November 10, 2022 • 36 mins
The year is 1849, and a riot at a Shakespearean theater has left dozens of people dead. But as it always is with the Bard, there's more here than meets the eye. Why did some people think Shakespeare was important enough to die for? How did the work of one man writing in Victorian England capture the tensions brewing in a newly independent America? And who, if anyone, is Shakespeare really for?
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. If I asked you to close your eyes and
tell me what Shakespeare sounds like in your mind? What
kind of sound would you hear tapping of a pen
on a paper? Oh yeah, yeah, just like thinking of
you know, in the scribble of like an old fountain
pen writing like it's very sharp sounding. And if someone
(00:36):
were speaking his lines, what would they sound like to you?
I feel like he would have an English accent. Yeah,
probably English was even English. He was English, Okay, yeah,
not American. Wouldn't sound America, Yeah, I mean it could
have been like super proper English, Like what if an
english Man would say, like a scholar? Can you imagine
a time in America where people would be willing to
die over Shakespeare? I believe in disagreement. I think it's
(00:59):
a good thing. I think people should test their views
and talk to other people and so long. So violence,
we draw the line violent not violence. It's hard to
imagine that art could inspire people to a violence like that.
It's true there was a time in America when Shakespeare
(01:23):
was important enough to die for the year eighteen forty nine.
America has been independent for less than a century. The
place New York City than just like now, it's the
great melting pot of American life. English culture still looms large,
especially in upper class New York, but there's also a
(01:47):
huge Irish population, heavily working class, and they loathe the
English and everything they represent. Theater is the popular art
form of the day. Rich people, poor people, refine rough
Everybody loves to go see a performance, and there's a
lot of Shakespeare for sure. Downtown. The greatest American actor
(02:14):
of the day is at work. His name is Edwin Forrest.
He was born in Philadelphia, just like the country, and
he's a living, breathing symbol of the American spirit. He's
big and handsome, athletic and virile, and he's famous for
a physical acting style that people find unbelievably lifelike. Forrest
(02:37):
is in residence playing Shakespeare and other roles at the
Broadway Theater on New York's lowery Side. He's famous for
his Macbeth. Is this a dagger which I see before me?
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
A few blocks north, the Astor Place Opera House is
(02:57):
waiting for a Macbeth of its own. The famous English
actor William Charles McCready is on an international tour, and
he happens to be Forest's greatest eval. McCready is everything
Forest is not classical, elegant, a little fragile, a little
effeat pity like a naked new Ball. Babe shall be
(03:25):
the horrid deed in every eye. DearS shall drown the wind.
He's got a following two, the uptown crowd, and certainly
not Forest's Irish fan base. The opera house is brand new,
its tickets are really pricey, and its vibe is deliberately posh.
(03:46):
It's intended for the Tufts, the upper class New Yorkers
who are ritzier than the folks on Lower Broadway. McCready
is known for his Hamlet, and for one moment of it,
in particular, at the point in the play when Hamlet
announces that he's going to feign madness, McCready takes out
a big handkerchief and he does this crazy dance. English
(04:09):
audiences go nuts. Forrest sails to England to see it,
and he gets himself a prime seat at McCready's theater.
When the handkerchief dance comes along, Forrest stands up and
he starts hissing loud. The feud is on. It is
(04:30):
a tale told by an idiot, a tale told by
an fully sound and fury full of signify Signify. I'm
(05:01):
Barry Edelstein, artistic director of the Old Globe in San Diego,
one of the countries leading Shakespeare theaters, and this is
where there's a will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and
Pushkin industries. Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of
unexpected places and asks what he's doing there and what
his presence means about him and about us. My companion
(05:25):
on this search for Old William is a friend and
colleague with their own deep interest in Shakespeare. M Weinstein.
M's a director and writer who works on television and
film and stage, and Shakespeare has been a big part
of their life. Hey am, Hey Barry, thanks for having me.
This Forest McCready rivalry is really juicy stuff. People don't
(05:50):
know much about it or about how much Shakespeare meant
at that time. So the Forest and McCready thing gets it.
Something that's been a theme through my thirty year career
working on Shakespeare in America, something that you and I
have discussed a lot, and that is the notion that
there is such a thing as an American Shakespeare, and
(06:11):
that American Shakespeare has a purity and a truth and
a power all its own. I'm right there with you, Barry,
and that notion isn't unique to us or to our
moment in American culture. It feels like theatermakers started searching
for it from the very time that this country was born.
But up until Edwin Forrest in the eighteen forties, no
(06:31):
single artist had planted the stars and stripes so deep
into the complete works of Shakespeare. And in a way,
he kind of changed the game, right, He invented an
acting style that somehow managed to express this country and
its energy and its values. He did, but ironically, he
discovered that there was no writer who allowed him to
be more American than William Shakespeare. It's so fascinating, Okay,
(06:56):
But back to the story. So Forrest went to England
to hiss at McCready, and now they're both playing Shakespeare
in New York within blocks of each other. Okay, So
Forrest's fans buy up a block of seats at astor place,
and when McCready starts to perform, they interrupt him, throwing
vegetables and screaming. The violence starts to get out of hand,
(07:17):
and patrons run out of the theater. Outside, they bang
into more a Forest's crew who've marched up from downtown.
They're throwing rocks that they've grabbed from a quarry nearby.
Windows shatter. The chaos escalates. Ten thousand people are jammed
into this one tight section of Lower Manhattan. The situation
(07:39):
gets so volatile that National Guard troops pour onto the scene.
They fire warning shots, but they don't help, so they
open fire on the Crown. People fall, there's blood. The
(07:59):
time is over. Dozens of people are injured and twenty
two are dead in the streets. It's the worst riot
in the young country's history, and its centers on whether
or not Shakespeare is American. M It's an amazing story,
(08:21):
isn't it. It's wild and it's crazy to me that,
even though it was a total cataclysm one hundred and
seventy five years ago, the Aster Place riots kind of
forgotten today. Yeah, the interview clips that open this episode
are proof of that. We recorded them on Aster Place,
And if I'm not mistaken, the only living legacy of
the riot is the New York City's mayor at the
(08:43):
time ordered the police department to permanently arm itself as
a cautionary measure. The force that patrols the streets of
the Big Apple today can trace its considerable firepower directly
to a dispute over Macbeth. That is absolutely true. But
Edwin Forrest's legacy lives on, and that is what I
want to explore in this episode of Where There's a Will.
