December 8, 2022 • 26 mins
Where men are women, women are men, and gender is As You Like It. Co-host Em Weinstein leads an exploration of how Shakespeare bent gender on the stage and in his writing, and how that inspired Em—and others—to step into their own truth.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. So people always ask me what my favorite Shakespeare
play is, and I have this standard dodge. I always say,
it's whichever one I'm working on at the moment. Huh. Yes,
I mean it's pretty much impossible to pick one. Winter's
Tale brings me to tears, Hamlet turns me into a philosopher.
(00:38):
Much Ado is like my favorite romantic comedy. I mean,
it's hard to pick. It is so at the Old Globe,
we're starting to work on the shows that are going
to be part of our Summer Shakespeare Festival next year,
and the one we're preparing for at the moment is
Twelfth Night. So good. I've directed Twelve Night before and
it is definitely up there for me. I've directed it too,
and it may be my favorite anyway. It's just a
(01:00):
perfect play. It has everything that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. Gorgeous poetry, romance,
crazy characters, fantastic story wins, a sword fight, cross dressing
as I am woman now all last the day? What
fifth Lisa, Sha Pool, Olivia breathe, Oh time. They'll must
(01:26):
untangle this, not I It is too hard and not
for me. Ton tie so m. Twelfth Night is also
on my mind for a whole other reason. That's the
Shakespeare play that was in rehearsal when you came to
work at the Old Globe for the first time, which
is when you and I met. Yeah, in twenty fifteen.
We just heard a little piece of that production. Rottina
(01:48):
Wesley was spectacular as Viola. Yes, we met when I
was in my early twenties and I just finished a
classical directing fellowship. We spent an enormous amount of time
talking about Shakespeare. So when I was looking for someone
to join me on this podcast expedition in search of Shakespeare,
you were absolutely the only choice. Thanks, Barry. I mean,
(02:10):
it's been so fun to be your copilot as I
pop in and out of TV directing gigs, which remind
me a lot of Elizabethan England. But we can get
to that another time. Yes, So, speaking of our friend William,
what I didn't know at the time and what I've
learned since, is that there really is a unique and
deeply personal dimension to your relationship with Shakespeare. And you've
(02:33):
been so generous in talking about it and sharing it
with me, and I'm really grateful to you for that. Well,
Shakespeare has been really central to my life in terms
of how I think about gender, kind of like in
that clip from twelfth Night we just heard, Violet calls
her gender too hard an for me too. Untie. You know,
I saw this tweet that says, your gender isn't assigned
(02:54):
at birth, It's assigned by your English teacher when your
class does a Shakespeare play. It's a great tweet. We
should use it as the subtitle for this week's episode
because what I'd love to talk about this week is
what is this guy from England four hundred years ago
doing in the middle of our contemporary conversation about gender
and m I'm so grateful that you're willing to take
the lead on this. Thanks Barry. You know, I've worked
(03:17):
in a lot of different places, with a lot of
different people on Shakespeare, and to me, there's always this
question in his work about where gender lives in his
characters and how it can be examined and toyed with
in his plays. Dear lads believe it, for they so
yet belie thy happy years that say thou art a
man Diana's lip. It's not more smooth and rubious. My
(03:43):
small pipe is as the maiden's organs, shrill and sound
and all as simplative a woman's part. I'm Barry Edelstein
and I'm m Weinstein. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the old globe and pushkin industries.
Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places
(04:04):
and asks what he's doing there and what his presence
means about him and about us. So the first time
I acted in a Shakespeare play, I got cast as
a boy, and it was a little taste of gender euphoria.
It turns out I wasn't alone in this. I spoke
to someone who also had a major discovery in a
Shakespeare play. She's an expert on about a zillion subjects.
(04:27):
If you've heard the name Amy Schneider, it's probably because
you're a Jeopardy fan from California, Amy Schneider. Amy recently
had the longest Jeopardy winning streak of all time. I
remember what an amazing achievement. Well, I wanted to talk
to Amy because I saw this article about how playing
the role of Francis Flute in Shakespeare's play A Midsummer
(04:50):
Night's Dream helped her realize who she really was. Oh,
can I just remind our listeners about flute. So there's
a play within a play in a Midsummer Night's Dream,
and throughout the show we watched this group of amateur
actors rehearse it and perform it. Francis Flute is a
bellows ender. His job is to tend to the tools
(05:11):
that keep a fire going in a factory or a shop.
And there's this female character in the play that the
men are working on and Flute gets a sign to
play it yes, and Amy was cast to play Francis
Flute in a community theater production in the Bay Area.
