Play On, the mind-blowingly ambitious program which tasked some of the nation’s best playwrights to modernize Shakespeare’s classics, poses this question: “You think you know Shakespeare?”
‘So, what the heck are we doing?” Lue Douthit, president and co-founder of Play On, asked rhetorically. “Well, when people think of translation, they think word for word, right? And we haven’t changed word for word. It’s more of a blending of the modern playwright and, of course, Shakespeare’s original words. Our playwrights were asked to think more about thought by thought instead of word for word or line by line.”
And when the Idaho Shakespeare Festival was putting together its 2024 summer season, and it committed to a new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they also committed to the Play On edition.
“We decided it would be this, from the very beginning,” said Sara Bruner, Idaho Shakespeare Festival artistic director-designate and director of Midsummer Night’s Dream. “This is a huge deal for us. A huge deal for the company, the community and our audiences.”
Bruner and Douthit joined Morning Edition host George Prentice to talk about the creative process of what should be the most-talked-about live production of the summer.
Read the full transcript below.
DOUTHIT: I'm Lue Douthit, co-founder and president of Play on Shakespeare.
BRUNER: And I'm Sara Bruner, artistic director designate of the Idaho Shakespeare Festival and the director of Midsummer Night's Dream, translated by Jeff Whitty.
PRENTICE: Sara, when you decided to do Midsummer Night's Dream, did you first decide to do it via the play on? By the way, what do you call this, an adaptation?
BRUNER: We call it a translation. And Lue can talk about why that word.
PRENTICE: But did you decide one before the other? In other words, hey, if we're going to do midsummer, we want to do it this way.
BRUNER: We decided Play On midsummer from the beginning.
PRENTICE: Okay. How big a deal is this for the company?
BRUNER: I think it's a huge deal. I think it's a big deal for the company, the artists and also the community as well our audiences.
PRENTICE: To a layperson, how do you describe this change?
DOUTHIT: What the heck we're doing? You mean? Yeah. Yeah, George, it's it's sort of the Moneyball question. When people think of translation, they think word for word, right? And we haven't changed word for word. We have just kind of blended. I call it little a blending of Jeff Whitty with William Shakespeare and that they're charged. All the playwrights were asked to kind of work on the text or thought by thought, line by line, not necessarily word by word, but sort of like, where did we get a little gnarled up? Is there a way to kind of unsnarl it?
PRENTICE: Simply, I can instantly assume that there's some quote unquote Old English, but but I think what I'm hearing is that it's more than that. It's also a cultural underlying.
DOUTHIT: It is, but it's also syntax. George, I think that the language that was spoken 400 years ago had a certain word order. That is not our word order today. And I think the experiment called Play on Shakespeare, in which we commissioned 36 writers to translate 39 plays attributed in part or whole by William Shakespeare, was to sort of see how could we? Is there a little, uh, engineering perhaps that could be done to just so that the word order made more sense to us in performance? I'm interested in the theater, like in performance. Right. So translated, when people hear that, they go, whoa, it's in English already. Lue, what are you doing? And I was like, yeah, I get that. But I'm interested in carrying forward what I think was an easier reception orally 400 years ago to how I feel like we often receive it today. So that is it's the act of translation. And this is going to get a little bit gnarly because we're going to also talk about Sarah's adaptation of the translation, right? Because when we do Shakespeare, news flash, everybody, we do mess with the text. Always. We always write. We're always adapting them. You know? And I'm kind of a purist in a weird way, which is going to sound very odd after what I just said we did to the text.
But to say you cut it, it's an adaptation and we almost always cut it. You said it in another time period. It's an adaptation and we've been doing that from jump. So what the layering here is, is we just looked at the language just as if language was nothing in Shakespeare. We just looked at the language. And if you think Photonegative George, most Shakespeare plays have the Shakespeare language and are set in contemporary times. We said, wait a minute, what if we just kept it in contemporary times? Because there's still some things we just don't aren't going to get even with the footnotes. Even if I pop up during the performance and say, George, this is why this is really funny, because in 1595 this happened. Like, that doesn't help us in performance, right? But if you think photonegative so that we set the experiment was to set the play. You do the whole play, whatever it is, don't fix it. You can't fix it. But we had it in more contemporary language. What might we learn about the plays? That was the experiment. Yeah.
