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Shakespeare in the Park (The New York Shakespeare Festival) |
Excerpted from Yu Jin Ko, "Shakespeare Festivals," Shakespeare in American Life exhibition catalog. Folger Shakespeare Library, 2007.
(Page 2 of 3) Eventually, the NYSF settled in Central Park in an amphitheater, Delacorte Theatre, that Papp fought bruising battles to build, but it also established a year-round home around the corner from the Astor Place of the nineteenth-century theater riot. As the Festival evolved, it continually struggled to maintain its egalitarian character and mass appeal. It borrowed, for example, the practice of celebrity casting from the American Shakespeare Theatre to bring recognized Hollywood stars to the stage (sometimes back to the stage), such as Al Pacino and Michelle Pfeiffer. But the Hollywood glamour was often coupled with an edgy, urban sensibility that lent a stylish excitement to Shakespeare.
It would also become a leader in a theatrical practice that was already growing when the Festival was established. The 1955 issue of Shakespeare Quarterly that noted the extraordinary number of Shakespeare performances on college campuses also hinted at something else on the landscape: "a comic strip Comedy of Errors, another staging of the same play as a study in abnormal psychology, a science fiction Tempest, a hillbilly Hamlet."2 Eclectic experimentation—which would come to be known and sometimes derided as "concept" Shakespeare—had arrived. Whatever one may think of this practice, it involved, at its heart, translating Shakespeare on stage into more accessible idioms.
Such experimentation was often driven by a kind of mantra, especially to educators who wanted to make Shakespeare more palatable to resistant students: cultural relevance. From the outset, the American Shakespeare Theatre, for example, was given to reshaping Shakespeare, as it did by designing its Much Ado (with Katherine Hepburn) with gestures towards Texas. Later, with Michael Kahn as artistic director, it would embark on productions of political plays (Henry V, Julius Caesar) that drew on the Vietnam War and a version of Romeo and Juliet that reflected on the hippie generation. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival was noticed for its diverse approaches to production.
2 "Current Theater Notes," Shakespeare Quarterly 6 (1955): 67-88, esp. 69.
The Public Theater
The Public Theater