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The Summer of our (Dis)Content

Part Three: “Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”

By Maureen Lenker

Having already explored the plethora of productions on offer in LA and how best to evaluate a show’s merits or worth, we are left with one final conundrum in this exploration of Shakespeare in Los Angeles. Not “To be or not to be,” though that is, of course, always the question. But rather a question that plagues artistic directors around the world, not only those who produce Shakespeare – how to bring in new audiences?

Shakespeare has his own cottage industry (it only takes one visit to Stratford-Upon-Avon or the Globe in London to see that). He has a cadre of devoted fans – those who create a market for products like Shakespearean insult band-aids. Those people will always turn up when a production of the Bard is on. But how do you reach beyond that and into your community? How do you engage and grow new and unexpected audiences? With conventional productions that present Shakespeare in its purest, most traditional form? Or something more avant-garde and innovative that plugs into contemporary trends?

Educational outreach is certainly a component of building audiences and reaching underserved areas in communities who may otherwise never encounter Shakespeare in their lives. Both Theatricum Botanicum and the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles offer classes and outreach programs that directly engage with school-age children. They go outside of the theater and into the classroom to cultivate the next generation of Shakespeare fans. But what about the performances themselves?

“The challenge is to take something that can be seen as a little bit corny, and then reinvent it in a way that’s actually exciting,” says Independent Shakespeare Co.’s Managing Director, David Melville. This reinvention can range from a new setting to a streamlined cut of the action to merely a sense of energy and fun. Perhaps, most provocatively and effective, the Independent Shakespeare Company (ISC) also foregrounds a diversity policy as part of their mission statement. “When we really made a conscious effort to make that happen,” says Melville, “we realized that everybody felt they were represented on stage. And it was so inspiring for us to see little kids come up and say ‘Oh my god, I’ve never seen a lead like that, maybe I could do that one day.’”

As a result, their audiences tend to be the most reflective of Los Angeles itself, filled with faces of every age, ethnicity, race, and creed. This is also undoubtedly tied to the fact that their performances are free and in a public park where new audiences can quite literally stumble upon their work. Melville proudly recounts a tale of a group of teenagers sneaking off into the Griffith Park Hills, who stopped in their tracks, mesmerized by the work and even returned the next night to see the entire show. “That’s what it’s all about,” he says. “Reaching pockets of people that no matter how you market, you’re never going to get.”

Ellen Geer of Theatricum Botanicum notes that they mostly develop new audiences through educational outreach. Theatricum has grown an audience along with their company over the years, and Geer says this give-and-take allows them to explore with greater range each year, including branching out into lesser-known plays from Shakespeare’s canon or introducing inventive settings. For Geer, Shakespeare’s popularity is obvious: “I think the whole country and the whole world needs more empathy now and understanding and caring and giving. That’s why he’s become so popular.”

Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles Artistic Director Ben Donenberg says that his company’s strength derives from the fact that they purposely are not looking to engage with traditional classical theatre patrons. “We’re not really looking to connect with that kind of an audience, so the actors then feel a freedom to explore their characters and their roles and the way they use their language that I think is unique to the company. Because we have this LA-centric perspective, it starts out with them being a little closer to themselves,” says Donenberg.

That wasn’t always Shakespeare Center’s approach to audience engagement, and it took years of trial and error to arrive at their current mission statement to reflect contemporary Los Angeles in their work. “In the beginning,” Donenberg says, “I thought it was important to do great American Shakespeare, and then I realized, I don’t know what that is.”

That realization led him to a different approach. “We ask ourselves why must the play be done now, today,” he says. “If you can deliver on Shakespeare’s intentions within a context that brings the audience closer, there’s not much you have to do to strike a chord with the hearts and minds of Los Angeles audiences . . . but you have to ask the questions, what you’re trying to say, to whom, and why now?”

Shakespeare Center productions are notable for re-situating Shakespeare’s plays in a Los Angeles, which runs the risk of concept overwhelming text in an effort to draw connections for modern audiences. Donenberg insists, however, that he always looks for “a contemporary context that doesn’t undermine the logic of Shakespeare’s world.”

Kenn Saberton, who directed the Shakespeare Center summer production of Twelfth Night, finds that setting out to produce a very specific thrust or experience for the audience from the word go is counterintuitive to the creative process. “All you can do is try and understand exactly what it is those characters and people want in any part of the play and then put it all together and see what you’ve got. Trying to control the whole is hard if you want it to have any kind of authenticity,” he says.

