Love's Labour's Lit Transcript (023)

Love’s Labour’s Lit (10/9/19)

LISA LUDWIG: Hello, this is Lisa Ludwig, Executive Managing Director of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, one of the largest free outdoor Shakespeare festivals in the country. Our stage is located in a beautiful Olmsted park in Buffalo, New York, and we proudly just celebrated our 44th season of free Shakespeare. You are at the Point of Learning with Peter Horn, and hopefully you are going to learn everything you ever wanted—or didn’t want to know—about Shakespeare in Delaware Park and Love’s Labour’s Lost. Take it away, Peter!

PETER HORN [voiceover]: On today’s show we ask the 400-year-old question: Are you ready to get Shakespearienced? We’ll hear from actors who return year after year to this unique Buffalo festival …

REBECCA ELKIN: Shakespeare in Delaware Park is for everyone, and you feel that.

[VO]: We’ll hear how the magic started in 1976 …

SAUL ELKIN: He said very casually, “Who’s doing Shakespeare in Buffalo?” And I said, “Nobody really. The colleges do it, but nobody’s doing it professionally. He said, “Start something!” I said, “How do I start something?” He said, “Well, call the mayor.” I mean, I grew up in New York City. Calling the mayor meant calling Mayor LaGuardia!

[VO]: And why this happening is not quite like any other.

STEVE VAUGHAN: It is the only Shakespeare festival that I know of that doesn’t have a fence around it. All the other festivals throughout the country that I’m aware of, the audience’s experience is tightly controlled. You come in, you get into a line, you wait behind a gate. When they open the gate, you can come in and then they control the seating. It’s free still and they pass the hat, but there’s no spontaneous chaos like we have!

[VO]: We’ll hear from some of those who work hard to pull it off—

MELISSA LEVENTHAL: One of the joys about theater is that it’s live, and it shouldn’t be the same show from night to night. We had people that came to see the show five or six times, and I think every show that they saw was just a little bit different. And that’s because we always worked on these characters. We never left the feeling of it stop.

[VO]: —and some of why we believe it matters.

REBECCA: To give the gift to a small kid of their first experience with Shakespeare being one that is accommodating of their needs, and open and welcoming and fun and live. It’s just so cool!

[2:52]

[VO]: If you’ve listened to this show for a while, you know I’m fascinated by the power of theatre to engage and connect, to challenge and delight. Last February I showcased Epic Theatre Ensemble and its work to provide a platform for NYC high school students and their ideas about the world; in March of 2018, I talked with Oskar Eustis at the Public Theater about the ancient relationship between drama and democracy. If you haven’t heard this show in a while, it’s because I spent most of the summer collaborating with a group of talented actors, designers, musicians, directors, stage managers, and interns in what is now one of Buffalo, New York’s great public art traditions, Shakespeare in Delaware Park—specifically, working on a play called Love’s Labour’s Lost. If you’ve only seen or read a few Shakespeare plays, this probably isn’t one of them—nor should it be, probably. The main plot is four rich guys who swear off food, drink, and sex for three years, or until four rich French ladies show up, about 15 minutes later. There’s misplaced letters, love triangles, and wisecracking clowns of many kinds, plus a strange turn at the very end where a king that the audience never meets dies and so prevents the rich kids from getting married. So weird. Plus, there’s wordplay and puns that even this old English teacher isn’t quite sure he understood completely, even after hearing or saying them four dozen times. But none of that kept a seven-year-old girl in the audience from being spellbound the entire time. I’d say she was in the front row, except that this is Shakespeare in Delaware Park, so there aren’t rows per se. There are blankets and lawn chairs, coolers and cheese trays, and one or two thousand people who showed up to watch some free theatre in one of the most beautiful spots in the city. As founder Saul Elkin likes to say, someone once described this festival as a huge picnic where a play happens to be going on. The sun is just starting to set on the lake to your left, and overhead some geese are nudging each other into a proper V. Not everyone who finds themself on Shakespeare Hill on any given summer night in Buffalo planned to attend a play; sometimes runners or longboarders or strollers in the park’s gorgeous rose garden just float on over, attracted by the spectacle on stage—or, if they can’t see the stage yet, whatever it is this crowd has gathered to see. But this seven-year-old girl didn’t show up accidentally. Her folks got here early enough to stake out a spot just five feet from the stage. As an actor in the performance, I am totally thrilled by this kid who seems utterly captivated from the moment the live music starts, and the king and lords of Navarre arrive on stage to tell us about the oath of abstinence they’re about to take. You may guess I’m going to claim that this child was at the point of learning—in this case, learning Shakespeare. You’re right about that. But so, I think, were those of us on, and behind the stage, putting the play together. I want to spend this episode unpacking some of the magic of this unusual experience in theatre by introducing you to some of the people who made the magic happen, but before we get into that I also want to note that this summer adventure was particularly deep to me, as it bookended my first full year back in my hometown after 25 years in New Jersey. As a little kid, some of my first memories of Buffalo, New York took place on this hill, when my parents, who were called here in 1978 to serve First Presbyterian Church, brought my brothers and me to see Shakespeare in Delaware Park. My dad in particular loved Shakespeare. A year before he died in 1998, he came to see me play some minor roles in a college production of Hamlet. There were four performances in total, and he came to see all four. Of Hamlet: not a short play. I said, “Dad, you don’t need to come every night, you know.” He said, “Son, when you’re bored with Shakespeare, you’re bored with life.” There wasn’t a sunset this summer on that glorious stage that I didn’t remember his words. Let’s start with Rebecca Elkin.

