Be Brave

Audiences aren’t intellectually lazy, but you might be treating them that way

I wanted to blame the headline writers for the clickbait title I saw on the Washington Post’s website: Dumbing down Shakespeare: Are Americans too intellectually lazy to appreciate his genius? Big and bold as you like and sure to elicit a visceral response, but like so many headlines, basically misleading or that’s what I was hoping. But nope. Peter Marks actually did write most of that sentence:

“Yet the fact that many theater companies seem to believe they can fulfill their classical mandates with only the most widely known plays, or worse, sacrifice more challenging plays to the popular-entertainment demands of the box office, makes me wonder whether these are signs of a deeper problem. That is to ask, are Americans too intellectually lazy to fully appreciate Shakespeare anymore?”

#AngrySigh.

Ok, so I understand Peter’s concerns as a critic about the state of Shakespeare and American classical theater. Folger Theatre is currently presenting “Timon of Athens” and that prompted his consideration of the lack of productions from the darker corners of Shakespeare’s cupboard. I am empathetic to the idea that a good classical company should encounter dustier or more difficult plays from time to time (those two categories do not necessarily overlap) especially if that name, Shakespeare, is in the title of your company. Peter laments, and I completely agree with him on this point, that many theaters only produce what are perceived as Shakespeare’s greatest hits, often in a (failed) effort to attract audiences. Mr. Marks made that point quite forcefully when he castigated Shakespeare Theatre Company for even producing “The Importance of Being Earnest,” a play that he was clearly tired of seeing even if the production in front of him was really good (he did it in his review which was probably not the right place to do that, but still).

I am, however, not willing to go along with Peter and suggest that these obscure and harder plays aren’t done because the audience is too intellectually lazy for them. For one thing, as canny as artistic directors may be about recognizing the lack of demand for “Timon,” the connection between an artistic director’s grasp of what their audience wants and the shows they decide to produce is tenuous at best. Even putting on a bigger name show like “The Taming of the Shrew” or “Tempest” or “Othello” is hardly a guarantee paying customers will show up or stir in single ticket buyers the desire to subscribe. If a theatre’s season is loaded only with what a theater company thinks will be popular, this is not because the artistic department and the literary staff have somehow accurately taken the intellectual temperature of the audience and found it a bit tepid for the difficult work they were contemplating. It’s not that audiences are too lazy, it’s that theater companies are afraid they might be, or rather, to say this without imputing specific motives, it’s because that theatre company doesn’t trust their audience.

Mr. Marks lands on his “the American audience is too intellectually lazy” thesis because he is a card carrying member of the “a play is worth producing simply because Shakespeare wrote it” party and he skips over the blazingly obvious. Dude wrote 38 plays. Some of those plays are bad. Even a classical company with Shakespeare in their name should be allowed to recognize that. If companies don’t produce “Timon” it is not solely because they don’t trust their audience to show up. Sure, spending some time with the garbage plays and doing your best to rescue them is an understandable use of your classical theater resources. Trying to figure out if a play has something to say today is basically your mission in life, but it’s also ok to recognize that audiences won’t show up for a play they don’t know and are pretty sure isn’t very good. If anything, I wish wholeheartedly that theater companies would interpret other work as generously as Shakespeare is interpreted. If you’re willing to treat Shakespeare’s flotsam with such respect, why not try to discover greatness where we never looked for it before? We’ve had 400 years to figure out “Troilus” and “Timon” and “Cymbeline,” why not engage with some dramaturgs and some academics and give a different obscure play a try, one considerably less featured in the canon (an absolutely discredited construct in the first place - It might even have been written by an woman, who knows?).

