From today's NY Times:
August 10, 2008
Critic’s Notebook
‘If to Do Were as Easy as to Know’
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
New discoveries pertaining to Shakespeare, the most exhaustively, obsessively studied writer in history, are rare. So the news that archaeologists in London have unearthed the remains of the theater where many Shakespeare plays were first presented inspired understandable excitement last week.
Archaeologists from the Museum of London, digging in the Shoreditch neighborhood, appear to have uncovered the foundations of the Theater, which opened in 1576 and was the initial London home of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, the troupe that employed Shakespeare as both actor and author.
Those dusty bricks will no doubt beget a few books. The shelves at chain bookstores already groan with tomes devoted to Shakespeare. Year after year, academics and critics continue to fill the void of concrete knowledge about his life with new interpretations of the sketchy historical record, new perspectives on the plays, new theories about the life.
But while the Shakespeare scholarship industry thrives, the art of producing and performing his plays seems to be in a state of decline in our own country’s cultural capital. London is awash in Shakespeare year-round — at the Royal Shakespeare Company, at Shakespeare’s Globe and at the National Theater — but his plays are performed only rarely on New York’s largest stages.
The Public Theater, which announced last week the hiring of a new executive director, Andrew D. Hamingson, presented just one Shakespeare play last season, an ill-received “Hamlet” at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, directed by the company’s new-ish artistic director, Oskar Eustis. The only other major homegrown Shakespeare production was the Lincoln Center Theater’s “Cymbeline.”
The two truly notable Shakespeare stagings to be seen here recently — “King Lear” starring Ian McKellen and “Macbeth” with Patrick Stewart — both came courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company. All praise to the Brooklyn Academy of Music, which hosted both productions (“Macbeth” later had a brief Broadway run) and regularly imports acclaimed international productions of classical theater. But isn’t it an embarrassment that when it comes to the greatest playwright in the English language — oh, heck, the greatest playwright in any language — America’s theatrical epicenter is fast becoming just another stop for globe-trotting star productions from England? A New Yorker could justifiably be a little ashamed, too, that both Chicago and Washington have large, well-financed and well-established theaters that produce three or more Shakespeare plays a season. Both are actually denoted “Shakespeare” theaters. New York hasn’t got one.
Commerce has always been the keynote of the New York theater, of course, and star-driven Shakespeare was long a staple of Broadway. But as the American theater matured in the early decades of the 20th century, the companies that bucked the mercantilism of Broadway — the Theater Guild, the Group Theater, the Provincetown Players — focused largely on new domestic and/or international work (although the Theater Guild sporadically produced classics including Shakespeare over the years). Eva Le Gallienne’s short-lived Civic Repertory Theater primarily championed Ibsen and Chekhov. Shakespeare took care of himself, with the help of British stars swanning into town to ravish the Americans with the beauty of their verse-speaking, or matinee idols like John Barrymore.
But the breadth of Broadway offerings waned as television and movies changed the cultural landscape, and the regional theater movement that spawned large repertory theaters in various American cities did not really play a part in the more bustling and complicated economy of New York theater.
When Joseph Papp founded the New York Shakespeare Workshop in 1954, he was driven by several impulses — to create free theater, to promote racial diversity onstage and to provide New Yorkers with a steady diet of Shakespeare. But as the company grew and moved into its Astor Place home, its brief widened to include the production of new plays and musicals. Unfortunately the economics of producing theater in New York has gotten tougher in the decades since Mr. Papp’s prime. In the late 1960s and early 1970s the New York Shakespeare Festival could present several Shakespeare productions on top of fistfuls of new American plays, not to mention the pioneering foreign work Mr. Papp also favored. Now the company produces far fewer shows a year.
For several years the emphasis has continued to shift to contemporary work, a change that appears to be accelerating under Mr. Eustis. There was no Shakespeare on any of the five stages at the Public in the last season, and none is on the schedule for the coming season. The first production announced for next summer’s Shakespeare in the Park is actually Euripides’s “Bacchae.” (And this year the hot ticket in Central Park was not “Hamlet” but the current “Hair.”) In 2002 the Public shed the “New York Shakespeare Festival” designation, at least for general branding purposes. It was a cosmetic change to be sure but one that seems to reflect a declining emphasis on the company’s Bardic roots.
The truly Shakespeare-hungry will not starve in the city. Smaller not-for-profit companies like Theater for a New Audience and the Classic Stage Company reliably program Shakespeare plays, and there are of course those notable international productions at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Lower down the theatrical food chain, scrappy little companies put on Shakespeare in parking lots and hole-in-the-wall theaters on the Lower East Side.
But there is an obvious reason for large Shakespeare-centric theaters like those in London and Washington and Chicago, and Shakespeare festivals like the notable ones in Stratford, Ontario, and Ashland, Oregon. Shakespeare best thrives at theaters that present his plays regularly and with significant resources. Even a minor Shakespeare play is a major challenge to produce well. Ideally you begin with a large cast of talented, classically trained actors — a commodity not in generous supply these days. Add skillful dramaturgy and an insightful, experienced director, and if you’re lucky you might just achieve competence. Practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect when it comes to writing as complex as Shakespeare’s, but it helps.
New York audiences could surely support a first-class Shakespeare theater. The wonderfully mixed audiences that fill Shakespeare’s Globe on the South Bank of the Thames look quite a bit like the crowds that flock to the Delacorte, or for that matter throng Times Square. And, after all, the Globe rose just over a decade ago — a cause led, interestingly, by the American actor Sam Wanamaker, who sadly died before the project came to fruition.
An intriguing plan to build a New Globe Theater in Castle Williams on Governors Island has a long list of distinguished supporters. But the draft for the development of the site released by the National Park Service in February did not include the New Globe. At this point it appears this worthy project is little more than a Web site and a dream. (You can check out details at www.newglobe.org.) More realistically, perhaps we can hope that Mr. Eustis and Mr. Hamingson, as they put in place their plans for the Public, will rededicate at least part of the company’s resources to the playwright whose works inspired Mr. Papp to establish it in the first place.
The need is real. Shakespeare is the taproot of the English-language theater, a limitless source of inspiration for theater artists of all kinds, an ever-renewable source of pleasure for audiences. To read him is a joy, yes, but the plays are better said than read. That the country’s leading theatrical marketplace can offer up only a paltry couple of major homegrown Shakespeare productions a year is a puzzle and a problem. But surely not an insoluble one.
---When I was about 12, Joe Papp, who was a family friend and dining with us that evening, telling us about his plan for free Shakespeare in Central Park, he also floated the idea that I would play Juliet when I was 14. He said "imagine that, a real 14-year-old in the part." As it happened I didn't play it, but later on was directed by Joe in The Mod Donna and by AJ Antoon in Subject to Fits at Joe's Public Theater, an expansion of the Festival.
Not long ago, I saw Lauren Ambrose as a splendid Juliet. She had bright red hair and although not actually 14 she really made you believe she was. Joe's vision came true after all.
