The Joys and Accessibility of Shakespeare’s Theatre Notes on the American Shakespeare Center’s Summer/Fall 2015 Season

• Published in: Shakespeare Bulletin Vol. 34; no. 2; pp. 295 - 306
• Main Author: O’Leary, Niamh J.
• Format: Book Review Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01-07-2016
• Subjects: Joan of Arc (1412-31); Review Essay; Shakespeare, William (1564-1616)
• ISSN: 0748-2558; 1931-1427; 1931-1427
• DOI: 10.1353/shb.2016.0018

Each of those plays is performed in conditions that draw on original staging practices: no sets, universal lighting (which means that the actors can see the audience, and the audience members can see each other), brisk pacing in an attempt to achieve the promised "two hours' traffic" (Romeo and Juliet, Prologue 12), plenty of music, and actors doubling parts. "Shakespeare had a soundtrack," the note claims, and the ASC preserves music's place within performance, updating it with contemporary music audience members can rely on to help them interpret the action of the play. In act four's long sheep-shearing scene, the assembled shepherds and bumpkins broke into song and dance to John Denver's "Thank God I'm a Country Boy," confirming the action's relocation to the happy country setting of Bohemia and the play's shift from tragedy to comedy. [...]connections enrich one's experience of live theater and the ASC invited us to make them by including a two-page "Casting Grid" in the program that listed actors across the top and plays down the left-hand margin, thus showing in direct visual conversation the parts each actor played in each production.