[7:40]

REBECCA: My name is Rebecca Elkin, and I played the Princess of France in this production of Love’s Labour’s Lost.

[VO]: Rebecca knows a thing or two about being a kid on this hill …

REBECCA: Shakespeare in the Park is definitely my favorite place in the world. It has been since I was a tiny kid.

[VO]: … because it was her father who founded Shakespeare in Delaware Park.

REBECCA: I’m told when I was three months old, my mom and dad brought me to the Hill, and I guess my dad held me up, Lion King-style, to introduce the Hill to their new daughter.

[VO]: Even if you’re not a little Simba, you don’t need a ticket for this festival. There’s just a free-will donation, so if you can find a place to sit, you can see the show.

REBECCA: There is such a magic in being able to share what is special about Shakespeare in the Park with anyone who wants to be there—and not just the people that can afford a ticket to a play, or not just people that are used to, or comfortable being in a theater. It is unique because Shakespeare in Delaware Park is for everyone, and you feel that. Being a kid that grew up on Shakespeare in the Park, there is not a summer of my entire life—not just my childhood, my entire life—that I haven’t spent either as an audience member or on stage at Shakespeare in the Park, and that has such a huge impact on who I am as a person.

[VO]: During the school year, Rebecca works as a drama therapist with high school students in New York City.

REBECCA: One of my favorite things now when I go back is seeing kids on the Hill and seeing some that are glued to it, like I was as a little kid, but also some that put their attention on it and then go run around on the grass for a while on the side. And the fact that both of those things are totally okay and both are welcome—to give the gift to a small kid of their first experience with Shakespeare being one that is accommodating of their needs, and open and welcoming and fun and live, it’s just so cool! And my favorite moments when I’m in a show are when a little kid comes up to me and wants to ask questions or wants to take a picture, or just wants to connect and say that they like what they saw and they like being here.

[VO]: Let me speak as somebody who has taught Hamlet, for example, to 18 years’ worth of high school seniors: Shakespeare doesn’t always feel like a gift to young people.

[10:27]

STEVE: Many of us had to read Shakespeare in high school and, and truly there’s nothing worse. Maybe a root canal would be worse, but there’s not much worse than trying to read Shakespeare when you’re 16 years old.

[VO]: This is Steve Vaughan, who directed this year’s production of Love’s Labour’s Lost. Steve has taught at Niagara University, the Eastman School of Music, and directed many high school shows. He’s now at SUNY Fredonia, and works as a fight choreographer and director in theaters throughout Western New York. His style is a little unorthodox …

STEVE: There’s only two reasons for going to high school that I can think of. One is theatre, the other is football. Everything else is optional. That may be somewhat opposed to your perspective, but for me and my friends and for what I enjoy now, those are the only two reasons that I would even go.

[VO]: But his passion is sincere.

STEVE: The only thing I’ve ever wanted to do was direct plays—of that I am confident. You know, in all the bizarre things that I do in my life, that’s the thing that I could not live without.

[VO]: We are narrative creatures—suckers for stories—which is, I’ll bet, part of what that little girl is tracking, wide-eyed on her blanket. Steve sees the job of director as putting the story first. 

STEVE: One thing that I always work very hard for is to make sure that when people come to the Hill, they’re not going to be put off, or be afraid of, or get a bad taste in their mouth, or feel lectured to by the material.

[VO]: Steve believes if we do our work as a play on stage, people will have a much more pleasurable time watching than, say, reading it on their own. 

STEVE: It’s very difficult to wade through the imagery, the—I call it the linguistic gymnastics of Shakespeare and his ilk. It gets to be pretty tedious very quickly, but! someone who cares about the audience’s experience can take those words and bring them to life in a way that is totally understandable and totally accessible. And my job—at least the way I approach the work—is to guarantee that the audience has a good time and walks away with something to think about in their life as well as watching these old characters. One of the most fascinating things for me as a student of dramatic literature is to come to grips with the concept that we have not changed at all—a tiny fraction of a millimeter—as human beings since the Greeks began writing plays down. You study the Greek plays and you’ll see the same people that we are today: the same characters, the same character defects, the same spiritual joy, the grandiosity, the immortal side of all of us, the divinity in all of us. You will see those heroes, you will see those  villains from literature from 5,000 years ago. We say, “Oh well, we are so evolved. We have iPhones! We can take video on my telephone. We’re so much smarter!” We are nothing. We are nothing! We are exactly the same as man and woman 5,000 years ago. The plays are the same. The conflicts are the same. The joys, the sorrows, the fears—they are the same. It’s very important for me to make sure that when an audience member leaves Shakespeare Hill, they’re able to relate to that; they’re able to understand that “Wow! All those big fancy words, he’s just talking about: This guy hates that guy. That’s all we're talking about.” And so I work very hard to try to distill the language. I love the language. The language is beautiful and it is truly, truly inspired writing. But the story has to come first. And if the story is compelling, then the language takes on the beauty that I can understand, that I can accept. When we’re working in rehearsal, I will often stop and ask the actors, “Now so what are you saying? What is it that you’re trying to say? You’ve got this long string of adjectives and adverbs, but what does that mean? What is it you’re trying to say?” And I’ll make them tell me simply in, you know, two words, what are they trying to do, and then go back and insert that—intention is the acting word— “What is your intention?” Insert that intention to drive this string of poetry. The poetry comes from an intensified way of performing, an intensified way of feeling and loving life, so if a normal person would go, “Oh, that’s great,” a Shakespearian actor would have to go, “Forsooth! Magnanimous! Extraordinary!”