For Saberton, engaging audiences is about finding some middle ground between challenging audiences and delivering what they might expect from Shakespeare. “You’ve got to have the desire to create something accessible, exciting, that doesn’t take too many liberties, but feels fresh,” he says. “I’m not saying it might not end up not working, but that’s different than just being dull.”

Melville echoes a similar point of balance, striving to push for artistic innovation while still enthralling the audience. “The story is first,” he says. “The story has to be clear and communicated . . . We try to always ask ourselves what’s going to be the most dramatic choice to make, what’s going to be the most exciting, and what’s clearest for the audience? Sometimes that does lead you back to the most obvious thing, but if we’ve gone on a journey to explore everything else, then that’s all you can do.”

Across the board, the consensus is that the key to cultivating audiences is keeping them at the forefront of decision making. Are you producing a piece of work that is comprehensible, relevant, fresh, and exciting for them? Melville is wary of companies that don’t take that to heart, saying, “You have to be careful about what the audience is going to take away from it – Is what you’re doing building the desire for them to want to come back to theater, or are you just pleasing yourself, in which case, they probably won’t.”

Focusing on audience engagement, whether that means giving a play a more accessible, contemporary context or delivering a quintessential (and comprehensible) Shakespearean experience, is key to all theatrical productions, not only Shakespeare. While artistic directors feel that it is challenging to find new pockets of audience members or win over those who dismissed the Bard in high school, they are certain the theatrical experience will remain a vital one. The packed houses at all of these productions, particularly the overflow of humanity in Griffith Park, suggests as much.

With the rise of social media and streaming entertainment, many naysayers mourn the death of the theatre and Shakespeare right along with it. But Ellen Geer remains confident, saying, “It won’t ever die. Because people need the experience of sitting in a group together and experiencing something smack dab in front of them where they can actually feel the breath of people.”

So whether an audience member is coming to Shakespeare for the first time or the fiftieth, he remains a dynamic and essential force in the American theatre and in the heart and soul of many artists and audience members. To use the man’s own words from Sonnet 18, “So long as man can breathe or eyes can see/ So long lives this and this gives life to thee.”

For the entire series on Shakespeare, and Shakespeare-in-the-park, see Part 1 and Part 2.

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The Summer of Our (Dis)Content: Part Two

If We Shadows Have Offended

By Maureen Lee Lenker   

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM, painted by Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, circa 1850

Last week, we established why Summer Shakespeare has such a foothold in Los Angeles, digging into how and why a playwright who lived hundreds of years ago can still be such a draw for audiences with Hollywood at their fingertips.

For any devotee of the Bard, this annual cornucopia of productions should be a boon. But the fact remains that though the quantity of Summer Shakespeare is profuse, the quality can often be lacking.

Audiences wander into and find productions that completely ignore or forsake the text’s original intentions, actors who can’t enunciate or don’t understand their words, or some terrible combination of the two. That’s not to be said there isn’t also stellar Shakespeare – this summer’s production of The Tempest from the Independent Shakespeare Company takes one of Shakespeare’s more difficult works, with its lengthy poetical interludes and complex politics, and delivers a high energy, funny, romantic romp.

The Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles’s production of Twelfth Night falls somewhere between the extremes of greatness and failure. It’s mildly diverting with solid performances throughout, but it never manages to rouse its audience from the poetical stupor Shakespeare can sway them into. Theatricum Botanicum’s largely over-acted Romeo and Juliet, resetting the play in modern Jerusalem, takes a broad jump towards contemporary relevance through vaulting ambition, which o’er leaps itself.

These three shows present us with the wide range of viewing fodder and beg the question, what should we, as a city, expect from the Bard?

ROMEO AND JULIET (1968) directed by Franco Zeffirelli, and starring Olivia Hussey and Leonard Whiting

For artistic director David Melville, he’s always looking to defy expectations. “I think there’s a slightly unfair connotation to Shakespeare in the Park that it’s going to be a kind of men running around in tights and things, and it’s going to be bargain basement rough stuff,” he says.

Given that the Independent Shakespeare Company performs in Griffith Park for free where park visitors can stumble upon productions, they run the risk of being mistaken for Robin Hood’s Merry Men and actively combat that stereotype.

“I think sometimes people will come here from a Renaissance Faire expecting that it’s just an annex of that,” says Melville. “That there will be people wandering around flame throwing and we’ll be drinking glasses of mead and shouting ‘Huzzah’ all the time. Which is great for the people that love that, but it doesn’t reach everybody, and the trick is to try to reach everybody.”

