The pile of dishrags grows ever taller, but I haven’t much knitting to talk about besides that, so I thought I’d share one of my amusements: The Shakespeare Game.
The purpose of the game is to imagine one’s self a director/producer and to dream up a novel production of one of Shakespeare’s plays. The ideas can be quick concepts—setting Romeo and Juliet on the Israel-Palestine border, for example—or more elaborate things with whole proposed casts, costume ideas, and the like. When I teach my summer Shakespeare class, I invite my students to play this game. I also have it going in the back of my head during the course.
Last year, when one of the plays Shakespeare Santa Cruz presented was King Lear, I imagined a production set in an assisted-living facility for people with Alzheimer’s. Lear would be one of the residents; the play would be his fantasies acted out by other residents and staff. This summer, I had the idea of making the setting even more specific: New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. The storm on the heath would be the actual hurricane. I picture a large-screen tv on the set, playing a continuous loop of news coverage of the disaster, with regular cuts to George W. Bush saying, “You’re doing one heck of a job, Brownie.”
This year, Shakespeare Santa Cruz is presenting Much Ado about Nothing and The Tempest. Since Tempest is often seen as Shakespeare’s “retirement play,” in which he foreswears the magic of theater and retreats to live an ordinary life, I’d like to try producing it as the final film of an aging director—sort of Sunset Boulevard-like. Ariel would be the director’s assistant with a clap-board to mark the beginning and end of scenes. I’d play Caliban as a Hattie McDaniel type: a gifted African-American actor forced to play mammy roles.
I also imagine a production of Taming of the Shrew done as tragedy, rather than comedy, in which the insults are sincere, the violence real. Watching a production like this would be grueling, but it would open up all sorts of ideas that are lurking right now under the script we’re so ready to laugh at.
Think back to your high school or college Shakespeare. What plays are you familiar with? What would you do with them to make them anew for audiences?