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DC Theatre Scene: I plan to bury Shakespeare, not to praise him. The 23rd of this month marks the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. I propose to honor him with a stake driven through his heart. I hope this will be the end of Will.
10 comments:
Lucy Scherrer
said...
No matter what the subject matter is-- a book, play, author, movie, TV series, musical--for every group of people who think that it deserves to be immortalized forever there will be another (albiet usually smaller) group that decries all such claims. The author's arguments in this article can basically be boiled down to: "yeah, it's good, but give it a rest" and that isn't really something that can be potently argued for or against. For everyone who thinks that Star Wars is the pinnacle of classic science fiction film there will be someone who says it's overrated, and for everyone who says that Hamilton is the greatest musical of our time there will be a group who doesn't (if Jacob Wesson doesn't find them first). I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with voicing opinions that you know are unpopular when it comes to deifying artistic works-- after all, if everyone thought certain things were great it would just be boring. However, I don't see anything particularly helpful in this either since most of it just boils down to opinion.
I have to agree with Lucy. This article is fine in writing off Shakespeare as overdone, but in the end it is just an opinion so it can’t go that far with discussion. And the author is not wrong. It has been four centuries since Shakespeare. And it is done a lot- just look at half the summer stock options- Shakespeare festival is in most of their names. I used to think keeping Shakespeare in his original dialect was the only way to go, but the more plays I read by him that are not the well known ones, the more I wish they could be translated already. You have to go through at least three to four readings before you actually understand what is going on and what they are saying. What is interesting about Shakespeare is you will always learn something new every time you read it because you’ll finally put the pieces together and a scene will make sense.
I so agree with this. I have always had something against Shakespeare, its not that his works aren't good, its just too over done. There are so many other works that have survived through history the same way his has, and we really should be looking at them too. I think we look so much at Shakespeare to represent his time period, but really their are a lot of other scripts that are valuable too. I might not go as far as saying that we should never do Shakespeare again, but if Shakespeare came back today and say the number of times his shows were produced, he would probably want to go back to death land. I challenge any group that have traditions to do Shakespeare shows each year or season, to find another playwright from a similar time period and do that show instead. I appreciate Shakespeare, I really do, but I think their is a point where it becomes safe to just do a Shakespeare show, so instead lets try something different.
I completely agree with this article and I think anyone who want’s theatre to continue should too. Those in ballet continue to perform The Nutcracker because every year it sells tickets. There is a market. For Shakespeare that is barely true anymore. While I won’t deny that a lot of our subscribers liked Much Ado about Nothing more than Lord of the flies, or Plague in Venice, they are also very old! And we have got to keep up with our audiences. Honestly if you haven’t read at least one of Shakespeare’s works before going to see a show, none of what is onstage will matter. Most audiences in a Shakespeare show laugh because of an actors inflection, not because they understand the wit. And maybe for the past four centuries we were only marketing to those who understood the wit, but that is no longer the case. We keep pointing out that we are losing to movies because our audience has too short of an attention span, so are we going to do something about it, or keep on pushing our young audiences on these 5 act iambic pentameter nap fests? We have to build them back up, start a solid audience again before we can ask them research a time period before they can buy a ticket to our shows- or they just won’t buy a ticket.
There will always be a disconnect between how people feel about famous icons, much like Lucy and Monica have said, but I think it's important to understand why Shakespeare is important. His plays captured not only the theatre of the time, but also the human condition of what it was like to live in Europe in the 1500's and 1600's. From social castes to romance to the everyday toils of the everyman, Shakespeare managed to portray just about every section of humanity as accurately as anyone we know. I have studied Shakespeare just as much in Advanced Placement Literature classes as I have in nay theatre classes, because there is clear literary and historical merit to his work, all theatrical business aside. He's also relevant for creating quintessential versions of stories that have been around since storytelling has become a common practice. This fact is readily apparent in today's society, when you evaluate all the works that are adaptations and reimagining of Shakespeare's works. Take Sleep No More for example, a piece that most consider a revolution in devised piece of theatre, that is an adaptation of Macbeth. Revolution doesn't have to be all new, but putting Shakespeare away like the author suggests seems to be the thought of a disgruntled author as opposed to a lover of history.
