 We are still missing one panel. We're going to get started. I think she'll probably show up in a minute. Okay, great. Thank you. For those of you who don't know, I'm Patrick Quick. I'm Executive Director of the Shakespeare Theatre Association and the Media Past Literary Chair of the National New Play Network. Yes, obviously New Play Network. And I'm also the Director of the New Play Development at Orlando Shakespeare Festival. More importantly, I want to introduce you to our guest, and I'm just going to read a little brief bio here. Amy Freed is an American playwright. Good. She was nominated as a finalist in the drama category of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for her play Freedom Land. In addition to Freedom Land, she is the author of The One Weird Problem Most Away with the Beard of Avon, both commissioned by South Coast Rep. The Psychic Lab, Life of Savages, and Other Plays. Her work has been produced at New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Rep, American Conservatory Theatre, The Goodman, Playwrights Horizons, and other theaters around the country. Her play, Safe in Hell, another South Coast rep commissioned, received its premiere production in April 2004, followed by a production at Yale Repertory Theatre. She has been the recipient of the Joseph Kesselring Prize, the Charles McArthur Award, and is a several times winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle. She currently teaches in New York and Manhattan Theatre Club. He wrote Nine Circles, which was also produced in Britain, as well as how to write a new book for the Bible, which premiered at Berkeley Rep. Seattle Rep and South Coast will receive the 2009-2010 Steinberg American Theatre Critics Association New Play Award. He is a many times participant in the Ohio Playwrights Conference, where he has developed most of his plays. He was founder and artistic director of Boston Shakespeare, which he wrote for several years, seven years, directing most of Shakespeare's canon. How about that? And Rob Allen Cove, who is co-founder and director of the Mission at the American Shakespeare Center, and Governor Professor of Shakespeare and Performance, and founder of the Master of Letters and Fine Arts Program at Barry Baldwin College. He has done lots of stuff with the locks and pliers playhouse, directing 30 productions played by Shakespeare contemporaries, including America's first professional production of Francis Beaumont's The Night of the Burning Pest. Spirit! A handbook for teaching Shakespeare. In 2001, he established the Black Friars Conference, a bi-animal reclaw of a celebration of early modern drama and performance. In 2001, the Commonwealth Governor's Arts Award. In 2009, he was the Theo Crosby Fellow at Shakespeare's Globe in London. In 2013, he was awarded the Boulder Shakespeare Library's prestigious Shakespeare Stewart Award. Give it up for Rob. And here's what's on the bill. Playwrights Bill K. Warren Gunderson will join us shortly, I hope. And we're ready to discuss how Shakespeare inspired them to write new plays. Why? Ralph Cohen championed the production of lesser-known early modern plays. One of these things is not like the other. So, um, and so, you know, I'm not going to talk about the National New Play Network. Mark Wu-Jay, who was the manager, came to work for us in Orlando with Jim and I, and so you guys need to join the new play, National New Play Network, and so we tried. They didn't want us because we had Shakespeare in our name. And, uh, finally, I took one of the board members out on a long pier with a picture of our greatest, and I said, you know, that if you let us into the National New Play Network, Orlando Shakespeare Theatre will be the only organization in the National New Play Network named after a playwright. And then that's it. There you go. So, I want to just, uh, turn it over to our panelists a little bit now, and I want to talk to Amy a little bit first. Um, the beer that they bought is probably one of your most well-known works for this crowd. Can you tell us a little bit about how that play got to start and what's happened with it since then? Yeah, I mean, it got to start in this kind of political way. I've always had kind of a big reaction to seven franchises of the play, so that Shakespeare authorship their curies. And, um, I got, I fell, accidentally, to this sort of network of conspiracy theorists. And I, and I set out to play about the lunatics that were attracted to conspiracy theorists. I was very, very, very into conspiracy with my friend, who's a lunatic, and I started to learn conspiracy theorists, who was interested in the idea of the role of the author of Shakespeare. So, I started reading all the newsletters and the strange material that was coming out of this group. And I got more and more obsessed with it. And I told them about the role itself. Initially, um, as I started being more about questions of the authorship of Shakespeare's plays, but what it really would be to, with the beard of Avon, was a different kind of investigation, which was really at the heart of this conversation. What makes a writer, you know, is it, as they are so wedded to in America, the idea that it's kind of in a way that can strike anybody, regardless of circumstances, or his language, language arts, the ability to think, argue, and reason, oh, that is a writer or something different, a different kind of apprenticeship. Which is very un-American notion. But that's what I got interested in, and that's what my writer is kind of involved in. Alright. Bill, you wrote a publication, which many of us saw, I know I saw that in Oregon, and I was just amazed that he walked away from the scene. Can you tell us a little bit about the story of that play? Sure. I did intend to write a publication. I wasn't looking for a play. I was relaxing in England, and I went to see The Globe. It was there for two weeks, I went to The Globe, and didn't expect any of it. I'm not into the historic scene of Shakespeare. And so, Mark Wildlands did originate second, and I just thought, this is okay, until he returns from Ireland, and he came down, and he had to talk about being a writer. He heard about being held at the crime of the stage, and he held the hands of one of the writers. I began to cry, and I realized that after seven years of directing at the Boston Shakespeare, I'm not included in this play well-written by the team to receive the novel that was happening. But then on the same trip, I went to Tower, and in the Tower, over the rack, was a song that said, no one was ever tortured in the Tower, because of the language. This, of course, is technically true, because you were tortured because you were a traitor, because you're not a religion. And I thought, this is a lie, and it must be very careful of lies. And then as I went from cell to cell, I wasn't expecting this, but I'm a judgmental priest. And when I walked into one of the cells, in a grave towards Henry Wall of the S.J., from the greater glory of God, and I felt the ground had started to crack. And again, it's about writing. A new question came in a lifetime, when I rapidly Shakespeare, writing tens of thousands of words in the service of a corrupt regime, or considered conscious inside the Tower of the Carpenter, a single word, into the prison wall. And that became, the play was done with that one, because that was the geography of the play between the Tower, fundamental between the Tower and the Low, and it took a lot of, it took four years of meeting in search of what would happen. But