The American Scene; Shakespeare

I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this. I'm going to do a little bit more of this, I'm going to do a little bit more of this. Good morning, my name is Joel Zanger, this is the American Scene. Our subject this morning are the problems of staging Shakespeare here in Chicago, or possibly on a broader level of problems, staging Shakespeare in America for an American audience today. To discuss the particular

problems as they appear for the director, the producer, and for the audience as well, we have two guests, we're particularly fortunate that both of our guests are very knowledgeable men in this area of theatre. I'd like to introduce them to you. First guest this morning is Dr. John Reich, who began his career as stage director of the Austrian National Theatre, and was a director and producer for Max Reinhardt. He came to the United States here in 1938, and since 1945, he worked in New York, translating, directing, producing a variety of plays of significant literary importance. He was brought here to Chicago in 1957, he was invited by the Art Institute to reorganize its Goodman Theatre in School of Drama, and has since directed Mary Stewart, which is being produced in Chicago this year, with a cast headed by Eva Lagallian. And this year too, at the Goodman Theatre, he has been instrumental in bringing in a production of the Merchant of Venice. Our second guest, Dr. Henry Nepler, is a

critic of drama, a student, and a man with a great deal of experience acting, directing, writing, and thinking about the play. I wonder if we might start, gentlemen, by what may very well be a devil's advocate position. I read very recently in the Report of Magazine, an article by Gore Vidal, and he suggested, perhaps only half playfully, that we might take a moratorium on Shakespeare productions. Let's stop, he said, for about 20 years, no more Shakespeare. It's become, at this point, merely a kind of vehicle for stars. The play is not the thing. How does it, how does it, you feel about that? Dr. Nepler, I wonder. No, I think that is nonsense. First of all, I don't, one can't declare a moratorium on a major playwright, it's ridiculous. Enough good ones. No, first of all, they aren't enough good ones. And secondly, I think that Shakespeare has an awful lot to say. I think the idea behind

Vidal was really that it's become a kind of race, a kind of comparison. How does Gilgut do it, how does Olivier do it, how does Evans do it. And I see nothing wrong with that. We compare the Traviata of Carlos and Tibaldi. I don't see why we shouldn't compare the Hamlet of Olivier and Gilgut. I agree with you. Don't you think so? Yes, I guess. But it's never a great danger that, in effect, we're watching Fordville Terence rather than plays. These are, well, these are great artists, they're not Fordvilleians. But I think we have, by no means, just these great stars appearing in Shakespeare. We will right now, the Goodman, have a merchant of Venice, which will have two guest artists, but they are not stars in the derogatory sense of the word. And you will soon have Mr. Arnold Moss in his company, a PNG come in two more Shakespearean plays, and he's not a star in that old fashioned

idea that he is overpowering the play. I wonder, don't you feel, sir, as a professional director and producer of plays, that a name is terribly important. Do you think, for example, that people will come to see Shakespeare without that name or the reputation? I think Shakespeare has always been the most successful playwright at all times. It's in Europe. It's here, too. I think whenever you put on Shakespeare, no matter what your actors are, or who they are, or what the stars are, whether you have stars or not, you will draw more audience than you would with any other playwright. Certainly, a number of problems distinguish a Shakespeare production, let's say, from production of a play by Mr. Williams or Mr. Saroyan, that make it a rather particular kind of thing to do. I wonder, the most obvious one that suggests itself to me is the problem of language. Well, yes, of course, language is a difficult problem

because the language of Shakespeare makes demands on the audience at the modern play largely. I think these demands are greatly overrated. First of all, Shakespeare has to be cut. I don't think he should ever be rewritten, but he should be cut. Well, yes, definitely. You can't, I mean, what Evans did, for instance, in the unexpergated hamlet is ridiculous because first of all, Shakespeare never wrote that play as it is printed. How do you mean? Could you amplify this? As it is printed, this is an agglomeration, a collection of the various versions of Shakespeare, the various earlier and later printings in his lifetime, shortly after, of the playwright. All put together, all put into one four -hour marathon, which he never wrote, in which I'm sure no one before Mr. Evans ever sought of performing really. The problem of language is there, but first of all, I think