And so I decided at the beginning, you know, you're
going through deciding your character motivation, which is another great
(05:32):
thing about Shakespeare, which is that there's so much ambiguity
that there's a lot of different ways you can play
even a smaller character. And so I was like, well,
I'm going to try to play it as this dude
is really kind of stoked about a dressing up as
a woman, and you know, that's some more interesting choice.
Was the reason I gave myself for why I wanted
to do it that way, but clearly in retrospect, like
(05:52):
it was giving me an excuse to enjoy it. Flute
initially says he doesn't want to play the girl, and
there's all of this discussion about what his voice is
going to sound like and what he's going to do
about his beard, which he may or may not really have.
But then when the play has performed, Flute Deliver, there's
a really beautiful monologue that transcends the comedy. He ends
(06:15):
up embodying this woman with grace and depth, and in
front of all of us, this man who was terrified
of not being manly enough has now embraced this different
gender and found an authentic moving voice. You know, it's
fascinating because Amy was really going through something parallel at
the time. She was in her early thirties and presenting
to the world as male. There I am every day
(06:38):
like and I can remember specifically, like sense memories of
being backstage when I'm getting into my female costume and
like rubbing some lipstick on my cheeks for you know,
cartoonishly overdone blush, and like putting this big wig on sideways.
Like the idea was that I loved dressing up as
a woman. Was terrible at it was the joke and
(07:00):
it just felt so good. And then of driving home
one day, and I just said, huh, if I could
just like wear a dress anytime, And I imagined myself
doing that and then introducing myself to somebody as the
name I randomly pick at the time was Jenny. I
was like, what if I said, Hi, I'm Jenny and
(07:21):
I went WHOA. I kept driving somehow, But it's like,
really one of the most shocking moments of my life
that suddenly it was like those things in the movies
whereas somebody goes like gasps and then there's this like
montage of flashbacks to how all the clues fit together. Now.
I mean, that was one of the things I was
thinking about. It is like, this role that was so
(07:42):
powerful and and empowering in my life is also a
cruel trans joke, the ones that I've been growing up
with all my life about oh, he's dress up like
a girl, like da da da day. You know. That's
the thing about Shakespeare is that, like The Taming of
the Shrew is pretty misogynist and like all these other things,
like there's all this stuff, but at the same time,
(08:03):
there's so much truth in it and so much power
that everybody can find the parts of it that work
for them. And then trying to out the rest. Wow.
Am that double view of Francis Flute is so great.
I've seen productions where it's just a straight ahead joke
that he's in address and Amy's right. The comedy is
rooted in a kind of cruelty. There's a definite cruelty there,
(08:26):
but I've always seen it as having the potential to
be more complex. Flute is afraid of being seen as
womanish in front of all these other guys. But there's
also this unexpected reversal. Unlike other popular media in which
we laugh at men in dresses, Flute has the ability
to make us cry. Maybe playing the woman is exactly
(08:47):
what he needed. Maybe he needed to locate that truth
inside himself, even if he hasn't trans and he never
puts on a dress again. That's such a great reading
of the play. I'd love to see a production that
does that well. I will say, you know, a lot
of this interpretation is coming from me, as a trans
person desperately looking for representation. Amy and I talked about
this very thing. It's such a beautiful idea that there's
(09:08):
as much power in us finding meaning in other people's
stories as there is in the artist's initial intention. And
I think that's something that gives me a lot of
power because there is so little representation of us out there,
and yet we have to see ourselves. It's a human thing,
especially in art. Yeah, playing someone who's playing a woman
was different than playing a woman, you know, and it
(09:29):
was something that I guess I could access more easily.
I think that makes sense. And I think as we
talked about the fact that our reading of France's Flute
as really like discovering themselves within the role and really
getting into it and really having a moment, that was
an image of being a trans woman that I had
never had before. Somehow in my mind it was you
(09:50):
are born as a baby and you know you're a
trans woman, and then like society fights you, and then
eventually like you move out of your home and you
get to do it. And that wasn't me. But being
a trans woman means being a boy for a while
and then being a trans woman, and that's what that
gave me. I love how Amy thinks about this. Francis
(10:11):
Flute's journey to embodying womanhood is messy and contradictory and
even looks like toxic masculinity. For a while, And even
though I felt like a boy in my entire life,
it took many decades for me to accept myself as trans,
in part because I had no stories, no plays, no movies,
no role models. How exciting is it, then, that Shakespeare
(10:32):
can stand in for us in this way, to hold
as a tour a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet
puts it. How exciting that he can give brilliant people
like Amy Schneider a home. We'll be back after a break,
(10:54):
So am I know a little bit about your Shakespeare
and gender story, And you know, I think it's kind
of cool that it centers on the same play that
Amy's story does, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yeah, and also
centers on Star Wars, not a play by Shakespeare. But
I'm with you. From the time I can remember, I
always saw myself as a boy, and I was obsessed
(11:15):
with Han Solo and desperately wanted to wear boys clothes
and be seen as a little boy. And luckily I
was allowed to dress however I wanted. And because of that,
I was constantly mistaken for a little boy, and people,
various people from my mother to my friends, to my
teachers and classmates would always correct the person that's not
a boy, that's a girl, and I knew that inside
(11:38):
of that there was a truth that was complicated. I
was kind of a boy, and I was kind of
a girl, and I was kind of someone else entirely.
