Ron Rosenbaum, the Shakespeare Wars

Ron Rosenbaum, the Shakespeare Wars

Shenandoah Shakespeare

Ralph Alan Cohen, Jim Warren

and the American Shakespeare Center

Jeffrey Boutwell

© 2011

Everyone knows the old saw about the best way of getting to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice.

Ralph Alan Cohen loves to tell a similar story about tourists in Londonasking how they can see Shakespeare performed in the world’s only reconstructed indoor theater, the Blackfriars Playhouse, which was home to Shakespeare and his acting company in the early 1600s.

With eyes twinkling and more than a hint of pride in his soft Alabama drawl, Cohen says “It’s easy. Find the Blackfriars tube station in London, it’s right there on the north bank of the Thames, not too far from St. Paul’s Cathedral. Go down into the station, take the Circle line to the South Kensington stop, then change to the Picadilly line out to HeathrowAirport. Catch a flight to Dulles outside Washington, D.C., rent a car, take interstate 66 west to Front Royal, Virginia, then go south on interstate 81 through the Shenandoah Valley to Staunton, Virginia, and just a few blocks from the birthplace of Woodrow Wilson you’ll find the American Shakespeare Center and its home, the Blackfriars Playhouse.”

Still chuckling, Cohen acknowledges that his directions may confuse those tourists thinking they’ll see Shakespeare performed in London, at the Globe Theater, the other major re-constructed Shakespeare playhouse thatis on the south bank of the Thames. The Globe was the lifelong dream of the American born actor and director Sam Wanamaker, who unfortunately died several years beforeits opening in June 1997. The two theaters, however, couldn’t be more different. Where the Globe was roofless and open to the sky, and could hold up to 3,000 people, the Blackfriars was indoors, in a former Franciscan priory, and much more intimate, seating perhaps 300. There were also class differences between the Globe and the Blackfriars, with ticket prices cheaper at the Globe, where a large part of the audience – the ‘groundlings’ – would stand in front of and around the sides of the thrust stage, unprotected from the elements above.

What the Globe and Blackfriars had in common, however, were the “original staging conditions” of Elizabethan theater to which Ralph Cohen and his ASC co-founder Jim Warren are passionately committed. They believe in doing Shakespeare, as drama critic Terry Teachout of the Wall Street Journal has described it, “straight up.” This includes universal lighting so that actors and audience can equally see each other, athrust rather than proscenium stage so that the audience envelopes the stage, minimal sets and scenery allowing for fast-paced action and a focus on dialogue, actors “doubling” in more than one role, and repertory seasons of as many as five plays performed concurrently.

If there’s one credo above all that Ralph Cohen lives by, it’s this: “Shakespeare never put on a play in front of an audience he couldn’t see.” Think about it. No footlights, klieg lights, or spotlights; no darkened theater, and no separation between actors and audience. Whether with the natural light of the outdoor Globe or the candelight of the indoor Blackfriars, Shakespeare and his fellow actors could make direct eye contact with the audience, playing directly to them and drawing them into the action of the play. Cohen adds that Shakespeare the dramatist would also write the audience into the play, whether as soldiers in Henry V’s army during the famous “band of brothers” speech or as Falstaff’s drinking companions at the Boar’s Head tavern. Universal lighting also allows everybody in the audience to see… everybody else in the audience, producing more genuinely communal responses – the laughs and groans, sighs and horrors – to what’s being performed on stage.

As the ASC bumper sticker on my car cheekily proclaims, “We do it with the lights on.” This indeed is the way Cohen and Warren have been doing it since their first production together in 1988 - a bare-bones Henry V staged in a former turkey hatchery in Harrisonburg, Virginia, where Cohen was on the English faculty at JamesMadisonUniversity. Soon thereafter the two created Shenandoah Shakespeare Express and a Richard III that toured various Virginia high schools in the fall and winter of 1988. The response was positive enough that Cohen and Warren decided to plow ahead with what one critic admired as their “no frills, in-your-face road company that worked cheap, played fast, and was not afraid to embrace the Bard’s bawdier side.”

Two years later, 1990 proved to be a breakthrough year when the SSE’s artistic premise of original staging conditions was validated by a performance of Julius Caesar at the annual meeting of the Shakespeare Association of America in Philadelphia in April.

Cohen remembers that our company “consisted of 12 college kids wearing Converse high tops, black chinos, and burlap togas. I kept wondering what the hell I had done. It seemed to me that my exposure as a dilettante was a certain thing, and I remember thinking that tenure was a good thing, that my family wouldn't go hungry.”
Following the performance some two hours later, “there were at least six scholars waiting outside - one was Barbara Mowat who ran the Folger Shakespeare Institute in Washington - to say how much they liked it and to ask what they could do to help. It was clear that we had struck a chord with them. Our shows, whatever their shortcomings, don't leave people talking about the concept or the set design. It does leave them talking about things the first audiences may have talked about – the acting and the play.”