that's how it ended. Great. I know you should also say that the drama to the movie about the former Shakespeare is here, so I'd like to welcome him. Awesome. I just got word that Lauren is on her way, so I'm just going to go ahead and continue with you guys here before we welcome her and laugh at her words. Amy, how do you approach your work, if you approach your work, when you do it with an eye towards the past, when you're writing about a historical person or event, how do you get inside their mind? How do you get inside them and tell their story? I guess my point of departure as a writer has always been about character rather than history, and I'm not ever been a strict respecter of forms in theater, but certainly in the case of writing about Shakespeare, it was part of a long exploration for me as a writer which was trying to learn how to write by sort of hanging onto the coattails of real writers. And so in working with Shakespeare, I just was immersing myself from my own fascination and learning as a writer with what it felt like to write in those rhetorical forms and the sound and the rhythms and what it was to explore in a meter, what meter does to a writer. So I've done that in a couple of plays and so my interest has been through language and that and feeling with that. Did to me as an artist, having to surrender to formal structures, a verse. When you mentioned talking about working in meter and rhythm, did your work as a teacher of acting influence how you approach playwriting? Yeah, yes, because of the brutal nature of theatrical action and that if a play isn't moving forward dynamically from a point of need and transformation, it's inert on stage. And so for a writer in theater, you have to be so muscular and so rigorous about that. So yeah, it's the one thing boys, it's the other I think. Very interesting. Because most playwrights struggle with the idea of how to get the play into the body of their own body and the body of an actor. And most playwrights will tell you that the most valuable thing that you can give them is a room full of actors and a copier. They want a copier as well. It is, right? It is. Bill, how about you? How do you approach your plays when you're writing from an historical context? How did you get into the character William Shakespeare slash George Bush with the equivocation? Well, I ran a Shakespeare company for seven years and Kirsten Giroux from Oregon Shakespeare was our Juliet and our Hermione and our Julia and many other characters. And so I lived in a Shakespeare company for seven years. But writing for me comes almost entirely from the feeling. I get hit with a feeling that's so strong I have to stop walking on the street or I have to stop what I'm doing because the feeling overwhelms and the feeling is not just a feeling the feeling contains information there's something behind the feeling and then the process of writing is unpacking from the feeling out to the information. And then trying to sustain the feeling trying to hear the feeling and trying to live in that moment in a continuing way. Thanks. Can you guys hear us okay? No? Can we get the mic back? And here's Lauren Gunderson, everybody. Welcome. While we're getting the mic, I'll tell you a little bit about Lauren. Lauren Gunderson. Yeah, I got this online so it could be completely false. Don't trust the internet. I know. Lauren is the... Yeah, they can hear me, I'm pretty sure. I'll pass this down. Lauren is the 2014 winner of the Steinberg ATCA New Play Award. It was a finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize for I and You, which I have seen all around the country, actually. It's a fantastic little play that I love dearly. She studied Southern Literature and Drama at Emory University in dramatic writing at NYU's Tisch School where she was a Reynolds fellow in social entrepreneurship. Very exciting. Her work has been commissioned, produced, and developed at companies across the U.S., including South Coast Rep, Emile, and Silent Sky, which was down at Theatre Works just recently. Yeah. The Kennedy Center, the amazing adventures of Dr. Wonderful and her dog. The O'Neill Center, the O'Neill Denver Center, Berkeley Rep, Shotgun Players, Theatre Works, Crowded Fire, San Francisco Playhouse, Merritt Theatre, You Know The Molocinquency, Only Theatre, Jeeva, and more. Her work is published at PlayScripps, I and You, Exit Pursued by a Bear and Toilet Trouble. Who knows Exit Pursued by a Bear? The Orlando folks, the Georgia folks. All right. You call that a Southern Revenge tragedy if I remember right. Yeah. She's a playwright of residence at the Playwrights Foundation and is a proud Dramatist Guild member. She is from Atlanta, Georgia. We have some Georgians here and lives here in San Francisco. Lauren, I asked these guys, and I'm going to ask you to run into the street. So I'm sure you're very prepared. We produced your work. Jim Halsey and I produced a reading of Exit Pursued by a Bear at Orlando Shakespeare five, six, maybe more years ago. And it was just such a great little piece. And I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about the story of that play. Just briefly, this story, which I basically say you tie a guy up on the chair and pour honey over him and wait for the bears to eat him. But you might have a better description and how that play came about. Sure. I'll make it quick. So Exit Pursued by a Bear started with the title, which I'm surprised that no other play has been named that. Really? I get it. So it was taking little bits of themes from Winner's Tale and smashing it with a domestic violence story. That is a broad and crazy comedy, one of those should be in the same play. But it really liberated me to take the kind of grand stakes of Shakespeare and smash it with something that I care a lot about, domestic violence, women's empowerment, kind of feminist story of a southern woman who is fed up with her abusive husband and decides to, not exactly a la Shakespeare, but a little bit, tie him up to a lazy boy recliner duct tape and with her friends, one who's a stripper. And the other is a cheerleader. And the other is a male cheerleader, yes, from UGA. Go. Go, Todd. And anyway, so they basically try to reenact scenes of his violence to her so that he can find catharsis and be a changed man. And if not, they're going to open the door and let the bears in and get away. So we wait to see what happens. But yes. Okay. Thank you very much. Well, I'm going to pass this right back to you. I asked these guys, and I'm going to ask you this. You obviously write with an eye towards the past occasionally. And I wanted to ask, what's your approach towards working with stories or themes or characters from the past? And tell us a little bit about how that influences your work. Yeah. The past is in Shakespeare references or the past is in like... Or classics? Sure, sure. Well, yeah, what I was really excited about thinking about this panel and these amazing people on it is... I mean, what I think is most... What's most gripping about Shakespeare as a kid and is still the reason why I continue to go back to it as a source for new plays is what I said earlier, the stakes, they are so high, always, constantly. And a lot of new plays that are, you know, kitchen sink stuff, they're just low. It's like about a divorce. Sorry. You know what I mean? It's like, I mean, that's very impactful when you're going through it. But compared to, you know, war and witches and people eating each other, like it's... The stakes are really high. It's really dramatic