by Ben Spatz
I don't have any desire to do Shakespeare in a standard way, or to try to recreate Shakespeare as he was done in any the 16th, 17th, or 18th centuries. Not only has everyone in the universe already seen a Shakespeare play done this way, but the original Shakespeare is just too far removed from our times. Yes, of course, "some things are universal," but it's a mistake to think that the abstract content of a play can get people interested in it if the mise-en-scene is completely unrelated to their lives. I saw this version of _Richard II_ that was like twenty white men and two white women in 18th Century black army uniforms. There was no sexual or racial or technological or capitalistic politics in the play. This kind of production will only interest upper-class white folks, the aristocracy of America.
Of course, this doesn't mean Shakespeare is no good anymore. He remains the greatest playwright we know in all of Western history up until the 20th Century. It just means that trying to reconstruct a Shakespeare play "on its own terms" will always create something hopelessly archaic and detached from American life today. Far better is to deconstruct Shakespeare on our own terms and bring his brilliance into the world. I really believe that something as simple as costume can do this. I know there have been far too many Hamlets set in modern army costumes, but that's because it's a brilliant idea. I would rather see twenty Hamlets in army camouflage and one in period costumes than the other way around. And then of course you must go further with it, as they do in the recent film of _Romeo and Juliet_.
You have to throw out the notion of letting the text speak for itself. Texts cannot speak for themselves, they have to be interpreted. This version of _Richard II_ I saw had in the program notes that the company wishes to "experiment in order to illuminate what is in the play, not impose a concept on it." These words are the kiss of death. No one who has this as their goal will ever make really interesting theater. These words are the artistic parallel of the scientific/anthropological "we want to observe the natives without interfering in their way of life." The postmodern revelation is that there is no neutral way of conducting research or of doing a play. When someone says they want to put onstage "what is in the play" rather than their own ideas, they are referring not to a neutral interpretation of the play but to whichever interpretation of the play is hegemonic. In other words, they want to do the play the way everyone would expect it to be done, or (only slightly better) the way people used to expect it would be done. This is the opposite of innovation.