EXPLORING SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES AYANNA THOMPSON EXPLORING SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES AYANNA THOMPSON

JAY O. SANDERS I get to do it as Falstaff. Talk about an audience for a fart show.

AYANNA THOMPSON They’re guaranteed to love you. I just wish there were more productions like this that were entering into Shakespeare with a sense of experiment and play, with less of the calcified, overbaked thing. For me, it sounds like the most exciting way to do it. I kinda wish there were gonna be reviews and a recording that we could access, because I think it would be one of those things that we would use in the clasroom a lot.

that kinda turns people off. And to see something that feels alive…

CHRISTIAN CAMARGO It’s sort of like when you go to see a show for their first night, and you go, “Wow, what’s going to go wrong?” The terror, the energy–that’s sort of what we’re doing.

JAY O. SANDERS I put myself all the way out and it always scares me, but it’s always what makes me the best that I can be. I know that’s the greatest reward. It was my choice to do Titus. They were asking me what I wanted to do and when I chose it, they said, “Wow, that’s… boy, that’s a hell of a choice. Why do you wanna do that?”

I said, “Because it scares the living crap out of me.” That’s where you know you’re gonna go learn something, challenge yourself, and bring more to the table. If you’re not scared by these major roles, you don’t realize what you’re getting into (or out of it).

At the same time, being challenged to think as fast as [the characters] do, to describe what wit is and then be witty within it, you have to feel stupid as you’re doing it because you go, “Wait, wait, wait, I’m not getting there as quickly as he’s getting there.” I have to be up to it. But you also know once you get there, it’s a ride like no other. You’re meeting Shakespeare and his idea of this character and bringing the best of yourself to think as fast as that person does and to feel as deeply as they do. It’s the great ride. It’s like embracing life on stage. It scares me, but it doesn’t scare me.

AYANNA THOMPSON It’s what acting is about, as you said.

JAY O. SANDERS For me, anyway. I just read a John Larroquette interview… I think he’s a very good actor, but he thinks of himself as a physical comedian and said, “I never considered acting an art.” And I thought, “We got nothing to talk about. That’s all I think of it as.” Acting is art, and it is my life. When it’s not art, I’m not giving it enough. People think, “Eh, you just do this, you go there, you pick that up, and fall down, and that’s funny.” I may do just what you said, but it’s all connected to all those things that we’ve discovered and all of the dedication to doing it in that moment, to trying to be so present that it happens every night, however successful you are or aren’t. It is the desire to do that what makes it art, I believe.

AYANNA THOMPSON Well, Eric, how about you? What scares you the most, what excites you the most?

ERIC TUCKER Well, I think the only thing that scares me is if someone doesn’t show up one night. Jeffrey’s gonna call me and say, “Come read because you know the blocking and we’re just reading.” So, if someone gets COVID, I’m gonna be the one they call in, probably.

CHRISTIAN CAMARGO Richard II.

ERIC TUCKER No, no, no. But, I’m excited because like he said, there’s no reviews. Like Christian says, this is a great way to see where we fail. It’s gonna be a great opportunity. I can’t see all the performances. I wish I could. They also have to do three performances for kids of Henry IV , so I know that’s always scary, but I think kids are a great audience for Shakespeare.

ERIC TUCKER Well…we’ll see. So often, productions feel like they just thought which costumes would be cool and that’s the era they set it in. But they rehearsed only three weeks and had to work on all the fight bits, the dance, and this and that. And there’s no depth to it, it doesn’t do anything different than I’ve ever seen. I think that is the stuff

JAY O. SANDERS But the big quest is for clarity. When I come in every day, I don’t go, “Now, what is the next step?” I go back and look at the same thing I’ve been doing and I keep making it clearer. By the time it gets really, really clear, I’m ready to start throwing the ball back and forth in a different way. When you’re really clear on what you’re saying, they hear you better, my scene partner hears me better, and then I hear what they’re doing better. Then we’re playing tennis rather than stuck in language.

EXPLORING SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES AYANNA THOMPSON

So, the clarity, for me, is everything in this and how far we get with it. The best review you can have is a kid watching and going, “Sh-t, I wanna do that!” or “I wanna see more of that.” You want them waking up to what’s possible. That’s a challenge. We know when we’re in rehearsal and a scene starts to get going (clearer and better, more back-and-forth), you go, “Whoa, that’s starting to happen, isn’t it?” And that’s the excitement that we live for and come in for.

AYANNA THOMPSON “I do. I will.”