and gripping. And so that's why Exit Presumed by Bear is not about like, they need to talk, they need to work out their merit. No, she's going to kill him with bears. It makes it... The stakes makes it gripping. The stakes make it funny. And so that's kind of where I always go back to is look at where the... Why those plays are still done now is they may sound a little funny to years that aren't used to that kind of poetry. They may feel a little grand. They may be a little melodramatic at times, but damn, if you can't deny that it is like life or death. And that's what's gripping. That's what's leaning forward. Even the love stories are life and death. The comedies are life and death. So as you all know, I'm speaking to the exact right audience. Anyway, so that's kind of where I start. It's like, how can we keep those stakes really high in a contemporary way? And usually thus far, most of my Shakespeare, where I've kind of taken Shakespeare and made a new play out of it, they tend to be comedies, because if you take those stakes and make them dramatic, it's a little too much for us now, but you could take those exact same stakes and make it a little ridiculous, and we're totally with you. So that's where I tend to go with that. Why do you think so many... And this could be for all you guys. Why do you think so many playwrights use Shakespeare as a jumping off point? Now, we know he used lots of other playwrights as a jumping off point. He barely could write a play without stealing a piece of it. But that doesn't make him any less grail. So why do you think Shakespeare is something that playwrights use quite often as a jumping off point? Well, for the same reason that Shakespeare used other playwrights as a jumping off point, because plot is hard. How about you, Bill? You're out? You're awesome. It's like a water, only it makes your voice louder. That's very nice. Yeah, one of my... I think that the thing for me about Shakespeare, I love what you said about stakes. I love what you said about comedy and tragedy, and I'm sort of... I'm sort of... I'm sort of... tragedy, and I'm sort of here to represent the other people who wish that they could write plays, too, during this period. So there's just earlier use, in a way. So I really think it's that. I think also, and I don't think we ever give quite enough credence to how much of a language revolution the 16th century was for the English people, it really was a time when everybody cared to speak well. In all of the playwrights that we read, I have a fun thing I do with my classes. I get to have graduate students who've come in from various from various colleges and universities, some with history degrees, some with theater degrees. It's sort of a foam. And I just... I have this thing I do. I start asking them can they name an Elizabethan or a Jacobean playwright? And we just keep... every time that somebody names one, and the deal is, can you name one whose plays still sell a ticket? You can still sell a ticket to one of their plays. And, you know, we've gotten up to 17 names from a period of 50 years and so the question is, what was going on? Because you can't do that. If you try to do that with any other 50-year period up to, say, 1950, you really have a hard time doing that. So what was going on? Something was happening, and I think it's sort of maybe equivalent to when we started looking at the great movies and something was going on in the 20s and the 30s that we'll always have to be aware of, you know, as people responded to one another. But what was going on really was language was... everybody was finding their language. Every playwright felt that they had to write new things. They had to write things you would want to write down. It was part of the game. So the language is so rich and wonderful and I know everybody in this room, and especially the people on this panel are deeply moved by that, or moved or enjoy it. My move may be too serious a word, but it's fun. And we love it. And so that's one thing. The other thing, I think we always underestimate how important it would be if a kid born in 1564 had the same queen, a woman at the top of the power structure for 39 years. And that man's going to write plays and put women in them. He's going to... It's going to be a little different. And then all the people following are following in that same footstep with that same model. So I think that's another thing we've failed to think about enough. So the plays are rich and they do seem to represent a lot of our experience in that way. But I go back to what you were saying before. I think the best thing about it, the most wonderful thing about it is they were so happy with opposites. They were so comfortable with opposites. And so later on... My opposites, what do you mean? Trump tragedy, comedy. I do this scene now. Everybody tries to separate them into subplots, but you really... The comedy is always right there. We had a wonderful... We have this season we're very pleased with where all of our actors work up a Q-Scripps. And we were doing the Jew of Malta. And the woman who was playing what's her name? Abigail. The Jew's daughter was poisoned by her father and her whole convent. Her whole convent is going. And she's dying in the arms of a priest. And the actor playing the part was very upset because they hadn't rehearsed it yet together. And it's like the day before they are and she says convert my father and tell him that I died a Gentile. Those are her last words. And she didn't know because she just had Q-Scripps that he was going to say and a virgin too which grieves me more. And you could say well you could try to average that out and try to... One actor could try to set up the other by being more serious or less funny or whatever, but both the funny thing and serious thing are brighter because they're just right there living next to one another. And something about that period maybe even just the way to rehearse did that. And finally I have to say as someone who has built an early modern theater the stage is... And I think this is happening now much much more in contemporary theater the audience was there the audience was there and so you were always writing off the stage you weren't just writing on the stage you were writing off the stage so for all those reasons I think the topic today of new plays really stretches all the way back to him and the people doing new plays and trying to do something then. Bill when I send all these guys an email and I think the question I asked was why is Shakespeare important why is Shakespeare important to your work and Bill wrote me back and I thought I'll quote a little he said while I was in London working on equivocation there was a panel entitled Discuss Shakespeare is a millstone tied around the neck of British theater I'll be moving in that direction thanks Bill so Bill what do you want to expand on that a little bit for us? Kind of as you were saying this is the right audience for some things the wrong audience I think Shakespeare has his problems and one of the things you wrote us is why is it important that Shakespeare be done I sent you a loaded question you caught that do you want an honest answer to this? yes I've been thinking about this and facing you and I love talking Shakespeare so it's been a great pleasure to hear your problems and the way I would describe the problem is saying the story of Henry V which is the master piece of the histories I would say how many of you have done Henry V and they've been great ok here's the plot of Henry V there is this king who