SETTING THE SCENE: DIRECTORIAL USE OF ANALOGY IN TWENTIETH-CENTURY AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE PRODUCTIONS by LAWRENCE RONALD TATOM B.A., California State University Sacramento, 1993 M.F.A., University of North Carolina – Greensboro, 1996 A thesis submitted to the Faculty of the Graduate School of the University of Colorado in partial fulfillment of the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Theatre 2011 This thesis entitled: Setting the Scene: Directorial Use of Analogy in Twentieth-Century American Shakespeare written by Lawrence Ronald Tatom has been approved for the Department of Theatre. _________________________________ Oliver Gerland, Associate Professor __________________________________ James Symons, Professor Date___________________ The final copy of this thesis has been examined by the signatories, and we Find that both the content and the form meet acceptable presentation standards Of the scholarly work in the above mentioned discipline. IRC protocol # 0902.28 Tatom, Lawrence Ronald (Ph.D., Theatre) Setting the Scene: Directorial Use of Analogy in Twentieth-Century American Shakespeare Productions. Thesis directed by Associate Professor Oliver Gerland This dissertation charts the historical development of the use of analogy by stage directors in twentieth-century American Shakespeare productions. Directorial analogy, the technique of resetting a play into a new time, place or culture that resembles or echoes the time, place or culture specified by the playwright, enables directors to emphasize particular themes in a play while pointing out its contemporary relevance. As the nineteenth century ended, William Poel and Harley Granville-Barker rejected the pictorial realism of the Victorian era, seeking ways to recreate the actors-audience relationship of the Elizabethan stage. Inspired by their work, Barry Jackson and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre discover the power of a specific type of analogy, modern dress, in the 1920s. At the same time, Arthur Hopkins and Robert Edmond Jones were exploring the power of thematic conceptualization in the United States. Orson Welles was the first to combine analogy and thematic conceptualization in his landmark productions of Macbeth and Caesar in the 1930s. Welles‟s work inspired Tyrone Guthrie and John Houseman to stage analogy productions of Shakespeare‟s plays in the 1950s and 1960s. In the 1`960s and 19702, a new generation led by Michael Kahn and Joe Papp pushed the use of analogy further, leading to a new eclectic style of Shakespeare production. By the end of the twentieth century, analogy had become a major tool for staging the works of Shakespeare and other classic texts, though some contemporary directors find it problematic and are moving away from it. iii CONTENTS CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION………………………………………….........1 Purpose and Scope of the Study …………………...……………….2 Review of Literature ………………………………………………12 Methodology ………………………………………………………15 II. THREE HUNDRED YEARS, AND STILL NO TRADITION .….....18 The Playwright as Director …………………………………..18 Restoring Will ………………………………………………..24 Back to the Texts ……………………………………………..33 The Rise of the Director ………………………………….......44 Revolt ………………………………………………….……...51 III. A NOT SO DISTANT SHORE ………………………………………65 Across the Atlantic ……………………………………………65 1900 …………………………………………………………...73 Modern Shakespeare ………………………………………….78 The Next Round ………………………………………………92 New Trends …………………………………………………..101 IV. THE WONDER BOY FROM KENOSHA ………….………………..106 Macbeth ……………………………….………………………….112 If It Worked Once ………………………………………………...121 V. THE FINAL PUSH ………………………………………..…………..132 iv Guthrie and the Second Stratford ……………………………...137 Outdoing Orson ………………………………………………...142 The Shakespeare Marathon …………………………………….149 VI. CONCLUSION …………………………………………………………...158 From Analogy to Eclecticism ………………………………………...159 Out of the Canon ………………………………………………...167 Where from Here? ……………………………………….……....173 BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………..182 v CHAPTER ONE INTRODUCTION For a while Shakespeare reinvented himself almost every day. He had to: he was an actor. In the Elizabethan repertory system, he might be expected to perform in six different plays on six consecutive days. Many times he would rehearse in one play in the morning and perform in another that afternoon. When he was not acting in plays, he was writing them. Like actors, Elizabethan playwrights were encouraged to demonstrate their adaptability. He juggled selves. He did not stop juggling them when he stepped out of the theatre. Like his characters, he played his part in family burials and marriages; he loaned money, bought property, invested venture capital, sued people, testified in court. But gradually the pace of