(09:07):
Every actor who speaks ambic pentameter on the stage of
the Old Globe or any other Shakespeare stage in this
country is a direct descendant of Forrest and m As
you know, for actors in Shakespeare, being American is a thing.
Just like Forrest was told by the establishment that no
matter what he did, McCready would always be better at
(09:29):
Shakespeare because he was English. So his descendants in our
era hear the same thing. When I started my career
in Shakespeare thirty years ago, i heard it American Shakespeare
was less than Shakespeare was English. His stories are English,
his references are London and Warwickshire. The English just do
him better, Oh totally. I mean I had Shakespeare teachers
(09:52):
who spoke in a British accent even though they're from America.
I mean I had actors show up on first days
of rehearsal doing sort of elevated British accents. I'm fascinated
by how these old prejudices continue to resonate through our theater,
in our act culture, even in our thinking about Shakespeare.
(10:12):
The Old Globe, the theater I run, has a professional
actor training conservatory, and its mission is to nurture the
Edwin forests of tomorrow. I had a conversation with the
director of our program and with one of his wonderful
students about how they connect their americanness to Shakespeare. We'll
get to their stories after a quick break. I'm Jesse Krez.
(10:40):
I grew up in East Los Angeles, California. I moved
to New York to study theater at the Juilliard School
when I was eighteen in nineteen ninety six. Jesse's a
professional actor with a long list of major Shakespeare credits.
He's also one of this country's great acting teachers. Jesse
and I first met like twenty five years ago when
(11:03):
I taught Shakespearean acting at Juilliard and he was my student. Now,
all these years later, he directs the Old Globe and
University of San Diego Shyly Graduate theater program, and in
that gig, he's a maker of future. Edwin forrests Jesse.
My experience as a young Shakespeare director in New York
(11:27):
was characterized by a fair amount of Anglophilia, pushing back
against American artists. There really was a sense that if
you weren't English, Shakespeare wasn't for you. And I wonder
if in your experience as a young actor, either in
training or at the beginning of your career, you ran
into that too. I did you know? It's hard? It
(11:48):
was hard not to. I mean, I came out to
New York in the nineties, and I remember when they
were teaching as Shakespeare. It sounded English, it sounded British,
it sounded like absolutely not me. And so there was
a right way to do it and a wrong way
to do it, and the wrong way I felt me
(12:11):
to win it the way it lived in me, the
way I wanted to say those words. Jesse discovered Shakespeare
some years earlier when he was in high school, and
fell in love with him, and just like Edwin Forrest,
he discovered that he and this writer could achieve powerful
things together. I went to the Los Angeles County High
School for the arts. I didn't really know him then.
(12:33):
I was working on like Lorca and Tennessee Williams, you know,
but I loved language. And then eventually they decided to
produce Twelfth Night and I auditioned and I got the
part of Sir Toby Belch, and it blew my mind.
Sir Toby Belch is one of the great comic characters
in all of Shakespeare. He's a loud, drunken, anarchic hurricane
(12:57):
of a man. And it was interesting because my brothers,
my two siblings, came to see it and they were like,
out of all the plays we saw you being in
high school, that was our favorite. And I was like, man,
that's Shakespeare. You liked me in Shakespeare and we've did
all sorts of different things in high school. And they
were like, oh, we have an uncle like that. And
so that was my first introduction into Shakespeare and being like, oh,
(13:19):
is this connected to me too. Classical actor training in
the late nineteen eighties when Jesse was at Juilliard, focused
really heavily on what American stage speech should sound like.
I'll give you ten points if you can guess what
they taught. And there was a book right that taught
you how to speak? Yeah? What was it called speak
with distinction? Speak with distinction by Edith Skinner? And what
(13:44):
sound did it create? A very British sound which they
call they called mid Atlantic, Yeah, right, they called mid Atlantic. Yeah,
nobody lives in the mid Atlantic exactly. It was a
made of sort of sound that you know. The behind
it is that you would be understood in the theater
(14:05):
if you spoke this way right back in the five seat.
And so you start wondering, am I not understood in
life if I don't speak that way? Can you do
two lines in the way d A. Skinner wants it
to sound? Do you think? Who's there? And that's how
(14:26):
I would say, Right, it's the opening of Hamlet, right,
who's there? And it really is this sort of bombastic
the rs are a little softer than an American R.
Who's there? Wow? Who's there? And there's there's the famous
asque list Yes ask pass And in truth, no living
(14:48):
person on planet Earth speaks that way. It's an artificial
construct gets this sort of hybrid of what an American
sounds like and what an English person sounds like. Yeah,
it feels neutralized. Yeah, it's almost lack of character. Right,
It's like, oh, so the person's going to walk out
on stage and then speak like that. Why aren't they
(15:08):
speak like themselves? You know, Barry, it's so archaic that
you know, I need to take a new voice in
speech class to actually get in there, and we teach
it at our school. But you don't speaks. You speak
with distinction. And we're using new techniques where we bring
the actor that's in front of us to get their
voice in the work and then start sharpening the way
(15:29):
they speak. It's amazing. And there's a bunch of old,
dusty copies of Edith Skinner sitting in a closet somewhere.
It seems like Jesse really wants actors to sound like themselves,
to find their own voice, and he wants them to
find their own voice inside Shakespeare. He wants artists to
(15:53):
make a genuine personal connection to the material, just like
he did starting out, and just like his family did
when they watched him on stage. He wants artists to
own Shakespeare. He becomes this thing where once you try
and break through, you can't stop because all of a
(16:14):
sudden something happens to you that you can't really name.
But you want more of it. I grew up hearing
the name Shakespeare because I did theater in middle school
and all of that stuff, but never was taught it.
(16:35):
That's Jeffrey Roshad, one of Jesse's acting students, never read
anything in English class, which everyone seems to do. And
I was like, oh, maybe Milwaukee school system felled us.
Who knows. Jeffreys a generation younger than Jesse, But that
same bias against American actors in Shakespeare was still around
(16:55):
when he was starting out. The energy in the air
of it was there, the presence of it was there.
And it's not just because it was Shakespeare, but I
think that a lot of what what I was feeling
growing up and being an actor of color was that
your lane was not in the American theater at all.
