Why We Do Shakespeare

BARTLETT SHER: You put Shakespeare into every season because, if you can afford it, they're the best stories. Some part of the canon is going to be speaking to the world that you're living in, in an contemporary sense, at some point. And it's often an interesting exercise to figure out where you need to go in Shakespeare to kind of reflect what's going on in the culture we live in now.

And at the same time, it's the best training for your community of artists. It's the work that you have to be able to do at a very high level to have any kind of reasonable artistic enterprise which can do work that's of a substance and of a craft and of a skill and of a level that's worth producing.