most people who go to the theatre don't you have a kind of familiarity with at least A Shakespeare play. I wish they had Mr. Appliar. It's not my experience. I think people would enjoy Shakespeare much more. In this country, especially, and in this city, most particularly, if they first read the play before they went to see it. Well, yes, that, of course, would be good. Well, there's a famous story, a manate, tootsure, a restaurant tour in New York, a professional vulgarian remarked at, I think, Olivier's hamlet and the intermission that he was probably the only person in the house who was going back to see how the play ended. But otherwise, most of us, when we go to a Shakespeare play, but we have read it. Do you think it's necessary? What I mean is, simply, can Shakespeare be played today as if it were a new play? Can you go to a play and understand it and enjoy it without this preparation? Yes, you can. How do you think about the match and the match? Well, I think the match is one of the more difficult plays, and I think it isn't an absolute requirement, but I think

that an audience would get three times as much out of it if they read the play before they come to see it. Because it's so rich in various levels of experience that you can't take it all in in one sitting, especially to content with the language too. Well, we will miss. Anyone will miss lines here and there unless he really is knowledgeable, really knows that play very well. But I think that a perceptive person is not going to miss the psychological or symbolic implications. They're not going to miss the character. And they are not going to miss, in other words, the essence of what Shakespeare is trying to put across. I think they can follow the storyline, but I'm not so sure they can capture the essence of what Shakespeare means to us today through the medium of this play. Why don't we talk about the merchant and see what the merchant means to us today or what it could mean to us? All right, now I

want to throw out just three suggestions. This is a play about a merchant city. Just look at the title. There is a merchant and there's a merchant in Venice. In Venice was the financial capital of the world in Shakespeare's time. It's a very known world. It's a known world, Shakespeare's time. Chicago is not the financial but the industrial capital of the world today undoubtedly. And this is a merchant city if there was one in modern times. We're doing this program in the merchandise market. Yes, there you see. So this is a play about merchants, but not everything in Chicago is merchants. If you go up the North Shore Lake Bluff and the more fashionable part of the North Shore, there are quite a lot of people up there who didn't make their own money and inherited it. They are part of the high society. Some of them live a very active

and useful and life -serving the community and others just live in a kind of a fairy tale world. They don't know what it is, not to have been rich, not to have their mansions and their servants and so forth. Now this is the second world in the merchant of Venice and where we would call it maybe Lake Bluff or any community up there, Shakespeare calls it Belmont. But it's exactly the same thing. Yes, it's true. Belmont is the kind of suburban setup. Ex -urban setup. People live in a kind of a happy fairy tale world, especially the youngsters. I'm not referring to mature people. Shakespeare's Belmont is not the world of mature people. It's the world of adolescence. It's the world of people in the early 20s, only teens. It's the same gang, we would say, if you can apply this world to a higher

social level, the same gang who now drive Jaguars and imported $10 ,000 cars and all sorts of stuff. Well, then you feel that this particular play somehow manages to bridge the, what is it, 300 odd years effectively enough for a contemporary Chicago audience to recognize these parents? That's why I think it's a great classic because it is at the same time particularly Shakespeare and universally human and of all time. And the third world in it, of course, is, you see, this is why I think the audience should read it. It is a world of symbolism. Symbols that are understandable, but not if they are thrown at you the first time and you have never read about them, like the casket stories and the ring stories. And Shakespeare brings all these three things together and interviews them in the way that only a genius can. You keep reiterating that one should reach Shakespeare before seeing the play. One has to