And then I got to Shakespeare Camp. I first played
the Moon in Midsummer Night's Dream, but I was livid
because I thought it had deserved a bigger part. It
was the first time in my life I heard the
phrase there are no small parts, only small actors. Oh. Yeah,
(12:02):
that's like the consolation prize for the actor who gets
the small part. Yeah, I mean there are really small parts,
but not to my own horn toot. But I kind
of stole the show as the Moon. And then the
next summer, when I came back to Shakespeare Camp, they
cast me as Bottom, the great comic character in Midsummer
Night's Dream, and God, I have never been happier. Suddenly,
(12:23):
here I am this little, rambunctious, outlandish, too big for
my britches, theater kid, and I get to play that
very part. Actually, I found a home video of the performance. Recently,
I rehearsed the death scene over and over again, stabbing
myself in every part of my body with this cardboard sword,
(12:43):
you know, evoking bottoms hammy elaborate over the top death.
Now that is quite a performance. Oh yeah, I was hooked.
(13:06):
You know. I had a Shakespeare themed birthday party when
I was eleven where I invited all of my friends,
who were all girls, to come over and rehearse Shakespeare
plays with me. I played the male lead in all
the scenes, obviously, and then the next morning, when the
mothers came to pick them up from the birthday slumber party,
we did a performance. I directed and starred in most
of it. But more than anything, I really wanted my
(13:27):
friends to experience and fall in love with Shakespeare as
much as I had to feel themselves in it like
I did. Got the bug at age eleven. That's on
the early end in my experience for me. It wasn't
until I was a teenager. Teenager is where it got
real for me too. I have the strong memory of
seeing this amazing production of As You Like It when
I was sixteen years old. That blew my mind. Oh m,
(13:49):
can I just jump in there. I just want to
remind everybody about the play, you bet, so As You
Like It is the play about Rosalind. She falls in
love with this handsome young man named Orlando, but her
wicked uncle who's in charge forbids them being together. So
Rosalind disguises herself as a boy and she runs away
to the famous forest of Arden out in the countryside.
(14:10):
She finds Orlando there, but he can't see through her disguise,
so Rosalind then decides to do a double disguise. This
girl dressed as a boy, then dresses as a girl.
It's one of the plays where Shakespeare is consciously playing
with gender, looking at the whole idea like through a
kaleidoscope exactly, which reminds me of this amazing production of
(14:33):
As You Like It that blew my world open. It
felt sexy and dangerous and punk rock. I don't know
how to describe it. It felt queer. I guess it
felt like me. And then I learned that Shakespeare wrote
over half of his sonnets is famous love Poems to
a Boy. We know so little about Shakespeare other than
the fact that he was able to speak from so
many different genders and sexualities and identities and perspectives. No
(14:57):
wonder actors of almost any cultural or personal background seem
to be able to find themselves in these plays. Actors
make intimate connections with Shakespeare, more intimate, I think than
scholars or readers, or certainly audience members do. I found
that the insights actors bring to these plays are the
deepest and richest of all. Me too. And there's one
(15:19):
more actor I wanted to talk to you about gender
and trans identity in Shakespeare. Skylar Cooper is a professional
Shakespeare actor. This was a huge career shift after he
started out in the military and then made a whole
new life for himself in the tech industry. It's hard
enough to break into the theater, but to do it
as a black transman is even harder. Skylar is passionate
(15:39):
about changing that I started out in this world, like
into this game that I had to play, and I
had to figure out early on what rules did I
need to change so that I could exist. Skylar has
thought deeply about how Shakespeare has impacted his life, particularly
the character Othello. Othello is one of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Barry,
(16:03):
I'll start the recap on this play for us. Please
so Othello as a general in the Venetian arm He's
an extraordinary military man, a genius really, and a hero
a thousand times over. He's also a more a dark
skinned black man, and as such an outsider in White Venice.
