Thoughts (finally) on Shakespeare

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MY POINT IS…

The plays of Shakespeare are incredible wells of inspiration and meaning, and working on any of them is always a challenging and enriching experience. Even after nearly 50 years of directing them, I still find them just the bestest playground ever.

With Midsummer I found new nuances and meanings each time I did it, and Midsummer is — let’s face it — mostly a romp without the mythic depths of Lear or even As You Like It.

Whenever I pick up a book like Shakespeare After All or The Year of Lear, I am astonished at the sheer amount of stuff that people have written about this man and his work. My own bookshelf has at least three shelves crammed with either scripts or books about him, and that’s just a drop in the bucket of what there is to know. I’m always learning something new.

(For example, in Twelfth Night, when the execrable Malvolio imagines that he will marry the Countess Olivia and will become “Count Malvolio”: it never dawned on me how ludicrous that is. A) The husband of a countess is an earl, not a count. B) Olivia’s title is a “courtesy” title, i.e., she’s not really a countess; her late father and brother were earls, and now that they’re dead she gets to use the title, but it’s not heritable. C) Even if she were a real countess, marrying her would not settle the title on the wretched Malvolio.)

It took me long enough to get this out of my head and into this blog, and I’m still stumped as how to say what I feel, exactly. But my point should be clear: Working with Shakespeare is a thrill. You will never get tired of it.

With that, I offer you an opportunity: Next April, Lacuna Group will revive its Shakespeare Smackdown, wherein you bring a speech or a scene to compete with others in a raucous evening of groundlings and invention. Want to do Brutus and Cassius’s argument from IV.iii of Julius Caesar as two professional wrestlers? (It’s been done.) Or stage a scene from the relatively obscure Henry VIII? Go for it.

I’ll be offering workshops and training on a weekly basis prior to the performance at the Newnan-Coweta History Center, so even if you have never done Shakespeare before, here’s a really fun way to get into the game.