BRUNER: I noticed myself, I remember when I first heard about play on. I had major mental blocks toward it, just in the idea in, in hearing about it, what my mind did with that and my Shakespeare loving heart and head going, no! But it didn't take long for me to be in the room with it to discover, oh, this unlocks so much of the unlocking that we're always trying to do when we're doing these plays. And let me paint the picture of what a Shakespeare rehearsal room looks like. Normally we all have the text. Everyone has come in, they've read the play. Often you have a few different people who bring along a stack of books with them in order to try to untangle what in the world they are saying. This is the actors I've done midsummer, three, four, maybe five times now. I can't sit down with a Shakespeare text and say confidently, I know what every single line of this means. So you have your actors in the room wrestling to paint this imagery, wrestling to connect cultural and social contexts so that an audience doesn't lean back during a play and go, I don't get Shakespeare. So now what we have is language that is no less sophisticated in its poetry, but much easier on the ear, much more in our sort of native speaking. And it allows us to lean forward and feel engaged. We understand it, we feel smart. And the poetry, because particularly it's Jeff Whitty's piece, is popping as an actor. I'm not doing all of the mental gymnastics of trying to wrestle an image to the audience. I can say it like a person would say it. And then I can engage more in, well, what's our relationship? How am I saying this? Why am I saying it? What's the tactic? What's the implication? How am I coining this phrase? It releases the performer to engage more humanely in the performance.
PRENTICE: You talked a little bit about coining the phrase, but does this? If it does, it all impact the iambic pentameter?
DOUTHIT: The assignment given was to match the play to the best of their ability. So if it's in iambic pentameter, they had to keep it in iambic pentameter. If there were rhymed couplets, of which there are scads In Midsummer Night's Dream, Jeff's challenge was to try to match the rhyming couplets to the best of his ability. Nobody, nobody thought they were going to out Shakespeare. Shakespeare. And what's interesting, George, about sort of this line by line, there's sort of like linguistic charge charge given is that, um, the prose became the more interesting opportunity, and sometimes it took a lot more language to explain what Shakespeare was doing, and sometimes it was less. And I find that sort of fascinating. And the dramatists were given the charge to decide, like, how much of a of information do I need right now, in this moment in the play, so that we all get the point and move forward? And that's what dramatists do. They decide when to lay an information. Right. The second thing that's been interesting about it is, is unpacking jokes. Jokes don't carry forward really all that well. Comedy is not generally even something last year we might have thought is funny might not be so funny. Right? So think about something 400 years old. And so those people who work on the comedies, I mean, when they unpack the joke, I said, well, that's fine, but it still has to have the same length, take the same kind of stage space. That's in the Shakespeare. I want you to honor the whole thing. I want you to honor the spirit of of the and the integrity of the of the whole play itself.
PRENTICE: What do you do when you run into you must run into instances where something would be deemed, at least through our 21st century lens, to be inappropriate.
DOUTHIT: They can't fix it. My argument would be, George, that if we understood exactly what these players were saying and how deep and nuanced they actually are, and that what people are wrestling with in this play, aside from us wrestling with understanding, literally what's being said that we would understand have a lot more empathy and we'd be able to kind of carry forward with them in the struggles that they're having. Even in Midsummer Night's Dream. It's a dark world we're entering. It's completely upside down because these two King of the King and Queen of the Faerie, are having a petty argument, and they have power, and they've turned the world upside down. And until they are right, the world will not be right. Now, I don't know how many people get that out of a Shakespeare play or midsummer. Right. And I'm just saying it's always there and available for me as audience. If I can be more involved in sort of that emotional struggle. Plays are all about emotion, right? Motion to emotion and emotion. That's what plays do. And I think all these plays are about the consequences of unchecked power. Then I think that it becomes more than just we're going to have a lot of fun with pool noodles, and that's going to be awesome. And I want to give too much away. But just to say that there's so much more in these plays, and that's what I'm really, really interested in in bringing up that they're, they're they're very, very deep actually.
