Rescripting Shakespearean Worlds Through the New York Shakespeare Festival
This panel thinks about how the New York Shakespeare Festival (NYSF), later known simply as Shakespeare in the Park, has used Shakespeare to engage with both local and global issues, responding to a changing world and taking advantage of New York City’s diversity to explore how Shakespeare can create radical acts of world building that respond to changing historical moments. Although it is hardly original to point out that the theatre offers acts of world-building, these papers explore how performance can be radical acts of world-altering, in turn disrupting Shakespeare in unexpected ways as a means of unsettling the world in which he is performed.
The vision of the Shakespeare festival was to create a Shakespeare for American audiences. It has thus always embraced the global community who move through the hub of the city, imagining a Shakespeare that speaks for and to the people who live in its boroughs. The locus of this engagement was the public space of the city’s Central Park. This remit, however, has expanded with the festival’s increased popularity, drawing crowds from outside of NYC. As such, NYSF Shakespeare routinely sits at an unusual intersection of radical performance and crowd-pleasing commercialism. Because of the diasporic makeup of New York City and the tourists who flock there, the festival is both intimately local and broadly global (and even inter-galactic) in its scope. This scope has only increased as performances from the NYSF have been streamed to audiences around the world.
This panel thus examines how the NYSF strives to alter the world it performs to and in by rescripting the Shakespearean worlds it stages. The papers in this panel thereby examine different forms of rescripting, from multiple “rescriptings” of the same play over time to new frameworks that “rescript” a familiar play in order to offer audiences a fresh take on theatre’s radical possibilities to offering new racial scripts that counter the longstanding parameters that shape how Blackness can and should be performed.
Together, then, these papers trace moments in Shakespeare’s twentieth and twenty-first century performance history in which traditional social and performance worlds are challenged by varying levels and types of radical performance. These rescripted and therefore altered Shakespearean worlds disrupt easy assumptions about the universes that Shakespearean texts construct, thereby directing attention to the impact of rescripted Shakespeares on changing cultural climates.
Vanessa I. Corredera, Andrews University
“I’ve got the joy, joy, joy”: The Rescripted, Radical Affect of Black Joy Merry Wives and Fat Ham
When considering the affects of Black theatre perhaps the heartbreak in Fences, the discomfort of A Slave Play, or the communal hope at the end of For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide spring to mind, not joy. Yet Black joy plays a vital role in countering racial oppression. This paper turns to two Shakespearean adaptations-–Jocelyn Bioh’s Merry Wives and James IJames’s Fat Ham–that center Black joy. I argue that both plays use Black joy to offer audiences a new, and therefore radical, racial script that counters the longstanding one of Black trauma.
Louise Geddes, Adelphi University
The Radical Simplicity of the Spanish Mobile Unit
During the 1960s, the NYTW made two attempts at Latinx Shakespeare: the bi-lingual Mobile Unit and the “Naked” Hamlet, a radical retelling that featured Martin Sheen using a Puerto Rican accent. The touring production presented the festival’s English options in Spanish translation, and took a grassroots approach, bringing in renowned artists from Mexico and South America, and celebrating Hispanic culture by running Macbeth alongside Federico Garcia Lorca’s plays. The paper compares the simplicity of the mobile project to the Naked Hamlet to suggest that the most radical staging of Shakespeare is simply the one that brings him to new audiences.
Stephen Purcell, Warwick University
‘Amazing and modern’: Troilus and Cressida at the New York Shakespeare Festival, 1965-73
In Shakespeare Our Contemporary (1961), Jan Kott redefined thinking about Troilus and Cressida, interpreting it as a savagely ironic anti-war satire that mirrored the disillusionment and radicalism of the 1960s. This paper tells the little-known story of the New York Shakespeare Festival’s engagements with this ‘amazing and modern’ play over the decade that followed, spanning science fiction, drag, and anti-war protest: from Joseph Papp’s groundbreakingly feminist 1965 production, through his development of a rock musical with Hair composer Galt MacDermot over 1969-71, to David Schweizer’s absurdist (and critically panned) production of 1973.