The Bard wrote for everyone
Here’s a dramatic irony: The playwright who gave us the most high-profile forum for diversity is a long-dead white male whose work was, in his day, performed exclusively by men who shared his skin color. William Shakespeare shuffled off his mortal coil 400 years ago this month (April 23 is the observed date), and while his plays remain as ubiquitous as ever, their presentation certainly has evolved. As concerns about the representation of different races, genders and perspectives have embroiled Hollywood and mass media, artists have continued to look to the Bard to examine changing times and reach wider audiences.
This year already has brought one
Hamlet starring a black actor — Paapa Essiedu, who plays the character as a modern graffiti artist in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s current production, in the playwright’s native Stratford-upon-Avon — and another, at Baltimore’s Cohesion Theatre Company, depicting the prince of Denmark as a lesbian. Broadway’s last Romeo and Ju
liet, staged in 2013, cast Orlando Bloom and African-American actress Condola Rashad as the doomed young lovers, and its most recent Julius Caesar, in 2005, starred Denzel Washington as Brutus.
“Shakespeare’s writing has a malleability and an accessibility like that of no other dramatist,” says British film and stage star David Oyelowo. In 2000, long before his acclaimed portrayal of Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma, Oyelowo played Henry VI in the first Royal Shakespeare Company production to cast a black actor as one of the Bard’s kings.
“There was a bit of noise about it at first,” recalls Oyelowo, who will play Othello this fall in a New York Theatre Workshop staging, opposite Daniel Craig’s Iago. “But once we began performing, the focus went back to the plays, which was wonderfully exonerating.”
Diversity got an earlier boost in the
USA with the support of producers such as John Houseman — who tapped Orson Welles to direct an all-black Macbeth in Harlem and on Broadway ( briefly) in 1936 — and Joseph Papp, founder of the New York Shakespeare Festival, precursor to the Public Theater.
Papp championed what came to be called “non-traditional casting,” a practice that gained momentum generally in theater.
Through the Shakespeare Festival — which continues as the Public’s Shakespeare in the Park series — he offered free performances of landmark productions such as a 1973 King Lear with James Earl Jones in the title role. The great Puerto Rican actor Raúl Juliá played the sinister Edmund.
For the Public’s current artistic director, Oskar Eustis, the approach suits “a great writer who was writing for the most diverse audience that had gathered for secular entertainment in years.”
That audience included uneducated groundlings — originally, an Elizabethan term for spectators in the theater pit — along with academics, aristocrats and royalty. “Shakespeare had to appeal to all those people, and his plays still have that astonishing ability to speak to all levels of society.”
That constancy is matched by an adaptability that has accommodated shifting social mores.
This year’s Shakespeare in the Park series launches May 24 with The Taming
of the Shew, helmed by esteemed British director Phyllida Lloyd and featuring an all-female cast. Eustis had wanted to produce the comedy that gave us the wickedly dueling Katherina and Petruchio for years, but says: “A man bringing a woman to heel is not what I wanted to represent on stage. ... In Shakespeare’s time, it would have been performed by all men. But we’re flipping that, which makes it considerably more interesting, and fun.”
Women playing men in Shakespeare’s plays is hardly a new phenomenon, of course.
Venerated English stage and screen actress Harriet Walter, recently familiar to Americans for her stint on Downton
Abbey, had “kind of given up on Shakespeare,” she says, before returning to him in the roles of Brutus and Henry IV in productions by London’s Donmar Warehouse. “That ability to make that language come alive dramatically is common to men and women, like playing Beethoven,” Walter says.
British-born Zainab Jah, now acting alongside Lupita Nyong’o in Broadway’s acclaimed Eclipsed, joined a list of nota- ble female Hamlets stretching back to Sarah Bernhardt when she played the part last year at Philadelphia’s Wilma Theater.
Neither Jah’s gender nor her race — she is black — fazed young audience members who attended talk-backs after student matinees. “Their teachers had questions,” Jah remembers, “but it didn’t matter to the students.”
Cohesion Theatre artistic producer Alice Stanley, who directed the recent
Hamlet with a lesbian protagonist, is in her 20s and has reinterpreted other Shakespeare plays to incorporate transgender characters. “People use Shakespeare’s work to touch on political issues all the time,” Stanley says. “Gender diversity is at the forefront right now, and there’s a lot that can be played with and reimagined.”
Walter points out that “Shakespeare’s theater was not naturalistic,” a factor that has fueled the imaginations of his interpreters.
Brandi Wilkins Catanese, associate professor of performance studies and African-American studies at the University of California-Berkeley, notes that “for a contemporary audience, Shakespeare’s plays don’t exist through a realistic framework. They’re already going outside their frames of reference in terms of plausibility and language. ... That can put your mind in a more expansive way of thinking about how to materialize the text.”
Shakespeare himself “played with layers of gender and identity,” notes Christopher Liam Moore, who is directing one showcase, Twelfth Night, for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. OSF is staging five works in repertory to commemorate the anniversary of the playwright’s death; others include The
Winter’s Tale, in a production (starting June 9) set in dynastic China and the American West and directed by a Chinese-American woman, Desdemona Chiang.
Korean-American actress Amy Kim Waschke is cast as the queen Hermione, while Twelfth Night’s Olivia — in Moore’s reading, a black starlet in 1930s Hollywood — is played by an African-- American, Gina Daniels.
Oregon Shakespeare Festival artistic director Bill Rauch notes that in its 2011 staging of Julius Caesar, the title character was played by a Latina, Vilma Silva. “As you approached the theater, we had a series of banners of world leaders who had been revered and then assassinated,” Rauch says.
“And they were men and women, black and white and Asian and Latino. Then you watched the play and got Shakespeare’s larger truth about the human impulse.”
In preparing to play Othello, Oyelowo has been exploring parallels between Shakespeare’s Moor and our current president.
“Othello, not unlike Obama, is powerful; and because of the color of his skin, he is symbolic in ways that empower some people and threaten others. We’re seeing something like that clearly played out in America today.”
No doubt Shakespeare’s works are inspiring other comparisons right now, and more reflection on the circumstances that unite and divide us.
“That’s why he is the first name we think of when we think of theater,” Walter says. “Because all of us want to express ourselves through his words, no matter where we come from or what color or shape or size we are. Shakespeare still speaks for the whole of humanity.”
“Because all of us want to express ourselves through his words, no matter where we come from or what color or shape or size we are. Shakespeare still speaks for the whole of humanity.” Actress Harriet Walter