Similar validation for the SSE use of original practices and universal lighting would soon come from other quarters, including the eminent Shakespeare scholar, Stephen Booth of UC, Berkeley, who said simply, “I first saw The Shenandoah Shakespeare Express perform in Washington, D.C., in July 1991 [at the Folger Shakespeare Library]. I haven't thought the same since about Shakespeare or the theater.”

In the spring of 1978, I had the great good fortune to see Alan Howard in the title role, and Helen Mirren as his Queen Margaret, in the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) trilogy ofHenry VI – a total of 8 hours of theater –all performed in a span of little more than 24 hoursat the Aldwych Theater in London. Little did I know at the time that, in the words of the Guardian theatre critic Michael Billington, I was privy to a theater season where “the RSC struck gold,” presenting Henry V, a virtually uncut three-part Henry VI, and Coriolanus in a season that “no other company in the world could match for quantity and quality.”

Unknown to me at the time was that I shared the experience with Ralph Alan Cohen, co-founder with Jim Warren of the AmericanShakespeareCenter in Staunton, Virginia, home of the Blackfriars Playhouse, the only recreation in the world of Shakespeare’s indoor theater which in September 2011 will celebrate its 10th anniversary.

In the 1970s, as an English professor at JamesMadisonUniversity in Harrisonburg, Cohen regularly took groups of students to Stratford-on-Avon and London to experience Shakespeare first hand. More than three decades later, in December 2010, I was interviewing Cohen in his office in Staunton when we realized we had both seen the same production of the RSC trilogy of Henry VI back in 1978. Cohen recounted to me, in his soothing Alabama lilt, how equally energized he and his students were by the production, which featured not only Alan Howard and Helen Mirren, but other Shakespearean stalwarts such as John Rhys-Davies (Gimli in Lord of the Rings and Sallah in the Indiana Jones movies) and Julian Glover (Gen. Maximillian Veres in the Star Wars films and the nasty business tycoon Walter Donovan in Indiana Jones).

Cohen went on to say, however, how terribly disappointed he and his group were when Alan Howard didn’t come out for a curtain call at the end of the admittedly strenuous three parts of Henry VI. Cohen remembers vividly how the audience had been swept up in the production, becoming an integral part of the action and passions on stage:

I don’t know what happened when you saw it, but Alan Howard did not come out at the end [of the trilogy]. I mean, I’m sure he was tired, but he didn’t come out. I remember this bitter feeling. I learned a lot [from that Henry VI trilogy] about how much we as an audience felt we had worked along with the actors, and there was a sense I had, of, well, Howard, you (expletive deleted)! Ok, ok, he worked really hard, but, we the audience get to say that to you. I rabble rouse for the audience’s right to say, Yeah!!!!”

Cohen admits that he “uses this story a lot” to emphasize the centrality of the audience to experiencing Shakespeare, and it’s easy to see why. Having co-founded the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express touring company in 1988 (it became the AmericanShakespeareCenter in

2005, with a permanent home in a recreated Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton), Cohen believes passionately that the audience – both in Elizabethan times and now - is and should be absolutely central to the writing and performing of Shakespeare’s plays.

Universal Lighting

Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts”

Unlike modern productions today, Elizabethan theatre also had a minimum reliance on props and scenery, the better to engage the imaginations of the 16th century audience in transforming the stage into the dank cells of the Tower of London or the narrow, cobblestoned streets of Verona. As the chorus entreats in the prologue to Henry V, the audience is called on to use their imaginations to “piece out our imperfections with your thoughts… for ‘tis your thoughts that now must deck our kings.” A throne here, a bed there, tables to signify a tavern, that was about all that was needed to ‘set the stage’ for what was the main focus of the play: the actors and their dialogue.

On the other hand, costumes did play a significant role in Shakespeare’s plays, in three respects, according to Cohen. First, because sets and scenery were kept to a minimum, colorful and sumptuous costumes provided the main dash of color to the production. Second, given the nature of Elizabethan repertory companies, where actors regularly played several different roles within a play (doubling), strikingly different costumes helped the audience focus on the character being portrayed, not the actor (all the more important in Shakespeare’s time, with boys and young men having to play all the female roles). Thirdly, as Jim Warren notes, “costumes helped an audience ‘read’ the play quickly by showing them at a glance who was rich or poor, royalty or peasantry, priest or cobbler, ready for bed or ready to party.”

An afternoon of entertainment, whether at the Globe, the Blackfriars, or another of the London playhouses, was more than just the staging of a play. Patrons were treated to a continuous show of drama, music, and comedy - perhaps even juggling and acrobatics - from before the play began, through the intermissions (interludes), to the epilogue.

Cohen and Warren emphasize that music was especially integral to performances at the Blackfriars; the “original Blackfriars was famous for its consort, which included some of the finest musicians in London, and Shakespeare was clearly happy to use that fact in his interludes, which he hadn’t done before the Blackfriars.” Necessity was also a factor; unlike the Globe with its outdoor lighting, musical interludes helped occupy the Blackfriars audience during the ten minutes or so it took to trim the theater candles during the performance.

