“So in addition to focusing on new work – which is very much our bag – should Wisconsin’s flagship theater be doing the classics as part of its repertoire?”
That’s the question Milwaukee Rep Artistic Director Mark Clements posed to me, while describing Milwaukee Rep’s production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, in an adaptation through which the Bard meets the Beatles.
More momentarily on this exciting new take on one of Shakespeare’s best comedies. But first, let’s return to Clements’ question, which he and Milwaukee Rep have answered with a resounding yes.
Through its Classic Play Initiative, Milwaukee Rep has now committed to staging at least one pre-1900 play in each of the next five seasons. As You Like It recently kicked off as part of Milwaukee Rep’s 2021/22 Season.
Giving the Classics Their Props
Clements has made new play development a signature feature of his tenure; the current Milwaukee Rep season features two new plays as well as a staged reading, and Milwaukee Rep has nearly a dozen additional playwrights under commission to create new work.
But the idea of staging more classics has been on Clements’ mind since he arrived at Milwaukee Rep; he directed Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman in his first season and Shakespeare’s Othello in his second.
Clements has also heard plenty since arriving in Milwaukee from patrons urging him to make classic plays a Milwaukee Rep mainstay. Attending a Milwaukee Rep community dinner several years ago, I watched such passionate lobbying firsthand, as a patron buttonholed Clements and practically begged him to stage a Eugene O’Neill play.
“It’s a question that comes up all the time with patrons,” Clements said. He used a conversation during a Bradley Foundation dinner – with Bradley Board member James Barry – as an illustrative example. “Jim told me, ‘I love what you’re doing, it’s really great, and we’re great fans,’” Clements recalled. “‘The only thing I really miss is the classics.’”
Taking these conversations to heart, Clements began thinking past doing the classics as one-offs and began dreaming of an entire series revolving around classic plays. Aided by a $100,000 renewable grant from The Bradley Foundation and a $250,000 grant from the Richard Hearn Estate, the Classic Play Initiative will help Clements bring this dream to life.
“Think about the things we’ve added or substantially changed during my decade here,” Clements said. “Rep Lab. Education immersion days. Musicals on the mainstage. More diversity on our stages.
“We’ve had success with these initiatives because we made a sustained commitment to them. We’ve had more traction when we’ve pursued initiatives over multiple years. We’ve created an appetite and allowed our audience to grow with us, until these features became part of our DNA. I envision the Classic Play Initiative being like that.”
Giving the Classics Some Pop
Bringing the classics to life doesn’t and shouldn’t mean deadly dull staging.
It most certainly doesn’t mean staging Shakespeare through characters running around in funny green tights, declaiming lines, and generally pretending to inhabit some faraway land that never existed – in Elizabethan England or at any other time.
In his brilliant Subsequent Performances (1986) – one of the finest books on this topic ever written – the late, great Jonathan Miller speaks about the “afterlife” of a classic, through which it continues to be made new by each new generation that encounters it.
Miller rightly points out that play scripts can’t ever fully provide “details of prosody, inflexion, stress, tempo and rhythm,” adding that “a script tells us nothing about the gestures, the stance, the facial expressions, the dress, the weight, or the grouping or the movements” on stage.
Even the most detailed stage directions – think playwrights like Shaw or Barrie – necessarily leave a great deal out of their scripts; it’s up to theater artists and the audiences for whom they create to imagine those scripts into life. No performance, Miller insists, is ever pure; no matter how old the play, every production is necessarily new.
Miller isn’t saying anything goes: Plays shouldn’t, he argues, “be subject to an infinite number of possible interpretations.” Any decent production of a classic needs to pay attention to what Miller describes as the “range of meanings” made possible by a script.
Clements has always intuitively understood this; one of the more memorable moments in my first-ever interview with him involved his passionate defense of Shakespeare’s language. A director shouldn’t, he insisted, presume to improve on some of the greatest poetry ever written. The point isn’t to change the words, but to make their context more accessible.
Cue Clements’ 2012 production of Othello.
Inspired by the hit TV series Sons of Anarchy, it set the gang violence rumbling beneath the surface of Shakespeare’s play within a leather-clad and tattooed world featuring Harleys growling across a blighted urban landscape. But it used Shakespeare’s words to tell the story, so that Shakespeare’s poetry could roar to life in a way that allowed a new generation to embrace this dark play’s terrible beauty.
“For me, it’s all about how we make the classics accessible to an audience so they can discover them,” Clements said. He wasn’t talking at this point about his Othello. He was talking about this season’s Milwaukee Rep production of As You Like It.
