Offscript - Show’s over, Shakespeare

Benching the Bard for a year



Shakespeare sucks all the oxygen from the room. You can’t touch Will — he’s theater’s greatest dramatist and the English language’s greatest writer. And that’s not always a good thing. His very excellence can keep other playwrights from sharing the stage.

I come not to praise Shakespeare, but to bury him — or at least suggest that he take a time out. A moratorium on all Shakespeare’s plays for a full season might be the best thing for both the Bard and playhouses alike.

Granted, this might pose a teensy problem for the Georgia Shakespeare Festival, the Shakespeare Tavern, Atlanta Classical Theatre (which has two plays by you-know-who in the upcoming year) and the Alabama Shakespeare Festival. The Shakespeare Tavern, for its 15th anniversary season, is doing a total of 12 Shakespeare plays, including repertories of four histories this winter and five comedies beginning July 31.

But after getting all that Shakespeare out of their system, why shouldn’t the Tavern give the Stratford man a rest? One problem with Shakespeare is that the same 20 or so comedies, tragedies and histories get produced over and over. Hey, I love Macbeth and Twelfth Night as much as the next guy, but I can practically recite them along with the casts — and I can’t be alone in that.

All of Atlanta’s classic-oriented playhouses have proved they can stage other playwrights just as well, and at times better. A Shakespeare-free year might generate some useful publicity, assuming that audiences even notice.

A Bard-boycott would give other pre-20th-century playwrights a shot at the spotlight. Admittedly, Shakespeare’s skills make contemporaries like Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson look like the B-team, but the other writers can’t show their talents if they’re permanently benched. For instance, Sheridan’s comedies hold up surprisingly well, whenever you get to see them.

With Shakespeare off the table, other options get freed up. Before co-founding the Festival in the mid-1980s, GSF director Richard Garner recalls Tom Hall of San Diego’s Old Globe advising him, “Shakespeare’s crazy. It doesn’t make financial sense. Run the other way!” Meaning that his plays have huge casts, multiple locations and often such complicated sets and costumes that they seriously drain a theater’s resources. Shakespeare may be the only period piece or classic text a playhouse can put in its season.

Leave Shakespeare’s slot vacant, and a staggering quantity of lesser-known writers rush to fill the gap. Americans are notorious for our poor grasp of history, a subject that theater can bring alive. English playwright Peter Barnes has a formidable body of pointed — and hilarious — historical plays, like the Black Plague comedy Red Noses. How about an English gardening double-header of Tom Stoppard’s brainy Arcadia and Naomi Wallace’s earthy The Inland Sea? Or back-to-back productions of Beckett and The Lion in Winter, with the same actor as the young and old Henry II?

Or put all of England aside to pay attention to American history, which U.S. drama gives short shrift. You might have to do some searching to go beyond Inherit the Wind, but Richard Nelson’s new Benedict Arnold play The General From America has won raves since its debut at Houston’s Alley Stage. I dare someone to stage my dream project, the musical 1776 — without the music. Take the lame songs away, and you have a gripping, witty look at the arm-twisting behind the Declaration of Independence.

And just imagine how much fresher Shakespeare will look and sound after a hiatus, and how many new ideas theaters can bring to his work. After being the star player for 400 years, the Bard deserves a breather.

Curtain
The death of legendary actor and director Joseph Chaikin strikes a blow not just to American theater but to Atlanta’s 7 Stages in particular. Chaikin frequently collaborated with 7 Stages, directing some of its finest shows. Last month’s production of Arthur Miller’s Broken Glass marked Chaikin’s last work as a director before his death June 22 of heart failure.

The theater still hopes to stage its revival of Chaikin’s 1992 production of Waiting for Godot in March, although it hasn’t made a final decision. However, Not Merely Players’ Gene-Gabriel Moore plans to honor Chaikin’s memory with a performance of Struck Dumb, a one-man show by Chaikin and Jean-Claude van Itallie, to be staged next spring at 7 Stages Back Stage.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com


‘’Off Script is a biweekly column on the Atlanta theater scene.??


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