PETER: It’s the difference between “She’s hot!” and “O, but she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”

STEVE: Precisely. Very well said, thank you. Much better Shakespeare than mine, so thank you.

PETER: Well, I’ve got a podcast.

STEVE: It’s true. You would never get the kind of talking that we see on the Shakespeare stage, and in fact, in most theater. It is a heightened reality. It is bigger than life.

[VO]: Like many of Shakespeare’s plays, Love’s Labour’s Lost sets up a kind of contest between country life, represented by the servants, and life at court as lived by the Spanish playboys and ladies visiting from France. Steve himself came up a little bit country.    

STEVE: Where I grew up, we had a school farm. We milked cows and took care of the pigs and the chickens and horses. And so that, that I enjoyed. We got to drive tractors and fix tractors—that I enjoyed very much. But theatre and football, that was it; the rest was optional.

PETER: Where was that, growing up?

STEVE: This is Harford County, Maryland, right on the Mason-Dixon line, north of Baltimore.

PETER: Gotcha.

STEVE: And you know, the nearest neighbor was half a mile away. It just so happened where I grew up milking cows, there were a string of three- and four-boy families all within a two-mile radius. And so we had our own private army of boys who were all the same age, who used to hang out together and do the shows and play the sports and raise holy hell and terror in the neighborhood. We were monstrous juvenile delinquents, but country juvenile delinquents. It’s different than city juvenile delinquents. I’m doing West Side Story now, so I think of the city juvenile delinquents and the things that they would do compared to the things that we would do. Very different, very different growing up.

PETER: It’s true that cow tipping is not actually a thing, right?

STEVE: You can, but it’s really not anywhere near as fun as other activities, like driving pickup trucks through people’s lawns and shooting mailboxes with shotguns and—

PETER: Who needs baseball bats?

STEVE: No, we had shotguns and dynamite. We had dynamite—

PETER: [overlapping] Uh-huh. So I just want to get to the bottom of this. This is not going to be the—dynamite for the mailbox?

STEVE: Well, you use small pieces of dynamite.

PETER: Like your M-80?

STEVE: An M-80 or black powder. My father was a muzzle loader, so we always had black powder around the house, and we would steal small amounts of black powder until we had enough to make a nice bomb and blow things up—

PETER: —like a mailbox—

STEVE: —or Coke machines that robbed us … A lot of these things I’m not proud of, but at the time they were a teenage expressions of angst and anxiety.

PETER: Do you feel that this agrarian basis, your rural background—do you think it predisposed you to favor some of the country characters [in Love’s Labour’s Lost] as opposed to the royals? You did describe Jaquenetta, our milkmaid, as the only person [in the play] who actually does work.

STEVE: That’s correct. I think that Shakespeare was predisposed to the rural, to a pastoral lifestyle. If you study As You Like It, or even A Midsummer Night’s Dream, many times you’ll see that Shakespeare is decrying the terrible behaviors at court, the arrogance and the sophisticates at court, and the bumpkins come out on top in terms of their cleverness, their ability to cope, their serenity with life. I think the Shakespeare was totally drawn that way. And I suppose, now that I think about it—thank you for the question—I think I do the same; I think I’m drawn that way as well. I love the city. I love urban life for the sake of the arts , where I can hear a symphony or I can go to the library, an art museum, or see theatre. I just got back from New York City, where I spent four days there doing urban delights. But the first thing I did when I got back is went out into the woods and cut firewood, because I can’t—I could never live either place solely. I have to have trees and woods around me. I have to have solitude, and I also have to have the art of all humans, not just my own art. My own art is not sufficient to live a fulfilled life.

PETER: This actually could be a very nice segue because here with Shakespeare in the Park, you have a cultural offering that to a lot of people feels very highbrow—just the idea of a Shakespeare play, right?

STEVE: True.

PETER: But then you offer it in this most democratic of settings,  and it’s not just this beautiful outdoor setting, which is, you know, stunning. Getting to work in a theater when you watch the sun set on Hoyt Lake. And—

STEVE: And the geese!

PETER: Yes, the geese! I mean, you know that part is beautiful, but also it’s this very democratic experience where people can just come and show up. People who may not have any idea that a play is taking place, just they’re going for a walk or kind of exploring, and then they see this crowd, or they hear something and they come over, and they can just sit down and be part of it. There’s no waiting in line, there’s no ticket to get. If you can find a spot on the Hill, you can be there, which is one of the things that for me is most exciting about it, and I appreciate it in a different way as a performer this year.