wants to busy giddy minds with foreign wars so for domestic reasons without any cause with an absurd cause in the world he goes to war but the real reason he goes is because somebody insults his balls and it's thrilling so he goes to foreign wars to prove his manhood while there he goes with the specific intention of making widows and making orphans and most of the play is dedicated to our feeling sympathy for him about how hard it is to fight an unjust war and the other one is fighting against overwhelming odds he says you know what we have to be humble because God fought for us today and the battle is a huge success because few of name are killed now I submit to you that if this were Lenny Reifenstall and if this was triumph of the will it would be called a war crime and you produced that play and you sobbed like I did on we few we happy few and the key element here is why it matters is Henry V is our logic of war and it is our rhetoric of war and it's a very bad, evil statement about war it isn't just, it's not ambiguous and you can't dirty it up no matter how dirty you make the war no matter what you do you end up rooting for him and a lot of Shakespeare's political philosophy works this way about political corruption and political murder Richard III is his greatest statement and the statement is, isn't it fun and I just finished writing Four House of Cards and they're making this, fundamentally we were making the same statement but it feels to me like this is happening because he was am I going on too long? but it feels to me like is not our problem any more than the Greeks problems are not our problems his problem was how do I talk about politics without saying anything how do I talk about politics without taking a compromising stand because men of conscience were being killed and this is because of his capricious monarchy we do not have that and he solved the problem by personally I believe that Amy Freed wrote the works of William Shakespeare that's my theory but he solved the problem by taking his name off the work and the work is not anonymous the work is disowned because somebody wrote it it isn't like an anonymous craftsman in a medieval cathedral and this is what we cannot afford to do because our problem is different the problem from which all of our great plays are written is this we are living in the midst of an astonishingly brilliant democracy no matter how screwed up our politics at the moment we are an amazing democracy and our problem and the problem which we need to write from which Shakespeare was the opposite of is how do we include everybody so the pens being held up in France saying that's us we need to be doing that we need to be putting our names on things and we need to be taking stands to include people from attention, attention must be played paid through through the great work begins it's all about how do we include everyone which is why Shakespeare is ultimately bad for us in a political sense not the comedies in which I think the stakes are very high but I think the stakes of the history plays are very very low because you watch mighty forces clash you're asked to be an observer so I don't know how important it is for another production of Henry V to happen or Richard McPherson now I think in the Final Four plays he was able to reimagine history as a fairy tale and that's what equivocation is about he rewrote all of history as inclusion how do we bring all the children home and Winter's Tale is a rewriting of the trial of Catherine of Aragon and it's brilliant but he finally got there but where he ended I believe is where we need to start I would point out not universal applause I think that's kind of really an amazing statement and I concur completely I think there's an element in which Shakespeare might China light now maybe not in the sort of fetishistic production cycle of his plays which I think is something we have to be honest about here's a guy that was the biggest innovator of the renaissance uses of the arts of language who innovated, who rediscovered and now we've turned him into sort of a museum exhibit in some of our attitudes so terrible contradiction and certainly he is spinning in his grave to see that the level to which he's been ossified in a certain way because of anything he was about transmutation and responsiveness to the moment but I do think there's one thing that is exactly right for a democracy about Shakespeare and I do think also that we should be writing towards this and looking towards this which is which he pitched high and low in a wonderful way as an inclusive author and he didn't give up the stakes of argument ability to include people of all backgrounds and classes in the way he spoke and I think that's a real challenge for today especially if we're dealing with attention deficit disorder there's no question in how audiences listen but does that mean we cave or does that mean we are nimble the way that Shakespeare was and that we can keep the stakes alive in what you're talking about Bill that there are real arguments that need to be made without giving up a form of versatility and demand on our audience can we keep them laughing and keep them thinking in that way and if we were working that way I think we would be really keeping Shakespeare's spirit alive as writers and as producers What do you think about that? Those were both incredible statements and I think also incredible challenges to writers like us now to say we idolize Shakespeare you know but to take up the mantle to do what he was best at requires us to as Bill says put our names on it and say I do not agree with this to be as passionate about it and you know the way that you were talking about Henry is the way I think about Taming of the Shrew Dear Lord y'all it's too much I cannot see that play again it's about an abuser and he's terrible and he wins and at the end it's just no matter how lovely you make that last or sassy you make her last speech or again I'm like I'm out I can't do this anymore which is why I wrote a play called the Taming which takes that feeling and goes all right let's actually talk about what we're talking about here and I think that as we're saying we can love the work and still have it be the thing that made me want to write and made me not just want to write but want to think and want to feel and want to to believe in magic and if the themes being discussed are so and I'm asking this I'm very curious if the themes discussed are so repugnant well that's just that play I mean when I read Hamlet this play is talking to me and even dramatically the structure of these plays we were talking about how they're not perfect plays either it's not just morally imperfect there's a lot of parts where I'm like really this scene now or or this you know this isn't tied up or you know we all know they're going to get married at the end and yes exactly you know so structurally it's complex and interesting but I think one of the things that it inspires and writers of our generation or I've had the best conversations about it are include questions about what it makes us do better stories now and part of that is continuing to challenge form and to say yeah let's you know windows tail when I describe it it's a tragedy of beginning and a comedy at the end how do we get there with a bear in the middle great and the elements of magic that it permits me to think about as a writer to go let's add witches let's add ghost I always when I teach Hamlet I'm like kind of about a ghost because that's what stops that's what stops and starts the