Acting Without Microphones

SCOTT KAISER: Well, an outdoor performance of Shakespeare is a very tricky thing, especially at the festival, because our tradition, all the way back to 1935 is, of course, not to amplify our actors. We're one of the last theaters in the country with an outdoor Shakespeare festival that doesn't amplify the actors. There are still a few left—in Cedar City, the Utah Shakespeare Festival, and I think Colorado Shakespeare Festival as well, in Boulder.

The challenges are the fact that, one, actor training no longer really addresses outdoor Shakespeare, so actors' skills are waning, and the ability of actors to fill large outdoor houses like ours—we have a 1200-seat outdoor house. What I find is our younger actors have not been trained to do this, and so we have to train them up and bring them up to speed in filling a house of this size.

The flip side of that is our audiences are less and less able to listen to Shakespeare being performed outdoors. They are so used to miking. When you go to Broadway shows, for example, a lot of Broadway shows, especially Broadway musicals now, are miked. If you go to Shakespeare in the Park in New York City, those shows are miked.

So often the expectation of the audience is they're going to be surrounded by speakers that are going to blast the sound at them and they're going to have no problem hearing and understanding the play. They're used to having music and sound blasted at them in the movies, so the experience of coming into an outdoor theater and really focusing on an actor that's twenty rows away, that is not amplified, and really focusing in on that actor, and focusing in on the voice that's coming from the stage, is in fact becoming more and more challenging for our audiences.