(17:16):
Your lane was Black theater. But just like Jesse, and
just like Edwin Forrest before them, both, Jeffrey found himself
falling deep into Shakespeare, and after a while he built
his own relationship with this writer in these texts, and
he found himself there. He heard his own voice in
Shakespeare's characters, and he saw his own story in the
(17:40):
plays stories. Initially, yeah, we have things set across the
pond talking about kings and all these other things, which
gives everyone an equal access point into it. You know,
people can come in with fresh new ideas because we're
not carrying the trauma or the history of the thing
(18:01):
with us, you know what I mean. So I think
that people from all different cultures can come together and
make this thing a new thing. Yeah. When I hear
Jeffrey or Jesse or you saying that someone told them
that the English do Shakespeare better than the Americans, what
I really hear is this sort of code English really
(18:23):
means white and male and wasp and educated and upper class.
Certain interests will always claim Shakespeare as their own, and
then they'll use them to keep others out. Back in
Forest's time, though working class Irish were the ones on
the margins. In the next generation it was the next
outsider group Italians or Germans or Jews. Then it was
(18:46):
people of color or trans people totally, I mean historically,
marginalized populations are often excluded from participating in a range
of American institutions. Shakespeare's only one of them. But you
know what, it's hard to stop artists from making art.
There was a black Shakespeare Company in New York City,
(19:06):
twenty years before the Astor Place riots. By the early
twentieth century, downtown Manhattan had Shakespeare theaters in Italian, German, Yiddish.
A straight line connects these theaters backward to Edwin Forrest
and forward to you and Me and Jesse and Jeffrey.
And in the New York Theater of the nineteen fifties,
(19:28):
that line that connects marginalized people to Shakespeare got stronger
and more powerful. That's because of a Titanic figure in
American culture named Joseph Papp. He was a producer and
an impressario, and he founded the New York Shakespeare Festival,
the home of the famous Shakespeare in the Park, and
(19:50):
he founded its downtown headquarters, the Public Theater. Pap did
things in his festival that hadn't been done before on
the American stage. He cast James Earl Jones as King Lear.
He cast Martin Sheen as Hamlet. She changed his name
from Ramon Estebbas to play the part. He cast Raoul
Julia as Petruchio. My super dainty Kate, for dainties are
(20:16):
old Kates, and therefore Kate take this up me, Kate,
Joe pab is a hero of mine. I have a
picture of him on the wall in my office next
to my desk, and I look over at it a
dozen times a day. He believed that Shakespeare was for everyone,
and in ways that would have made Edwin Forrest proud.
(20:37):
He kind of elbowed the default English style out of
the way, and he insisted on making room in Shakespeare
for americanness in all of its varieties. We'll be right back. Perhaps.
Successor as artistic director of the Public Theater is Oscar Eustace.
(21:01):
I worked at Oscar's side at the Public Theater for
five years before I moved to San Diego in the
old Globe. Oscar is a giant. He's the original producer
of Hamilton, to name just one of his many distinguished credits.
He's also a thinker, especially about the theater's place in
American culture and the much bigger question of what the
(21:22):
idea of culture could even mean in a society that's
as diverse and various as ours. I found him in
his office and I asked him about the aster place
riots So, Oscar, this crazy thing happened in the eighteen forties,
where Shakespeare became so important to Americans that they were
(21:42):
willing to die for him. And there was this riot
involving two actors, an Englishman named McCready and an American
named Forrest, and it turned into a violent outburst that
happened on Astor Place in New York City. An Asterplace
is right outside the window behind you. And every day
(22:04):
when you walk to work to make Shakespeare in the
American Theater, you walk, that's the place where Americans died
on the street in the name of some cultural values
attached to Shakespeare. What do you think when you walk
past Estra Place every morning about that? Well, I feel
(22:24):
lucky to inherit a history in this building, in this neighborhood,
in this city, in this field that informs everything we do.
We didn't appear out of Zeus's forehead. Suddenly we appear
out of a long history not only of American dealing
with Shakespeare, but of American battles of who owns the culture, because,
(22:47):
of course, the thing that was at the root of
the Estraplace riot. On the surface, it was a battle
of who's the better Shakespeare rerector, But really it's about
who owns the culture. And one of the things that
you see in the intensity of that battle was the
determination of ordinary, uneducated, working class Americans to say, Shakespeare
(23:09):
belongs to us. He's not your property because you have money.
He's not your property because you identify with the English.
He's not your property because of your class and education.
He's our property. And I think that shows that from
all the way back in eighteen forties, Shakespeare wasn't simply
something that was imported into this country. Shakespeare was a
(23:33):
battleground for establishing ownership of the culture. We embraced him
and indeed wanted to seize him for our own. Oscar
points out that this is exactly what the builders of
the Astor Place opera house we're trying to do, to
seize Shakespeare for themselves. It was deliberately built by the
(23:54):
upper class of New York City with a dress code.
You had to wear white cloves, and they charged enough
so that working class people couldn't get in. And it
was that that inspired the riot as much as the
fight about Shakespeare. The idea that we don't want to
let culture separate into the high and low. We insist
(24:14):
that we want to all go to the same theater together,
and if you won't let us a bunch of us
are going to die for it. I asked Oscar why
he thought this episode in American history had been forgotten?
Was it because Shakespeare just isn't as present in American
life today as he was back then. I think that
another way of thinking of it is the tafts at
(24:36):
the Aster Place opera House. One they managed over the
almost two centuries since then, to bring Shakespeare to their places,
so that Shakespeare belongs to the academy, Shakespeare belongs to
graduate schools, Shakespeare belongs to the highly educated Anglo files
in this country, and was essentially taken away from the
(24:58):
working people. Who is Shakespeare for? This is the question
behind the Aster Place riot, and it's the question every
one of us working on Shakespeare asks every day. How
do we make a Shakespeare for everybody? And how can
we make sure that the McCready crowd the opera house
(25:21):
audience doesn't get to monopolize him. Oscar answers that question
by reminding me of the conditions Shakespeare encountered making theater
in his own day. Shakespeare was faced with entertaining the
most diverse audience that any theater maker had faced since
the ancient Greeks. He had illiterate groundlings watching the play
(25:44):
at the same time as Oxford and Cambridge graduates, watching
the players at the same time as the aristocracy, and
his job was he had to entertain them all at once.
And in order to do that, in essence, without saying
it out loud, you're making that audience understand that they
all have something in common. They walk in as individual
(26:07):
people from their own tribes and own classes, but the
act of watching the piece of theater together turns them
into a city, turns them into a community of their own.
