![\"\"](\"http:\/\/www.boulderblueline.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/gordon-wickstrom-as-king-lear-sm.jpg\" "\\"gordon")
<\/a>The author as King Lear in a photo he calls “Hands” with Edgar on bottom and the fool on top<\/p><\/div>\n
By virtue, then, of this authority vested in me, I embark on what is certain to be a discursive and altogether anecdotal address to the cloud above us.<\/p>\n
Let me say that my immediate impulse to let this fly is the front-page article in the Sunday Camera<\/em> for May 26, 2013 to the effect that the Colorado Shakespeare Festival at the university is off and running to what may be fiscal solvency and integration into the greater life of the university.<\/p>\n I should be glad\u2014and I am\u2014but not without a nagging uneasiness, if not worry, about what may be going on beneath this new optimism. The festival\u2019s new management and the new dean of the college are determined to knit the study and use of Shakespeare intimately into the intellectual and cultural mission of the university. That ought to be everyone\u2019s good news. But is that all? Why is it not already so knit?<\/p>\n There is indeed a subtext to this article, intent as it is on being so up-beat, that has become all too clear. It is that Shakespeare<\/em> is, in fact, no longer an intimate or central presence in the education and cultural consciousness of our time<\/em>\u2014and place at the university. We are losing him and must somehow, by some artful or decanal magic, try to work him back into our lives at least here in Boulder.<\/p>\n If, of course, we can afford it.<\/em><\/p>\n This is cause for real worry, and it\u2019s national, not wrought exclusively in Boulder. Were things as they should be, we should find Shakespeare shot though the life of the whole university, any university; and an annual production or festival should be the expression and celebration of that immense presence.<\/p>\n Instead, the Dean of the college and the director of the festival must try to set back-fires against the steady demise of Shakespeare in our lives<\/p>\n If they can afford it.<\/em><\/p>\n Who or what can prevent this loss in our lives? Who will always demand space for Shakespeare? The dean, who is intent, like most university administrators who administrate by being jolly good fellows, will back away from Shakespeare when the money fails. Alas, the public is no longer apt to demand Shakespeare, and the typical undergraduate on campus today will not miss what she does not know about in the first place. Shakespeare appears to be in steady decline in both the classroom and on the stage.<\/p>\n Who or what can save Shakespeare from oblivion?<\/p>\n Who? The actors!<\/em><\/p>\n The actors know their work; they know their material. And they know that their work and material begin and end in Shakespeare and the unmitigated joy that comes in acting those roles in those plays on stage, any stage, anywhere, any time. The players will keep Shakespeare before us, deans and the public and the box office notwithstanding.<\/p>\n It works like this:<\/p>\n Think for a moment of Hamlet, said by some to be the first modern man; think of him caught in a man-trap of unspeakable sorrow. What is the poor guy to do? Kill himself? Maybe\u2026.<\/p>\n But then, as though on historical cue, here come the players to Elsinore. Hamlet knows them, admires them, and they inspire him with a really bright idea. He asks the leading actor if they can play a classic, The Murder of Gonzago<\/em>? Of course they can and are at the ready. Hamlet asks if they can add \u201csome dozen or sixteen lines\u201d that he would \u201cset down\u201d for them\u2026. Of course they can!<\/p>\n And so, the performance of a classic drama with a bit of contemporary fixing gets performed in order to diagnose and expose a profound disease in the body politic of Elsinore. And it works<\/em>. Our lives are effectively dealt with.<\/p>\n That said, imagine some contemporary techie whose start-up has collapsed on him. In his despair he knows of some crazy, left-over performers and an even crazier play he once knew, and could those performers get it up and put it on? Of course they could, they have always had that play at the ready and will blast wide open the evils that have our techie near to killing himself.<\/p>\n We don\u2019t <\/em>know<\/strong> Hamlet; we are <\/em>in<\/strong> him.<\/em><\/p>\n The actors have always had this great stuff to act, are at the ready to act it, crazy to act it and for nothing if necessary, or for the pittance that deans provide them to come to the university to try to live, like sacrificial animals, to serve, asking only to act.<\/p>\n Actors are too strange for us.<\/em><\/p>\n Certainly too strange, with their strange secret life, for deans even to mention at formal occasions to celebrate the Colorado festival. Everybody gets thanked except the actors, they who by far have made the largest contribution and sacrifice to what we are urged to come to see and hear in the theatre. It embarrasses me.<\/p>\n An image from the 1961 production of King Lear<\/em>, with Ricky Weiser as Lear’s daughter Goneril<\/p><\/div>\n It is actors acting who will keep Shakespeare going.