At the core of Mr. Marks’ assertion of audience laziness is the purist’s reaction to the common complaint that, when you take away the familiarity of a plot or the allure of the big name, Shakespeare’s language is a massive barrier to bringing the people in. Like most Shakespeare acolytes, Peter is bothered by the notion that Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s “Play On!” program to translate all of his plays into modern English might actually be necessary for some or even most audiences, though Peter at least admits that OSF is doing the playwriting community a great service by commissioning a diverse group of playwrights to write these translations (he is more appreciative of American Shakespeare Center’s ambitious competition to pair completely new works with each of Shakespeare’s plays and perform them together in rep over a 20 year period, perhaps because they try to incorporate Elizabethan performance practices into their productions — a practice I am lukewarm on, but hey do you). Mr. Marks enlists Columbia University professor James Shapiro to put his unease with the need to translate Shakespeare into modern English into different words. Shapiro says “[w]hen actors and the director know what they’re saying, audiences do, too.” That is valid as far as it goes, but it doesn’t demonstrate that Shakespeare doesn’t need translating; it demonstrates that modern productions translate Shakespeare’s words in the literary office and in the rehearsal room. Actors and directors do serious work to understand Shakespeare’s words (yay, dramaturgs) precisely because they are in a foreign language. Yes, his English is vaguely intelligible, but the word order and the word choices and the words themselves are often totally alien without some form of scholarship to explain them. It’s insane to expect the audience to have done that work, which takes a theater company weeks, if not months. It kind of enrages me, as a language nerd and a foreign language speaker, that anyone thinks that the weight of ~400 years of history has not exerted any gravitational effect on the common consensus that constitutes our English language community, which is to not even mention that thousands of miles separate America from England. It’s essentially like arguing that you should be producing concert programs of Hans Sachs Meistergesang without translation in Berlin or parts of Poland or Ukraine or Israel because German and Yiddish speakers can basically understand Middle High German. If Molière and Cervantes are accessible to modern speakers of French and Spanish, it’s primarily because both of those languages have royal academies dedicated to curating those languages’ development (but don’t ask the Academie Francaise what to do dans le week-end). The church of Shakespeare is about as close as English gets to that level of cultivation. For far too many people, Shakespeare is considered such a master, it’s only the intellectually lazy that can’t grok the genius of his poetic language rather than admitting that languages can change quite a bit over centuries, yeah, centuries.

Up to this point, I have been as generous to theatergoers as possible. It must be said, however, that most people attending Shakespeare shows are not experts in theatre, history, art history, design, or literary criticism. Shocking. This is not because they are lazy, intellectually or otherwise, or not necessarily. Audiences are and have always been less intellectually engaged with texts like Shakespeare’s than the producing theaters, including Shakespeare’s original audiences. A big chunk of the audiences of his own day weren’t that damn bright to begin with, hence all of the fools and the plebes and the rude mechs and the clowns keeping the folks on the ground just entertained/interested enough to keep the rotten fruit from flying. It is just plain wrong to fetishize Shakespeare as dazzling high art, when he clearly aimed much lower all of the time. What I think makes Shakespeare so great and refreshing is not that he made works of genius that we need to genuflect before and whose language is somehow untouchable, but because he and his ensemble didn’t get precious. They cranked out imperfect product at a prodigious rate. All of Shakespeare’s plays have pacing problems, surplus characters, excess dialogue, suffer from some structural deficiencies, and/or rely on a few to many deux and their machina. Some of those plays overcome all of those problems to touch on profound patterns of human emotion and experience and feature stretches of poetry that are staggering in their beauty. Some of them don’t have any of those things. Pretending that any of them, let alone all of them, are so touched by genius that the language carries all before it just gets in the damn way of turning that play into a good production.

Look, it sucks when a good play and a good production and a good theater don’t find their audience. People miss out on stuff they would like all the time though. We are all behind on our TV watching, right? How long is your Netflix queue? Books and magazines are piling up on our nightstands and breakfast nooks. We all have tabs in our web browsers we keep meaning to read but never get around to. This is how we all live, producers and audience members alike. Even when we do great and famous work for the best reasons, some people who would love our work just won’t be there because, like the man sang, that’s life. The rule for theaters needs to be: “Do work that you believe in.” It would be great if “and don’t worry about ticket sales” was the next clause there. Sadly, that is not the world we live in, so we will continue to have to wrestle with the problem of “Why this play now?” and one of the answers to that question will include “Because we think people will show up.” It would be really great if theaters could find more justification for a show than that because audiences absolutely know when theaters aren’t doing a show with conviction, which is what happens when they choose a “Hamlet” just because, well, people know it. Audiences know when they are being condescended to, don’t freaking do it. Don’t blame the audience at all. Take a deep breath, trust your company, and be brave and take off into that undiscovered country Hamlet was always going on about.