And that's why I think Shakespeare is so vital for
a democratic culture, because he can do that. He can
make us all see ourselves in the play and in
(26:30):
each other. I told Oscar about my conversation with Jesse
Perez and Jeffrey Rishad, the head of the Old Globes
Actor training program, and his student, how Jesse, who's Mexican American,
and Jeffrey, who's Black, had their own run ins with
McCready's view of Shakespeare, and I reminded Oscar of my
own collision with the anglophiles shakespeare world view, a perspective
(26:54):
that his public theater has done so much to overturn.
There is a fantastic tradition that I think it exists
in all the arts, but I can speak knowledgeably about
it in the theater that people who are not fully
accepted into the dominant culture have the best and most
insightful view of the culture. People who were not wasps,
(27:17):
but who came from Irish Catholic traditions, Jewish traditions, and
of course African American traditions have always been the spark
that actually illuminates something in the theater. And I think
that condition of having at least one foot firmly outside
the mainstream is a huge advantage for artists as they
(27:38):
try to capture our time, because they're not completely embedded
in our time, they're partially removed from it, and so otherness,
I think is actually a great perspective for revelation. This
insight seems so crucial. There's always another outsider group in America.
(28:00):
That's how American identity is formed by bringing together people
and cultures from elsewhere. And as we know, it's not
always a smooth process, and the core of americanness is
not fixed. It shifts all the time as new groups
and influences arrive at the edges and start to move
(28:20):
toward the center, the astor place. Riot reminds us that
again and again, Shakespeare has been a door that opens
to let outsiders in. That's why the question of who
owns him is so important. The owner of Shakespeare is
one of the gatekeepers of American identity. And while Shakespeare
(28:43):
may be the ultimate icon of insiderness, the quintessential figure
of high culture value up on his pedestal for the
rest of us to try to reach, Oscar reminded me
that he's also something else. Entirely, Shakespeare was also a
glover's son who barely finished what we would call middle school,
(29:06):
who never went to university, who became the most celebrated
and brilliant writer in the history of the English language.
It's why so many people have tried to deny that
that working class kid from Stratford actually wrote his own plays,
because they so desperately want to believe it required being
on the inside, it required an Oxford education. As a
(29:27):
matter of fact, it must have been an aristocrat, because
only an aristocrat would have that talent. So from the
very beginning, people have tried to reject the idea that
part of Shakespeare's greatness is he was not an aristocrat.
He was not part of the in crowd. He was
a working class kid who made it. Who owns the culture?
(29:51):
Who owns Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been at the center of
my professional life for thirty years. And here's what I know.
He's always up for grabs. He's not just a writer.
He's not just the name on a volume with thirty
six great plays in it. He's something more, a force
of immense cultural power. He's an institution that carries weight
(30:15):
and heft and layer upon layer of meaning. And there
has been and still is competition over who gets to
control him, who gets to speak the lines he wrote,
who gets to decide what he means, and whose interests
he's construed to represent. That's why he keeps showing up
(30:36):
in places where we don't expect him, Because in any
corner of the culture where there's a hunger for the authority,
he confers he'll appear. Shakespeare grants legitimacy. Forrest and McCready
wanted to establish themselves as the greatest actors of their day,
so they needed to prove themselves on Shakespeare. If you
(30:57):
can excel at Shakespeare, then you're the best there is.
On the other hand, he's a kind of portal that
outsider groups and individuals step through in order to participate
fully in the culture. Participation in Shakespeare becomes a kind
of badge of authenticity. And on yet one more hand,
he's like a magnet that draws people toward him. He
(31:20):
becomes a kind of gathering place, a site where disparate
groups can find some sort of common ground. He forges community,
He brings consensus. When there's no other language we all share.
We can at least agree that the lines of Romeo
and Juliet are beautiful. All this is what I want
(31:45):
to get at with where there's a will. What is
it about Shakespeare that keeps him showing up in surprising
corners of our world? What does it say about him
that he was once at the center of a debate
about American identity that turned deadly on the streets of
New York, and that now he's doing rehabilitative work in
correctional facilities and helping kids on the autism spectrum to communicate,
(32:09):
and shaping our observances of our faith, and showing up
in the mouths of presidents and politicians and what does
it say about us that we keep putting him in
these places? Jesse Perez and Jeffrey Rashad, custodians of the
future of Shakespeare in America, are asking these very questions.
(32:29):
And what I always do for the younger generation is
I say, fight for your story, find your story in it,
and fight for it. Put it out there, make us
see it. Be so specific and detailed with the text
work which we try to teach them, so that you
put it on their lap, the audience's lap, and we
can be like, Okay, how do we deal with this now?
(32:50):
Because it does belong to us. It's the English language,
it was meant to be interpreted by everybody. So I'm
just interested in what it means today. Why Shakespeare now?
And they're here to tell us. My students are here
to tell us. They're guiding the way. I am so
glad to be entering into this work now where the
(33:16):
tide is turning on the attitude towards it, and who
can take ownership of this work because now I feel
such a freedom to bring the work to me instead
of having to do the work to get to it.
I think it's more impactful. I think it's more dynamic
when I bring the work to me, into my life,
(33:39):
into my personal dramaturgy, into my story. When this body
stands on the stage and speaks those words, it's a
different thing from when this body does it. And that's
because we've lived different lives, and because we're speaking this language,
it automatically is mine. It's automatically mine. To tell the
(34:00):
world Where There's a Will? Finding Shakespeare is written and
hosted by me Barry Edelstein. My co host is m Weinstein.
(34:22):
Our show is produced by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott,
with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our
executive producers are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin and Alex Lewis
and John Myers from Row Home Productions. Our editor is
Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Our theme
is an original composition by Hannis Brown. Samuel Buzid is
(34:45):
our fact checker. Thanks to actors Daniel jerrold As McCready
and Ian lasseter as Forrest, Where There's a Will is
a co production of Pushkin Industries and The Old Clobe.
Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy Veturbie artistic director
and Timothy J. Shields is Audrey Esu Geisle, Managing director
of the Old Globe for the Globe Thanks to Sound
(35:06):
director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sounder Evan Eason,
Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson, Assistant to the
artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The Theodore and Audrey
Geiselfund provides leadership support for the Old Globes year round activities.
To learn more about the Tony Award winning the Old
Globe one of America's leading regional theater companies, visit the
(35:28):
Old Globe dot org. If you love this show, consider
subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and add free
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cents a month. Find the Pushkin Plus channel on Apple
Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To find more Pushkin podcasts,
listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you
(35:51):
listen to podcasts.