SUSANNAH PERKINS I came in with all these ideas because every time I’ve seen “I do. I will” it’s been very sentimental. I was like, “I’m gonna do it in this cool a-hole way where I’m like, ‘Yeah, I do, I will.’” And it’s been really, really hard not to look at Jay and cry every single time we’ve done it. You can have ideas about Shakespeare. Doing them is something very, very different.

JAY O. SANDERS But also, doing them with the people you’re doing them with.

SUSANNAH PERKINS Yeah, that’s right.

JAY O. SANDERS You can have four different Falstaffs, four different Hals, and those scenes will be different things. If they’re not, the people are dead. The whole point is to take the chemistry that we have and that we find–and that’s not preconceived because we’re just getting to know each other the same way as we’re getting to know the text–and ride that to somewhere that tells you where it wants to go.

You can make decisions about “Boy, I thought I heard you do this, and…,” “Oh, that’s a great idea, can we try that?” But even that–is that how it’s gonna stay? Who knows? The idea is to keep listening and recognize where relationships and dramatic tension are taking us.

AYANNA THOMPSON Maybe that’s another gift to us from Shakespeare–to learn to listen. I don’t know that we’re very good listeners.

JAY O. SANDERS Absolutely. People who don’t know how to do Shakespeare think it’s all about them saying some beautiful words. If you look at the scenes, they’re all answers to what the other person’s saying.

AYANNA THOMPSON All right. Eric, any last words for our readers?

JAY O. SANDERS I’m hoping for your last words.

CHRISTIAN CAMARGO What’s your last word?

JAY O. SANDERS Because you’re not gonna direct after.

ERIC TUCKER No, it’s probably just the end of my whole career. Well, a friend of mine said they wanted tickets but, “I’m afraid they’re all gonna go so fast.” It’s like, that’s nice.

AYANNA THOMPSON I think they will, too. I think they’ll go very fast. I think this is something that seems super exciting, and what New York needs at this moment.

JAY O. SANDERS Michael [Rogers] was just saying today that he hasn’t come back to theater before because he’s afraid in being in rooms of COVID. People all have their own relationship to what the pandemic is, and he’s venturing back and said, “Well, this feels good.”

I think the audience needs to feel that too. It’s not a big house, and we’re doing what we do that you can’t do on Zoom and on film. It’s that live crackle of it. I’m thinking there may well be a number of people who look at it and go, “Jesus, that’s how they should do it! Oh my God!” The excitement of the moment–not that it’s finished, but I recognize what it is that–

ERIC TUCKER It’s the spirit of this, that you can somehow keep that. I do think that one of the neat things about this is that it should have the effect of watching a new play being read because we haven’t beat it into submission or made it feel sterile.

It’s gonna be very fresh every time they do it. New audience, another night. They don’t know the lines, they have their books, they have each other, and that energy, like Christian says, the first night of anything is gonna feel like we’re looking at new works. How often does Shakespeare make you feel like that? You know what I mean? So I think it’s a really cool event and people are going to get something out of this. Certainly, this is not a way you get to hear Shakespeare very often and I think they’ll sit up and listen. I hope.

EXPLORING SHAKESPEARE'S HISTORIES AYANNA THOMPSON

AYANNA THOMPSON Well, on that note, thank you all for your time and your fearlessness. I’m very, very excited for this, and I’m excited for the audiences, and, as you said, especially for the students. What a great first experience with Shakespeare.

JAY O. SANDERS The ideal thing would be if the older audiences feel like the students, you know what I mean? If they walk into it with that same thing of “What the f– is this? Oh, that was cool!” But, that whole discovery thing is ideally the best part about doing this..

AYANNA THOMPSON is a Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, and the Director of the Arizona Center for Medieval & Renaissance Studies (ACMRS).

In 2021, she was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Thompson is the author of Blackface (Bloomsbury, 2021), Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars (Arden Bloomsbury, 2018), Teaching Shakespeare with

Purpose: A Student-Centred Approach , co-authored with Laura Turchi (Arden Bloomsbury, 2016), Passing Strange: Shakespeare, Race, and Contemporary America (Oxford University Press, 2011), and Performing Race and Torture on the Early Modern Stage (Routledge, 2008). She wrote the new introduction for the revised Arden3 Othello (Arden, 2016), and is the editor of The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare and Race (Cambridge University Press, 2021), Weyward Macbeth: Intersections of Race and Performance (Palgrave, 2010), and Colorblind Shakespeare: New Perspectives on Race and Performance (Routledge, 2006). She is currently collaborating with Curtis Perry on the Arden4 edition of Titus Andronicus. Thompson serves as a Shakespeare Scholar in Residence at The Public Theater in New York, and currently serves on the boards of the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the National Parks Arts Foundation, and Play On Shakespeare. She is a pastPresident of the Shakespeare Association of America.