For Melville, this comes down to a “focus on entertaining the audience, not pandering to them, but giving them something that will constantly surprise and delight them.” The ISC relies entirely on donations, which they don’t solicit from audiences until after the show, so that their work is always held accountable to audiences.

But there’s a question beyond what we should expect from the Bard. That question is, how should we process our disappointment on those occasions that Shakespeare’s productions come up short. This question virulently divides artists.

Director Kenneth Saberton declares, “Audiences shouldn’t ever settle for mediocre theater, period. What’s the point? Life’s too short.” For Saberton, the definition of mediocrity comes down to whether or not a performance captures an audience’s attention for its duration. “It’s got to be relevant to the people watching it,” he says. “It’s got to move them, it’s got to excite them, it’s got to hold them. It’s got to do all those things. It it doesn’t, it doesn’t deserve to exist.”

Artistic directors Melville, Ben Donenberg (Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles), and Ellen Geer (Theatricum Botanicum) share a more generous perspective, as well as an optimistic view of the power of Shakespeare’s themes and language. “I think there’s room for every kind of thing as long as it’s being done,” says Geer. “Because even if you’re doing it badly, the stories will ride through.”

Melville echoes this notion that there is always something to be gleaned from even the poorest of productions: “I’ve seen so many Hamlets and some of them are bad and some of them are good, but I’ve never seen a Hamlet where I didn’t get something out of it, so maybe something is better than nothing.”

Donenberg responds in kind, saying, “Each production is a rediscovery of Shakespeare’s plays because that particular group of people in that time and place have never assembled. If people are interested in investigating Shakespeare and there’s an audience for it, all the power to them. The more the merrier.”

Donenberg notes that each institution should evaluate its production values based only on whether they’re meeting and improving on their individual company aims. “It’s up to the institution putting it on to ask if it lived up to the standards they’re shooting for,” he says. “I think the real danger with all of these companies is when they stop asking these questions.”

All three artistic directors note that it would be a disservice to dismiss Shakespeare productions outright based on over-saturation or a wariness of mediocrity. “When you go down the road of evaluating whether art should exist based on quantitative reasoning,” says Donenberg, “you’re really demonstrating that you don’t understand the function and the purpose of an artist in society.”

Geer and Melville stress the enrichment Shakespeare adds to our lives as a reason for always returning to him as an artist and audience member. Geer says she took refuge in Shakespeare from a young age, with her father, actor Will Geer, telling her, “Ellen, whenever you’re depressed, you just read a little of this and you’ll never have to see a psychiatrist.”

For Melville, it extends beyond that to historical and political resonance. “We need it because it’s a connection with our past, which so handily delineates how we behave as human beings,” he says. “I think it’s amazing to be able to reach back into the past and say we’ve always been like this. Donald Trump might be scaring you right now, but just have a look at Richard III.”

Audience members and critics can debate the merits of a particular Shakespeare production, choosing to embrace or deride the performances and directing choices. Ultimately though, it’s not about that so much as it is the deeper learning experience you derive from interacting with Shakespeare’s themes, characters, and preoccupations in a live theatrical setting.

Melville sums it up, saying, “People have always said through the centuries that you can learn so much morally through Shakespeare, but also, there’s something spiritual about it as well. It’s not religious, it’s more about communing with what happens when we are the greatest we can be, and Shakespeare was the greatest writer, and it’s important to stay in touch with that.”

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The Summer of Our (Dis)Content?

By Maureen Lee Lenker

Lorenzo González and David Melville Independent Shakespeare Co.’s THE TEMPEST. Photo by Grettel Cortes

Summer Shakespeare has become as much a seasonal rite as lazy beach days or s’mores around the campfire. Since Max Reinhardt’s legendary 1934 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Hollywood Bowl (made into a film only one year later), summer Shakespeare has become an indelible part of Los Angeles civic culture, with dozens of productions popping up annually, with both union and non-union actors. Companies blanket the county, from Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum in Topanga Canyon to the Independent Shakespeare Company (ISC) in Griffith Park to Shakespeare by the Sea in the South Bay.

On the 400^th anniversary of his death, what makes Shakespeare endure as a seminal artistic figure in a city thousands of miles from the land of his birth? What brings Angelinos back to Shakespeare summer after summer? Why has a Moliere summer festival never taken hold? Is The Imaginary Invalid or Tartuffe not as theatrical, and goofy, and accessible as A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Romeo and Juliet?

