Shakespeare's Appeal

GORDON EDELSTEIN: Shakespeare fits into any season, anywhere, any time. He is our greatest playwright. It's perhaps a cliché to say this, but when you have the joy of working on a Shakespeare and having Shakespeare live in your theater, you are reminded all over again every time why he is a towering figure in the history of drama.

I think the audiences love seeing Shakespeare. It is always amazing to me how much audiences love seeing Shakespeare. They are nourished by it and excited by it and challenged by it as we theater practitioners are.

One of the reasons when we do Shakespeare we sell so many tickets is because people of all stripes love to see it. I'll give you two examples, and I'll give you more examples. We did Hamlet the previous year and we did Midsummer this last year. My favorite performances for those shows were the student matinees. The kids, who are hardly elitists, went bananas over both those productions. Went nuts, and when Hamlet was over, there was a line out the dressing room trying to get the autograph of the young actor who played Hamlet because they related to him so much. Now both of these, I believe, were very good productions which endeavored to communicate to the audience, and I believe mostly succeeded.

And all you need to do is to go to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, or more to the point, go to see Shakespeare in the Park during the summer. See the line all the way around the park with people of all different stripes waiting on line all day to see free Shakespeare. It was Joe Papp's extraordinary genius and vision which redoubled the commitment of Shakespeare for everybody, and Shakespeare is for everybody. There is this illusion of "Shakespeare is difficult," and of course he is difficult to a certain extent, but if the productions genuinely try to communicate and not obfuscate, if the productions generally are not trying to show off their intellectual complexity, but are trying to show, tell the stories that Shakespeare wrote, because he was a great storyteller, I believe that Shakespeare is for everybody.