Making Shakespeare Popular
Written during the same year that Shakespeare wrote Hamlet, As You Like It features numerous love stories. Cross-dressing and cosplay. Passionate young people willing to fight the power. Wordplay that would make any rapper jealous. One of the most famous and best-known speeches in all of Shakespeare (the one beginning “all the world’s a stage”).
And Rosalind, the greatest heroine Shakespeare ever created (sorry, Cleopatra).
As You Like It should be a hit in any age, and it has been. But it’s sure to reach entirely new audiences in its current production in Milwaukee accompanied by two dozen Beatles songs, in an adaptation by Daryl Cloran, Artistic Director of Citadel Theatre in Edmonton.
When Cloran’s As You Like It made its debut during Vancouver’s 2018 Bard on the Beach festival, it was repeatedly extended and shattered attendance records. During an ensuing Manitoba production, the reviewer for the CBC described Cloran’s union between the Beatles and the Bard as “such a fitting match that you wonder why it hasn’t been done before.”
Like Clements’ Othello, Cloran’s As You Like It doesn’t rewrite Shakespeare, although Cloran does make cuts (lest we forget, Shakespeare himself made substantial cuts to Hamlet, which otherwise runs four-plus hours). “When Daryl could replace a piece of text with a song, he’s done that,” Clements said. “But he hasn’t changed or rewritten text.”
Cloran is renowned for his commitment to growing audiences, especially through the sorts of programming – including immersive performance and interactive performance – that allows young people to experience the magic of theater. Which emphatically includes Shakespeare.
As Clements rightly noted during our interview, Milwaukee has experienced very little professional-level Shakespeare involving Equity actors and robust production values since the demise of Milwaukee Shakespeare 14 years ago.
During that same time period, American Players Theatre, Door Shakespeare and Chicago Shakespeare Theater have all scaled back how much actual Shakespeare they do; additionally, all of them are between two and three hours away. Even Milwaukee Rep has only done eight Shakespeare productions during the 35 years it has been in its current location.
It takes nothing away from the various community theater productions of Bard plays that one can see here – Dale Gutzman’s Off the Wall Theatre has long done especially fine work – to suggest that Milwaukee would benefit from more Shakespeare being presented in the sort of top-flight stagings one would expect from Wisconsin’s largest theater.
Recognizing this need, Clements is quite sure that the Classic Play Initiative will be giving us more Shakespeare, soon.
Looking Ahead
As for other future installments of Milwaukee Rep’s Classic Play Initiative, Clements is also ruminating on the possible marriage of an 18th-century comedy and the world of Andy Warhol.
Still further down the road, he envisions an adaptation of a Greek tragedy (all the rage, right now, as one can see in plays as different from each other as Simon Stone’s Medea and Brandon Jacob-Jenkins’ Girls, a wild and fun adaptation of Euripides’ The Bacchae).
Most important, and consistent with his commitment to sustained engagement, Clements also seems to be thinking past the parameters of the Classic Play Initiative itself.
As noted above, the five-year Classic Play Initiative involves works written prior to 1900.
But in his first decade here, Clements has also demonstrated his love for 20th-century American classics; he’s not only directed Miller’s Death of a Salesman (2011), but also John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (2016) and Tennessee Williams’ The Glass Menagerie (2017). Two of those productions finished on my list of the top ten Clements productions during his decade at Milwaukee Rep.
“We’ve never done Williams’ Sweet Bird of Youth,” Clements noted. “We haven’t done his A Streetcar Named Desire since we’ve been in this building.” Clements could have added that Milwaukee Rep hasn’t staged Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof since 1998 and that it hasn’t gone near the late Williams work that is finally receiving its due, in multiple productions across the country.
Bottom line: Williams is this country’s greatest playwright. He has written some of American theater’s most memorable women. But he has been woefully underserved by this state’s largest theater company.
“Looking back at our history, and certainly our history in this building since 1987, suggests that we have not prioritized or had any prime interest in the classics,” Clements said.
He’s clearly intent on changing that. Yes: Clements is looking to the future. But as Toni Morrison observed in her dazzling readings of classic American literature, you can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’re from. Or as William Faulkner said long ago, “the past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”
A Milwaukee-based writer and dramaturg, Mike Fischer wrote theater and book reviews for the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel for fifteen years, serving as chief theater critic from 2009-18. A member of the Advisory Company of Artists for Forward Theater Company in Madison, he also co-hosts Theater Forward, a bimonthly podcast. You can reach him directly at mjfischer1985@gmail.com.