When I first started reading this, I had a negative reaction to this authors words. I thought that he didn't understand the importance and relevance that many of us have come to know and have been taught to know. There is a reason that Shakespeare's work is so famous and why his plays have been produced without compare. I however can see where the authors coming from, he wants the other brilliant authors of that time to have a chance. He too has a love of Shakespeare and understands his work's importance, but he doesn't want to see that work diminished anymore. He is tired of watching "amateurs" attempt Shakespeare and manipulate in unrecognizable. In this regard, I think he has kind of lost sight of whats important. Didn't we all start off as "amateurs"? Isn't the beauty of theatre being able to take the playwright's message and relay it to an audience in a way that helps them to understand and relate to the text. For example, CMU's recent production to the play Antony and Cleopatra and gave it a new life, speaking a message that many of the audience members had never even pondered.
I definitely agree that although Shakespeare is great, his work is being overdone which isn't his fault. Theaters do it because it's a safe "classic" choice that will never go wrong, while audiences would watch it even if they don't completely understand it because they don't want to look like they don't appreciate Shakespeare. It's interesting to note how Shakespeare is also widely taught in English classes, but because it's taught in an educational setting it allows us to dissect and actually understand the significance of Shakespeare's work while we don't necessarily have to do so when we are watching a show. I think the CMU production of Antony and Cleopatra was very well done in the sense that it was altered to be meaningful and impactful and relevant to us in this day and age. I don't have a problem with Shakespeare plays being performed, they just shouldn't be performed simply because "it's Shakespeare".
I’m as much a fan of Shakespeare as the next Thespian, don’t get me wrong. But this article brought up a lot of good points about Shakespeare’s popularity. Sometimes I can’t help but find it a bit excessive. Especially since there are so many wonderful Renaissance playwrights and other classical figures that get overlooked. I find Shakespeare’s writing to be beautiful, but I can’t help but wonder how many time’s one can adapt Hamlet before we run out of ways to make it interesting. I’m not saying the use of Shakespeare is wrong, I think it’s great to pay homage to one of the greatest playwrights to have graced the stage. But there are other options as well when one wants a classical play. Additionally, often theatre education for that era is so hyperfocused on the bard it overlooks entire sections of theatre history. I think the theatre world could expand our horizons just a little bit.
Shakespeare is great, and I love a lot of his works, the Complete Works I got from my father from Christmas is still one of my most cherished possessions. But I do worry about theaters performing Shakespeare just for the stake of Shakespeare and forcing it into a modern context to try and relate with their audience and hide the fact that this play is one that the audience has probably seen a million times. I don’t want audiences struggling to find important pieces of theater by modern authors that actually comment on our time because all they are being offered is Hamlet melancholically tweeting about his dad. Just last night I was having a conversation with someone about the problems of modernizing Shakespeare, particularly Romeo and Juliet, a play which features a seventeen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old getting married and where the main issue is they inability to communicate. He had been in a modernized production where they blatantly brought cellphones out on stage, now in Romeo and Juliet the whole drama of the play is kind of destroyed if Juliet could have just texted Romeo her plan. However, just this year at CMU we had a wonderful example of modernizing and re-contextualizing a Shakespearean work in Anthony and Cleopatra. I think why that play worked so well is that they had a clear intention and message behind why they were changing the original text and setting of the play, instead of just change for the stake of being “new and different.” Performing Shakespeare is important as long as we can find new and interesting ways to work with the text, if not there are plenty of modern playwrights that deserve more attention. If you have to put Horatio in jeans and a T-shirt to make your production interest, something has gone wrong.
Eh, this article seemed awfully whiny to me. Yeah, people produce a lot of Shakespeare. I don’t mind it. There’s a reason why we still perform his plays hundreds of years later. They’re damn good plays. Due to the wildly different artistic variations with which one can produce any given Shakespeare play, every production of Hamlet (and the like) is different. You can set his plays in a wide variety of places, times, situations, etc. and still produce an interesting show. I like to think of Shake spear’s works as skill-builders for both actors, directors and designers. The material is so dense and replete with ideas that it can be challenging to unpack it. Well, the company is forced to unpack whatever play is being produced and come up with their own, unique take on it. Shakespeare’s plays can certainly be produced with little deviation from their original production, and that can be challenging and exciting to do as well. The point is, Shakespeare is produced for a reason. I wouldn’t mind a greater proportion of work from his contemporaries being produced today, but don’t kill the Bard.