He falls in love with Desdemona, the strong and powerful
(16:23):
daughter of a senator who doesn't want othellow to marry
his daughter, and the two of them elope and run
off to Cyprus to a Venetian military garrison. And there's
this other soldier in the play. Iago. He is one
of the giant villains in all of Shakespeare. He's angry
that he's been passed over for a promotion by Othello,
and he vows to get revenge. Iago tries to take
(16:46):
Othello down, and he does so by suggesting that Desdemona
Othello's wife has been cheating on him. Othello gets taken
in by the lie. It eats him alive. He kills
Desdemona and then himself in what is the most painful
type of tragedy, in my opinion, one as common as
it is disgustingly avoidable. I saw a black man who
(17:06):
was trying to belong in a way that I have
tried to belong my entire life. So I understood what
Othello was going through. Towards the end, he says, she
loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I
loved her that she did pity them. That's a very
(17:27):
key line, and that has always been the thing that
I had to think about when I performed Othellow, she
loved me for the dangers I had passed. What does
that mean to someone when you say that they loved
me because of the things that I had gotten over,
I had gone through. They appreciated me, they saw me,
(17:51):
They saw me in a context where Schuyler couldn't find
images of himself anywhere else. He found them in Shakespeare.
Go in and be the change, right, be the change
and be you know what I'm saying, like, bring yourself
into the world. And Shakespeare was that entry. It was
that doorway. You know. It allowed anyone to come in.
(18:13):
Whether you're black, whether you're queer, whether you're trans, straight, ciss,
it doesn't matter. It's like it allows you to find
your human condition, your human self, your humanity. That's shakesperience humanity.
We'll be right back. I'm so grateful to you, m
(18:40):
and to Amy and Skylar two for sharing your stories,
especially at this moment when trans people are so vulnerable,
and trans rights are under attack in so many places,
And you've all made me understand something new about Shakespeare.
So I'd like to run a thought past you. Sure.
One of the things I know about Shakespeare m is
(19:00):
that as a dramatist, he's addicted to binaries. The Merchant
of Venice, jew versus Christian Henry the Fifth England versus Friends,
Romeo and Juliet to Give versus Capulet, Antony and Cleopatra,
Rome versus Egypt, and on and on and on. It's
just binaries everywhere. But here's the thing. Shakespeare's practice is
to collapse these binaries, to expose them. Sometimes he likes
(19:24):
to show the way that binaries are restrictive, even false,
and gender is the ultimate false binary, Isn't is the
one we're taught to believe in since birth like so
many of these others. And Shakespeare's characters are always fighting
against his false binaries. But then in the comedies there
are these big weddings at the end that feel like
they're restoring what the characters have worked the whole play
(19:45):
to undo. It's a part of as you Like It
that always tortured me after Rosalind has found this profound
liberation and fallen in love and broken gender binaries and
worn a shepherd's outfit. Then she has to put on
what she calls her women's weeds, her female nobleman attire,
and get married. Even in the production that change my
life as a kid. I really winced at this moment.
(20:09):
It felt like all of the freedom of the play
suddenly got stripped away, the binaries were reinforced. But then again,
him speaking of Rosalind, she's girl boy girl in the play.
But remember, on Shakespeare's stage she would have been played
by a boy actor, So really it's boy girl, boy girl.
(20:30):
And it occurs to me him that maybe this kind
of double helix of gender wrapped around gender, and maybe
that's the central metaphor on the subject in all of Shakespeare.
Oh completely, it's this weird and wonderful spectrum. It's totally confusing,
and more than anything, it's fun and it's entertaining, and
it's sexy. And what's more important than that, which brings
(20:52):
us to the very end of As You Like It,
in which in the final moment, Shakespeare asks us to
consider the boy girl boy girl helix, and in an
ultimate intellectual pirouet. He reminds us that gender is nothing
but a mercurial game of who wants to kiss who? When? Ah?
I love that speech. Rosalind gets the last word. Yes,
(21:13):
it's so fun and meta. Is this actor a man
or a woman who wants to kiss them? Maybe? Everyone?
It's a full of sexual innuendo and dirty jokes and
a whole lot of possibility. I would kind of love
to hear that speech. Am I think there's any chance
I might ask you to read it? Well, you heard
(21:34):
my very good bottom performance, so I'm not surprised you're
asking me to return to the stage, Barry, But for
you I will. And as you listen, I want you
to pay attention to the word if. What if we
saw gender not as a binary but as one big if.
I'm going to skip the beginning of this and go
straight into the magic part. I mean literally magic, because
(21:55):
our boy girl boy girl Rosalind ends the show with
a sort of spell. My way is to conjure you,
and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, oh women,
for the love you bear to men, to like as
much of this play as please you. And I charge you,
(22:17):
oh men, for the love you bear to women. As
I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them.