<\/em><\/p>\n I propose 1948 as the point year in my life at the university. I choose it perhaps because I was a veteran of the wars, returned home in \u201945 and to CU– and, as a rising junior in \u201948, got married, and came onto the stage of Mary Rippon as Leontes in Winter\u2019s Tale<\/em> directed by the festival\u2019s founder, Jack Crouch.<\/p>\n Summer nights back then, beginning in 1944, saw the production of first a single, then three of the plays in this unique theatre that never was intended to be a proper theatre. The audience was almost entirely local and intimately associated with the university. I mention this because there has been such an immense change in the audience. In those early days there were many more faculty in the audience, fewer young people out on a date under the stars, fewer tourists, and more regular folks just interested in Shakespeare. And it was strictly an amateur actors\u2019 theatre, coming as they did from within the university. There were no corporate sponsors to thank for saving Shakespeare.<\/p>\n I\u2019m certain that the standard of production back then was not the equal of the professional and pre-professional polish of the actors and the scenography of today. The university was much smaller and more insular. Faculty and students tended to know or at least recognize one another. There was about us, as though from a most distant galaxy, the faintest glow of a medieval quality in our intellectual, cultural life. Dare I call it a brotherhood? The university had not yet given itself over to the somber assurances and grants to the hard sciences. It still risked the arts.<\/p>\n I venture to think that, back then, the faculty were richer in general liberal learning<\/em> than they are in this new day of specialization in the \u201cresearch university.\u201d Back then, Shakespeare, whether we knew the plays or not, was assumed to lie at the very heart of any education. And so, there were those teachers of mine, sitting out on those hard stone benches, unassisted by any back support, our esteemed faculty. They had come to watch me make a pitiful stab at Falstaff and to tell me about it afterward. What an honor for me. And the deans came too. They were a more austere lot back then, in charge of traditions and standards as well as the purse. Few were ever the jolly good fellows of today.<\/p>\n Portal arches<\/p><\/div>\n Our playing space back then was still the original garden structure designed sui generis<\/em> of native sandstone filling a natural space between two beautiful academic buildings. It was there for its own sake, unintended for anything but its own loveliness. It was a complete work of architectural art in itself, meant for moments of repose, of quiet reflection, an accidental visit that can \u201cgive that thought relief,\u201d even eating one\u2019s sack-lunch. It came upon one with Keats\u2019s \u201cfine suddenness\u201d as one walked through one \u201cback stage\u201d arched portal on the way through the place to exit on the other side. It was a daytime, daylight, personal place to discover or go, often just to be alone, and not intended for conventional play-going. It was its own poetry in stone.<\/p>\n But Jim Sandoe \u201cdiscovered\u201d it, and, in a moment of inspiration, thought that it might just work for Shakespeare. He made it work with astonishing success, and no one has dared look back from that big idea\u2014until now.<\/p>\n Sandoe\u2019s productions and those of directors who followed him swept fully across the actor-busting, vast expanse of the \u201cstage,\u201d from alcove to alcove, front to deep, deep back, rather like panoramas<\/em> of the plays, rather than as they are today, insistently center focused on the huge raked disc. In those days, with Sandoe and Crouch, the text, the words, the playwright reigned supreme. They insisted on that.<\/p>\n Any scenic element \u201cbuilt\u201d into the garden, stone and verdant grass theatre was deeply resented by many who attended regularly. I was, I confess, the first to design and have built a \u201cthrust\u201d platform out over the \u201cpit\u201d at center stage. That was in 1961 for my Romeo and Juliet. The lovers died right down center on top of the audience. There were those who thought it a desecration.<\/p>\n An image from the program of Romeo and Juliet<\/em> directed by the author<\/p><\/div>\n We lacked most everything back then except our devotion to the plays and our audience.<\/p>\n I think that we must at last admit that Mary Rippon is a lovely but unfortunate performing space. I think there can be no theatre anywhere harder to get into and out of than Mary Rippon. Let alone walk to after finding a place to park one\u2019s car. And it is the most uncomfortable of theatres– for all the beauty of the moon and stars.<\/p>\n Every year the old faithful heads of the audience get whiter and whiter, and stumbling around those stone benches ever more perilous, and the struggle to get out at the end, through those two small doors at the back, simply awful. It was never meant to be. It pains me to say that, in spite of all who have loved this unique theatre-like structure, we have forced ourselves upon Mary Rippon: this memory of a primordial, archetypal performance space, that was once so beautiful.<\/p>\n To plead for the actors again, when Louis Jouvet was shown the huge and glittering new \u201ctheatre\u201d at the Palais de Chailllot in Paris, he pronounced it \u201ca device to destroy actors\u201d.