American Shakespeare Productions

BARTLETT SHER: I think Americans do Shakespeare easily as well as anywhere else in the English-speaking world, but we tend to judge and doubt ourselves more than most people do, because of our great English forefathers, and because of the great history of performance of Shakespeare in England, and in Canada, to some degree. But, in fact, we do extraordinarily great Shakespeare, but we tend to be harder on ourselves about it.

So there are a lot of arguments within it as to what it would be, and because we don't actually have a coherent, original source of what makes our theater connected, and there are a lot of individual people doing individual versions of it, it actually makes it a little bit more disparate and a little bit more American in nature, which is that it's divided and separate and a lot of different approaches and very little singular conversation.

If you go to England, everybody has very singular conversations about what they think Shakespeare should be, going back to the 40s at the RSC all the way up through the 70s and Trevor Nunn, and there's a sense of history about it. We don't have the same sense of history, so we get very confused about what it is. But at the same time, we have some extraordinary artists working in Shakespeare who make incredibly exceptional work on the par of any of those great English companies.