Experimental vs. "Elite" Shakespeare

BARTLETT SHER: I did a lot of Shakespeare in my developmental period of life in Boise, Idaho, at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival, which had no preconceived notions about what Shakespeare should be.And we did the most experimental, most insane, most rigorous Shakespeare you could imagine, and that audience, which I would say is a common man audience to some degree, loved it no matter how crazy we got.

When they would get stroppy or unhappy as an audience, is when we got more traditional. And so I find that the common everyday American has absolutely no problem taking in the big scale and ideas of what Shakespeare is at all. And that the worst part of Shakespeare is when it becomes an elite form. Americans hate, hate! abstraction, a sense of an elite, any of that.

And it doesn't make any sense. They were really popular plays when they were written and their great achievement was that you had incredibly deep human ideas at a high level of language for common people, and it trusted that everyday people could handle such a level of language. And that's what I think Americans get when they have the kind of Shakespeare that's really exciting.