What’s more, in a town full of talented actors and directors, are we getting the best of the Bard or mediocre takes on his work? Either way – as a town with a thriving but an often obscured theater community – what should we expect from our Shakespeare productions? And finally, whether we’re producing traditional or innovative productions, how can companies draw in new audiences to ensure this summer pastime continues into the future? In a series of conversations with the artistic teams of Will Geer’s Theatricum Botanicum, Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles, and the Independent Shakespeare Company, Stage Raw set out to find answers to these queries.

Part One: All the World’s A Stage

Fred Sanders, Stephen Caffrey and Christopher Rivera in Shakespeare Center of LA’s TWELFTH NIGHT. Photo by Michael Lamont

Across the United States, from the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington D.C. to Ashland, Oregon, Shakespeare has become nationally produced and adored. Both Ellen Geer, Artistic Director of Theatricum Botanicum, and Kenn Saberton, director of Shakespeare Center’s Twelfth Night and a former Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) member, note that more Shakespeare is produced in America annually than in Shakespeare’s home country. Indeed, Shakespeare’s Globe, which regularly delights tourists and Brits alike along the banks of the Thames throughout the summer months, was brought back to life by an American, Sam Wanamaker.

While companies such as the RSC, the National and most recently Kenneth Branagh’s season at the Garrick often produce exquisite intimate pieces of theatre, it is the homespun, unpredictable nature of outdoor theatre at the Globe and across America that best embodies the play’s original production format. Kenn Saberton says, “Shakespeare’s Globe was basically outdoor Shakespeare, so it lends itself linguistically in that he’s very good at describing lighting and weather, even if you’re outside in the middle of a very hot afternoon.”

Shakespeare Center Artistic Director Ben Donenberg echoes this sentiment: “Shakespeare wrote the plays with the assumption that they were going to be performed outdoors, and the way he uses language and rhythm and vowels and consonants creates stories that can project over vast spaces.”

Perhaps Shakespeare dominates our national summer civic culture then because the warm weather and long days are naturally conducive to this format (and where are conditions more ideal than in perpetually balmy Los Angeles?). In contrast, Shakespeare’s Globe regularly faces the prospect of rain – and when I saw Iqbal Khan’s Macbeth there earlier this summer, the torrential downpour may have had an atmospheric affect, but it also made it nearly impossible to hear the actors. (It also doesn’t hurt that Shakespeare plays exist in the public domain, thus saving companies hefty fees for performance rights.)

Shakespeare’s language is designed to exist in an outdoor space while removing us from it – transporting us across meadows and seas and time zones to places with atmospheric diversions. Independent Shakespeare Company Artistic Director David Melville relishes the opportunity for audience engagement with an outdoor performance: “You can’t control the audience’s experience with lighting and sound effects and stuff like that,” Melville explains. “They have to make a conscious decision to participate.”

But even if summer Shakespeare seems a natural fit for the plays, how did William Shakespeare, a poet described by his contemporary Ben Jonson as “not of an age, but for all time,” come to hold a place of such prominence on the Los Angeles summer calendar? In a town Woody Allen once condescendingly described as “a place where the only cultural advantage is that you can turn right on a red light,” how did the foremost symbol of poetry and playwriting come to have such a hold?

This first requires dispelling two assumptions – one, that Los Angeles is an anti-intellectual town, and two, that Shakespeare is a decidedly highbrow artistic pursuit. Both are common misconceptions. While New Yorkers and East Coast bastions of thought may still sneer at Los Angeles as a cultural wasteland, the purview of celebrities and the star machine, those of us who live here recognize it as a site of rich artistic innovation and intellectual dynamism. What’s more, Shakespeare was never meant to be purely for the intellectual elite. As David Melville explains, “Shakespeare absolutely wasn’t about appealing to one demographic of intellectuals, although, he certainly in his lifetime moved in intellectual circles. His job was to entertain everybody.”

But how can Los Angeles companies fight against these misperceptions and conquer the challenge of winning over audiences who view Shakespeare as an incomprehensible high school reading assignment? In short, how can (and does) our city restore Shakespeare to the masses?

With inimitable dry British humor, David Melville retorts, “I think if you start by approaching it by not boring people, then that’s a step in the right direction.” Certainly, creating a production that engages and excites an audience (as the ISC’s The Tempest does this season) is a crucial first step. But across the board, the artistic directors agree that it comes down to two factors – ensuring the language and meaning of the play are clear and making the play vital and relevant to a modern audience.

Melville, Geer, and director Saberton all stress the importance of verse-work, education, and the necessity of casting actors who possess the technique and craft to deliver Shakespeare’s language with clarity and comprehension. Ellen Geer admits, “What scares people from [Shakespeare] is his elevated language.” Director Saberton echoes this sentiment: “If the actors don’t understand what they’re saying, then you don’t have a cat in hell’s chance of the audience understanding . . .There is no point in pretending Shakespeare is easy. There’s no point in pretending it’s up to the audience to do the work.”