STEVE: It is extraordinary. It is the only Shakespeare festival that I know of that doesn’t have a fence around it. All the other festivals throughout the country that I’m aware of, the audience’s experience is tightly controlled. You come in, you get into a line, you wait behind a gate. When they open the gate, you can come in and then they control the seating. It’s free still and they pass the hat, but there’s no spontaneous chaos like we have, when you know, when crazy people or people under the influence come staggering down the Hill—

PETER: Most of whom are not the actors—

STEVE: Most of whom are not the actors—

PETER: —in that show.

STEVE: Most of whom are not the actors in that show. That’s true. We’ve had streakers. Dogs escape, babies cry. We’ve had dogs get up on stage before. I remember once we had half of an audience that was full of Pokémon treasure hunters. I don’t know whether you know—

PETER: You mean like Pokémon Go?

STEVE: I don’t really understand it, but it’s some kind of treasure hunt where you look at your phone and the phone tells you where Pokémon are—whatever that means. And then you follow the treasure map around the city, and these, all these people were staring at their phone and wandering around in the park and all of a sudden, they looked up and were like, “Oh, there’s a play!” And they all sat down and started watching the play. Our theater is a hill in the park, wide open. And you know, whatever happens is what’s going to happen, so if you’re an actor in the show, you get used to dealing with the spontaneity of a live audience that is uncontrollable, which we make no attempt to control.

[VO]: Let’s meet some more of the actors who thrived in front of the park’s lively audience.

[24:59]

DAVID WYSOCKI: This is David Wysocki. I’m an actor playing the role of Lord Dumain in Love’s Labour’s Lost. I was performing in a space for an audience that was on a wider, massive scale. And when you’re performing outdoors, it’s just incredible. The audience—you’ll always see the audience, from the late afternoon until the dark of night. It was intimidating because they were present there, but also exciting because you get to continuously get their involvement and their interaction, and their reaction is just thrilling.

MELISSA LEVENTHAL: My name is Melissa Leventhal. I played Jaquenetta in Love’s Labour’s Lost, otherwise known as the country wench.

[VO]: You heard Steve and me reference the milkmaid Jaquenetta during our conversation. To prepare for a role that’s part love triangle/part clown, Melissa drew inspiration from everything from commedia dell’arte to Stephen Sondheim musicals. Commedia dell’arte was a fad in Italian theatre 300 to 400 years ago, but its stock characters—its go-to characters, its straight-from-Central-Casting characters—still feel lively. For further examples, consult your sitcom of choice. 

MELISSA: I took a look at some stock commedia dell’arte characters, in particular the Colombina character. She is the harlequin’s mistress, so she’s one of the servants and one of the clown characters in commedia. And I took what I had learned from Niagara University when I had to take the physical theatre classes, and we studied commedia and how to portray stock characters like that to focus on how to portray Jaquenetta. Petra from Sondheim’s A Little Night Music: she has a song called “The Miller’s Son,” and to me that kind of embodied the essence of Jaquenetta’s character, which was to enjoy all of the men that she was able to, because life is too short and too sweet to waste it. Life’s meant to be enjoyed.

[VO]: Melissa knows what she’s doing on a big stage.

MELISSA: So historically I was originally trained for large theatre, and the use of facial expressions, and especially makeup, is a little bit different. When you’re working with a large stage, you have to be a little more pronounced. And I just really enjoyed the entire experience. Jaquenetta was just fun and flirty, and the way that she was portrayed as someone that enjoyed life in all of its shapes and forms is something pretty remarkable. To be a plus-size actress in particular, showing the body positivity, which I think is very important in today’s society, and was also very important to me, too. To be able to portray someone that’s not, you know, a stereotypical “beauty,” if you will, or size—to be shown as something worth desiring. It’s very important to me, and a privilege and an honor to be able to portray that as well. [Charles Wahl, singing as Moth: By this you shall not know/ For still her cheeks possess the same/ Which native she doth owe.] It was an absolute joy to work with everyone on this show. The level of professionalism, and the level of fun that we had as a cast was pretty unique. And we never let anything get really stale. We tried not to. It’s very important, I think, as an actor to continue to work and develop your character even on your 22nd show as much as you are on opening night, and trying to find different things that you can play with, and feeling the audience and being engaged with them and with your fellow actors on stage and what they’re doing. It’s a treat. It’s a treat to work with people that don’t let the work get stale, because it shouldn’t. One of the joys about theater is that it’s live, and it shouldn’t be the same show from night to night. We had people that came to see the show five or six times, and I think every show that they saw was just a little bit different. And that’s because we always worked on these characters. We never left the feeling of it stop.

[VO]: In a minute we’ll hear from the founder of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, but before that, one last actor, who played Don Armado, another Shakespeare creation based on the commedia character Capitano, a guy who talks tough but doesn’t really like to fight. Involved in the love triangle with my character, the wry jester called Costard, Don Armado won the affection of Jaquenetta every night for the three and a half weeks we performed, but I bear him no ill will. In fact, I’m grateful he takes up the question actors may get asked most often: “How do you learn all those lines?” 