10 comments:
No matter what the subject matter is-- a book, play, author, movie, TV series, musical--for every group of people who think that it deserves to be immortalized forever there will be another (albiet usually smaller) group that decries all such claims. The author's arguments in this article can basically be boiled down to: "yeah, it's good, but give it a rest" and that isn't really something that can be potently argued for or against. For everyone who thinks that Star Wars is the pinnacle of classic science fiction film there will be someone who says it's overrated, and for everyone who says that Hamilton is the greatest musical of our time there will be a group who doesn't (if Jacob Wesson doesn't find them first). I don't think there's necessarily anything wrong with voicing opinions that you know are unpopular when it comes to deifying artistic works-- after all, if everyone thought certain things were great it would just be boring. However, I don't see anything particularly helpful in this either since most of it just boils down to opinion.
I have to agree with Lucy. This article is fine in writing off Shakespeare as overdone, but in the end it is just an opinion so it can’t go that far with discussion. And the author is not wrong. It has been four centuries since Shakespeare. And it is done a lot- just look at half the summer stock options- Shakespeare festival is in most of their names. I used to think keeping Shakespeare in his original dialect was the only way to go, but the more plays I read by him that are not the well known ones, the more I wish they could be translated already. You have to go through at least three to four readings before you actually understand what is going on and what they are saying. What is interesting about Shakespeare is you will always learn something new every time you read it because you’ll finally put the pieces together and a scene will make sense.
I so agree with this. I have always had something against Shakespeare, its not that his works aren't good, its just too over done. There are so many other works that have survived through history the same way his has, and we really should be looking at them too. I think we look so much at Shakespeare to represent his time period, but really their are a lot of other scripts that are valuable too. I might not go as far as saying that we should never do Shakespeare again, but if Shakespeare came back today and say the number of times his shows were produced, he would probably want to go back to death land. I challenge any group that have traditions to do Shakespeare shows each year or season, to find another playwright from a similar time period and do that show instead. I appreciate Shakespeare, I really do, but I think their is a point where it becomes safe to just do a Shakespeare show, so instead lets try something different.
I completely agree with this article and I think anyone who want’s theatre to continue should too. Those in ballet continue to perform The Nutcracker because every year it sells tickets. There is a market. For Shakespeare that is barely true anymore. While I won’t deny that a lot of our subscribers liked Much Ado about Nothing more than Lord of the flies, or Plague in Venice, they are also very old! And we have got to keep up with our audiences. Honestly if you haven’t read at least one of Shakespeare’s works before going to see a show, none of what is onstage will matter. Most audiences in a Shakespeare show laugh because of an actors inflection, not because they understand the wit. And maybe for the past four centuries we were only marketing to those who understood the wit, but that is no longer the case. We keep pointing out that we are losing to movies because our audience has too short of an attention span, so are we going to do something about it, or keep on pushing our young audiences on these 5 act iambic pentameter nap fests? We have to build them back up, start a solid audience again before we can ask them research a time period before they can buy a ticket to our shows- or they just won’t buy a ticket.
There will always be a disconnect between how people feel about famous icons, much like Lucy and Monica have said, but I think it's important to understand why Shakespeare is important. His plays captured not only the theatre of the time, but also the human condition of what it was like to live in Europe in the 1500's and 1600's. From social castes to romance to the everyday toils of the everyman, Shakespeare managed to portray just about every section of humanity as accurately as anyone we know. I have studied Shakespeare just as much in Advanced Placement Literature classes as I have in nay theatre classes, because there is clear literary and historical merit to his work, all theatrical business aside. He's also relevant for creating quintessential versions of stories that have been around since storytelling has become a common practice. This fact is readily apparent in today's society, when you evaluate all the works that are adaptations and reimagining of Shakespeare's works. Take Sleep No More for example, a piece that most consider a revolution in devised piece of theatre, that is an adaptation of Macbeth. Revolution doesn't have to be all new, but putting Shakespeare away like the author suggests seems to be the thought of a disgruntled author as opposed to a lover of history.
