Aline xxv Brother Blue xxix, xxxiii, 44, 81, 111 Brown, Scott 65, 88 Brown, William 72–3 Browne, Roscoe Lee 6 Brustein, Robert 1 Bunraku xxvi, 110–12 Bunuel, Luis xxxiii Burton, Richard 21–2 Butler, Paul xiv Butterfield, Fox xxxv, xxxvi Cain, Bill xxxii Cartelli, Thomas 22 casting xvii, xviii, xxix, xxxiii, xlvi, l–li, 4, 6–8, 10, 35–6, 52–3, 66, 69–98, 109, 116 colour-blind xxxix, l–li, 7–8, 70–1, 75–6, 78–81, 111 colour-conscious 7–8, 70, 77–81, 89, 93, 95–7 conceptual xxix, 78–80, 89 integrated 6, 8, 75–8 non-traditional 4, 33, 34, 70–82, 109, 116 history of 71–7 Chakrabarti, Lolita 120 Charles, Gaius 83 Chastain, Jessica xlv, 56, 63, 83, 127 Chéreau, Patrice xxi, 102 Chevilley, Philippe 122–3 Chomsky, Noam 24, 51 choreography 16–17, 21, 57–9

Cimolino, Antoni xlviii, 90 Ciulei, Liviu 24 Clay, Carolyn xxxiv, xxxv Clayburgh, Jim 21 collaboration xxxvii, xlv, li, 2–3, 6, 18, 31, 51, 59, 91–2, 105, 116, 118, 132 Colón-Zayas, Liza 47, 83 Conner, Lynne 12 Coppola, Francis Ford xliii Cornwell, Jane 123 Courtney, Krystyna 73 Davies, Timothy Maxwell xxxv The Lighthouse xxxv Day, James 6 Deboo, Ana 77–8 Defoe, Willem 21 de la Tour, Frances 9 DeVille, Abigail 90–1 Edelstein, David xxvi–xxviii Ekulona, Saidah Arrika 47, 83, 85 Elie, Rudolph, Jr 74 Elitch Theater (Denver, CO) xix Explosives B xxv Fanon, Franz 24, 51 Feldberg, Robert 87 filmic techniques xxix, 12, 13, 16, 22, 70, 101 Foreman, Richard 13, 24, 41 Forman, Stanley 44 Frankel, David xxix–xxx Freedman, Samuel 19 Galeano, Eduardo 24, 51 Garin, Erast 17

index

Godard, Jean-Luc xxi, xliii–xliv, 102 King Lear xliii–xliv Godfrey, Robyn 99 Gogol, Nikolai xxxi The Inspector General xxxi Goodman Theatre (Chicago, IL) xiii–xv, xliv–xlv, 24, 34 Graham, Martha xviii Gray, Spalding 21 Grotowski, Jerzy 8 Hageman, Elizabeth 114 Haj, Joseph 109 Halley, Ben, Jr xxxiii, 81, 111 Handel, George xxxi Orlando xxxi Henahan, Donal 1 Hitchcock, Alfred 10–12 Hoffman, Philip Seymour xlv, xlvii, 63, 83, 85, 127–9 Hoile, Christopher 95 Holly, Ellen 75 Holzinger, Gregor 83 hooks, bell 70 Houseman, John 4 Howes, Libby 21 Ingalls, James F. 91 Innes, Christopher 26, 60 International Centre for Theatre Research (Paris, France) 9 Isherwood, Charles l, 94 Jenkins, Ron 112–13 Jennings, Caleen 119 Johnstone, Dion xlix–l, 93–7 Jonson, Ben 110

149

juxtaposition xix, xxi, xxix, 21, 27, 40, 45, 11, 132 Kabuki xxxi, 13, 110, 112 Kaplan, Jon l, 57 Kennedy Center xiii, xxxvi–xxxix, xli, 10, 18, 19 Kerouac, Jack xliii On the Road xliii Kidnie, Margaret Jane xlviii, xlix–l, 92–4 Kiely, Robert xxiii–xxvi King, Martin Luther, Jr 29, 46 King, Rodney xv, 34 Kingsley, Ben 9 Komparu, Kunio xxxiv–xxxv The Noh Theatre xxxiv–xxxv Kramer, Jane 22–3 Kroll, Jack xxxv, 4 Kronos Quartet 30 Krusoe, Jenny Cornuelle 47–8, 57 Kuchwara, Michael 88 Kunshu opera 26 Kurosawa, Akira xxxiii La Mama Experimental Theater Club (New York) xix, 12, 13, 24 Langham, Michael 7 Lash, Larry xlvi, 87 Lazare, Larry 1 LeCompte, Elizabeth li, 11, 18–24, 30, 57, 102 The Performing Garage 18, 20–1, 23 Lester, Adrian 9 Levin, Harry xxiii, xxvi