Still, the companies are careful to stress that the language also should not be treated as foreign. “If you approach it from the perspective of it being something that needs translating, that’s the wrong direction. It’s written in modern English, and it’s really important that you work with actors who are keen to tell the story and the play through the language,” says Melville.

Geer stresses the need for actors and audiences to absorb Shakespeare’s language. “Once you get into the rhythm of him,” she says, “he reaches to the absolute center of the human heart. He reaches all classes, all cultures of people. . .It’s almost like a religion in a sense that it helps evolve your spirit when you really get into it.”

Making the language comprehensible is furthered by treating the plays as living, breathing works. Melville stresses that his company is encouraged not to be too precious with the text, especially when it comes to comedy. “If Shakespeare’s written a joke that made sense 400 years ago,” he says, “and it was topical then, [it’s] not funny anymore.” Melville wholeheartedly endorses occasionally adjusting or cutting text to make words or humor more contemporary for the sake of comprehension.

Still, merely ensuring productions are understandable is not enough to return Shakespeare to mass audiences of Los Angeles (Indeed, while ISC’s Tempest has flawless delivery and is also a raucous good time, Shakespeare Center’s Twelfth Night and Theatricum’s Romeo and Juliet offer superb verse execution, while failing to excite or intrigue.)

Judy Durkin and Shaun Taylor-Corbett in the title roles of Theatricum Botanicum’s ROMEO AND JULIET. (Photo by Ian Flanders)

Beyond entertainment value, the Shakespeare Center of Los Angeles also hopes to restore Shakespeare to a mass audience by making him relevant for local audiences. Artistic Director Ben Donenberg says, “Our mandate comes from Shakespeare’s Hamlet where he says the purpose of playing is to hold a mirror up to nature . . . Our vision is to reflect the history and people of Los Angeles in our productions where we consider Shakespeare a contemporary Los Angeles playwright writing about today.” Donenberg says this comes from a desire to attract a distinctively Angelino audience, rather than the typical patrons of classical regional theatre. Instead, he aims to pursue “any number of interpretative takes that remove the distance of doublet and tights.”

With Twelfth Night, they have set the show in the 1940s, using an air raid and dog fight in Santa Monica as a jumping off point for the opening shipwreck and ensuing events. Unfortunately, beyond an initial media montage that suggests the air raid and a director’s note, there is little to differentiate the play from its typical setting. It doesn’t disrupt the text, but it also does not necessarily provide any new insight into the play or Los Angeles with this particular overlay. Similarly, Theatricum places their Romeo and Juliet in contemporary East Jerusalem, translating the Montague-Capulet blood feud to modern terms, but over simplifying the conflict in the process.

Still, there is clearly something to reflecting the concerns, needs, and interests of the community as a way to return Shakespeare to the masses. Melville cites a commitment to “a spirit of playfulness, not being precious about it, and a real spirit of diversity.” The Independent Shakespeare Company succeeds in its combined devotion to language and a sense of fun, building a direct relationship with the audience by playing in it. Melville says, “We always try to incorporate them as an element, so that we can connect with the audience and we’re working with them to create something in our imaginations.”

It’s this connection with the audience, whether the production is outdoors in a park or in an enclosed intimate space, that both restores Shakespeare to his original mass appeal and makes it an integral part of American civic culture. Shakespeare is praised for his universality – the enduring resonance of his themes. Allowing an audience to reflect on the play’s universal truths in relation to their own lives, while also hopefully enjoying themselves, is what keeps both them and the artists returning to this work. And where better to return Shakespeare to the people than Los Angeles? A sprawling metropolis that relies on the optimism of the future and the achievements of the past to reflect on our present moment — a city, in that regard, not so different from Elizabethan England.

As Ben Donenberg says, “Los Angeles history is so diverse and so textured that to say I’m holding a mirror up and reflecting the people of my community means something specific in Los Angeles that it wouldn’t mean in a different community that doesn’t have the history, diversity, and vastness of space and geography.”

Shakespeare’s age was one of wonder – a time of unprecedented scientific discovery, geographical exploration, artistic and literary achievement; an age steeped in an appreciation for and celebration of the past, but also an era plagued by political and religious upheaval. How do we give Shakespeare back to the people, and why does it endure in Los Angeles? We accept that through fate or mischance we have become the very audience he was writing for.

Check back next week for Part Two in this feature series.