Taking the arts beyond the few and bringing the public into the performance space is not a new theory, but it’s challenging to execute. And nowhere in the country is this execution done as effortlessly as at the American Shakespeare Center at the Blackfriars Playhouse. The venerable organization is the most respected Shakespeare theater in the U.S., and the center is highly regarded around the world.
The second season for its artistic director, Brandon Carter, marks two anniversaries: the 35th of the Center itself, as well as the 400th of Shakespeare’s First Folio. Published in 1623, seven years after the Bard’s death, it contained about half of his plays that had never previously appeared in print, including As You Like It, Julius Caesar, Macbeth, The Tempest, and many more. Without the First Folio, many of his plays might have been lost forever.
“The First Folio saved 18 of Shakespeare’s plays, and we thought that we would sort of capture some of them to celebrate our 35th year,” says Carter. “We are about connecting with people and having audience contact. That’s who we are and, for the audience to take that away from the performance changes the shape of our plays.”
Over the past season, those plays included some of the favorites of the master playwright, including Measure for Measure, Much Ado About Nothing, and The Taming of the Shrew. And what Carter means by “audience contact” is literal: when this journalist was interviewing Carter, he gave an impromptu of a scene from Othello—once as a straight performance and the second time addressing me as if I were part of his monologue.
The first iteration was impressive—Carter is a stellar actor and Shakespeare is definitely his milieu—but the second made me blush, laugh out loud, and then feel extremely swoony when Carter clasped my hand in his. It was intense, to say the least, and it forced my intimate connection with Carter’s character and his plight of trying desperately to avoid marriage—something this writer can identify with.
And to that delicate point, Carter says, “I think the mainstay of my vision is creating a symbiotic relationship between the early modern cannon, specifically Shakespeare, and new voices and audiences. I think that’s most important in classical work. This theater has been ahead of the curve in interrogating the classics because there are a lot of themes in these shows that are testy, that are archaic—you know, maybe we shouldn’t be producing some of these shows today. But I really believe that if we interrogate it right—with thought, with love, with compassion—I think we actually tap into what Shakespeare was trying to do.”
Shakespeare, for his part, was a master of audience involvement. His shows were funny, sad, terrifying, and grim, and the viewer was wrenched through all of those emotions by being part of the play itself through each actor’s own initiative. And, to wit, there is audience seating on the stage at the Center (a reiteration of London’s Globe)—velvet cushioned Savonarola chairs to be exact—where audience members can partake in the plot on a personal level sheerly due to their proximity to the players.
But it’s not all Men in Tights prancing about, imposing themselves on the audience. There is a diverse company that puts on a physical performance with some vigorous acrobatics and lots of terrific facial contortions—and they do get up real, real close and personal but not in a creepy way.
“Really, what you need is an audience on all sides,” says Ralph Cohen, theater director of the American Shakespeare Center, who founded the organization in 2001. “In my opinion, that’s the strength of what this place is—it returns the theater to the most important three elements: the script, the actor, and the audience.”
Following up on Cohen’s comments, Carter expresses how the actual words the actors are performing from that script, in that theater, when they directly address that audience member, can prompt a change on a deeper level. “Shakespeare was trying to create community,” Carter says. “He was trying to create a connection through language—and I think bridging that gap and tapping into what Ralph is saying is that we are reminding folks about the power of language and how that can heal, how that can bring us together.”
At this point, Cohen returns to me and, about the aforementioned swoon-worthy personal performance by Carter, says, “So I just thought I’d ask you, what’s the difference? I mean, are you listening better? Are you hearing all of the words? Aren’t you hearing all of the ways that we set the speech up? And you’re trying to interpret them right? That is clear, honest, which is what it was meant to be.”
It might not seem as though simply having the lights on would enhance a performance. To some, it might seem as though being able to see other members of the audience would be distracting or somehow not as intimate or individual. This is why it’s so hard to pull off—because if it’s done wrong, with a cast that’s not as seasoned or with an artistic director ill-versed in this mode of performance, it can detract from the individual experience of seeing a play. But this is not the case at the American Shakespeare Center.
The show opens with the audience. The cast performs, inexplicably, pop songs from a random selection of decades in a scratch comedy crew kind of way. They encourage the audience to dance, sing, and generally horse around in the stalls and circles. And they do. In fact, if you’re not prepared for this to happen, you will be amazed at how people really, really come out of their shells at a performance here. Strangers dance with each other, people sing, and move throughout the theater. If you’re on the shy side, there’s a bar in the lobby.
After the song and dance performance, the show begins with a tongue-in-cheek flourish that’s almost a private joke. Looking around, you see that the audience is in on it. And what this brings to Shakespeare is in the language. It juxtaposes the Olde English spoken word with modern fooling around and it almost makes a parody of the work—almost, but it doesn’t.
What it does do is take the traditional language of Shakespeare and make it easy to understand. Even if you miss the more arcane spoken aspects of it, you can watch to see if the rest of the audience gets it the way you might in a conversation—like when you check to see if the people you’re talking to get the meaning of something, thereby giving you the perception of it. It’s body language, facial expressions, and reactions that allow you to invest yourself in the performance with the rest of the people in their seats. Like Carter says, it’s a community, immediately made, all part of the same conversation.
Cohen says, “It would be impossible for an actor not to know what every audience member was thinking, sometimes saying. It’s chess in three or four dimensions. It’s because you’re playing a part, but you’re also playing a part where everybody knows you’re playing a part, and you’re trying to make them a part of what you’re doing.”
And it’s true. The actors play off each other but they’re playing off the audience, too. If, as Carter did with me, an actor brings in an audience member in, addressing her directly, the actor acts to that viewer. When I laughed, Carter got closer to me, and when I blushed, he moved further away. And in fact, where so many performances are about the actors, this performance was about me and what I brought there that day—a bit of inhibition and my typical self-consciousness.
For Carter, this individual conversation with the audience is the light in itself—the community he hopes to continue to build at the American Shakespeare Center. “Whatever journey led me here, to keep our lights on, to do it with the lights on, that is important for this region,” he says. “That is important for us continuing to be gatekeepers of Shakespeare in a way—how he might have done it. I just want people to come here and experience that, and to be in a shared life with people in our community. I feel like if you’re missing out on that, you’re missing out on something special.”
Meredith Lindemon is Virginia Living’s managing editor. She has written for Garden & Gun, Conde Nast Traveler, and New England Home. You can follow her on Instagram @meretraveler.