Pushkin. If I asked you to close your eyes and
tell me what Shakespeare sounds like in your mind? What
kind of sound would you hear tapping of a pen
on a paper? Oh yeah, yeah, just like thinking of
you know, in the scribble of like an old fountain
pen writing like it's very sharp sounding. And if someone
(00:36):
were speaking his lines, what would they sound like to you?
I feel like he would have an English accent. Yeah,
probably English was even English. He was English, Okay, yeah,
not American. Wouldn't sound America, Yeah, I mean it could
have been like super proper English, Like what if an
english Man would say, like a scholar? Can you imagine
a time in America where people would be willing to
die over Shakespeare? I believe in disagreement. I think it's
(00:59):
a good thing. I think people should test their views
and talk to other people and so long. So violence,
we draw the line violent not violence. It's hard to
imagine that art could inspire people to a violence like that.
It's true there was a time in America when Shakespeare
(01:23):
was important enough to die for the year eighteen forty nine.
America has been independent for less than a century. The
place New York City than just like now, it's the
great melting pot of American life. English culture still looms large,
especially in upper class New York, but there's also a
(01:47):
huge Irish population, heavily working class, and they loathe the
English and everything they represent. Theater is the popular art
form of the day. Rich people, poor people, refine rough
Everybody loves to go see a performance, and there's a
lot of Shakespeare for sure. Downtown. The greatest American actor
(02:14):
of the day is at work. His name is Edwin Forrest.
He was born in Philadelphia, just like the country, and
he's a living, breathing symbol of the American spirit. He's
big and handsome, athletic and virile, and he's famous for
a physical acting style that people find unbelievably lifelike. Forrest
(02:37):
is in residence playing Shakespeare and other roles at the
Broadway Theater on New York's lowery Side. He's famous for
his Macbeth. Is this a dagger which I see before me?
The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee.
A few blocks north, the Astor Place Opera House is
(02:57):
waiting for a Macbeth of its own. The famous English
actor William Charles McCready is on an international tour, and
he happens to be Forest's greatest eval. McCready is everything
Forest is not classical, elegant, a little fragile, a little
effeat pity like a naked new Ball. Babe shall be
(03:25):
the horrid deed in every eye. DearS shall drown the wind.
He's got a following two, the uptown crowd, and certainly
not Forest's Irish fan base. The opera house is brand new,
its tickets are really pricey, and its vibe is deliberately posh.
(03:46):
It's intended for the Tufts, the upper class New Yorkers
who are ritzier than the folks on Lower Broadway. McCready
is known for his Hamlet, and for one moment of it,
in particular, at the point in the play when Hamlet
announces that he's going to feign madness, McCready takes out
a big handkerchief and he does this crazy dance. English
(04:09):
audiences go nuts. Forrest sails to England to see it,
and he gets himself a prime seat at McCready's theater.
When the handkerchief dance comes along, Forrest stands up and
he starts hissing loud. The feud is on. It is
(04:30):
a tale told by an idiot, a tale told by
an fully sound and fury full of signify Signify. I'm
(05:01):
Barry Edelstein, artistic director of the Old Globe in San Diego,
one of the countries leading Shakespeare theaters, and this is
where there's a will finding Shakespeare from the Globe and
Pushkin industries. Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of
unexpected places and asks what he's doing there and what
his presence means about him and about us. My companion
(05:25):
on this search for Old William is a friend and
colleague with their own deep interest in Shakespeare. M Weinstein.
M's a director and writer who works on television and
film and stage, and Shakespeare has been a big part
of their life. Hey am, Hey Barry, thanks for having me.
This Forest McCready rivalry is really juicy stuff. People don't
(05:50):
know much about it or about how much Shakespeare meant
at that time. So the Forest and McCready thing gets it.
Something that's been a theme through my thirty year career
working on Shakespeare in America, something that you and I
have discussed a lot, and that is the notion that
there is such a thing as an American Shakespeare, and
(06:11):
that American Shakespeare has a purity and a truth and
a power all its own. I'm right there with you, Barry,
and that notion isn't unique to us or to our
moment in American culture. It feels like theatermakers started searching
for it from the very time that this country was born.
But up until Edwin Forrest in the eighteen forties, no
(06:31):
single artist had planted the stars and stripes so deep
into the complete works of Shakespeare. And in a way,
he kind of changed the game, right, He invented an
acting style that somehow managed to express this country and
its energy and its values. He did, but ironically, he
discovered that there was no writer who allowed him to
be more American than William Shakespeare. It's so fascinating, Okay,
(06:56):
But back to the story. So Forrest went to England
to hiss at McCready, and now they're both playing Shakespeare
in New York within blocks of each other. Okay, So
Forrest's fans buy up a block of seats at astor place,
and when McCready starts to perform, they interrupt him, throwing
vegetables and screaming. The violence starts to get out of hand,
(07:17):
and patrons run out of the theater. Outside, they bang
into more a Forest's crew who've marched up from downtown.
They're throwing rocks that they've grabbed from a quarry nearby.
Windows shatter. The chaos escalates. Ten thousand people are jammed
into this one tight section of Lower Manhattan. The situation
(07:39):
gets so volatile that National Guard troops pour onto the scene.
They fire warning shots, but they don't help, so they
open fire on the Crown. People fall, there's blood. The
(07:59):
time is over. Dozens of people are injured and twenty
two are dead in the streets. It's the worst riot
in the young country's history, and its centers on whether
or not Shakespeare is American. M It's an amazing story,
(08:21):
isn't it. It's wild and it's crazy to me that,
even though it was a total cataclysm one hundred and
seventy five years ago, the Aster Place riots kind of
forgotten today. Yeah, the interview clips that open this episode
are proof of that. We recorded them on Aster Place,
And if I'm not mistaken, the only living legacy of
the riot is the New York City's mayor at the
(08:43):
time ordered the police department to permanently arm itself as
a cautionary measure. The force that patrols the streets of
the Big Apple today can trace its considerable firepower directly
to a dispute over Macbeth. That is absolutely true. But
Edwin Forrest's legacy lives on, and that is what I
want to explore in this episode of Where There's a Will.
(09:07):
Every actor who speaks ambic pentameter on the stage of
the Old Globe or any other Shakespeare stage in this
country is a direct descendant of Forrest and m As
you know, for actors in Shakespeare, being American is a thing.
