Boulder – When it comes to modernizing Shakespeare, a purist might bark, “Where do you get off?”
The Colorado Shakespeare Festival gets off just about anywhere. “The Taming of the Shrew” got off in a 1950s drive-in, complete with poodle skirts. “Two Gentlemen of Verona” got off at an amusement park. “Much Ado About Nothing” has gotten off both in a Rough Rider-era New England town square, and the wild American West. This year’s “Twelfth Night” has the Bard’s twins shipwrecked off a cruise liner, landing on a Caribbean island during Carnivale.
Over 48 years, the CSF has been unafraid to take the Bard places even he would never have dreamed of. Or would he?
“It’s just as important for us to have fun with this material now as it was for Shakespeare’s own acting company to have fun with it (500 years ago),” said CSF producing artistic director Dick Devin. “They played with the text every night for 60 years before most plays were even written down.”
There are about 80 Shakespeare festivals in the U.S., and each struggles with staying true to the language while remaining accessible to modern audiences with short attention spans and many entertainment options. The Utah and Oregon Shakespeare festivals have a rule: On their outdoor main stages, all plays must be performed as they would have been within 75 years of the play’s creation, Devin said. Smaller stages cater more to modern sensibilities.
The CSF keeps a much bigger and more colorful sandbox.
“What’s important to me is that we create a season that offers the audience a variety of performing styles,” said Devin. One play is always presented classically (this year’s “The Winter’s Tale”), one is a tweener (“Othello” as a somber World War I allegory) and one is “out there” – and you don’t get much further out there than Carnivale.
“Dick has created a very open forum for directors in terms of approach, which is such a gift,” said “Othello” director Jane Page. “That gives you a huge palette to draw from.”
Most fests are smart enough to do nothing more to the language than cut it (otherwise some plays might breach five hours). Devin’s out-of-the-box challenge last year was for all three directors to bring their productions home in two hours.
That leaves time and place as the sandbox toys. There are three main reasons directors play so freely with these concepts, and pandering to today’s audiences is actually last on the list. No. 2 is to give artists freedom to explore new storytelling possibilities. No. 1 is to keep loyal, scholarly subscribers from being bored.
“You have to remember only a small percentage of people go to the theater to begin with,” Page said, “and the percentage of people who see Shakespeare is a sliver of that population.”
Those people who now have seen seven “Twelfth Nights” at CSF deserve a new look at the play every time it comes up, Devin said. “I think most audience members appreciate that they are going to see a newly vitalized production, with a fresh view of Shakespeare’s take on humanity, every time out,” he said. ” It’s crucial that we keep people involved and interested and stimulated.”
Page, who directed a smashingly frothy Old West “Much Ado” in 2003, said the most important task for any Shakespearean director is “to find the window that people can then use to enter the play more easily.” She knows this because she remembers what it was like to meet Shakespeare as a kid.
“I always felt stupid,” she said. “And as I got into school, I realized the problem was that it never felt like it was about real people and real situations. They were these actors in pumpkin hose standing and delivering lines in a very declamatory style, which I could care less about. I have no interest in the museum pieces.”
That changed when she saw Franco Zeffirelli’s “Romeo and Juliet” film.
When the setting and characters and the costumes all make sense, boom, the language does, as well. “Suddenly I understood it,” she said.
The discovery of a production’s “window,” Page said, occurs within the answer to “when and where is there a place that this could reasonably happen?” For “Othello,” the story of a black general brought down by jealousy over his white wife, that meant finding a place and time when an African could conceivably rise to a position of great military power.
In World War I, more than 2 million African soldiers were conscripted into service by European armies as war raged between Italy and the Ottoman Empire. An Othello could have emerged from there.
“I am also really focusing on the notion of the outsider,” Page said, “which really works well here in terms of race.”
Page also saw the presence of hired mercenaries as an arc to the present because the U.S. military is outsourcing so much of its support work in Iraq and Afghanistan. “That’s a new thing for us,” she said. “Private companies are handling security in Iraq and biological research for the government. That is the new military.”
Modern audiences also will inevitably think about Christianity versus Islam, “which is fascinating to me because Shakespeare never mentions religion,” Page said. “That’s our own sensitivity. Every era has their own lens to view the truth.”
By setting “Othello” in World War I, audiences will consider history, race, religion and current events, plus core issues of jealousy and rage, all because a director explores different places and times.
“What I loved most about doing ‘Much Ado’ in the Wild West is that the kids who were ushering were telling me, ‘I’m getting my friends who hate Shakespeare to come see this one,’ and I was like, ‘Yeah!”‘ Page said.
“If you get them into the theater, and you let them have a good time, then maybe they’ll say, ‘Gosh, I’d like to go see more of that.”‘
Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.