be familiar with it. Well, that is, of course, something that would mean that the American audience had to take their play going a little more seriously. Exactly. And they are likely to do it at the present time. Exactly. You certainly don't have to read, I'm not going to mention any titles, but you certainly don't have to read much else that's going on around town here or in New York in order to be able to understand it right away. So I had a feeling, you know, with, for instance, a thing like West Side Story, which is, incidentally, the Romeo and Juliet translation to the New York West side, that it would be good to be familiar, at least with Romeo and Juliet. The thing moves too quickly. The thing has an immense impact, but you, you, the Symbols don't all come through if you haven't had a little advance preparation. I think if you see a play like Office Descending by the time I said, well, you, you would be a much greater appreciator of this event in the theatre if you had read the play or knew anything about Greek legend. So what we really need is an audience that is willing to

spend a little time on its theatre going that is willing to consider the theatre not only simply a matter of pure entertainment, but let's not use the word education. Enlightenment. Unfortunately, you're, you're, you're introducing education. No, it is, I mean, even negatively. That's not what it is. You very, we very much have to make that kind of statement because over and over again, at least I know as a teacher, I will have a student who will tell me, I don't like Shakespeare. I studied it in high school. That brief exposure was enough by nature of it being a study procedure. And this is one of the great curses on, unfortunately, aren't they? Yes, it is. But serious theatre going, the necessity for preparation. Yet, on the other hand, if people only realise that the thing is not put before them, pre -trued in life as it might be in high school. But if they realise that these plays, especially the plays, or let's say, of a man like William Shakespeare, have an immense amount to give in psychological terms. We

are an age interested in psychology, psychiatry, psychoanalysis. People are more concerned with their own psyche than they have ever been before, quite naturally. And here is a man who wrote 300 years before Freud and anybody else, and like any other great writer, like like Flobé or Racine or Dostoyevsky, manages to convey some very profound insights into human nature. Well, I do think, Mr. Nepper, that really modern psychology has, in its application to life, has not dug up anything that the ancient Greeks or Shakespeare didn't know or didn't project in their own words. So, in that way, we have to consider Shakespeare as a considerable help, because he provides us, not with case histories, but he provides us with a kind of integrated life experience to my mind. Yeah, but certainly he, in his own time, wrote for provided caviar, and also provided jigs with roundlings. What you are in fact asking is a contemporary audience be made exclusively of that highly sophisticated, rather small. Oh, we wouldn't want that. We couldn't play in front of

a lot of university professors, they would bore us to death. That's interesting. The audience would bore you to death. Oh, yes, you have to have an audience that participates in the play. As I like to draw, if he goes back to see how Hamlet comes out, that's very much better than the little finagling kind of approaches that you might get otherwise. Now, may I give an example of how the Merchant of Venice corresponds to the last advances of depth psychology, for instance. We are indebted to these things to Professor Ferguson, Francis Ferguson, who wrote a book about. But this is the idea, briefly. The ancient Greeks used to call everybody who was not born in Greece, a barbarian, and the ancient Jews, for instance, had one word by which they

designated everybody who was not a Jew, and that word was Gentile. That is, everybody who was not one of, they elected, was really discriminated against. Now, Mr. Dr. Jung and Martin Psychology have come to the conclusion that this fear of what is outside us, the fear of the stranger, the fear of strange surroundings, is often projected in that we are also afraid of the unknown in our own hearts. And so the character of Shylock is a projection, a three -dimensional visible projection in this work of art, of what we fear inside ourselves because we don't know it. And this is largely the psychological or a psychiatric basis of antisemitism, or any racial and religious intolerance. So that you would say actually the merchant does three things in terms

of a modern audience? That's modern three things. Well, we've talked about the three anyway. That the idea of death psychology, the idea of inherited versus acquired wealth, and then the symbols that are being used. Well, in agreeing to this, we've got to be very careful, Mr. Gneppler, because the merchant of Venice is not an antisemitic play, and it is not a pro -Jewish play. It is a deeply human play. You see, it's not a play in which Shylock to Jew gets the playwrights undivided sympathy and the Christians are bad people. It's a play in which a little more charity is required of everybody, be it Christian or Jew, and this is the message. His story will like Bluffer or... Everybody. Everybody. The story will be of course this is a remarkable thing because he was not writing in a time where that kind of writing was in a time of...

