50jili Who’s Afraid of William Shakespeare?
Earlier this month, theater lovers in the Bay Area got some very bad news. California Shakespeare Theater, the beloved nonprofit company that has operated there for 50 years, announced that it would soon close in the face of an “insurmountable financial impasse.” As the artistic producer at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, I take losses like this to heart. And they worry me, too. It sometimes seems the American theater’s relationship to the Bard might be fraying.
In my travels this summer, from coast to coast, for instance, I saw Shakespeare theaters producing less Shakespeare. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival — among the nation’s biggest and oldest classical companies — offered only two plays by Shakespeare out of 10 productions in 2024. San Diego’s Old Globe produced “Henry 6” — but nothing else by the Bard. The Chicago Shakespeare Theater is self-producing only one play by Shakespeare out of nine. At my own Shakespeare Theatre Company, where the schedule of plays is decided by committee, “Comedy of Errors” is our only Shakespeare play. It is the first full season in our company’s 38-year history in which we are only programming one. Further north, the 37-year-old Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival in upstate New York mounted three productions last summer, notably missing for the first time any works by Shakespeare, another dubious first.
How real is this Shakespeare shrinkage? American Theatre magazine, which collects data from more than 500 theaters, publishes a list of the most performed plays each season. In 2023-24, there were 40 productions of Shakespeare’s plays. There were 52 in 2022-23 and 96 in 2018-19. Over the past five years, Shakespeare’s presence on American stages has fallen a staggering 58 percent. At many formerly Shakespeare-only theaters, the production of the Bard’s plays has dropped to as low as less than 20 percent of the repertory.
Why might American theaters be running away from Shakespeare?
Shakespeare’s plays tend to be big and expensive. Theaters are being affected by rising labor and material costs, as well as audiences reluctant to return in the aftermath of Covid-19. Feeling the pinch, many producers are turning either to one-person shows, which are less expensive to produce, or to musicals and generic potboilers with a perceived broader appeal. As one artistic leader told me recently, “Agatha Christie is single-handedly saving the American regional theater.”
The real answer may be something else. Over the past 10 years, as American politics and culture have grown more contentious, Shakespeare has become increasingly politicized. In 2017, the Public Theater’s Delacorte production of “Julius Caesar” depicted the assassination of a Donald Trump-like Caesar. The production elicited protests from Trump supporters, and corporate sponsors pulled their funding. Shakespeare is also under assault from the progressive left. In July 2020, the theater activist collective “We See You, White American Theater” turned the industry upside down with demands for a “bare minimum of 50 percent BIPOC representation in programming and personnel,” referring to Black, Indigenous and people of color. Though Shakespeare’s name went unmentioned, his work remained the white, male, European elephant in the room.
The disputes over Shakespeare are intense, even scary. In 2023, Nataki Garrett, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s first Black artistic director, resigned after receiving racist death threats and other forms of harassment. She had been a vocal supporter of “We See You,” and had attempted to diversify the company’s repertory and working practices. There is a long history of theaters running from Shakespeare during times of political division or uncertainty. From 1810 to 1820, “King Lear” was banned from the English stage when King George III suffered from bouts of insanity. In the United States, the Astor Place Riot of 1849 was an anti-immigrant riot with a Shakespearean pretext in which about two dozen people lost their lives. The sparks that lit the flame were rival productions of “Macbeth”: One starred Edwin Forrest, an outspoken Jacksonian Democrat and patriot. The other featured William Macready, a cosmopolitan British elite.
Overall, violent crime fell 3 percent and property crime fell 2.6 percent in 2023, with burglaries down 7.6 percent and larceny down 4.4 percent. Car thefts, though, continue to be an exception, rising more than 12 percent from the year before.
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