entire thing is this could be we could stop when Hamlet sees a ghost and he goes there are ghosts that could be that play what is that that land from which no traveler and all of a sudden there's a ghost and it's there and part of me goes can we all just discuss the fact that there's a ghost that can chat with our new character so anyway the permission that that gives us let's blend let's be radical let's make magic on stage that's different than the more aesthetic version of what we're talking about morally but I also think that where Shakespeare perhaps starts to fail us ethically and morally is a chance for us to point it out and like for Shrew to say let's look at that why is this so itchy right now that's obvious why it's itchy it's horrible you know and in these war plays how can we point it out instead of excuse it or say oh that's what they were doing back then I mean the best plays I saw the most amazing Caesar up at Ashland a couple years ago the one in the round didn't see that one God bless that was a great production because it really one of the things that I've never felt before was this surge of kind of mob mentality and that production got the audience cheering in a way where we were absolutely a part of that overthrow and that treachery and it was if we were complicit in a way that oftentimes productions it's as you were saying we're watching we're given permission to disengage and to not to not really have an opinion but productions that do make you say what do you think about this are important Ralph was Shakespeare writing for his audience and and if so and I'm assuming he probably was then he's still writing for us it's a great it's a great question I'm sure early on that's what he was doing he was writing for his audience so it's a wonderful thing about us Loveslight was lost where where he puts four attractive young men and four attractive young women on the stage and the audience contract is that those four you know four couples are gonna couple by the end of the play and then he just blows that up so he had a really interesting relationship with an audience where he would use the normal contract between audience member and actor and play and then mess with it entirely and I think I I'm here to talk about the other the other people we've that into this no I think it's like no and isn't it hard to get away and that's that's an albatross I guess but I think I don't think after say just this is my after 1598 I don't think he not including Mary Wiles and Winsor he ever get a damn about pleasing an audience I think this is something different happened and that's just my view of it and I think that kind of ability to make whatever he's going to be talking about even more important and I would really like just for a moment to speak with Bill about Henry V because I found that a very disturbing play too but I find that I think he made it a disturbing play and it's careful to give us Williams and it's careful to give us a gloating you know when he catches the traitors the way Shakespeare says that up we know before it happens we already know that he knows and he's perfectly safe when that scene takes place it's set up that way so all the gloating he does and oh look at your faces when you know there's white as the paint all of that business he becomes most unpleasant so I do think that there's a kind of subtly about the ways in which Shakespeare is examining but even that is a barrier to me that play I completely agree with you that it's a terrible thing it's about we do leadership and there's this guy that everybody said I had to get the cone he's a guy named Ron Heifetz and he's at Harvard School of Politics and I called him out to say we're doing this and the people have given us a lot of money and I wanted to bring in a star and we do Shakespeare and leadership and he says oh I know what you do he says you do the ashencore speech on Christmas day and he says and I just can't come because that's not a good cause that's not a good cause and I said yeah which is exactly what Williams told him exactly the word it's a cause be not good before that he says okay I'll come Ron Heifetz is a good man so I think there's a complexity there but I think that play pleased everybody but the really smart people who may have felt just a little bit whatever the word for an Englishman would have been at that time Jane the Worcester I would like to say Henry the Fifth pleases me enormously I weep copious tears and laugh my ass off it's not that it's not a play with extraordinary muscle but I think questioning the presuppositions of Shakespeare which I think all of you have done at various times and certainly shrew brings it out and merchant brings it out I think our task is a different task I think our task is the August Wilson task in some way of how to reinterpret our history in a way to understand who we actually are it's true in terms of Shakespeare's themes but I also think that the thing that makes him astonishing that we still do value and connect with on a molecular level is the extraordinary freestanding immediacy of his voice that lands for us and it has nothing to do with his themes in a way it has to do with his soul or that writer's soul and I think still it's a mystery to me why still you hear it and it's like somebody who's whispering in your ear from today that what he knows about feeling and what he knows about the places of the soul and what he knows about depression and what he knows about all of that I don't understand how that voice is still alive and if we could write that way in our time I would be very thrilled when we'd be able to write so enduringly so I think that's also what keeps us coming back in spite of the more contextual issues of the plays and the stories as him as a writer as a poet that lives that best live and also just not the words but the character I'm so impressed at his bad guys and girls and it always makes me want to write it's just evil just because it's terribly fun to write it's also terribly fun to watch that's why Iago is just I can't get enough and it's awful it's that music you're not supposed to listen to but you're like yeah so I do think that there's something that is it is undeniably brilliant and challenging but also just it's so much fun and I think that's what I miss with some other writers of that age and now sometimes it's just not fun to be in a play have you felt that? you're sitting there and you're like I get why I'm supposed to be so into this and I'm proud that I'm here and I'm culturally I'm doing my cultural duty but I can't waste it to be done or to go get some wine for the second time but with so much of Shakespeare I just find myself laughing and finding new ways to laugh and do so much I feel like that is still funny in the same way that I mean not in the same way politically but those jokes just land they still land which part of my issue was true is that it's not really funny anymore I kind of can't laugh at it where the you know what you do and somewhere I can cackle out loud can you cackle it? yeah I can as somebody who spent a lot of my life looking at new plays evaluating new plays ruining people's lives making people unhappy making some people very happy I often say I'm looking for the next Shakespeare I'm looking for the next Chekhov which some of you I know some of you in particular will disagree with that but and I've gotten myself in trouble by saying there aren't that many great writers out there right now I don't think in my mind but when I say that I say it because I'm comparing them