Just like Forrest was told by the establishment that no
matter what he did, McCready would always be better at
(09:29):
Shakespeare because he was English. So his descendants in our
era hear the same thing. When I started my career
in Shakespeare thirty years ago, i heard it American Shakespeare
was less than Shakespeare was English. His stories are English,
his references are London and Warwickshire. The English just do
him better, Oh totally. I mean I had Shakespeare teachers
(09:52):
who spoke in a British accent even though they're from America.
I mean I had actors show up on first days
of rehearsal doing sort of elevated British accents. I'm fascinated
by how these old prejudices continue to resonate through our theater,
in our act culture, even in our thinking about Shakespeare.
(10:12):
The Old Globe, the theater I run, has a professional
actor training conservatory, and its mission is to nurture the
Edwin forests of tomorrow. I had a conversation with the
director of our program and with one of his wonderful
students about how they connect their americanness to Shakespeare. We'll
get to their stories after a quick break. I'm Jesse Krez.
(10:40):
I grew up in East Los Angeles, California. I moved
to New York to study theater at the Juilliard School
when I was eighteen in nineteen ninety six. Jesse's a
professional actor with a long list of major Shakespeare credits.
He's also one of this country's great acting teachers. Jesse
and I first met like twenty five years ago when
(11:03):
I taught Shakespearean acting at Juilliard and he was my student. Now,
all these years later, he directs the Old Globe and
University of San Diego Shyly Graduate theater program, and in
that gig, he's a maker of future. Edwin forrests Jesse.
My experience as a young Shakespeare director in New York
(11:27):
was characterized by a fair amount of Anglophilia, pushing back
against American artists. There really was a sense that if
you weren't English, Shakespeare wasn't for you. And I wonder
if in your experience as a young actor, either in
training or at the beginning of your career, you ran
into that too. I did you know? It's hard? It
(11:48):
was hard not to. I mean, I came out to
New York in the nineties, and I remember when they
were teaching as Shakespeare. It sounded English, it sounded British,
it sounded like absolutely not me. And so there was
a right way to do it and a wrong way
to do it, and the wrong way I felt me
(12:11):
to win it the way it lived in me, the
way I wanted to say those words. Jesse discovered Shakespeare
some years earlier when he was in high school, and
fell in love with him, and just like Edwin Forrest,
he discovered that he and this writer could achieve powerful
things together. I went to the Los Angeles County High
School for the arts. I didn't really know him then.
(12:33):
I was working on like Lorca and Tennessee Williams, you know,
but I loved language. And then eventually they decided to
produce Twelfth Night and I auditioned and I got the
part of Sir Toby Belch, and it blew my mind.
Sir Toby Belch is one of the great comic characters
in all of Shakespeare. He's a loud, drunken, anarchic hurricane
(12:57):
of a man. And it was interesting because my brothers,
my two siblings, came to see it and they were like,
out of all the plays we saw you being in
high school, that was our favorite. And I was like, man,
that's Shakespeare. You liked me in Shakespeare and we've did
all sorts of different things in high school. And they
were like, oh, we have an uncle like that. And
so that was my first introduction into Shakespeare and being like, oh,
(13:19):
is this connected to me too. Classical actor training in
the late nineteen eighties when Jesse was at Juilliard, focused
really heavily on what American stage speech should sound like.
I'll give you ten points if you can guess what
they taught. And there was a book right that taught
you how to speak? Yeah? What was it called speak
with distinction? Speak with distinction by Edith Skinner? And what
(13:44):
sound did it create? A very British sound which they
call they called mid Atlantic, Yeah, right, they called mid Atlantic. Yeah,
nobody lives in the mid Atlantic exactly. It was a
made of sort of sound that you know. The behind
it is that you would be understood in the theater
(14:05):
if you spoke this way right back in the five seat.
And so you start wondering, am I not understood in
life if I don't speak that way? Can you do
two lines in the way d A. Skinner wants it
to sound? Do you think? Who's there? And that's how
(14:26):
I would say, Right, it's the opening of Hamlet, right,
who's there? And it really is this sort of bombastic
the rs are a little softer than an American R.
Who's there? Wow? Who's there? And there's there's the famous
asque list Yes ask pass And in truth, no living
(14:48):
person on planet Earth speaks that way. It's an artificial
construct gets this sort of hybrid of what an American
sounds like and what an English person sounds like. Yeah,
it feels neutralized. Yeah, it's almost lack of character. Right,
It's like, oh, so the person's going to walk out
on stage and then speak like that. Why aren't they
(15:08):
speak like themselves? You know, Barry, it's so archaic that
you know, I need to take a new voice in
speech class to actually get in there, and we teach
it at our school. But you don't speaks. You speak
with distinction. And we're using new techniques where we bring
the actor that's in front of us to get their
voice in the work and then start sharpening the way
(15:29):
they speak. It's amazing. And there's a bunch of old,
dusty copies of Edith Skinner sitting in a closet somewhere.
It seems like Jesse really wants actors to sound like themselves,
to find their own voice, and he wants them to
find their own voice inside Shakespeare. He wants artists to
(15:53):
make a genuine personal connection to the material, just like
he did starting out, and just like his family did
when they watched him on stage. He wants artists to
own Shakespeare. He becomes this thing where once you try
and break through, you can't stop because all of a
(16:14):
sudden something happens to you that you can't really name.
But you want more of it. I grew up hearing
the name Shakespeare because I did theater in middle school
and all of that stuff, but never was taught it.
(16:35):
That's Jeffrey Roshad, one of Jesse's acting students, never read
anything in English class, which everyone seems to do. And
I was like, oh, maybe Milwaukee school system felled us.
Who knows. Jeffreys a generation younger than Jesse, But that
same bias against American actors in Shakespeare was still around
(16:55):
when he was starting out. The energy in the air
of it was there, the presence of it was there.
And it's not just because it was Shakespeare, but I
think that a lot of what what I was feeling
growing up and being an actor of color was that
your lane was not in the American theater at all.
