The Shakespeare Project
Encyclopedia
Riverside Shakespeare Company
The Riverside Shakespeare Company of New York City was founded in 1977 as a professional theatre company on the Upper West Side of New York City, by W. Stuart McDowell and Gloria Skurski...
, then New York City's only year-round professional Shakespeare theatre company, inaugurated The Shakespeare Project, based at the theatre company's home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, The Shakespeare Center
The Shakespeare Center
The Shakespeare Center was the home of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, an Equity professional theatre company in New York City, beginning in 1982, when the then six-year-old theatre company established its center of theatre production and advanced actor training at the 90 year-old West Park...
. The Shakespeare Project was the first major New York residency of actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
- with Edwin Richfield, Heather Canning, Christopher Ravenscroft, Jennie Stoller and John Kane (the later two from Peter Brook
Peter Brook
Peter Stephen Paul Brook CH, CBE is an English theatre and film director and innovator, who has been based in France since the early 1970s.-Life:...
's A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream
A Midsummer Night's Dream is a play that was written by William Shakespeare. It is believed to have been written between 1590 and 1596. It portrays the events surrounding the marriage of the Duke of Athens, Theseus, and the Queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta...
) - for a week of public workshops, panel discussions, seminars and performances at the company's Upper West Side theatre, The Shakespeare Center. The event was launched at a luncheon in the Shakespeare Room of the Algonquin Hotel attended by Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York . "The Public," as it is known, has many small theatres within it...
, Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes Brown was an American actress whose career spanned almost 70 years. She eventually garnered the nickname "First Lady of the American Theatre" and was one of twelve people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award...
, Frank Rich
Frank Rich
Frank Rich is an American essayist and op-ed columnist who wrote for The New York Times from 1980, when he was appointed its chief theatre critic, until 2011...
, Gloria Skurski, W. Stuart McDowell, and members of the Royal Shakespeare Company
Royal Shakespeare Company
The Royal Shakespeare Company is a major British theatre company, based in Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, England. The company employs 700 staff and produces around 20 productions a year from its home in Stratford-upon-Avon and plays regularly in London, Newcastle-upon-Tyne and on tour across...
in mid October of 1983. According to the New York Times, over one thousand actors, students, teachers and stage directors, from the ages of 15 to 87, signed up for 22 sessions taught by some of the leading actors from London's Royal Shakespeare Company.
At the launching of The Shakespeare Project, Marilyn Stasio
Marilyn Stasio
Marilyn Stasio is a New York City area author, writer and literary critic. She has been the "Crime Columnist" for The New York Times Book Review since about 1988, having written over 650 reviews as of January 2009. She says she reads "a few" crime books a year professionally and many more for...
of The New York Post, called it "the adventurous Shakespeare Project involving the five guests from the Royal Shakespeare Company...a unique venture." Stasio added, "Everybody at the opening night party, including such members of the theatrical community as Milo O'Shea
Milo O'Shea
-Early life:He was born and raised in Dublin and educated by the Christian Brothers at Synge Street, along with his friend Donal Donnelly.He was discovered in the 1950s by Harry Dillon, who ran the "37 Theatre Club" on the top floor of his shop The Swiss Gem Company, 51 Lower O'Connell Street...
, Barnard Hughes
Barnard Hughes
Bernard Aloysius Kiernan “Barnard” Hughes was an American actor of theater and film. Hughes became famous for a variety of roles; his most notable roles came after middle age, and he was often cast as a dithering authority figure or grandfatherly elder.-Personal life:Hughes was born in Bedford...
and Gloria Foster
Gloria Foster
Gloria Foster was an American actress, most known for her stage performances portraying an array of African-American characters, including her acclaimed roles in plays In White America and Having Our Say, winning three Obie Awards during her career.In films, she was perhaps best known as The...
, seemed to want to a regular event of the unprecedented project." In the evenings, the five actor also performed a "five-hander" version of Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice
The Merchant of Venice is a tragic comedy by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. Though classified as a comedy in the First Folio and sharing certain aspects with Shakespeare's other romantic comedies, the play is perhaps most remembered for its dramatic...
, Dylan Thomas' Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood
Under Milk Wood is a 1954 radio drama by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, adapted later as a stage play. A movie version, Under Milk Wood directed by Andrew Sinclair, was released during 1972....
, and the New York premiere of D. H. Lawrence
D. H. Lawrence
David Herbert Richards Lawrence was an English novelist, poet, playwright, essayist, literary critic and painter who published as D. H. Lawrence. His collected works represent an extended reflection upon the dehumanising effects of modernity and industrialisation...
's The Tarnished Phoenix.
The week-long residency drew sell-out crowds at its two venues, the All Angels Episcopal Church at Lincoln Center, and The Shakespeare Center - the home of the Riverside Shakespeare Company, located in West Park Presbyterian Church at Amsterdam and West 86th Street in Manhattan. The Host Committee for The Shakespeare Project included Henry Guettel, Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein
Leonard Bernstein August 25, 1918 – October 14, 1990) was an American conductor, composer, author, music lecturer and pianist. He was among the first conductors born and educated in the United States of America to receive worldwide acclaim...
, Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes Brown was an American actress whose career spanned almost 70 years. She eventually garnered the nickname "First Lady of the American Theatre" and was one of twelve people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award...
, Bernard Jacobs, John V. Lindsay, Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York . "The Public," as it is known, has many small theatres within it...
and George Plimpton
George Plimpton
George Ames Plimpton was an American journalist, writer, editor, and actor. He is widely known for his sports writing and for helping to found The Paris Review.-Early life:...
.
The first residency of its kind by actors from the Royal Shakespeare Company
According to the New York Times, until the launching of The Shakespeare Project in 1983, "the Royal Shakespeare Company's actors had never conducted their workshops in New York City and never been open to actors in addition to students."On the opening night of The Shakespeare Project, Christopher Ravenscroft (right) of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production of Nicholas Nickleby was quoted by Marilyn Stasio of The New York Post, observing:
- I am teaching the RSC approach to Shakespeare, which is essentially how to take him out of the classroom and make him live. But I would really like to tell the Americans that they already have the talent and the technique. All they need is the practice to take the horror out of Shakespeare.
To this, John Kane, who created the role of Puck in Peter Brook's seminal production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, added:
- There's one area of acting in which we can teach the Americans nothing, and that's the area of intuitive acting and psychological reality. What we can teach, though, is our own classically based tuition, our strict discipline and our external approach to verse. Articulation is not one of the strong points of American acting, and yet articulation is what makes the expression of emotion easier.
Edwin Richfield, whose roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company included Friar Lawrence in Romeo and Juliet said:
- There should be no mystique...I keep saying - I say it so often in class - Shakespeare is just a very good playwright. In his lifetime, he never published a play. He just wrote them and did them. He never thought the plays had a future for professors to write books, saying, "The reason there's a third murderer is...
Heather Canning, who appeared in the Royal Shakespeare Company production of Marat/Sade
Marat/Sade
The Persecution and Assassination of Jean-Paul Marat as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of Charenton Under the Direction of the Marquis de Sade , almost invariably shortened to Marat/Sade, is a 1963 play by Peter Weiss...
on Broadway, noted:
- It's good to remove the reverence, because Shakespeare is very frightening to Americans. I heard that when they did Othello on Broadway they put Christopher Plummer's name on the marquee, and James Earl Jones's name - everyone but Shakespeare. It was as if he might scare people away.
About The Shakespeare Project, Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp
Joseph Papp was an American theatrical producer and director. Papp established The Public Theater in what had been the Astor Library Building in downtown New York . "The Public," as it is known, has many small theatres within it...
, head of the New York Shakespeare Festival
New York Shakespeare Festival
New York Shakespeare Festival is the previous name of the New York City theatrical producing organization now known as the Public Theater. The Festival produced shows at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, as part of its free Shakespeare in the Park series, at the Public Theatre near Astor Place...
said, "The Shakespeare Project provides a unique opportunity for New Yorkers to have exposure to actors from one of the leading Shakespeare ensembles, The Royal Shakespeare Company." On the promotional material for the project, Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes
Helen Hayes Brown was an American actress whose career spanned almost 70 years. She eventually garnered the nickname "First Lady of the American Theatre" and was one of twelve people who have won an Emmy, a Grammy, an Oscar and a Tony Award...
wrote: "On October 18-22, the Riverside Shakespeare Company will host The Shakespeare Project, when five actors from London's Royal Shakespeare Company will present workshops, seminars, and performances in an entertaining and educational program offered for the first time in this city. Join me there, October 18th!"
As Samuel G. Freedman wrote in The New York Times on October 24, 1983:
- The British actors came to New York, at a cost of $13,000, under the sponsorship of two American groups passionate about staging Shakespeare in the United States. One is the Riverside Shakespeare Company, an Off Broadway organization with a special interest in education, which acted as host to the English. The other is the Alliance for Creative Theater Education and Research, a joint American-English group that since 1975 has sent Shakespearean actors in American colleges to train actors in performing Shakespeare.
The Shakespeare Project was part of an educational program presented by The Riverside Shakespeare Company and the Alliance for Creative Theatre and Educational Research (ACTER) at the University of California at Santa Barbara. It was hosted by the Riverside School for Shakespeare, the year-round professional training program designed for actors, directors and teachers, under the direction of John Clingerman, working with actors and directors from The Riverside Shakespeare Company. The Shakespeare Project was conceived and produced by W. Stuart McDowell, Artistic Director, and Gloria Skurski, Executive Director of the Riverside Shakespeare Company
Riverside Shakespeare Company
The Riverside Shakespeare Company of New York City was founded in 1977 as a professional theatre company on the Upper West Side of New York City, by W. Stuart McDowell and Gloria Skurski...
.