Shakespearean Theater: It's Not What You Think

An Interview with Michael Kahn

By Martin Moeller

Blueprints Winter 2006-07
Volume XXV, No. 1

Michael Kahn has led the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, DC, for 20 seasons as artistic director, creating what The Wall Street Journal calls "...the nation's foremost Shakespeare company." He is also the founder of the Academy for Classical Acting at the George Washington University and the former RichardRodgers Director of the Drama Division at Juilliard. His Broadway credits include a Tony Award nomination for his production of Show Boat.

Kahn is currently leading the Shakespeare Theatre Company into a new era with the creation of the Harman Center for the Arts, a two-venue performing arts center (including the new Sidney Harman Hall, currently under construction, and the existing Lansburgh Theatre) that will expand the company’s offerings while creating opportunities for artists from around the world to perform in Washington, DC. He is also serving as curator of the Shakespeare in Washington festival, which was conceived by Michael Kaiser of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.

Martin Moeller: What were the motivations behind the city-wide Shakespeare festival

Michael Kahn: The idea began in a conversation that Michael Kaiser [president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts] and I had, about how this city is so culturally rich, and in many ways people don’t know about it. People know that Washington is the seat of power and also the home of extraordinary monuments and history, but I don’t think they really understand the depth of cultural life here. So we talked about a festival of Shakespeare, and Michael asked that I curate it. I began to see it as a city-wide festival, including not just the major performance venues, but as many of the city’s cultural institutions as possible. The idea was to celebrate Shakespeare not just as a playwright, but as perhaps the most influential person in all the other arts, because so many operas, music, ballet, painting, books, poetry, and dance have come out of people’s responses to Shakespeare.

MM: To what extent do you think the design of a given theatrical space influences the character of the performances within it?

MK: I think it always has. Shakespeare’s plays would not have been written the way they are if the theaters of the era had had proscenium stages. Shakespeare’s plays are written almost cinematically, and that really comes from the idea that you’re not changing the scenery. So there’s an extraordinary fluidity that you didn’t get once the proscenium was created, and as a matterof fact, once scenery was created. Shakespeare’s plays would probably be an hour shorter if he didn’t have to describe the setting, the climate, the time of day. And of course, some of his most extravagant poetry is in his description of scenic effects, of place, of weather. If there had been scenery, he wouldn’t have needed to do that, so some of the most beautiful passages about night, or winter, or flowers, or fields— you just wouldn’t have them.

When theaters got scenery, writers didn’t write about place anymore. People wanted to go to the theater to see what they considered historical reality. They would see painted sets of Rome, and they would feel that they were seeing Rome. Shakespeare didn’t care— he just talked about it. With the 20th century, with the invention of things like thrust stages, open stages, and arena stages, we began to move closer to an original Shakespearean idea, which is that it’s really just a floor and actors, and the creation of imagination by actors and by lights.

MM: I understand that you instructed the architects of Sidney Harman Hall to avoid any attempt to evoke, even indirectly, the character of the Globe or other Elizabethan theaters.

MK: I am not particularly interested in original practices. I don’t really know how the actors acted in Shakespeare’s time, and to be honest with you, I don’t care. Nor am I ever interested in recreating the [Globe]. I think that is a distancing device—it’s comfortable for people, and they think, “Oh, good, if I see Shakespeare like it was done originally, then it’s culturally okay.” It’s not in any way disturbing.

MM: And, of course, we don’t really know how it was done. What we do know is that the audiences in those days were probably pretty boistrous—eating, talking, and often drunk.

MK: Well, if you go to the Globe [replica] in England, it’s fun, immersing yourself in a form of theater that the audience hasn’t seen, standing and talking during it, and now snapping photographs and that sort of thing. But, without being rude, that strikes me more like a Maryland Renaissance Fair than a major theatrical experience. I think it’s wonderful that the Globe’s there, but I don’t consider that the way that Shakespeare should be done.

MM: What were your primary goals for the new theater?

MK: First of all, the goal of the Shakespeare Theatre Company was to not let the architecture tyrannize the director. I’d like to be able to transform the architecture to be able to illustrate or most illuminate what I think the play has to say and how I want to say it. So in the initial discussions with Jack Diamond [of Diamond + Schmitt Architects Inc., the firm responsible for the design of the theater], we said, “Okay, we could have an open stage—a room in which we could do the play without scenery. We could also turn that into a thrust theater by moving some of the seats, or if we really wanted scenery, we turn that room into a proscenium.” So we have a proscenium, and a thrust stage, and an open stage, which gives us a real opportunity to use scenery, to not use scenery, to just use lights and props or to do full sets, to put the audience in different places.

We were also interested in making the theater available to other organizations for dance, chamber music, opera, and spoken word performances, so the acoustics of the house became very important and had a great deal to do with how the room is built. So both the desire for it to be very transformable for plays but also acoustically perfect for other kinds of art—those have really been the two defining things about how the space was created and what it’s made out of.

MM: How did the design of the new theater develop over time?

MK: Originally the theater was going to be in another part of the building. It wasn’t going to be on the street; it wasn’t going to be seen. And Jack, by reorganizing some of the structure, convinced the base building architects [SmithGroup] that this building would be better if the theater were on the ground, in the front. We actually assumed that we would have to be on the side and you wouldn’t see us from the street. So the architect completely transformed that, and I think to everyone’s huge satisfaction.

MM: Are there any plans to redo the Lansburgh Theatre once Sidney Harman Hall opens?

MK: We don’t own the Lansburgh—I think at the moment, it will stay as it is. The designers of the Lansburgh [Graham Gund Architects, now known as GUND Partnership], in making a sort of very modern version of the horseshoe at the Globe, really made a truly intimate theater that is wonderful for Shakespeare. One of the important things I said to Jack Diamond was, even though the new theater is twice as big, the relation to the audience and the actor cannot be any further away.

MM: Is the Shakespeare Theatre Company exploring any new strategies for presenting plays?

MK: I think we will all find ourselves becoming involved in one way or another with new technology. We are talking about plays incorporating interactive things with people at home—for example, setting little cameras on actors so people at home can actually watch Hamlet from different characters’ perspectives, and during the performance they can choose how they want to look at the play. We have talked about doing, say, Antony and Cleopatra, in which the Rome scenes would be filmed at another stage, and the Egypt scenes would be on our stage, and audiences in both cities would be connected to the play. We have a lot of ideas about how things could change with the use of technology in our spaces. It’s probably a couple of years into our future—first we want to get the new theater up.

MM: Has your experience with the Sidney Harman Hall influenced your thinking about the physical environment for plays?

MK: We interviewed quite a lot of architects to talk about ideas, but before I even met them I had to think about what a 21st-century Shakespeare theater might be like. I am sure that many other people have lots of other feelings, and I think your exhibition is actually going to make me go, “Why didn’t we do that? Why didn’t we think of that?” But it was a very interesting exercise for me to say, “I have my freedom here, within the confines of the footprint of the building. What could happen?” It was interesting because one of the reasons that we made the choice of the architect that we did was because I felt so simpatico with Jack, who was actually very interested in listening to what I thought might be possible. I know a lot about architects, and there are some brilliant architects who don’t necessarily talk to the client, and the client often gets a fantastic building, but we needed somebody who really could connect with the visions that we had and move them forward. Jack has done that in a wonderfully collaborative way. It’s been a pretty extraordinary relationship. •

 

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