That between you and the women the play may please.
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many
of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that
(22:38):
liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I
am sure as many as have good beards or good
faces or sweet breaths will for my kind offer when
I make curtsy, bid me farewell. Am. That was fantastic. Thanks.
I just love that speech so much, and I really
(23:00):
did hear that if if I were a woman, I
would kiss you. It's one of the most powerful words
in Shakespeare, and it's in one of my very favorite
Shakespeare lines. It's from this play from As You Like It, Touchstone.
The clown does this long speech about the power of if.
He sums up his whole approach to life by saying,
(23:22):
and I love this much virtue in if. Oh yeah,
he's saying that IF has good in it. It's a
little word that's great and powerful. It's a word that
sets imagination in motion. I wonder what would happen if
if is the dreamer's word. If is how we propose
(23:46):
that things don't need to be forever the way they've
always been. If is the prompt toward progress and growth,
wouldn't it be great? If that's really what we're talking
about here, Barry, I mean, it's what we've seen throughout.
Where there's a will, Shakespeare can open a door to
transformation and change. Maybe that can inform how we think
(24:08):
of gender. What if we could understand gender the way
Rosalind does. What if it's not this socially constructed, restrictive,
rigid thing, but what if it's a joyful, open, playful,
fluid way of being who we truly are? Much virtue
in If, Much virtue in If? Where There's a Will?
(24:37):
Finding Shakespeare is written and hosted by me Barry Edelstein.
My co host is m Weinstein. Our show is produced
by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer
Sanchez and Salman 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
(24:59):
engineer is Justin Burger. Our theme is an original composition
by Hannis Brown Samuel Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki
Merrick is our voice coach. Our show was recorded at
Bill Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio and The Old Globe. Where
There's a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries
and The Old Clobe. Our executive team includes Jacob Weisberg,
(25:21):
Malcolm Gladwell, Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carrie Brodie, Carlie mcgliori,
Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrell, Litalmolad, Greta Kohne, and Mia Lobell.
Our marketing team includes Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner,
Nicole Morano, Mary Beth Smith, Jordan Macmillan, Isabella Narvaiz and
(25:43):
Sean Carney. We couldn't make the show without operations and
licensing support from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig, Daniela la Khan
and Jake Flanagan. Our development team is Lital Mulad and
Justine Lange. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy Veturbie
artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is audreaesqu Geisle, Managing
(26:07):
director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks to
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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
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(26:28):
winning the Old Globe, one of America's leading regional theater companies,
visit the Old Globe dot org. If you love this show,
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Pushkin. So people always ask me what my favorite Shakespeare
play is, and I have this standard dodge. I always say,
it's whichever one I'm working on at the moment. Huh. Yes,
I mean it's pretty much impossible to pick one. Winter's
Tale brings me to tears, Hamlet turns me into a philosopher.
(00:38):
Much Ado is like my favorite romantic comedy. I mean,
it's hard to pick. It is so at the Old Globe,
we're starting to work on the shows that are going
to be part of our Summer Shakespeare Festival next year,
and the one we're preparing for at the moment is
Twelfth Night. So good. I've directed Twelve Night before and
it is definitely up there for me. I've directed it too,
and it may be my favorite anyway. It's just a
(01:00):
perfect play. It has everything that makes Shakespeare Shakespeare. Gorgeous poetry, romance,
crazy characters, fantastic story wins, a sword fight, cross dressing
as I am woman now all last the day? What
fifth Lisa, Sha Pool, Olivia breathe, Oh time. They'll must
(01:26):
untangle this, not I It is too hard and not
for me. Ton tie so m. Twelfth Night is also
on my mind for a whole other reason. That's the
Shakespeare play that was in rehearsal when you came to
work at the Old Globe for the first time, which
is when you and I met. Yeah, in twenty fifteen.
