In Which the Author Sounds Off About Modern Shakespeare Attitudes

A week ago I went into D.C. to sit on an open rehearsal for the Shakespeare Theater Company's production of King Lear, opening on Tuesday. I highly applaud the STC for giving the public access to their rehearsal process, as it is a wonderful window into the world of theater, and it turned out to be a highly enjoyable afternoon.

That said, I took strong issue to something said during the opening remarks. While welcoming the sizable crowd to the space and setting up what we would be seeing in terms of the play and the process, we were told that "this is King Lear like you've never seen it before."

It's an innocuous statement, one frequently bandied about and used to describe almost any Shakespeare production not involving corsets and starched ruffs, and that's why I take issue with it. This production of Lear has been highly lauded and much anticipated, and I'm sure it will turn out to be an evening of exciting performances and will in some way shed new light on the play, but to trumpet it as some kind of pinnacle of innovation is, in my mind, both misleading and detrimental.

If you are, say, the Tiny Ninja Theater, than, yes, you can rightfully proclaim a Lear like no other. But a production such as the STC's, wherein the cast is gender faithful, the staging (from all I could see) very close to presentational and the telling linear and loyal to the work should not be hailed as something mind-blowingly innovative. That it has energy, that it has life, that it is set in another country (Yugoslavia, it would seem) and in an era post-1616 is something that should be embraced and triumphed. But not, not as a brave new world. In all the productions I have seen, but two have been done in the period style, and they were both at The Globe, a space specifically designed to put one in the mind frame of the Bard's original staging.

I take issue with the STC not because they are the only ones, or because this production's claim to innovation is particularly offensive, but because they are just the most recent in a long-line of examples I have come across. In fact, I don't blame the STC at all. I blame the audiences.

I don't know when, exactly, Shakespeare became sacred. Originally written for the working classes of Elizabethan London, his plays were anachronistic, melodramatic, implausible and, in some instances, downright profane. That they also happened to be brilliant gives them sustained life even 400 some years later. But it's also this brilliance that has contributed to the bubble around them, as if they were delicate pieces of spun china instead of the kind of earthy pewter found in the taverns that populated the South Bank. As a result, audiences have developed this mindset of reverence, often couple with intimidation, in regards to the plays. They are, admittedly, sometimes difficult to understand the first time around, and as a result theatergoers have an over-heightened sense of self-satisfaction and expectation. "I am going to see Shakespeare," they say to themselves, "this makes me smart and cultured."

Well, yes, it does. But if that's your attitude than more often than not it comes with the view that Shakespeare should be in the same category as string quartets, books with few periods and restaurants that specialize in dishes covered in coulis or ganache. And that's just wrong.

During my time in England, I worked as an usher at a theater where the RSC was in residence. While none of the three plays were done "traditionally" (and keep in mind that even that is a misnomer, as even the most "traditional" companies these days are often co-ed), The Taming of the Shrew was the one that drew large criticism for its seeming liberties. Setting the oft-disposed Christopher Sly induction in a modern day strip club and then physicalizing the sexual puns within the play, the production outraged patrons who found it shocking and, according to one particularly livid man, pornographic. What upset me more than the reaction to the staging was the fact that behind these complaints lay a clear and obvious ignorance as to what the play was actually saying. There was no true understanding, or it would have been plain that the RSC was simply suiting the action to the word. The patrons who complain so loudly about seeing what Shakespeare wrote illustrated in a clear way are the same ones who go to the shows to ratchet up cultural brownie points and status, not out of any particular love of the plays themselves or support of their continuing place in modern theater.

Which brings us back to the main point. The problem is not that STC, or any company for that matter, shouldn't take pride in their production for being lively and vigorous and trying to see the play in a new light. It's that they feel the need to warn us, to prepare us, to make excuses for their lack of French hoods by promising we get even more credit for allowing them to present something in a exciting way. And that we, as an audience, hold them to those veiled apologies, making it more difficult for fresh and new takes to get the credit and attention they deserve.

If Shakespeare can't be toyed with, messed with, examined and explored and then exploded on-stage, then his plays become museum pieces; carbon copies of productions seen by each subsequent generation without the evolution his language so brilliantly provides for. The play might be the thing, but it's the production that's what brings it to life.

It's up to us to open our minds and make sure it's not D.O.A.