[30:36]

TOM LOUGHLIN: Hi, my name is Tom Loughlin, and I played a Don Adriano de Armado. I think what I had to learn in order to do Love’s Labour’s Lost was not so much learn something new but relearn something I thought I already knew how to do. I’m the oldest cast member and I’ve noticed that as my career has progressed through the years, one of the things I have trouble with now is learning lines. When I was a younger actor, I used to be able to go to rehearsals and go to blocking rehearsals and rehearse the dialogue with my fellow actors. And then when the time came to drop the scripts, the lines would just be there, without any further effort on my part. But I have noticed that as I’ve gotten older, the brain doesn’t fire the same way. The brain cells don’t have as quick a little mechanism in their synapses, so I’ve had to make an effort to relearn how to learn lines. The trick that I picked up perhaps one or two shows ago is recording my lines along with somebody else so that I would record an entire scene. Someone else would read all the lines of the other characters in the scene and I would read my own lines, and I would record that scene and then play it over, listen to it, and I was able to do other things. I was never very good at cold memorization, which is just looking at the script, reading the lines, trying to memorize them, putting the script down, trying to say them out loud, reading the script, and so on. That always frustrated me. But this way I can take them, listen to them, I can hear the scene, I can hear the other parts being read to me and I can say my own minds over the recording that I have checked for any errors and continue on. And this helped me a lot in Love’s Labour’s Lost, because I actually came into rehearsals a week late, so I had to come in with my lines pretty much already memorized to keep with my fellow actors. In terms of the rehearsal process, it’s a part of aging. Your brain doesn’t fire very well. You forget where you put your keys on and so forth. And in my case, it’s a matter of where I put that line. But this process has been a real big help to me in relearning how to learn lines.

[33:00]

[VO]: Let me take a quick intermission to say that if you’re just joining us, it’s probably because the driver couldn’t stop listening to Point of Learning just because they picked you up. I don’t blame them, frankly. These are important ideas, carefully curated. If you like what you hear, please take a moment to subscribe, rate, review, or share this podcast with somebody you know curious about what and how and why we learn. You’ll be able to fit it in because I can only produce a show every 6 or 8 weeks. They take a while to make because my goal is that whenever you listen to it, it’s the best thing you heard that day. That’s the goal, anyway! Highlights from my interview with founder Saul Elkin are coming right up, but let me suggest that if you like this peek behind the theatre curtain, you might also like episode 019 about Epic Theatre Ensemble and episode 011 from the Public Theater in New York City. So how did the magic begin? Meet Saul Elkin.

[34:10]

SAUL: Whatever it might be when it begins, by the time the sun begins to go down and the city noises begin to abate, it becomes a theatre. And if you’ve had the experience as an audience of seeing Shakespeare or if not, suddenly you are invested in ways you weren’t—maybe you were worrying about picnic that you brought. Maybe you were worrying about getting the bottle of wine you brought open, but by the time we get to a certain point in the play, we’re all in a theater together, and the quality of attention to these plays has been extraordinary, I think. You would think in the park, in the open air, with a diverse audience, that it would be difficult—but it’s not. Things get quiet and things get very focused as well.

[VO]: Last month I got to sit down with Saul Elkin, actor, director, and giant of the theater scene in Buffalo. In 1976, when he founded Shakespeare in Delaware Park, he was a professor and chair of the theatre program at the University at Buffalo. Forty-four seasons later, he’s still the artistic director of the festival; he directed The Tempest earlier this summer, for example.  When I asked him to share some background about the origins of Shakespeare in Delaware Park, I assumed that it had been inspired in part by Joe Papp, the visionary founder of not only the Public Theater in NYC but also the New York Shakespeare Festival, now most often called Shakespeare in the Park. Joe Papp’s festival began in 1954, some two decades before Shakespeare in Delaware Park, so I assumed there was some kind of Papp connection—but I had no idea that Saul had once auditioned for Papp.

SAUL: For a production of Richard III. I had no idea that George Scott had been precast and I thought certainly it’s—

PETER: George C. Scott? That George Scott?

SAUL: Yes, that one, that George Scott. And I thought for sure that the part was open and I could do it. I had called for an appointment for an audition, and I was told to come to that little outdoor theater at the foot of Grand Street in Manhattan.

[VO]: This was before the New York festival moved to the Delacorte Theater in Central Park, which opened in 1962.

SAUL: I was told to memorize a two-minute speech, which I did. So I took something from  Richard III, needless to say. There were about 20 people then my name was called. [Joe] Papp was sitting there, and a couple of other people. I did the speech, I started to go, and he said, “Wait a minute.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s a good sign.” He said, “Sit down.” So I did. “Tell me something about yourself,” he said. So we began to chat and it turned out that we were both Jewish, we were both the children of immigrant parents. It got very warm, and the more we talked, the more I thought, “This is going somewhere really terrific!” And finally at the end of which he said, “You know, I think I can offer you a non-speaking role.” And  my heart sank, and I said, “Can I get back to you?” I don’t know if anybody in the history of Joe Papp’s existence as a producer ever said to him, “Can I get back to you?”

[VO]: He never did get back to Joe. Saul already had an acting gig lined up in Vermont for the summer, so he took that, and avoided making the call to tell Joe he wasn’t interested in the non-speaking part. 