to those that we sometimes that we consider the greats the people in this room consider the greats so I want to ask you Ralph who are some of the other voices from Shakespeare's time that you consider are some of the greats and how did they grapple or did they grapple with the social issues of the day that we're discussing here about Shakespeare? I really can't answer the social issues very well I mean I feel like I can say some things about how they grapple because you know some of the best Fletcher is amazing Fletcher does some crazy good things Cvoage is a play that is remarkable where a bunch of guys end up on an island run by a bunch of women there's some Amazonians who had shipwrecked there before and aren't allowed to be around guys so you talk about a premise that's big and let's look at something completely different that's one of those the insane ship Countess is a wonderful play the gender politics are really interesting we were talking about Shrew and Fletcher writes same retained and Shakespeare is in the company when he does it and two things are going on and it's like you did that one I'm going to do the other one I've written my list of strata and now I'm going to do the other one and they both say think of the box office they're both doing that and I think you feel this wonderful conversation as you see these plays I am here to urge all of you to take very seriously the possibility of staging something a cool title like a mad world by master something you could put on a poster and it might be fun for people some of the best ones aren't very good we had the best time with the custom of the country which is a play that hadn't been done in America I think ever we did a production of custom of the country it's one of the filthiest plays ever written and yet it starts with a roulette in fact we did it at the same time we were doing Country Wife and the same guy played both it was fun to see that parallel but it's all about how many women he could do at the beginning he gets in trouble in another country and he has to work in a male surroglio and you see him come out no, no more women please because they're going to him they do things with that and then they do touching things about sexual relationships I'm saying now look up custom of the country think about doing it do something clever like say don't bring your children this is too dirty or something like that so you'll get a video audience because in fact it is and in a mad world is it mad world my masters and you have a Frank Goldman is in is it mad world? Frank Goldman is a whore whose name is Frank who arranges everything and at one point and I've really not seen this on a modern stage at one point gets the suitors who are there out of the way so the suitors she's best paid by can go in and be with his girlfriend by taking a doc on stage that's just very unusual and and I mean it's just when it comes to rules and sort of thinking outside they did a lot of that and were they responding to Shakespeare? I do my work on Johnson Johnson spent his career disapproving of the way Shakespeare wrote his plays it's like somebody from the 20th century somebody very it's like Shaw it's like Johnson is Shaw reading Shakespeare and going no no no that's so unbelievable you can't do that those are and that's going on the whole time and of course deeply loving his work at the same time so I think that they were really talking to each other and I think a better now a better now is one of them did something about social things the other one would too but you'd be better to look I think or responding to one another's works and sort of gnashing those things up to get the idea of the feel of the time it's really remarkable and I do recommend any of you who would like to I got a list of the plays we've done and point to ones I think really work well you know those those of us here and these writers here I'm sure I hear a lot why are we why do these dead guys okay it was hilarious but we worry about living writers what's the value and again another loaded question is there value in producing these established or lost quote new works as opposed to the works of people that need to put you know food on the table that are playwrights trying to make a career right now what's the value frankly I hope you three never eat again we also have actors we want to see so if we have a good play we want to do that no I'm not here I am here to say I want to do all your plays I'm not in charge entirely of what plays we do but I think we should every single year be putting on a new play by a new person that has some sort of Shakespeare content and by that I might just mean reach as far and love language and that might be all I mean to say Shakespeare content but I totally believe that and we have done that I have a good friend some of you know Paul Minzer who wrote a wonderful play called The Brats of the Clarence and we put that on it's a great little show and that to you I'll act as his agent get in touch with me I'll put you in touch with Paul Minzer so yeah I'd rather feed you guys I guess than put the flowers on Beaumont's grave but if you have not done The Night of Burning Pestle then you do not really understand how Tyranny Dello got his ideas I mean it's really something and as modern as it can be and very groundbreaking for its time go ahead well I learned my Shakespeare from the New York Shakespeare Festival which only happened it only ended up in Central Park because the truck broke down I don't know if everybody knows that it wasn't planned they were doing the burrows the truck broke down in Central Park and they just stayed there so when I was growing up it was James Earl Jones as a kid George C. Scott as a kid Colleen Dewhurst as a kid all of these people doing Shakespeare in the park I think the real reason to do these is because they were written for cities I mean they aren't the city comedies but they were written to gather cities and the plays that we write like you were saying before are meant for very small psychological investigations which is also important but these things were meant to gather everyone together and outside of the amendment which can also do the same thing but a South Pacific is extraordinary I think it's the gathering of the city that the Shakespeare Festival is for that's what I grew up with and that's what you people did and the trick in New York was it was able to gather everybody every burrow came and every burrow was represented and you could feel that in the audience and you could feel the danger of the park at the time which was a dangerous place but the real thing is what you guys do better than almost anything else but in films is gather people around universal themes and I think that's what a Shakespeare Festival is Fantastic I'd like to go ahead we only have about 15 minutes left but I'd like to go ahead and open it up to questions or comments from before Yeah I think one question I'd like to ask to all the panelists Thanks, Patrick Thank you very much Fantastic and enjoyable discussion What I'd like to hear a bit more amplify from all of you is why do you write because it's one thing to look at Shakespeare and say where he does this, where he does that but I just have to hear loudly and clearly for more of you about why do you write and why do you think that where does that sit in relation to Shakespeare and Ralph I guess it's to you why do you produce plays and why do you do it The gathering answer The gathering answer The gathering answer The gathering answer Why do you write? It seems