When I first started reading this, I had a negative reaction to this authors words. I thought that he didn't understand the importance and relevance that many of us have come to know and have been taught to know. There is a reason that Shakespeare's work is so famous and why his plays have been produced without compare. I however can see where the authors coming from, he wants the other brilliant authors of that time to have a chance. He too has a love of Shakespeare and understands his work's importance, but he doesn't want to see that work diminished anymore. He is tired of watching "amateurs" attempt Shakespeare and manipulate in unrecognizable. In this regard, I think he has kind of lost sight of whats important. Didn't we all start off as "amateurs"? Isn't the beauty of theatre being able to take the playwright's message and relay it to an audience in a way that helps them to understand and relate to the text. For example, CMU's recent production to the play Antony and Cleopatra and gave it a new life, speaking a message that many of the audience members had never even pondered.
I definitely agree that although Shakespeare is great, his work is being overdone which isn't his fault. Theaters do it because it's a safe "classic" choice that will never go wrong, while audiences would watch it even if they don't completely understand it because they don't want to look like they don't appreciate Shakespeare. It's interesting to note how Shakespeare is also widely taught in English classes, but because it's taught in an educational setting it allows us to dissect and actually understand the significance of Shakespeare's work while we don't necessarily have to do so when we are watching a show. I think the CMU production of Antony and Cleopatra was very well done in the sense that it was altered to be meaningful and impactful and relevant to us in this day and age. I don't have a problem with Shakespeare plays being performed, they just shouldn't be performed simply because "it's Shakespeare".
I’m as much a fan of Shakespeare as the next Thespian, don’t get me wrong. But this article brought up a lot of good points about Shakespeare’s popularity. Sometimes I can’t help but find it a bit excessive. Especially since there are so many wonderful Renaissance playwrights and other classical figures that get overlooked. I find Shakespeare’s writing to be beautiful, but I can’t help but wonder how many time’s one can adapt Hamlet before we run out of ways to make it interesting. I’m not saying the use of Shakespeare is wrong, I think it’s great to pay homage to one of the greatest playwrights to have graced the stage. But there are other options as well when one wants a classical play. Additionally, often theatre education for that era is so hyperfocused on the bard it overlooks entire sections of theatre history. I think the theatre world could expand our horizons just a little bit.
Shakespeare is great, and I love a lot of his works, the Complete Works I got from my father from Christmas is still one of my most cherished possessions. But I do worry about theaters performing Shakespeare just for the stake of Shakespeare and forcing it into a modern context to try and relate with their audience and hide the fact that this play is one that the audience has probably seen a million times. I don’t want audiences struggling to find important pieces of theater by modern authors that actually comment on our time because all they are being offered is Hamlet melancholically tweeting about his dad. Just last night I was having a conversation with someone about the problems of modernizing Shakespeare, particularly Romeo and Juliet, a play which features a seventeen-year-old and a thirteen-year-old getting married and where the main issue is they inability to communicate. He had been in a modernized production where they blatantly brought cellphones out on stage, now in Romeo and Juliet the whole drama of the play is kind of destroyed if Juliet could have just texted Romeo her plan. However, just this year at CMU we had a wonderful example of modernizing and re-contextualizing a Shakespearean work in Anthony and Cleopatra. I think why that play worked so well is that they had a clear intention and message behind why they were changing the original text and setting of the play, instead of just change for the stake of being “new and different.” Performing Shakespeare is important as long as we can find new and interesting ways to work with the text, if not there are plenty of modern playwrights that deserve more attention. If you have to put Horatio in jeans and a T-shirt to make your production interest, something has gone wrong.
Eh, this article seemed awfully whiny to me. Yeah, people produce a lot of Shakespeare. I don’t mind it. There’s a reason why we still perform his plays hundreds of years later. They’re damn good plays. Due to the wildly different artistic variations with which one can produce any given Shakespeare play, every production of Hamlet (and the like) is different. You can set his plays in a wide variety of places, times, situations, etc. and still produce an interesting show. I like to think of Shake spear’s works as skill-builders for both actors, directors and designers. The material is so dense and replete with ideas that it can be challenging to unpack it. Well, the company is forced to unpack whatever play is being produced and come up with their own, unique take on it. Shakespeare’s plays can certainly be produced with little deviation from their original production, and that can be challenging and exciting to do as well. The point is, Shakespeare is produced for a reason. I wouldn’t mind a greater proportion of work from his contemporaries being produced today, but don’t kill the Bard.
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