SAUL: Flash forward about 12 years. I’m now a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon, and I’m told that we’re going to have guest lecturers for this one course I’m taking, a course called Problems in Theatre Production. And there are about a dozen of us sitting around a table and in walks the chair of the department with Joe Papp, who was the first lecturer. And I thought, “He can't possibly remember me. There’s no way he can remember me.” So he invites us all around the table to introduce ourselves. And I do, very quickly. And he says, “Wait a minute. I know you, don’t I?” And I said, “No, I don’t think so.” “You were going to get back to me,” he said. Now this is 10 years later.

PETER: Wow.

SAUL: And I said, “I’m sorry, Joe. Something came up.” And we got very friendly. And eventually, when I decided to do a PhD dissertation on Shakespeare, there was no one in the department who felt ready to do that, to take that on with me. And the chair suggested Joe Papp. So he was back in New York, but at this point I talked to him on the phone and he said, “Yeah, I’ll do it. I’ll do it, but I won't come to Pittsburgh. You’ll have to come to New York.” And I said, “That’s cool.”

[VO]: Joe Papp advised Saul on his dissertation, and as if the two directors were starring in some Shakespearean buddy flick, years after the awkward start at the audition, they become friends. Saul earns his PhD from Carnegie Mellon and starts at UB in 1969. A few years later, Joe calls to ask whether Saul might be interested in taking a crack at a new play by Myrna Lamb called Apple Pie, loosely based on the life of Bess Myerson, the first and—as of this taping—only Jewish Miss America (I know!). Myerson later served in NYC government and on several presidential commissions.

SAUL: Anyway, he sent me the play. I liked it. I produced it here in Buffalo with local actors. He came to see it. He loved it;  he eventually produced it in New York, not with me directing it, but somebody else. But I knew that would happen. While he was here for the final rehearsals, we went out to have a drink together. And he said, very casually, because he had helped me do this Shakespeare dissertation, “Who’s doing Shakespeare in Buffalo?” And I said, “Nobody really. The colleges do it, but nobody’s doing it professionally. He said, “Start something!” I said, “How do I start something?” He said, “Well, call the mayor.” And I thought, “That’s sort of interesting.” I mean, I grew up in New York City. Calling the mayor meant calling Mayor LaGuardia! The very idea of calling the mayor was beyond me. I said, “Well, what do I say?” He said, “Tell him you want to start a Shakespeare festival!”

[VO]: It seems that Joe Papp’s take on Better Call Saul was Saul Better Call. A week later, Saul calls the Hon. Stanley Makowski, who served as Mayor of Buffalo from 1974 to 1977. 

SAUL: And here’s the interesting thing about Buffalo. I called and got his secretary to ask for an appointment. She put me right through to him, which is rare. I mean, this will happen in no other city, and I was unprepared. “How can I help you, professor?” he said. And I said, “Well, I’m interested in starting a Shakespeare festival and uh, I’d like to come in and talk about it.” He said, “How about next week?” And I had really thought very little about it, but I said, “Yes, of course!” We made a date. At that point I took a walk in Delaware Park and I found that hill, and I thought, “This is the spot!”

PETER: Wow.

[VO]: Buffalo audiences for this episode know full well what a gorgeous setting this is, the spot Saul imagined that day as what might become Shakespeare Hill, but if you haven’t visited yet, the park was designed just after the Civil War by the same dream team of landscape artists, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, who had designed Central Park in New York City just before the Civil War. Aight, back to Professor Elkin and Mayor Makowski. 

SAUL: So I went in, I marched into the mayor’s office with semi-plan, and he liked it. And he was very clear to say, “We can’t give you any money, but we’ll give you all the help we can.” And you know, for 44 years, the city has been very, very helpful. They store our stage, they truck it to the park for us, they pay the electric bill. … But immediately we got audiences. I mean the very notion of doing Shakespeare in a beautiful park … and that location attracted people. And so my plan was to do one year. I was teaching acting at UB and I thought, “This is a way to teach classical acting without offering the course in the academic year.” Which is exactly what happened. Most of the actors were stude nts. I used the money that I would normally have used to hire a summer faculty to hire actors. I had auditions both here and in New York, and I hired a core of professional actors. I started with The Winter’s Tale. I was afraid to do one of the more popular plays. I was afraid to do Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet because everybody would know it. So the plan was to choose to play that nobody knew, and that turned out very well. And we did a very interesting production of The Winter’s Tale. Lots of people came, and we went on to a second year, and then a third. And here we are, forty-four years later.

[VO]: In the early days, the festival had a reputation for edgy productions. For example, here’s Saul on Hamlet [1977, Season II] influenced by a production that Joe Papp had directed in New York City.