like such a big question that I should have a very eloquent answer for and don't Why do I write? I can't help it I think everything Well, okay so what just happened in Paris that's kind of why I write and what I mean by that is the overwhelm of that experience just watching from quite far away is I don't know where to put that and I think a lot of us don't know where to put that and I started to go to theater to find a place to put stuff like that whether it's the small things, your first heartbreak or something horrific and grand and so I went to theater to find a place to put that and then I think a lot of us probably started as actors I certainly do and quite soon realized that it was the writing where I could change the ending as an actor you can't do that and as a writer I was like oh yeah, okay I can have this power to further explore what to do with that feeling and that's kind of what I still do Anybody else want to I mean the honest answer is that you know I wrote because I wasn't a good enough actor and I had the desperate hunger to turn myself into somebody from being nobody and I had no voice and I was no one and writing became a tool for survival and in the maturing and the delving and the journey of that you start, I started to want to become part of a bigger narrative in which I had place and dignity and I think that theater is about giving place, dignity and narrative to a terrifying existence and you do it any way you can with laughter, with language, with art with craft, with bullshit and you just try to make it a gathering point for the city and remind the city that they're not just dwellers of the boroughs, that there's a bigger commonwealth that we're part of that is elevating, ultimately even if all it is is the recognition of our common torments in the public space I was directing for the Boston Shakespeare Company at the time and I went to see Nicholas Nicolby and I then cried the month of October without quite knowing why and it wasn't just the extraordinary achievement that that production was but it was I didn't want to continue to reproduce images or varieties of images from the past I wanted to create images that were closer to our own experience than what we had inherited what I had inherited and so that became a conscious decision to try to move towards images that are closer to us so we are less alienated from ourselves I haven't written oh actually in college I wrote something called Lemon Tree Simulator but I do I do it in a very kind of producing play, it's very nice if you follow I had that in but I do want to answer the question because I think I know the answer for me this is just my answer there's a moment in Much Ado that I think about a lot because I'm always having arguments about essentialism with my good friend Paul Menzer and we're always talking about things meaning something different then but there's something about a laugh that you know the writer meant the laugh so when Benedict rationalizing his decision to go ahead and be in love says the world must be peopled I believe that all my heart that got a laugh then the writer writing it knew it would get a laugh then it's one of those beautiful jokes it's a joke on himself he knows what a stupid thing it is to say and what a wonderful thing it is to say and for me I put on Shakespeare because I love to watch I've been very lucky in being able to watch audiences for many many years watch audiences and I love to watch young people hear that line for the first time and laugh in exactly what I think would be the same way someone laughed 400 something years ago and then that moment I feel like you know the world is being peopled thanks other questions or comments don't be shy I'm waiting I just want to say that we added into our program we added into our programming last summer up in New Hampshire a modern comedy plays with the Bard slot and I put out a call on the staff folks list and got wonderful responses from everyone and I'm still hearing names of new plays that somehow connect with Shakespeare and it was a way to bring in some of our audience in the area that love community theater and love musical comedy but oh no Shakespeare so we did something from St. Lawrence Shakespeare Sherlock Holmes in the case of Hamlet which is like a totally frivolous mashup that was widely received, cheered the guys came down from St. Lawrence they said this is wonderful we only did it once up there we were like the North America the American premiere of it and we're writing them and we'll keep doing them because there's a bunch of our audiences out there that want to see something else and it's a way to link what we do with those audiences other questions for our panelists or comments yes Madeline potentially scary question which is off of your comment about becoming a writer in order to be able to change the ending I'm curious because one of the few things I think probably Shakespeare had little power to not get killed over was making sure he did restore order in the ending if there were any thoughts any of you had on maybe any endings he might not have wanted to end that way that's a good question anything he didn't want to end that way I don't know if he would want it to end it but I would want it to I swear I hate to keep going on fruit but just imagine if she had it at the end she was like you know what turn the table over punch him in the nose you know I would love to see that version it's a terrific question I have all sorts of questions about Beth in terms of what he did although I saw a production recently that made me think it's a better play than I ever thought before but sometimes when I'm watching with Beth I get a sense that it's going in a direction that he doesn't want to go it's driving him along but I would suggest to flip the question a little bit I think there's something like Henry VIII ends with a statement that is a palpable lie and I look at that and I think what was he doing he knows this did not happen so why is he doing what that did have any of you ever seen or read Thomas Moore to which he contributed it's an extraordinary play but in it he's able to handle the entire controversy of Henry VIII in his contributions to it without ever mentioning the marriage and he makes Thomas Moore this incredible saint by the end of it, Mad Moore so I think it's an interesting question as to what he really finally wanted to say in a lot of the play I find true a deeply satisfying play because my parents were they were not at all violent but they thought constantly so that back and forth of who's winning and who's losing who's up and who's down with a vibrant woman and a vibrant man I never feel that she's being beaten into the dust I feel like she's fighting back with everything that she has and again how you do the ending is a real question and go back to the questions of endings yeah, Clark I can talk about that so I guess my opinion would be how do we move forward and always approach the works of Shakespeare in conjunction with your works all as new works do you know what I mean because I hear what you're saying about what was true and I hear what you're saying about Henry VIII and those things and if we approach them as new works and approach them and we see those ambiguities in there, we say this is a troubling thing what is this young upstart trying to say and give him the honor of being the team that gives perhaps because I just feel a lot of factor to use it a lot of rock and roll and what drives me crazy is usually we do this classic rock station and it's like here's