(17:16):
Your lane was Black theater. But just like Jesse, and
just like Edwin Forrest before them, both, Jeffrey found himself
falling deep into Shakespeare, and after a while he built
his own relationship with this writer in these texts, and
he found himself there. He heard his own voice in
Shakespeare's characters, and he saw his own story in the
(17:40):
plays stories. Initially, yeah, we have things set across the
pond talking about kings and all these other things, which
gives everyone an equal access point into it. You know,
people can come in with fresh new ideas because we're
not carrying the trauma or the history of the thing
(18:01):
with us, you know what I mean. So I think
that people from all different cultures can come together and
make this thing a new thing. Yeah. When I hear
Jeffrey or Jesse or you saying that someone told them
that the English do Shakespeare better than the Americans, what
I really hear is this sort of code English really
(18:23):
means white and male and wasp and educated and upper class.
Certain interests will always claim Shakespeare as their own, and
then they'll use them to keep others out. Back in
Forest's time, though working class Irish were the ones on
the margins. In the next generation it was the next
outsider group Italians or Germans or Jews. Then it was
(18:46):
people of color or trans people totally, I mean historically,
marginalized populations are often excluded from participating in a range
of American institutions. Shakespeare's only one of them. But you
know what, it's hard to stop artists from making art.
There was a black Shakespeare Company in New York City,
(19:06):
twenty years before the Astor Place riots. By the early
twentieth century, downtown Manhattan had Shakespeare theaters in Italian, German, Yiddish.
A straight line connects these theaters backward to Edwin Forrest
and forward to you and Me and Jesse and Jeffrey.
And in the New York Theater of the nineteen fifties,
(19:28):
that line that connects marginalized people to Shakespeare got stronger
and more powerful. That's because of a Titanic figure in
American culture named Joseph Papp. He was a producer and
an impressario, and he founded the New York Shakespeare Festival,
the home of the famous Shakespeare in the Park, and
(19:50):
he founded its downtown headquarters, the Public Theater. Pap did
things in his festival that hadn't been done before on
the American stage. He cast James Earl Jones as King Lear.
He cast Martin Sheen as Hamlet. She changed his name
from Ramon Estebbas to play the part. He cast Raoul
Julia as Petruchio. My super dainty Kate, for dainties are
(20:16):
old Kates, and therefore Kate take this up me, Kate,
Joe pab is a hero of mine. I have a
picture of him on the wall in my office next
to my desk, and I look over at it a
dozen times a day. He believed that Shakespeare was for everyone,
and in ways that would have made Edwin Forrest proud.
(20:37):
He kind of elbowed the default English style out of
the way, and he insisted on making room in Shakespeare
for americanness in all of its varieties. We'll be right back. Perhaps.
Successor as artistic director of the Public Theater is Oscar Eustace.
(21:01):
I worked at Oscar's side at the Public Theater for
five years before I moved to San Diego in the
old Globe. Oscar is a giant. He's the original producer
of Hamilton, to name just one of his many distinguished credits.
He's also a thinker, especially about the theater's place in
American culture and the much bigger question of what the
(21:22):
idea of culture could even mean in a society that's
as diverse and various as ours. I found him in
his office and I asked him about the aster place
riots So, Oscar, this crazy thing happened in the eighteen forties,
where Shakespeare became so important to Americans that they were
(21:42):
willing to die for him. And there was this riot
involving two actors, an Englishman named McCready and an American
named Forrest, and it turned into a violent outburst that
happened on Astor Place in New York City. An Asterplace
is right outside the window behind you. And every day
(22:04):
when you walk to work to make Shakespeare in the
American Theater, you walk, that's the place where Americans died
on the street in the name of some cultural values
attached to Shakespeare. What do you think when you walk
past Estra Place every morning about that? Well, I feel
(22:24):
lucky to inherit a history in this building, in this neighborhood,
in this city, in this field that informs everything we do.
We didn't appear out of Zeus's forehead. Suddenly we appear
out of a long history not only of American dealing
with Shakespeare, but of American battles of who owns the culture, because,
(22:47):
of course, the thing that was at the root of
the Estraplace riot. On the surface, it was a battle
of who's the better Shakespeare rerector, But really it's about
who owns the culture. And one of the things that
you see in the intensity of that battle was the
determination of ordinary, uneducated, working class Americans to say, Shakespeare
(23:09):
belongs to us. He's not your property because you have money.
He's not your property because you identify with the English.
He's not your property because of your class and education.
He's our property. And I think that shows that from
all the way back in eighteen forties, Shakespeare wasn't simply
something that was imported into this country. Shakespeare was a
(23:33):
battleground for establishing ownership of the culture. We embraced him
and indeed wanted to seize him for our own. Oscar
points out that this is exactly what the builders of
the Astor Place opera house we're trying to do, to
seize Shakespeare for themselves. It was deliberately built by the
(23:54):
upper class of New York City with a dress code.
You had to wear white cloves, and they charged enough
so that working class people couldn't get in. And it
was that that inspired the riot as much as the
fight about Shakespeare. The idea that we don't want to
let culture separate into the high and low. We insist
(24:14):
that we want to all go to the same theater together,
and if you won't let us a bunch of us
are going to die for it. I asked Oscar why
he thought this episode in American history had been forgotten?
Was it because Shakespeare just isn't as present in American
life today as he was back then. I think that
another way of thinking of it is the tafts at
(24:36):
the Aster Place opera House. One they managed over the
almost two centuries since then, to bring Shakespeare to their places,
so that Shakespeare belongs to the academy, Shakespeare belongs to
graduate schools, Shakespeare belongs to the highly educated Anglo files
in this country, and was essentially taken away from the
(24:58):
working people. Who is Shakespeare for? This is the question
behind the Aster Place riot, and it's the question every
one of us working on Shakespeare asks every day. How
do we make a Shakespeare for everybody? And how can
we make sure that the McCready crowd the opera house
(25:21):
audience doesn't get to monopolize him. Oscar answers that question
by reminding me of the conditions Shakespeare encountered making theater
in his own day. Shakespeare was faced with entertaining the
most diverse audience that any theater maker had faced since
the ancient Greeks. He had illiterate groundlings watching the play
(25:44):
at the same time as Oxford and Cambridge graduates, watching
the players at the same time as the aristocracy, and
his job was he had to entertain them all at once.
And in order to do that, in essence, without saying
it out loud, you're making that audience understand that they
all have something in common. They walk in as individual
(26:07):
people from their own tribes and own classes, but the
act of watching the piece of theater together turns them
into a city, turns them into a community of their own.