SAUL: That Hamlet was my first shot at really taking the play in a direction one would not expect with Shakespeare. When Hamlet first appeared, a coffin was wheeled on stage, and the lid flipped open, and Hamlet sat up wearing earphones, with pictures of the Beatles inside the coffin. The coffin was wheeled to the foot of a bed in which Claudius and Gertrude were sleeping. I directed it and also played the Ghost [of Hamlet’s father, King Hamlet] in Hamlet. I did a couple of things where Hamlet sat in my lap and I was a ventriloquist: I did the speech, and Hamlet would move his mouth. We had a rock band. We got to the end of the play in rehearsal and I realized that we couldn’t end with swords because we were very modern; that somehow that final scene in Hamlet—where Hamlet duels Laertes and they both die—had to be done another way.  So I invented a duel with pistols, a duel that was sort of like Russian roulette. And then it boiled down to one pistol that Hamlet had, and he would hand it to people. There was one bullet in the revolver, and he would turn it so that people would point at people and it would either shoot or not shoot. And it boiled down to the stage was littered with bodies except Hamlet. And he needed somebody to play Russian roulette with him. So I had him go out into the audience every night and he found somebody who was willing to come up onto the stage and shoot him. And as he brought the person onto the stage, he explained what that person had to do. He gave the person the pistol, stood him over on stage left. He went over to stage right. He said, “Okay, point.” He had turned the revolver so that the gun wouldn’t go off. The guy pointed the pistol at Hamlet—click, click, click—it didn’t go off. Hamlet thanked them very much, took the pistol from him, walked him back to his seat, ran back onto the stage, tripped,  and the gun went off! Confetti, and the orchestra played. And Hamlet said, “the rest is silence,” and the play ended that way. So it was very popular with young people. There were young people who came again and again to see this version of it. And it sort of led me into doing a variety of things with the plays that I’m not sure I would do anymore. You know, in a way, I went through a period where every crazy idea, we did. If there was an actor in the [company] who said, “Why don’t we try this?” I would say, “Let’s try it!” And then somewhere along the line, I began to think maybe I should trust the plays a little bit more. Maybe I don’t need to fiddle with them the way I have been. And I remember my wife saying, “Why don’t you do the plays that were written, so they get off your back?” There were letters to the editor about why I was fooling with Shakespeare. So in recent years, the plays I’ve directed, the other plays that we’ve done have tended to stay closer to the script, to the plays that Shakespeare wrote.

[VO]: One of the features of the festival that Saul instituted at the start was the internship, a kind of apprentice role for student actors. It’s changed over the years, but internship is still very much a feature of Shakespeare in Delaware Park. This year nine extraordinary young people helped to make the shows happen, on and offstage. Most were in high school; Vince had just finished 8th grade.  

[47:20]

VINCENT CONNOR MURPHY ROBISON: Hello, my name is Vincent Connor Murphy Robison, but you can call me Vince, Vinny … I’ve been working at Shakespeare in Delaware Park as an intern for two years. And what an intern does is more or less, you know, take care of the stage. We prep the stage, we take stuff on and off, and occasionally we’ll have small parts [in the show]. And I’ve been working as an actor, so to say, since I was in fifth grade, and I’m 14. I was inspired to really start acting by Shakespeare in Delaware Park. When I saw them in it, I was like, “Why can’t I do that?” And I decide to start, you know, doing small parts in the fifth grade when I first had the chance, but now I’m working with Shakespeare in Delaware Park, and it’s good because, you know, they’re giving me a chance to really work with professionals. And that being on my resume can help me with getting other professional work. But really what the interns do other than prepping the stage, taking stuff on and off and having small parts is that about two o’clock at [SUNY Buffalo State College] Tuesday through Friday, we take classes on acting about like improv, punctuation, and other great stuff. And traditionally on the last Friday of each show, we put on a show of our own at about six o’clock but however, this year we have to do it on Saturday the 17th.

[VO]: The interns’ show last month was particularly fine—they did a one-hour version of Two Gentlemen of Verona, and all of us in the audience nearly lost our damn minds they were so good. All the live music—or more precisely, music recorded live—from LLL was taped for this podcast (with permission from the composers—full credits at the end) by the man who did all the live sound from the show, Tyler Furniss. It’s part of the curse of audio engineers that most people only notice their work when something doesn’t work, like a crackly mic, or sound that suddenly drops out. But their expertise and dedication are essential if anybody’s going to hear any actor in a park that is pretending to be a theater! 

[49:47]

Hi, my name is Tyler Furniss, and I am the soundboard operator for this season of Shakespeare in Delaware park. What that means is I control all the microphones and the sound effects for the actors and the musicians. Anything that goes through the speakers is in my hands. The main thing I’ve had to adapt to is just the fact that it’s outdoors. This is the first outdoor theater I’ve worked in, and it poses a lot of new challenges. If you know a thing or three about electronics and microphones, you’ll know they don’t like being wet, they don’t like humidity, they don’t like static electricity, and all these things really fight against you when you’re working outdoors. So in this theater more than any other that I’ve worked in, it’s very important to have a backstage crew that’s gonna work with you and communicate with you when things go wrong.

[VO]: I’m so glad as well to have a representative from our amazing stage management team, because too many theatergoers (and more than a few actors) don’t really understand how critical the stage management, or SM, role is. 

NATALIE MORROW: Hello, my name is Natalie Morrow. I’m the stage manager for Love’s Labour’s Lost in Shakespeare in Delaware Park. This means during rehearsal, I do a lot of communicating, recording, and organizing. During the show, I’m in charge of everything onstage and backstage, and one of my main jobs during performance is to maintain the show and keep morale up after the director leaves.