rock we won't hear your loss at work here's the Rolling Stones playing Sadistuction of 5 trillion times and you can't even hear what that original came from what's wrong man why can't you get it you know what I mean because we've heard it so many times we know what it's about the value of looking at every play of every time as a new work and this time it's equal with all those songs I don't know if there's a question here I adore Shakespeare but I think it has to be in conversation always with the present moment in our last season at Boston Shakespeare we did seven shows and each of the Shakespeare's was paired with a modern play so with Othello we did the Boston premiere of Lesson from Alice and so the dialogue of those two plays going back and forth with shared cast Courtney Vance was in both that's what I think it might be needed and of course the New York Shakespeare Festival became that while you were doing Henry V you were also doing sticks and bones and the dialogue between those two is I think essential Oregon does this and I think the more of that that we have the better does that make sense and also I think that the big important work we're doing as producers and supporters of Shakespeare is the illumination of that text which is so much of our work as we work with Shakespeare and when it happens there's the thrill of ownership I think for everybody, I saw Nick Kuyner's I don't know if anybody saw this time in Athens couple seasons back you can take a play that you think is impossible it is rendered legible and contextualized any way you want whether it makes a point about relevancy or tries to relate to our particular moment in history it sets up a shockwave because it's so rare that it is delivered to with the degree of interpretive skill that it needs to connect to a listening audience today but when it does there's a kind of a pride I think because it's our heritage of language and thought and I think that just as in terms of the union of what is old and what is new we need to be curators in order to be strong innovators and we need to know where we came from for our next generation in the garden of today's writers so I think there's nothing to be ashamed of in the work of preservation to the degree that we have to preserve and real illumination in the way that engages all of us and the better we do it I think the better it makes its own case I don't think it's a real question because all of us have been stirred, moved destroyed, devastated left earful by the good moments of artistry that Shakespeare still provides because it does represent a level of high artistic achievement for all of the participants in a way that modern plays with their slenderness of cast and the modern breakdown of language just don't afford it's our template for virtuosity as artists is good for us new writers to be part of and to be measuring up to thank you one quick thing is just about the most impacted I've been by Shakespeare not just reading him for who he is and his beauty of language is remembering that the witches in Macbeth are supposed to be scary and I was never scared until one production I was terrified and that was when I go oh this is that play it's easy to make something funny well it's not actually easy to make something funny but it's easy to recognize oh that's supposed to be funny well we'll make it funny but to find the horror in things because we're different now we can say Shakespeare can be simple and pure and done with light and air like he was originally which I would love to see more of that as well but we also have toys now it's going to be harder to scare us it's going to be harder to make us really believe a certain kind of love story so how do we really go for it and I say use the toys I was terrified by those witches it was the first time that I really connected with that play beyond just like oh I can't wait to chop that off so yeah trying to see how we can really find the core emotion and go for it we have a play right here we have a play right in the audience so I'd like to take your question I just wanted to go back to Tamey and the Shrew for a minute I just wonder if anybody else on the panel has a response to Mr. Cain's defense of Tamey and the Shrew I had I'll make this quick too so I actually did see a great production of Tamey and the Shrew at Calshakes a couple seasons ago and what made it great and frankly tolerable for me it's very hard for feminists to watch that play can I get an amen there you go the way that it made sense to me the first time was to make sure that it is obvious that that city in which this story is taking place is run by men there are no grandmothers there are no mothers, there are no nannies there is no one but these two young women and a bunch of dudes and that is for those of us walking down the streets of some cities it's hard to be a woman just walking down the street much less when that entire city is full of guys and they all want to talk about your virginity and your marriage and who's going to do you next that's a little intimidating and frankly not very funny so you've got to have a strong Catherine but the other reason that that production started to make sense was the world was like bubblegum it was like Miami Vice it was full of this strange it was like I've never done cocaine but I'm assuming that's what it was like it was just full and colorful and going and going and like it was over turning sense and that's the only way I can make frankly sense of that play is if it's full of people not making any sense and that there isn't there's nobody that really has a moral center there besides just well the rule is that the old one has to get married first not does she have a heart anyway Bill has comments over there that were kind I've directed true a couple of times the last time I directed it was at NYU and I had a very specific image of what I wanted for Kate and instead this very short Korean woman came in named Monique Hult and Monique is profoundly deaf and when she walked out I said to myself she's wonderful I said maybe she could play a servant and this big bell rang in my head and said how dare you how dare you think that and so through auditions she ended up playing Kate and she walked on at the beginning and she signed and no one in the audience understood it and then her voicer came out and hummed behind her signing and hummed didn't say the words but you must remember this a kiss is just a kiss and you realize that she had her own language and over the course of the play her rage at her language not being spoken by anyone became the reason to understand why she was so alone and why she had to overturn the world and by the time it got to I say this is the son Petrucchio was speaking her language and by the time they got to the end they could get away with the final scene because they were both speaking the same language and they were and there was a tremendous intimacy now the production which was fantastic finally fell down at the last moment because when she put her hand under his foot being Asian it was such a cultural stereotype that no matter what we did it looked beautiful and we couldn't dirty it up but the rest of it that struggle, that reason for her fighting back the audience was on her side from the very start and Petrucchio had to come around and I think there are ways of doing that play All right, well I'd like to thank our panel for this on HowlRound TV from the theater comments at Emory in Boston so Emory, yes and Emory Sun, sorry so you can watch it anytime you want thanks everyone