150

index

Levine, Lawrence 42–3, 71–2 Lindström, Trish xlix, l, 92–3, 95, 96 Loehlin, James xv, 1 Los Angeles Festival xliv–xlv Los Angeles race riots/uprising xiv–xv, 34–5 Lovelace, Margo xix, xxi, 12–13 Lovelace Marionette Theater xviii, xix, 12–13 Luddy, Tom xliii Lyubimov, Yuri 10, 11, 13–15 Mabou Mines (New York) 12, 41 McAllister, Marvin 73 McClain, LeRoy 83 MacDonald, Ann-Marie 119 McDormand, Frances 21 Mailer, Norman xliii Marable, Manning 24, 51 Mark, Charles xlii masks 110–12, 114 Masonic Concert Hall xlviii, 90–1 Mayer, Timothy xxxv, xxxix Mejia-LaPerle, Carol xlix, l, 94 Melrose, Rob 109 Mercury Theatre (New York) 4 Meyerhold, Vsevolod 2, 14–18, 60 biomechanics 16–17 Miller, Arthur xix, 19, 21 The Crucible 19 Minton, Eric 96–7 Molotsky, Irvin xli, 108 Morris, Mark 30 Morrison, Toni xlv–xlvii, 25, 39, 82, 116–25

Desdemona xlv–xlviii, 58–61, 63, 81, 109, 116–25 Moyers, Bill xl, 43 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus xx, xxxv, xliii, 27, 42 Cosí fan tutte xliii Don Giovanni xliii, 27 multivocal 26–8, 31, 102, 132 Nadajewski, Mike xlix, l, 93, 96 national theatre 7, 43 New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF) 6–7, 70, 75 Nichols, Mike xxxiii Noh xxxi, xxxiv–xxxv, 26, 110, 112, 113 Non-Traditional Casting Project (NTCP) 77–8 Norman, Jessye xliii Nun, Trevor 110 Obama, Barack 82, 83, 86–8, 144 Offenbach, Jacques xxi The Tales of Hoffman xxi, 102 opera xxi, xxiii, xxxi, xxxv, xliii, xliv, xlv, xlviii, li, 8, 10, 11, 17, 26, 42, 52, 60, 124 Oregon Shakespeare Festival 81, 109 Ortiz, John xlv, 62, 63, 64, 83, 88, 127, 128, 129 Ortiz, Tareke 91 Papp, Joseph li, 6–8, 70, 75–7 paratextual documents 51, 52, 66

index

paratheatrical events 34, 66 Pettengill, Richard xiii–xiv, 34–5, 51, 53 Pitches, Jonathan 15–17 postmodern 26, 29 Public Theater (New York) xlv, 6, 109 Pulos, Will 103 puppets xix–xxi, xxxi, 2, 12, 14, 61, 117 Quick, Andrew 20, 23 Received Pronunciation (RP) 46 Rich, Adrienne 24, 51 Richards, David xiv, xvi, xxxviii, 1, 10, 19, 103, 108 Rippy, Marguerite 4, 5, 74 Robeson, Paul 74–5 Rosenbaum, Ron 49 Rosenberg, Scott xxviii, 103 Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) xvii, xl, xliii, 8, 43 Rozan, Micheline 9 running time, long xxi, xxix, xxxiv, xlviii, 14, 34, 57, 93 Savran, David 21 Schechner, Richard 20, 23 Schumann, Peter 13–14 Sciolino, Elaine 123 Scott, Harold 78 Seago, Howie 81 Sears, Djanet 120 Seawell, Donald R. xxxvii, xlii Sellars, Peter appearance xvi