We just heard a little piece of that production. Rottina
(01:48):
Wesley was spectacular as Viola. Yes, we met when I
was in my early twenties and I just finished a
classical directing fellowship. We spent an enormous amount of time
talking about Shakespeare. So when I was looking for someone
to join me on this podcast expedition in search of Shakespeare,
you were absolutely the only choice. Thanks, Barry. I mean,
(02:10):
it's been so fun to be your copilot as I
pop in and out of TV directing gigs, which remind
me a lot of Elizabethan England. But we can get
to that another time. Yes, So, speaking of our friend William,
what I didn't know at the time and what I've
learned since, is that there really is a unique and
deeply personal dimension to your relationship with Shakespeare. And you've
(02:33):
been so generous in talking about it and sharing it
with me, and I'm really grateful to you for that. Well,
Shakespeare has been really central to my life in terms
of how I think about gender, kind of like in
that clip from twelfth Night we just heard, Violet calls
her gender too hard an for me too. Untie. You know,
I saw this tweet that says, your gender isn't assigned
(02:54):
at birth, It's assigned by your English teacher when your
class does a Shakespeare play. It's a great tweet. We
should use it as the subtitle for this week's episode
because what I'd love to talk about this week is
what is this guy from England four hundred years ago
doing in the middle of our contemporary conversation about gender
and m I'm so grateful that you're willing to take
the lead on this. Thanks Barry. You know, I've worked
(03:17):
in a lot of different places, with a lot of
different people on Shakespeare, and to me, there's always this
question in his work about where gender lives in his
characters and how it can be examined and toyed with
in his plays. Dear lads believe it, for they so
yet belie thy happy years that say thou art a
man Diana's lip. It's not more smooth and rubious. My
(03:43):
small pipe is as the maiden's organs, shrill and sound
and all as simplative a woman's part. I'm Barry Edelstein
and I'm m Weinstein. And this is where there's a
will finding Shakespeare from the old globe and pushkin industries.
Our show discovers Shakespeare in all sorts of unexpected places
(04:04):
and asks what he's doing there and what his presence
means about him and about us. So the first time
I acted in a Shakespeare play, I got cast as
a boy, and it was a little taste of gender euphoria.
It turns out I wasn't alone in this. I spoke
to someone who also had a major discovery in a
Shakespeare play. She's an expert on about a zillion subjects.
(04:27):
If you've heard the name Amy Schneider, it's probably because
you're a Jeopardy fan from California, Amy Schneider. Amy recently
had the longest Jeopardy winning streak of all time. I
remember what an amazing achievement. Well, I wanted to talk
to Amy because I saw this article about how playing
the role of Francis Flute in Shakespeare's play A Midsummer
(04:50):
Night's Dream helped her realize who she really was. Oh,
can I just remind our listeners about flute. So there's
a play within a play in a Midsummer Night's Dream,
and throughout the show we watched this group of amateur
actors rehearse it and perform it. Francis Flute is a
bellows ender. His job is to tend to the tools
(05:11):
that keep a fire going in a factory or a shop.
And there's this female character in the play that the
men are working on and Flute gets a sign to
play it yes, and Amy was cast to play Francis
Flute in a community theater production in the Bay Area.
And so I decided at the beginning, you know, you're
going through deciding your character motivation, which is another great
(05:32):
thing about Shakespeare, which is that there's so much ambiguity
that there's a lot of different ways you can play
even a smaller character. And so I was like, well,
I'm going to try to play it as this dude
is really kind of stoked about a dressing up as
a woman, and you know, that's some more interesting choice.
Was the reason I gave myself for why I wanted
to do it that way, but clearly in retrospect, like
(05:52):
it was giving me an excuse to enjoy it. Flute
initially says he doesn't want to play the girl, and
there's all of this discussion about what his voice is
going to sound like and what he's going to do
about his beard, which he may or may not really have.
But then when the play has performed, Flute Deliver, there's
a really beautiful monologue that transcends the comedy. He ends
(06:15):
up embodying this woman with grace and depth, and in
front of all of us, this man who was terrified
of not being manly enough has now embraced this different
gender and found an authentic moving voice. You know, it's
fascinating because Amy was really going through something parallel at
the time. She was in her early thirties and presenting
to the world as male. There I am every day
(06:38):
like and I can remember specifically, like sense memories of
being backstage when I'm getting into my female costume and
like rubbing some lipstick on my cheeks for you know,
cartoonishly overdone blush, and like putting this big wig on sideways.
Like the idea was that I loved dressing up as
a woman. Was terrible at it was the joke and
(07:00):
it just felt so good. And then of driving home
one day, and I just said, huh, if I could
just like wear a dress anytime, And I imagined myself
doing that and then introducing myself to somebody as the
name I randomly pick at the time was Jenny. I
was like, what if I said, Hi, I'm Jenny and
(07:21):
I went WHOA. I kept driving somehow, But it's like,
really one of the most shocking moments of my life
that suddenly it was like those things in the movies
whereas somebody goes like gasps and then there's this like
montage of flashbacks to how all the clues fit together. Now.
I mean, that was one of the things I was
thinking about. It is like, this role that was so
(07:42):
powerful and and empowering in my life is also a
cruel trans joke, the ones that I've been growing up
with all my life about oh, he's dress up like
a girl, like da da da day. You know. That's
the thing about Shakespeare is that, like The Taming of
the Shrew is pretty misogynist and like all these other things,
like there's all this stuff, but at the same time,
(08:03):
there's so much truth in it and so much power
that everybody can find the parts of it that work
for them. And then trying to out the rest. Wow.