<\/p>\n Mary Rippon may not destroy actors, but as a theatre building it will do them no good. It can teach a young actor bad habits as it did me. It is too vast a space into which to try to pitch Shakespeare\u2019s verse. It is a killer, and the recent advent of actors wearing mikes only affirms it.<\/p>\n 1940’s postcard of the Mary Rippon Theatre<\/p><\/div>\n And yet, I think it difficult for someone who was not there as I was, sixty-five years ago, to understand what it was like in American university life just after WWII when returning veterans flooded college classrooms\u2014and theatres.<\/p>\n The excitement, the drive, the high spiritedness, the craving for more (like actors wanting to act) was everywhere. We wanted to learn, to be told about the world in a way we had not dreamed of before, even when at war.<\/p>\n In such a light, in such a vein, in such a thrill, my wife and I watched our first Shakespeare ever, Sandoe\u2019s Henry IV, part I<\/em>. Much of it swept over our heads. But the gigantic importance of what was going on was unmistakable. It was revelation.<\/p>\n But now, how do we pitch the plays to people who speak mostly texting<\/em>English and no longer know anything of Shakespeare? Is the conviviality and immediacy of the social media compensation enough? Will students put down their hand-helds long enough for a lecture or a detailed three-hour performance\u2014with no shortcuts? Or will they remember, like Hamlet, some old play long enough to call up the ready actors to do them good with it?<\/p>\n I think, now, that we ought to have left Mary Rippon alone.<\/em><\/p>\n We can only regret that there was not from the beginning a university plan to put visionaries like Sandoe and Crouch in an apt device for performing Shakespeare.<\/em><\/p>\n I must come to an end, the end of this tirade. But how do I end? I wonder…. Certainly, I must say that the Colorado Shakespeare Festival was for me the professional springboard to advance whatever career I had. I am profoundly grateful.<\/p>\n I believe that the problems the festival has had over the years are not the fault of managing directors, stage directors, surely not the actors, nor even university administrators. All of them well-meaning and capable. They stem from a theatre facility of wrong design for the use to which we have put it. Over the years, I have been a voice in the wilderness crying out this indictment. Now, I venture to write it down.<\/p>\n At the same time, I need to say\u2014and this has become important to me\u2014that I have of late had to try to understand the work of those who would use Shakespeare far and wide from conventional productions of the plays. For instance, school kids in Denver can go on a rampage of joy through a holiday of the great dramatist\u2019s words and characters, making them their own<\/em>, right out in the streets. It makes me want to beg forgiveness for my snobbery. I recognize now that we are in the hands of Shakespeare, and have been all the time. He abides our question and uses us in endless ways of truth.<\/p>\n He is an enduring dimension of what it is to be human, and he will not be quiet and mind his own business, not with any actors around to act him.<\/p>\n It is not that we KNOW Hamlet but that we are IN him.<\/em><\/p>\n Perhaps that crazy mix of Denver kids in the streets can save us after all.<\/p>\n I am glad I have been roused from so long a slumber among the plays more or less strictly performed, to a new understanding that raising hell in the rough with Shakespeare may be another good way to skin his exquisite cat.<\/p>\n I want to think about Mary Rippon Theatre, that special, almost secret place locked between the wings of Hellems classrooms and Henderson Museum on the University of Colorado campus\u2014and now obscured under the scenic constructions for contemporary Colorado Shakespeare Festival productions.<\/p>\n Mary Rippon<\/p><\/div>\n This \u201cgarden theatre\u201d was named for the first woman to teach at the university, she who was so influential in its early development, a professor of German and philology, and a dean. Historian Silvia Pettem has shown her to be one of the great souls of her day. Professor Rippon died forgotten in Boulder in 1935 but was to be remembered in 1939, when this beautiful theatre structure was completed and named for her.<\/p>\n Another of the greatest of professors in the annals of the university, an international authority on Elizabethan drama and its production, George F. Reynolds was consulted by famed university architect, he of the \u201cTuscan Rural\u201d inspiration, Charles Klauber, about the theatre\u2019s arrangement.<\/p>\n That Professor Reynolds was consulted at all caused many to argue that Mary Rippon, because of its multiple acting areas, must therefore be a sort of latter day Elizabethan theatre. One has only to examine pictures of it as it once was\u2014or remember it as I do\u2014to see that it is far more Greek than English, far, far better suited for monumental dramas of Aeschylus than for the intimacies of Shakespeare. Mary Rippon reminds me of the Theatre at Epidaurus. Nothing of London.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/a><\/a><\/a>A Plague Upon This Howling<\/h2>\n
The Tempest<\/h2>\n
Part II<\/h1>\n
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