And that's why I think Shakespeare is so vital for
a democratic culture, because he can do that. He can
make us all see ourselves in the play and in
(26:30):
each other. I told Oscar about my conversation with Jesse
Perez and Jeffrey Rishad, the head of the Old Globes
Actor training program, and his student, how Jesse, who's Mexican American,
and Jeffrey, who's Black, had their own run ins with
McCready's view of Shakespeare, and I reminded Oscar of my
own collision with the anglophiles shakespeare world view, a perspective
(26:54):
that his public theater has done so much to overturn.
There is a fantastic tradition that I think it exists
in all the arts, but I can speak knowledgeably about
it in the theater that people who are not fully
accepted into the dominant culture have the best and most
insightful view of the culture. People who were not wasps,
(27:17):
but who came from Irish Catholic traditions, Jewish traditions, and
of course African American traditions have always been the spark
that actually illuminates something in the theater. And I think
that condition of having at least one foot firmly outside
the mainstream is a huge advantage for artists as they
(27:38):
try to capture our time, because they're not completely embedded
in our time, they're partially removed from it, and so otherness,
I think is actually a great perspective for revelation. This
insight seems so crucial. There's always another outsider group in America.
(28:00):
That's how American identity is formed by bringing together people
and cultures from elsewhere. And as we know, it's not
always a smooth process, and the core of americanness is
not fixed. It shifts all the time as new groups
and influences arrive at the edges and start to move
(28:20):
toward the center, the astor place. Riot reminds us that
again and again, Shakespeare has been a door that opens
to let outsiders in. That's why the question of who
owns him is so important. The owner of Shakespeare is
one of the gatekeepers of American identity. And while Shakespeare
(28:43):
may be the ultimate icon of insiderness, the quintessential figure
of high culture value up on his pedestal for the
rest of us to try to reach, Oscar reminded me
that he's also something else. Entirely, Shakespeare was also a
glover's son who barely finished what we would call middle school,
(29:06):
who never went to university, who became the most celebrated
and brilliant writer in the history of the English language.
It's why so many people have tried to deny that
that working class kid from Stratford actually wrote his own plays,
because they so desperately want to believe it required being
on the inside, it required an Oxford education. As a
(29:27):
matter of fact, it must have been an aristocrat, because
only an aristocrat would have that talent. So from the
very beginning, people have tried to reject the idea that
part of Shakespeare's greatness is he was not an aristocrat.
He was not part of the in crowd. He was
a working class kid who made it. Who owns the culture?
(29:51):
Who owns Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been at the center of
my professional life for thirty years. And here's what I know.
He's always up for grabs. He's not just a writer.
He's not just the name on a volume with thirty
six great plays in it. He's something more, a force
of immense cultural power. He's an institution that carries weight
(30:15):
and heft and layer upon layer of meaning. And there
has been and still is competition over who gets to
control him, who gets to speak the lines he wrote,
who gets to decide what he means, and whose interests
he's construed to represent. That's why he keeps showing up
(30:36):
in places where we don't expect him, Because in any
corner of the culture where there's a hunger for the authority,
he confers he'll appear. Shakespeare grants legitimacy. Forrest and McCready
wanted to establish themselves as the greatest actors of their day,
so they needed to prove themselves on Shakespeare. If you
(30:57):
can excel at Shakespeare, then you're the best there is.
On the other hand, he's a kind of portal that
outsider groups and individuals step through in order to participate
fully in the culture. Participation in Shakespeare becomes a kind
of badge of authenticity. And on yet one more hand,
he's like a magnet that draws people toward him. He
(31:20):
becomes a kind of gathering place, a site where disparate
groups can find some sort of common ground. He forges community,
He brings consensus. When there's no other language we all share.
We can at least agree that the lines of Romeo
and Juliet are beautiful. All this is what I want
(31:45):
to get at with where there's a will. What is
it about Shakespeare that keeps him showing up in surprising
corners of our world? What does it say about him
that he was once at the center of a debate
about American identity that turned deadly on the streets of
New York, and that now he's doing rehabilitative work in
correctional facilities and helping kids on the autism spectrum to communicate,
(32:09):
and shaping our observances of our faith, and showing up
in the mouths of presidents and politicians and what does
it say about us that we keep putting him in
these places? Jesse Perez and Jeffrey Rashad, custodians of the
future of Shakespeare in America, are asking these very questions.
(32:29):
And what I always do for the younger generation is
I say, fight for your story, find your story in it,
and fight for it. Put it out there, make us
see it. Be so specific and detailed with the text
work which we try to teach them, so that you
put it on their lap, the audience's lap, and we
can be like, Okay, how do we deal with this now?
(32:50):
Because it does belong to us. It's the English language,
it was meant to be interpreted by everybody. So I'm
just interested in what it means today. Why Shakespeare now?
And they're here to tell us. My students are here
to tell us. They're guiding the way. I am so
glad to be entering into this work now where the
(33:16):
tide is turning on the attitude towards it, and who
can take ownership of this work because now I feel
such a freedom to bring the work to me instead
of having to do the work to get to it.
I think it's more impactful. I think it's more dynamic
when I bring the work to me, into my life,
(33:39):
into my personal dramaturgy, into my story. When this body
stands on the stage and speaks those words, it's a
different thing from when this body does it. And that's
because we've lived different lives, and because we're speaking this language,
it automatically is mine. It's automatically mine. To tell the
(34:00):
world Where There's a Will? Finding Shakespeare is written and
hosted by me Barry Edelstein. My co host is m Weinstein.
(34:22):
Our show is produced by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott,
with assistant producers Jennifer Sanchez and Salmon Ahad Khan. Our
executive producers are Katherine Girardo from Pushkin and Alex Lewis
and John Myers from Row Home Productions. Our editor is
Audrey Dilling. Our mix engineer is Justin Berger. Our theme
is an original composition by Hannis Brown. Samuel Buzid is
(34:45):
our fact checker. Thanks to actors Daniel jerrold As McCready
and Ian lasseter as Forrest, Where There's a Will is
a co production of Pushkin Industries and The Old Clobe.
Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy Veturbie artistic director
and Timothy J. Shields is Audrey Esu Geisle, Managing director
of the Old Globe for the Globe Thanks to Sound
(35:06):
director Paul Peterson and Assistant to the Sounder Evan Eason,
Director of Marketing and Communications Dave Henson, Assistant to the
artistic and managing directors Carolyn Budd, The Theodore and Audrey
Geiselfund provides leadership support for the Old Globes year round activities.
To learn more about the Tony Award winning the Old
Globe one of America's leading regional theater companies, visit the
(35:28):
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(35:51):
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