I think the deepest idea is that the Jew in the pursuit of justice puts himself just as much and the wrong as the antisemitic Gentiles have a little bit. Yes, that's... I wonder the applicability of this play for our own time. Does it suggest a modern dress version, or do you feel this is a violation? It's not necessary, I agree. It's not necessary. For instance now, the old Vic, I think three years ago, did a triless encressor in modern dress, brought it over here, and I thought it was charming. It was a marvelous performance, but it can't be done in many other ways. I remember Mr. Neville and it wasn't real in modern dress, it was in 1914. Oh well. As you feel that this element of removal is important. It is important, that we call this aesthetic distance. I don't like the evening dress hammer very much. I don't go along with that. It's not necessary. After

all, it destroys some of the illusion. This is not the way in which Shakespeare is up to date. He is up to date in much more profound ways than anything else. And the most fantastic thing is what Shakespeare does in the trial scene, bringing together all these three or four elements that we have discussed, and making very clear, this is often not made clear by actors or by stars, as you said before, but making very clear that, first of all, in the world, you have to have justice and contracts on which merchant cities and whole nations and now the universe are being built and maintained have to be honored under all circumstances. So here, anticipating lock and so, that universal... That is a last resort. As you said, as well, you see. Yes, it is. ...and for the Soviet law. After this, when law is honored, when contracts are acknowledged, then Shakespeare says something supernatural

which is inside us and yet above us will come and set things right. That's the wonderful idea, and that's what he calls mercy. I wonder if we might just switch for a moment. We were talking about the delight, you said, that it's afforded the actor and the director by the presence of the groundlings. This suggests the kind of emphasis on scenes and machines. Is that the case today? Do you feel that Shakespeare should be fairly elaborately done? I remember well Miss Cornel's, Cleopatra, which drew as many reviews for the elaborateness of the set. Well, we have all come away from this, both the British producers and the American producers. We have all come away from that. We have returned to what Shakespeare originally has in his own theatre, which was the utmost simplicity of physical appearances but a certain amount of lavishness in costumes. I think that, of

course, it is unfortunate in some cases that Shakespeare can't be staged on the kind of stage that he himself had. The one that was not cut off from the audience by Curtin and lights the audience's darkly proscenium arch. The stage is lit. It provides a cutting off, a fourth wall, an imaginary wall that sets the stage aside from the audience. Instead of that, his stage jutted into the audience and the actors could communicate with a kind of ease that they come today. This is even such a marvelous theatre as the Goodman, and it really is a wonderful stage. It doesn't have that, of course. Of course, we don't have it, but we have the intimacy of size. It's easier to communicate in the Goodman with the audience because there are only 750. Whereas in the loop there are there twice as many. Would you say that we simulate at least that kind of intimacy perhaps in the theatre and the round experience? Is this achieved this time? No, we do have. There is a very funny thing. There is no real performing theatre

in Great Britain which is as honestly and truthfully patented after Shakespeare's original theatre as two theatres in America. The San Diego and the Aslan's. Are these theatres that were designed specifically for Shakespeare production? They can operate over the summer and the outdoors just like Shakespeare's theatre. Are they commercial theatres? No, they are art theatres. There is one commercial one that I know which is built on that principle is rather large. And that is the one in Stratford, Ontario. Yes. That one is. But the reason why I didn't mention this before is because Stratford, Ontario is not following Shakespeare's design of Shakespeare's theatre anyway. No, it's a very free reinterpretation of the principles of the Shakespearean stage but it isn't a reconstruction of the Shakespearean stage. But Aslan, I know again in San Diego, California are reconstruction

