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5/18/09 8:07 AMThe Heretic’s Foundation II: New York’s Shakespeare Problem « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 1 of 6http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=1863
 
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The Heretic’s Foundation II: New York’s Shakespeare Problem
Friday, April 24, 2009Bylines
 By John Hudsondarkladyplayers@aol.com
Heretics challenge established orthodoxies and this column combines three juicy ones: real estate, acting styles and Shakespeare.Now that the last year of recession, financial crises and the decline in theatergoing have put an end to any possibility of aShakespeare theater being built on Governors Islandin theforeseeable future, it is time for rethinking. Although it was supported by a long list of arts leaders, including Oskar Eustis of the PublicTheater, Randall Bourscheidt at Alliance for the Arts, Reynold Levy at Lincoln Center, Gerald Schoenfeld atthe Shubert Organization and such financial leaders as George Soros,this $78 million planwasfundamentally a product of the financial and real estate bubble that has burst. I say it is time to go back tobasics.It is safe in the short term-but bad long-term strategy-for such major nonprofit institutions as the BrooklynAcademy of Music to continue importing star-studded foreign productions of Shakespeare. For one thing,
 
5/18/09 8:07 AMThe Heretic’s Foundation II: New York’s Shakespeare Problem « Clyde Fitch ReportPage 2 of 6http://www.clydefitchreport.com/?p=1863
they effectively siphon our dollars overseas. For another, these productions do nothing to build capacity andinfrastructure here in New York City. They provide no income, and no training that I know of, for NewYork’s actors and theater professionals. They deprive our local economy of the full economic stimulus thata homegrown production could provide.What is our alternative? Once, we might have had a few of them. In 1997, the Riverside ShakespeareCompany, based at Columbia University and sponsored by the chair of its theater department, was dissolvedafter two decades in existence. In 1998, the National Shakespeare Conservatory was dissolved. And in myopinion, the Public Theater totally abandoned its ambition to provide New York with a substantiveShakespeare festival some years ago. Yes, New York City independent companies produce many revivals of the Bard each year. Manhattan universities still present half a dozen or more student productions eachspring. Plus let’s not forget companies other than the Public offering Shakespeare for free in city parks andin other modest productions. Yetas Charles Isherwood of the New York Times has written, it is a “puzzleand a problem” that New York does not have a large Shakespeare theater.One reason perhaps is the sheer difficulty of the plays themselves, along with the need for productions to besupported by scholarship. It’s no coincidence that some of the most successful Shakespearean theaters co-exist with centers for Shakespeare scholarship: the RSC resides just down the road from the ShakespeareInstitute at the University of Birmingham; the Shakespeare Theater in Washington, D.C. is just across townfrom the Folger; and the Globe is partnered with King’s College London. Whether these theaters use thatscholarship effectively is a completely different question. But by simply by being proximate to one another,together with opportunities for scholarly conferences and for networks of students, there is created everymanner of cross-fertilization. And it’s in that cross-fertilization that exists tremendous marketing advantagesthat New York’s scene at the moment lacks.What New York is known for is training, especially in the realistic and naturalistic acting methodsdeveloped by Stanislavsky, Strasberg, Meisner and Adler. This is all very well for working in TV, film andcommercials, but it has created a body of actors who are ill-equipped to perform Shakespeare’s plays-atleast without undoing some of what they have been taught. These works are highly metatheatrical,incorporate extensive direct address, use complex multilayered allegories, multilingual puns and thecharacters are emphatically not ‘real people,’ but complex literary figures which, to be comprehended,require the creation of a particular alienation effect. To perform them in accordance with the way they werewritten requires a highly presentational acting approach. Performing them as superficial narratives in arealistic style and in high-concept directorial settings obscures rather than elucidates their underlyingmeanings. Although such Shakespeare may attract pop culture audiences, it only delivers a tiny fraction of their potential value.Claudia Alick’s horrific claim that Shakespeare is “American theatre’s little blackdress, appropriate for all occasions and able to be paired with just about everything“ is an indictment of atheater that ignores the plays’ inherent meaning.The hoo-ha over the last few years on rallying support for a new Shakespearean theater in New York hasdiverted attention away from issues far more pressing than real estate. Originally several companiesperformed the Shakespearean plays. A dedicated company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, was established in1594; for the next five years they performed at various theaters before the building of the Globe and theBlackfriars. So having a physical building need not be a priority, but because of the difficulty of the work,having an ongoing semi-permanent ensemble of actors is. As monologist Mike Daisey has emphasized (inhis
 How Theater Failed America
),too much attention goes to bricks and mortar. Not enough attention goesto constructing the human capital of an ensemble that can work together over time.
 
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Such an ensemble, supported by the necessary research, dramaturgy, speech, technical and audience-development specialists, could be funded for a fraction of the cost of the so-called New Globe, and it couldperform in preexisting spaces around New York City.And at this particular point in time, it could also deliver extraordinary value. Why, one might ask, does itmatter if, or how well, these 400-year-old plays are performed? And what is the need to do anything about itnow? If Shakespeare’s plays are superficial amusing entertainments, mysteriously created by a glover’s sonfrom Stratford, and now appreciated only by a cultural elite with tastes for obscure English history, thentruly it does not matter at all. But if, as the latest scholarship and a few experimental New York productionsseem to show, these plays actually mean something radical-and utterly heretical to established dramaturgicalviews on the plays-then it may matter very much indeed.The potential exists for pioneering a completely new understanding of the plays-to test out the latestShakespeare research in performance on stage. While nobody was paying attention, Shakespeareanperformance quietly reached a point of discontinuous innovation, a ‘black swan’ moment of unpredictabletransformation. The next year or so will indicate whether New York’s arts institutions are savvy enough toseize on what Kelly Morgan (former associate director of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, and now atheater professor at Fitchburg State College) calls the “breathtaking new avenues” for performance that havealmost miraculously opened up.
 John Hudson is a strategic consultant who specializes in new industry models and has helped createseveral telecoms and Internet companies. He is currently consulting to a leading think tank on the futureof the theater industry and pioneering an innovative Shakespeare theory, as dramaturge to the Dark Lady Players. This Fall he will be Artist in Residence at Eastern Connecticut State University. He has degreesin Theater and Shakespeare, in Management, and in Social Science.
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One Response to “The Heretic’s Foundation II: New York’s Shakespeare Problem”
1.
Will Owen
says:April 25, 2009 at 8:35 amDear Mr. Hudson,The Shakespeare Company you envision — intelligent in its dramaturgy, beautiful in the performingof it actors and actresses — I think is waiting the wings, soon to step onto the stage of the globalscene — if it can generate the audience to support it. Bear with me. By some estimates there arenearly half a billion persons on the planet for whom English is either their first or a working language.A tiny fraction of these — and yes, it’s an elite, fortunate to have gotten an education — is eager toappreciate — indeed, love — Shakespeare. Any fraction of half a billion greater than the nanoscopic isa huge audience for any company. You evoked heresy at the start of your article — and blasphemy
of 00

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