Thus ‘musick’ of infinite variety abounds in Shakespeare. Dances, airs, jigs,masques, and songs are woven into the fabric of his plays, seeking to “soothe the savage breast.” As an element of “original practices”, the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express was committed from the first to carrying on this tradition;nearly all the members of what is now the ASC repertory are accomplished musicians and singers as well as actors.

Cohen isadamant that “from the very beginning we thought of music as a way to signal to the audience thatthis wasn’t going to be what they expected; it’s been part of the DNA that Jim has nourished over the years of the company. My mantra is that we hope you’re having a great time at the show and that you like the play; we’re going to give you the best play we can. But if you’re coming back because you like the music, and looking at the people, and drinking the beer, that makes us just as happy, that we’ve created an evening for you that’s really special.”

It was with this commitment to original practices and universal lighting that Cohen and Warren created the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express. And it was done on a shoe-string, with no guarantee that season one would be followed by season two. As one of the original actors, John Harrell, remembers it, the troupe had a bit of a Ken Kesey, merry prankster quality to it, taking 2-3 week road trips along the eastern seaboard in “whose ever car might make it”. Harrell, who’s featured in a book on Shakespearean actors to be published in summer 2011 that will include profiles of Dame Judi Dench, Kevin Kline, Ian McKellen, and Vanessa Redgrave, remembers Cohen talking about finding a patron who might donate vans for the traveling troupe, and thinking that “[Ralph] was absolutely insane, that’s never going to happen!” Despite the barest of resources, and with no one yet being paid, the company put together what Cohen and Warren called The Maiden Tour in 1988 (Richard III), followed by The Taming Tour in 1989 (The Taming of the Shrew), which traveled to Delaware, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire and New York. When not on tour, it was back to Harrisonburg where Cohen had teaching and theater production duties at JamesMadisonUniversityand Warren was finishing his graduate studies.

The PhiladelphiaStory

“This mad Blackfriarsproject”

In his highly entertaining The Shakespeare Wars(2006), the literary critic/journalist Ron Rosenbaum surveys the intellectual jousting and parrying that characterizes the tumultuous battlefield of Shakespearean scholars, critics, biographers, and theater directors. It’s a wonderful panorama of who’s doing what to whom in the oft shifting debates over the Bard in terms of post-modern deconstruction, “close reading” textual analysis, feminist and Marxist theory, and other critical lenses. Shakespeare-lovers will recognize names such as the British theatre directors Peter Brook and Trevor Nunn, academic scholars Stephen Booth, Harold Bloom, Helen Vendler, and Frank Kermode, and the Shakespeare of the cinema created by Lawrence Olivier, Orson Welles, Franco Zeffirelli, and Kenneth Branagh.

Rosenbaum recounts how he first met Ralph Cohen and Jim Warren when he attended their Shenandoah Shakespeare Scholars Conference in October 2001 in Staunton. Birthplace of President Woodrow Wilson and home to Mary Baldwin College, Staunton (pronounced, Stan-ton) is an attractive Shenandoah valley town full of Victorian architecture, less than an hour west of Charlottesville as you climb over the Blue Ridge mountains on interstate 64. As Rosenbaum notes with more than a touch of wonderment and admiration, Cohen (and Warren) had been working for years on “a bizarre quixotic project… this mad Blackfriars project,” to build a replica of the indoor Blackfriars playhouse, the original being situated in an old Dominican priory on the north side of the Thames in London, where Shakespeare’s theater troupe, by then called The King’s Men, began staging performances in 1608. The priory had been established in 1275 (its friars wore black robes) and then deeded to Henry VIII in 1538 before being used for children’s plays beginning in the 1580s. The large upstairs hall of the two-story building was the frater, or dining hall, that also served at times as a parliamentary chamber, and it was this space that was later converted into a theater to be used by Shakespeare and The King’s Men. In a wonderful piece of historical irony, we know that Shakespeare’s Henry VIII, one of his final plays written in 1612-1613, was actually performed in the very same Blackfriars’ hall where divorce proceedings against Katherine of Aragon were carried out by Henry VIII in 1538.

In the early 1990s, the most likely site for a recreated Blackfriars playhouse wasCohen and Warren’s home university, James Madison in Harrisonburg(about 45 minutes north of Staunton on Interstate 81). As that effort began to stall, Cohen and Warren were contacted by Joe Harmon, a Staunton businessman and inn-keeper. Harmon had seen a photo in the local paper of an SSE production of scenes from Twelfth Night being performed for an NEH Institute of Scholars in, of all places, an abandoned cattle auction stockyard in Harrisonburg. As Cohen laughingly recalls, the enclosed cattle stockyard was the perfect setting for Elizabethan theater: “like the Blackfriars, it had two doors, for the cattle (actors) to come in and the cattle (actors) to go out, and an auctioneer’s podium like the Lord’s Room (the balcony above the stage) and all that.” Harmon, a local innkeeper, was very much taken with the idea of the SSE and a Blackfriars Theater enhancing Staunton as a tourist destination, and began to rally local support.