metamorphosis began to slow. Finally, on April 23, 1616, he stopped reinventing himself altogether. He was buried two days later. We have been reinventing him ever since. - Gary Taylor, Reinventing Shakespeare Every script is, theoretically, susceptible to improvement.” - Tyrone Guthrie, In Various Directions “To communicate any one of Shakespeare‟s plays to a modern day audience, a director must be prepared to set every resource of modern theatre at the disposal of his text.” - Peter Brook, Style in Shakespeare Productions “Shakespeare belongs to us. We can create any world we want to.” 1 -Joanne Akalaitis, “Joanne Akalaitis” “All roads lead to Shakespeare.” - Eric Bentley, Modern Shakespeare Offshoot PURPOSE AND SCOPE OF THE STUDY This study will attempt to trace stage directors‟ use of analogy as a scenic tool in the production of Shakespeare‟s plays in twentieth-century American theatre. Though the reasons for Shakespeare‟s continued popularity have been argued for four hundred years, and will continue to be argued for years to come, the fact remains that he is the most produced playwright of our time. Author John Elsom, in Is Shakespeare Still Our Contemporary?, describes the Bard‟s predominance not just in the theatrical world, but throughout culture, as nothing short of “startling” (7). For many years American Theatre magazine, in its fall “Season Preview” issue, published a listing of the most produced plays in American regional theatres for the coming season – and that listing was invariably accompanied by some form of statement that excused the “ubiquitous” Shakespearean productions from the rankings, productions that would have otherwise led the list every single year. To many, Shakespeare has been, and remains, the “Mount Everest of Western theatre – a canonical challenge that must be faced simply because it is there” (Green 69). And it is not just the West that worships at the altar of Will – “almost no spot in the world has been left untouched. From his home town of Stratford-on-Avon to the film audiences of Japan, Shakespeare has been cast upon the world” (Staub 33). Just as Shakespeare was, according to Gary Taylor, constantly reinventing himself, successive generations of theatre readers, scholars, critics, artists and audience members have striven to interpret, and reinterpret, the playwright‟s works, attempting to mark them with their 2 own individual stamp. Not surprisingly, then, the study of modern Shakespearean production is a huge and daunting undertaking. There is a vast amount of material available on the subject; as Harry Levin points out in his essay “Critical Approaches to Shakespeare from 1660 to 1904,” “the body of critical writing that bears witness to that [Shakespeare] experience is the largest that any single writer has ever attracted” (Wells Studies 213). Charles Marowitz, in his book Recycling Shakespeare, calls the study of Shakespeare an “academic Godzilla” (69). More has been written about Shakespeare‟s work than the work of any other theatre artist, and the opinions concerning it are myriad. Questions abound in this field of endeavor: What is it that makes this particular playwright so popular, four hundred years after his time? Why are his works still the center of theatre production in the English-speaking world? What in these writings sparks audiences flock to theatres and sit by the thousands under the stars in numerous summer festivals? Why do actors still clamor and fight to revisit the roles he wrote, year after year? Perhaps some of the answers lay in the universality of Shakespeare works. The director John Hirsch quoted one of his central European colleagues: “When there are no new plays to express what‟s happening in a society, just go to the shelves of the classics and you are sure to find a play which will speak most directly to the issues you want to deal with in the theatre” (qtd. in Istel 34). British director Peter Brook wrote about the immense phenomenon that is Shakespeare‟s work for the theatre: If one takes those thirty seven plays with all the radar lines of the different viewpoints of the different characters, one comes out with a field of incredible density and complexity; and eventually one goes a step further, and one finds that what happened, what passed 3 through this man called Shakespeare and came through existence on sheets of paper, it‟s something quite different from any other author‟s work. It‟s not Shakespeare‟s view of the world; it‟s something which actually resembles reality. A sign of this is that every single word, line, character, or event has not only a large number of interpretations, but an unlimited number. Which is the characteristic of reality. (Brook What 40) During the recently completed twentieth-century, directors led the charge to “contemporize” Shakespeare. Their leadership