PRENTICE: I'm anxious to hear an example of this. I think I'm grasping the idea, but can you give us an example?
BRUNER: Absolutely.
PRENTICE: Of change. Okay. Where where are we in the play right now example.
BRUNER: We have we have been in Athens in the play. We've learned about the problem that Hermia has, which is that her father wants her to have, um, a different suitor than the one that she is interested in. We have now transformed the space into the woods. Okay, we've met puck and now we're just meeting Titania and Oberon, and we're just starting to wrap our heads around what the multitudinous issues are between the two of them. But this is the beginning of that. This is Titania addressing Oberon. Okay. I'm starting with the OG, as we call it, which is the original. Got it. This is Titania. Oberon has just said, am I not thy lord? And Titania responds, then I must be thy lady. But I know when thou hast stolen away from fairyland, and in the shape of Corin sat all day playing on pipes of corn. And Versing love to amorous phillida. Why art thou here come from the farthest steppe of India? Okay. That's the original. Yeah.
DOUTHIT: Who the hell's Karen?
BRUNER: Who's Phyllida? Um, so now we will go to the Whitty translation. Oberon says, am I not your lord? And Titania says, if so, I'd be your lady. But I know when you have sneaked away from fairyland and in a shepherd shape, reclined all day, you play on corn pipes and write verses to a lovestruck shepherdess. Why are you here? Come from the furthest mountain of India.
DOUTHIT: Yeah, that's what I think happened 400 years ago. And. And you can hear the verse, right? You can hear it's in rhythm, right? I mean, he's he's quite marvelous, actually, when I approached him about doing this translation, it was at a time when he was working on a new musical called Head Over Heels, and it was in all in iambic pentameter. And so I thought, well, he's in the rhythm of it. So he should he should take this on. And he did not know midsummer at all, which I find fascinating. He did not know the play.
PRENTICE: So are these commissions then, of playwrights? Yes. And you said 36 with 39 with the 39 plays have. Where are you with the 39? They're all done. They are all done in 2019.
DOUTHIT: So we then formed our own company. They started at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival commissioned these 36 writers. Uh, and then we did a big festival in New York in 2019, and we read them all in chronological order over a five week period. And I'm telling you, it was exhilarating and exhausting. Um, with a company of 150 actors or something. It was it was an amazing feat. And since then, the company is dedicated to try to promote productions and to get them into schools and into communities and to be used that way.
PRENTICE: Um, in your time here, what is your role in your time here in Idaho?
DOUTHIT: Well, we have technically called me dramaturg of this production, which is that unfortunate German sounding word that nobody knows what it really means, including me. But to say that I, um, I'll say how I look at the role, which is I am the advocate for the play, and I help advise, uh, Sara as she works with the actors and designers. And I just kind of provide play advice.
PRENTICE: Play whisperer.
DOUTHIT: The play whisperer. Yeah, kind of kind of that. Right. It's interesting in this, uh, iteration because there's, there's Jeff Whitty involved as well. I mean, he owns this draft, this is his work. So I am representing him to a certain degree in the room as well. And that's that's one of the most interesting things about this, this whole assignment. And just to say, the most radical thing we did, George, is we put a playwright back in the process because I think there was one there 400 years ago.
PRENTICE: Sara, goodness knows this is a team effort. That said, this relationship is so different and so unique, at least from a lay person's perspective. What is this like?
BRUNER: Well, I mean, it's really incredible there. If a directing a play, it is a big old task and it's really helpful to have an advisor, an advisory role, someone who is yes, yes, yes, this, that and the other in the rehearsal room. But let's tether ourselves back to the text. Let's tether ourselves to what's going on. Let's tether ourselves to story. Um, I don't know that Lue and I are working or have worked at all in a traditional director dramaturg relationship, because we've collaborated in a lot of different ways in the years that we've known one another. So to me it transcends that. And we redefine or don't define what it is. We check in to see what it should be daily. And there's just a lot of trust there with keeping eye on the story and maintaining the integrity of the Shakespeare, of the Whitty and of, um, of what our overall goal is, as stated.