of the Shakespearean stage. The appeal this is really a critical difference. So does this mean that without such a stage Shakespeare is not what it should be or what you would ideally wish it to be? He is thought to vary, I would say, to need that. It isn't essential. It's nice. It's useful. I'm always a little offended. When I see, for instance, the old Vic in New York or in Chicago in some of the theatres into which it is put. Because they are so large and so crowded and part of the trouble is that your knees don't fit. But then they don't fit for Williams either in that. Yeah, but then the old Vic puts itself into the Shakespearean memorial theatre in Stratford upon even which is very far from what Shakespeare really was. And they're very unhappy with it. Now, I just spend a day with one of the governance of the Shakespearean memorial theatre. And you see how many people in Stratford think the best solution is to tear down the whole place. You're not contemplating tearing down the Goodman. No, no. It's difficult. I wonder, the Goodman Theatre, of course, is not merely a theatre. It's a school as well. It's a training ground for actors.

For professional actors. For professional actors. Yes, I accept the invitation. I wonder, is there such a thing as a Shakespearean actor? Is this a different kind of training? Is it a different kind of actor? Well, in order to play Shakespeare, unfortunately, if you're an American, you do need considerably more training than to be a successful actor in non -Sexperial players. That's the problem. But I wouldn't say that you have to go to a different and separate school and study nothing but Shakespeare. Although we have begun to have such a school, Mr. Sanger, which is in the summer and start for Connecticut and the Winter in New York, the Shakespeare Festival Academy. Is it absolutely necessary for an American audience to struggle not merely with Shakespeare's lines but with British accents before we can now? No. There seems to be the practices. Are you convinced that an American actor has the right to use standard

American -stage language rather than imitate British? Which is of course not standard American language with such, but standard American -stage language will do just as well. Several productions I know of have done that and there is nothing wrong with that. In fact, two strong and English accents to my mind over here is going to create a distance. A further distance. There are already enough distances. There is no need to enhance that. Mr. Marshall, Shakespeare Company also uses strictly American standard -stage language and I think it's very good. I saw these two productions in New York and they're really very good. Nothing people should go and see them that have so rarely a chance to see both the tempest and measure for measure. Another infinitely varied and fascinating psychological drama. This is an American, an all -American cast you've said. I remember the original tempest production with Mars

and it was equipped with such a tremendous variety of accents. It was practically again a kind of League of Nations affair with Vera Zarina as Ariel and Canada Lee as Caliban. And then two Czech comics doing a little bit there. Shakespeare survives almost anything I would say, though he might get a little dull at times in the process. And he is not dull, even his comedies I think in the version of Venice after all is a comedy. Let's not take it as more than anything else, not more or less. He survives perfectly. Here's an interesting observation, maybe. The presence of Maurice Kanoffsky who is considered the greatest American childlock, he's now considered the greatest childlock in the American theater, has modified the style of this production a little bit. It's become less humorous perhaps than I would have done it had I directed it. It was directed by Charles McGor. But of course the fact

that Kanoffsky has played a part before colors, any production. He would be inclined to make it a more serious play. The moment you put the merchant as much as that in the center and a personality of that, centers it more I suppose. I had no idea. You're right. I suppose the strength of the fact was very serious. I raised the problem of the Shakespearean players, the vehicle for the star, and taking necessarily it's coloring from the particular abilities and intentions. Well Mr. Kanoffsky does not behave like a star and certainly is not the star in the derogatory sense of the word. A star comes in and rehearses maybe six days for the actors. He has been rehearsing for weeks and this means a great deal if you consider that he has played this many times. I think we can certainly say, though, that as we must finish now, that whether the symbolism, whether the economic applications are evident in any case, the Shakespeare will, any Shakespeare production will offer a good and entertaining evening of theatre. I wonder if I might thank you both

gentlemen for your time. Thank you. This is Joel Zanga for the American Scene. Good morning.