151

biographical background xviii–lii gap year (1975–6) xx, 12–13 Harvard University xxii–xxxi, xxxv, lii, 4, 8, 11, 15, 43–4, 47–8, 57, 99, 115 Phillips Academy Andover xx, xxiii, 2 in the popular media xv, xlvii, 1, 11, 21, 64 purpose of theatre collective inquiry 36–7, 40, 51, 125, 132 democracy training 27–8, 36–7, 40, 102 spirituality 27–31, 38–9, 130, 132 Serban, Andrei xix, 12–13 Shakespeare, William as American xxxvii, xxxix–xl, 42–7 iambic pentameter 61, 131 language xl, li, 45–6, 51, 53, 75, 107, 124 plays Antony and Cleopatra xxvi, xxviii, 47–8 Coriolanus xxiii–xxiv, 7, 54, 76 Cymbeline 31 Hamlet 9, 21–3, 75, 79, 80 1 Henry IV xxxi, xli Julius Caesar 5, 7, 13, 41, 76 King Lear xxviii, xxix–xxx, xxxiii, xliii–xliv, 43–5, 47, 64, 73, 81, 112, 116

152

index

Macbeth xxv, xxvi, xxvii, xxxiv–xxxv, 4, 47, 73, 74, 80, 116 The Merchant of Venice xiii–xv, xliv–xlv, 24, 34–5, 51, 53, 55, 62–4, 73, 81, 116 A Midsummer Night’s Dream xvii, xxxv, xlviii–li, 9, 48–9, 57, 70, 82, 89–98, 116 Much Ado about Nothing xxviii, xxix Othello xlv–xlvii, 39, 47, 56, 60, 62–6, 70, 74, 81–9, 97, 116–24, 127–9 Pericles xxxiii, xxxv, 31, 81, 109–16 Richard II 113 Richard III 72, 73, 75 The Tempest xx, 31 The Winter’s Tale 31 Shewey, Don xxxi–xxxii, xlv, 30, 33–4, 41–2, 104–5, 110, 114–15 Shipley, Sandra xxxv Simon, John 47, 88 Sinise, Gary 24 Sitwell, Edith xxiii Façade xxiii Skantze, P.A. 100 Slotkin, Lynn 95 Smith, Liz xxxv, 4 Smith, Peyton 21 sound 7, 13, 20, 21, 28, 45–7, 53, 60, 61, 63–5, 84, 91 pre-recording/splicing xix, 20

Stanislavsky, Konstantin 15, 17, 60 States, Katherine xvii, 99–100 Stein, Gertrude xvii, xx, 21 Stevens, Roger L. xxxvii Stewart, Ellen 13, 24 Stone, Webster xxxiii, 111, 112 Stratford Festival (Ontario, Canada) xlviii–l, 90–1, 99, 109 Strindberg, August xlviii, 89, 94 chamber play xlviii, l–li, 89, 90, 92, 94 Sullivan, Erin 33, 124 Svoboda, Josef xix, 12 Swan, Christopher xxxviii, 114, 115, 116, 133 Swed, Mark xlviii, 118, 123 Taganka Theatre (Moscow, Russia) 11, 13, 14 Theatre for a New Audience (New York) 109–10 Traoré, Rokia xlv, xlvii, 39, 59, 116–25 Desdemona xlv–xlviii, 58–61, 63, 81, 109, 116–25 Trousdell, Richard 4, 18, 52–3 Tune, Tommy xxxi, 30 Twiggy xxxi Valk, Kate 21 van Hove, Ivo li Vawter, Ron 21 Villaurrutia, Xavier 24, 51 Vincentelli, Elisabeth 88 Vogel, Paula 119

index

Warhol, Andy xviii Welles, Orson xxxiii, xxxv, 4–5, 7, 74, 80 Wentworth, Scott 109 White, Shane 71–2 Wilson, John Dover 74 Wilson, Robert 13, 26, 38, 41 Winer, Linda xlvii Woronicz, Henry xxxiv

153

Wooster Group, The xxxv, 10–12, 18–25, 41, 57, 102, 108 Hamlet 21–2 L.S.D. xxxv, 19 North Atlantic 19 Route 1 & 9 102 Zinoman, Jason 122, 125 Zoffoli, David xxxiv