DOUTHIT: There's also, um, a huge kind of in the moment ness about putting on a play. George. Right. And that Sara must and the designers and actors must contend with a physical space. Right. And that that will dictate certain ways that things get done. It'll dictate what, um, how how the text will play itself out in that space. And so you have to be very, um, uh, what's the word I want adept in a certain way about the, the, all the adaptions, adaptations that, that Sara is making in the on the fly.
BRUNER: It's agile.
DOUTHIT: It's that's the word agile, right. Because it's a huge responsibility. Uh, the role of of the director. And, um, I will always be the one who says, remember story. Remember story. And sometimes I'd be like, well, story. We can't deal with that right now. Okay, I get it right. But at the end of the day, there are two pieces that are being put together, right? There's a script that's been written down, and then there's the play in performance, and there are two different things. And Sara's basically translating the two dimensional, you know, from the two dimensional art object known as the play. She is making that three dimensional. And in that translation, so many decisions need to be made.
BRUNER: I, I grew up doing outdoor theater, so I didn't grow up being used to relying on technical elements from the very beginning of the play in order to tell the story and what that has meant for me is that I believe that the people are the special effects, the words are the special effects. And what's really beautiful, particularly in Idaho, is that for the first half of almost every one of our plays, we are the special effects. It's it's the stage pictures that we're creating. It's how we're using our bodies. It's how we're using our voices and how we are turning a phrase to create the shared reality while we're in the amphitheater. And then as the night creeps in, then we can start dialing it in. We can start bringing it down. We can start using some of those technical bells and whistles. And it so often, it so often moves perfectly that the the course of an evening so often moves perfectly with the arc of a play, and then we all end up in this quiet place together at the end of the evening.
DOUTHIT: I think that the biggest difference may be, George, between 400 years ago and today, is that I think 400 years ago we went to hear a play and today we go to see a play. And I'm really happy that we're wanting to emphasize hearing, you know, the text and that actors are as much a part of that storytelling as the theatrical elements that we've added today.
PRENTICE: The last question I'll have for both of you, I'd like you both to weigh in on this. And that is, you know, just based on how many families come to Idaho Shakespeare. Um, there will be a good number of folks. Young people in particular will see this play for the first time. So this will be their Midsummer Night's Dream. It's not a matter of comparison. It's not a matter of adaptation or change or anything like that. This will be their play. And that's rather heady, but rather exciting too, don't you think?
DOUTHIT: Heck, I learned yesterday that somebody, um. I went to the board meeting. I had the great, uh, honor to come and address the board meeting yesterday, and there was somebody who hadn't seen midsummer yet, so I'm like, okay, right. It's not just about kids. First of all, this is Shakespeare. What we're doing is Shakespeare. It is the spirit of Shakespeare. We didn't mess with the story. And that's to me where the difference is. And I understand people worrying about the language. But yes, it's a language is a delivery system. It is not the ends. It is the means to the ends. And I think we're going to get the ends a little bit better. I also think this won't be their last midsummer, apparently. You know, there's been ten productions at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. I think this is the 10th. So it's not going to be the last. No doubt you're going to do your third grade version as well. And somewhere in high school. Right. So there's that I think, uh, for me, it's not so much about beginner's mind as much as it is about for the first time. Can we go to this play and see it as if for the first time? And that's the spirit I think we should have with all of these plays. It's easier when it's a new play because we have no idea. But it was a new play 400 years ago And that togetherness, that telling story between with actors and audience engaged together, that's the project. And it's and Shakespeare is a beautiful delivery system for that project.
BRUNER: I'm thrilled to think about this midsummer as being the first midsummer for audience members, or a new midsummer for audience members. I have three Godsons who come to see all of our plays now, and it's every play. It is the first time for them, every single time they see one of our plays, and it's been amazing to hear them talk about those plays in retrospect, and what they hang on to and what the plays are to them. And for me, it's about engaging an audience and creating curiosity. And I think with this piece in particular, what we'll have is getting people curious about Shakespeare and wanting to come back and not feeling disconnected, not feeling like it's not for them, not feeling like they're not smart enough to hear all of the language, but they can feel like, I get this and now I want to come back for more.
PRENTICE: How exciting.
BRUNER: Thanks, George.
Find reporter George Prentice @georgepren
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