Am that double view of Francis Flute is so great.
I've seen productions where it's just a straight ahead joke
that he's in address and Amy's right. The comedy is
rooted in a kind of cruelty. There's a definite cruelty there,
(08:26):
but I've always seen it as having the potential to
be more complex. Flute is afraid of being seen as
womanish in front of all these other guys. But there's
also this unexpected reversal. Unlike other popular media in which
we laugh at men in dresses, Flute has the ability
to make us cry. Maybe playing the woman is exactly
(08:47):
what he needed. Maybe he needed to locate that truth
inside himself, even if he hasn't trans and he never
puts on a dress again. That's such a great reading
of the play. I'd love to see a production that
does that well. I will say, you know, a lot
of this interpretation is coming from me, as a trans
person desperately looking for representation. Amy and I talked about
this very thing. It's such a beautiful idea that there's
(09:08):
as much power in us finding meaning in other people's
stories as there is in the artist's initial intention. And
I think that's something that gives me a lot of
power because there is so little representation of us out there,
and yet we have to see ourselves. It's a human thing,
especially in art. Yeah, playing someone who's playing a woman
was different than playing a woman, you know, and it
(09:29):
was something that I guess I could access more easily.
I think that makes sense. And I think as we
talked about the fact that our reading of France's Flute
as really like discovering themselves within the role and really
getting into it and really having a moment, that was
an image of being a trans woman that I had
never had before. Somehow in my mind it was you
(09:50):
are born as a baby and you know you're a
trans woman, and then like society fights you, and then
eventually like you move out of your home and you
get to do it. And that wasn't me. But being
a trans woman means being a boy for a while
and then being a trans woman, and that's what that
gave me. I love how Amy thinks about this. Francis
(10:11):
Flute's journey to embodying womanhood is messy and contradictory and
even looks like toxic masculinity. For a while, And even
though I felt like a boy in my entire life,
it took many decades for me to accept myself as trans,
in part because I had no stories, no plays, no movies,
no role models. How exciting is it, then, that Shakespeare
(10:32):
can stand in for us in this way, to hold
as a tour a mirror up to nature, as Hamlet
puts it. How exciting that he can give brilliant people
like Amy Schneider a home. We'll be back after a break,
(10:54):
So am I know a little bit about your Shakespeare
and gender story, And you know, I think it's kind
of cool that it centers on the same play that
Amy's story does, A Midsummer Night's Dream. Yeah, and also
centers on Star Wars, not a play by Shakespeare. But
I'm with you. From the time I can remember, I
always saw myself as a boy, and I was obsessed
(11:15):
with Han Solo and desperately wanted to wear boys clothes
and be seen as a little boy. And luckily I
was allowed to dress however I wanted. And because of that,
I was constantly mistaken for a little boy, and people,
various people from my mother to my friends, to my
teachers and classmates would always correct the person that's not
a boy, that's a girl, and I knew that inside
(11:38):
of that there was a truth that was complicated. I
was kind of a boy, and I was kind of
a girl, and I was kind of someone else entirely.
And then I got to Shakespeare Camp. I first played
the Moon in Midsummer Night's Dream, but I was livid
because I thought it had deserved a bigger part. It
was the first time in my life I heard the
phrase there are no small parts, only small actors. Oh. Yeah,
(12:02):
that's like the consolation prize for the actor who gets
the small part. Yeah, I mean there are really small parts,
but not to my own horn toot. But I kind
of stole the show as the Moon. And then the
next summer, when I came back to Shakespeare Camp, they
cast me as Bottom, the great comic character in Midsummer
Night's Dream, and God, I have never been happier. Suddenly,
(12:23):
here I am this little, rambunctious, outlandish, too big for
my britches, theater kid, and I get to play that
very part. Actually, I found a home video of the performance. Recently,
I rehearsed the death scene over and over again, stabbing
myself in every part of my body with this cardboard sword,
(12:43):
you know, evoking bottoms hammy elaborate over the top death.
Now that is quite a performance. Oh yeah, I was hooked.