[VO]: Natalie is studying Stage Management at SUNY Purchase.

NATALIE: The park runs very differently than the commercial theater model I’m taught at school.

[VO]: Natalie learned the importance of proofreading emails. Raise your hand if you’ve been there! Every night after rehearsal the SM writes a rehearsal report that goes to the directors and sometimes the designers. So this one time she sends out a rehearsal report before reading it carefully. 

NATALIE: I wrote, “We’re getting rid of the entire set.” Period. And I just sent it out, just like that.

[VO]: By her own account, this was close to accurate.

NATALIE: We did get rid of all of our set furniture, except for a few chairs and a table, but set furniture is not the same thing as the entire set.

[VO]: Realizing what she had done the next morning, she immediately emailed the set designer and the technical director, writing something like—

NATALIE: “Please, please, please tell me you have not demolished the set yet. We will be keeping the set. Here’s what's going on …”

[VO]: I was delighted that Natalie chose this rare misstep to share, because it really does stand as an outlier against the extraordinarily high-caliber work she and the rest of the SM team did before, during, and after the run of the show. To return one last time to our 7-year-old on the blanket riveted to the show, I’ve suggested that she connects with the free-wheeling spectacle, with the efforts to make our story understandable and to sell this old language as fresh. After all she’s 7, so she’s at a great age to encounter Shakespeare. She’s used to hearing grownups say things she doesn’t understand completely. She can roll with it in ways that older people who are a little more anxious tend to find difficult. But she also likes to laugh. Everybody needs to. Send in the clowns!   

NICK LAMA: I think we had the best job this summer.

[VO]: That was Nick Lama, who played a Keystone Cops-style constable named Dull. Here’s Charlie Wahl, who played Don Armado’s servant, called Moth.  

[53:30]

CHARLIE WAHL: You gotta laugh, especially in today’s age. You need a distraction. You know, hopefully people are aware of their surroundings and what’s going on and what’ s going on in the world, especially now. It’s not good right now. Hopefully it gets better, that’s for sure. But you know, especially with our phones, we’re just all looking at our phones constantly and just on social media. And I don’t think that we’re equipped to—I don’t think we as humans are equipped to know all the bad stuff that we know on a daily basis that comes up on social media. Because we didn’t have that access before and now, just so many bad things pop up all the time. That probably happened before, but you didn’t know about it. Not to mention the state of the world right now, which is also just awful and you need a distraction from it. So yeah, you gotta find the things that make you laugh. You gotta find—Drama is great for entertainment also because it makes you feel, but comedy, you need it. Whether it’s a comedy podcast or a comedy TV show or a night at the theater, which I hope we provided people some laughs. I think that’s just so important in 2019.

[VO]: Shakespeare’s comic characters, some of whom are full-on clowns, play an important role. Here’s Nick again.

NICK: They were the characters that oftentimes playgoers most related to. They were the ones who translated what was happening to the audience, which is why the clowns were the ones who talked to you, who came out to you eye to eye, who came out onto the Hill. They made sure that everybody was on the same page.

[VO]: Back to Charlie for the last word.

CHARLIE: You know, I think our role as clowns to make the people laugh—to make the people onstage and offstage laugh—to do that, to achieve that well, you have to have a very tightknit cast; you have to have a cast that has chemistry. I think that we really did have chemistry for this show. It was a joy to do the show because of the cast, because of the people that were involved, and we became close just by, you know, yourself [Peter], me, Nick, Tom Laughlin, who plays Don Armado. We just fooled around a lot backstage and we really became close by joking around and having fun and just improv-ing off of each other all the time.

[VO]: Our show closed each night with this ballad of Spring and Winter, so here’s a taste of that. You’ve heard Nick talk, but have you heard him sing?  

[Nick singing as Constable Dull: When daisies pied and violets blue,/ And lady-smocks all silver-white,/ And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue/ Do paint the meadows with delight,/ The cuckoo then on every tree/ Mocks married men; for thus sings he:/ “Cuckoo! Cuckoo!” O word of fear,/ Unpleasing to a married ear.]

[VO]: That’s it for today’s show. My great thanks to Steve and Saul, and all those who shared some of their experience working on this play. A full list of cast and crew is posted on the show page for this episode. Special thanks to the musicians, including Randy Andropolis and Jay Wollin who wrote the music for Love’s Labour’s Lost, and Jay Wollin, Keith Galantowicz, and John Landis who performed it, with singing by Charlie Wahl, Tom Loughlin, and Nick Lama, supplementary guitar by Tom Loughlin, and extra fiddle from Charlie and me. Above and beyond went Tom Makar, who let me use music he composed and recorded for previous Shakespeare in Delaware Park productions of Romeo and Juliet, As You Like It, Richard III, Henry the IV, Pt. 1, and Comedy of Errors, not to mention his original remix of “Weight of the World” by Shayfer James to start us off. If you’re in Buffalo, you can hear Tom Makar playing original songs and inspired covers the first Wednesday of every month at Mister Goodbar. Thanks finally to you for listening and spreading the word about Point of Learning, written, recorded, mixed, and edited by me, Peter Horn, right here in God’s Country, Buffalo, New York. Back at you just as soon as I can with more ideas about what and why and how we learn.