(13:06):
You know. I had a Shakespeare themed birthday party when
I was eleven where I invited all of my friends,
who were all girls, to come over and rehearse Shakespeare
plays with me. I played the male lead in all
the scenes, obviously, and then the next morning, when the
mothers came to pick them up from the birthday slumber party,
we did a performance. I directed and starred in most
of it. But more than anything, I really wanted my
(13:27):
friends to experience and fall in love with Shakespeare as
much as I had to feel themselves in it like
I did. Got the bug at age eleven. That's on
the early end in my experience for me. It wasn't
until I was a teenager. Teenager is where it got
real for me too. I have the strong memory of
seeing this amazing production of As You Like It when
I was sixteen years old. That blew my mind. Oh m,
(13:49):
can I just jump in there. I just want to
remind everybody about the play, you bet, so As You
Like It is the play about Rosalind. She falls in
love with this handsome young man named Orlando, but her
wicked uncle who's in charge forbids them being together. So
Rosalind disguises herself as a boy and she runs away
to the famous forest of Arden out in the countryside.
(14:10):
She finds Orlando there, but he can't see through her disguise,
so Rosalind then decides to do a double disguise. This
girl dressed as a boy, then dresses as a girl.
It's one of the plays where Shakespeare is consciously playing
with gender, looking at the whole idea like through a
kaleidoscope exactly, which reminds me of this amazing production of
(14:33):
As You Like It that blew my world open. It
felt sexy and dangerous and punk rock. I don't know
how to describe it. It felt queer. I guess it
felt like me. And then I learned that Shakespeare wrote
over half of his sonnets is famous love Poems to
a Boy. We know so little about Shakespeare other than
the fact that he was able to speak from so
many different genders and sexualities and identities and perspectives. No
(14:57):
wonder actors of almost any cultural or personal background seem
to be able to find themselves in these plays. Actors
make intimate connections with Shakespeare, more intimate, I think than
scholars or readers, or certainly audience members do. I found
that the insights actors bring to these plays are the
deepest and richest of all. Me too. And there's one
(15:19):
more actor I wanted to talk to you about gender
and trans identity in Shakespeare. Skylar Cooper is a professional
Shakespeare actor. This was a huge career shift after he
started out in the military and then made a whole
new life for himself in the tech industry. It's hard
enough to break into the theater, but to do it
as a black transman is even harder. Skylar is passionate
(15:39):
about changing that I started out in this world, like
into this game that I had to play, and I
had to figure out early on what rules did I
need to change so that I could exist. Skylar has
thought deeply about how Shakespeare has impacted his life, particularly
the character Othello. Othello is one of Shakespeare's great tragedies. Barry,
(16:03):
I'll start the recap on this play for us. Please
so Othello as a general in the Venetian arm He's
an extraordinary military man, a genius really, and a hero
a thousand times over. He's also a more a dark
skinned black man, and as such an outsider in White Venice.
He falls in love with Desdemona, the strong and powerful
(16:23):
daughter of a senator who doesn't want othellow to marry
his daughter, and the two of them elope and run
off to Cyprus to a Venetian military garrison. And there's
this other soldier in the play. Iago. He is one
of the giant villains in all of Shakespeare. He's angry
that he's been passed over for a promotion by Othello,
and he vows to get revenge. Iago tries to take
(16:46):
Othello down, and he does so by suggesting that Desdemona
Othello's wife has been cheating on him. Othello gets taken
in by the lie. It eats him alive. He kills
Desdemona and then himself in what is the most painful
type of tragedy, in my opinion, one as common as
it is disgustingly avoidable. I saw a black man who
(17:06):
was trying to belong in a way that I have
tried to belong my entire life. So I understood what
Othello was going through. Towards the end, he says, she
loved me for the dangers I had passed, and I
loved her that she did pity them. That's a very
(17:27):
key line, and that has always been the thing that
I had to think about when I performed Othellow, she
loved me for the dangers I had passed. What does
that mean to someone when you say that they loved
me because of the things that I had gotten over,
I had gone through. They appreciated me, they saw me,
(17:51):
They saw me in a context where Schuyler couldn't find
images of himself anywhere else. He found them in Shakespeare.
Go in and be the change, right, be the change
and be you know what I'm saying, like, bring yourself
into the world. And Shakespeare was that entry. It was
that doorway. You know. It allowed anyone to come in.
(18:13):
Whether you're black, whether you're queer, whether you're trans, straight, ciss,
it doesn't matter. It's like it allows you to find
your human condition, your human self, your humanity. That's shakesperience humanity.
We'll be right back. I'm so grateful to you, m
(18:40):
and to Amy and Skylar two for sharing your stories,
especially at this moment when trans people are so vulnerable,
and trans rights are under attack in so many places,
And you've all made me understand something new about Shakespeare.
So I'd like to run a thought past you. Sure.
One of the things I know about Shakespeare m is
(19:00):
that as a dramatist, he's addicted to binaries. The Merchant
of Venice, jew versus Christian Henry the Fifth England versus Friends,
Romeo and Juliet to Give versus Capulet, Antony and Cleopatra,
Rome versus Egypt, and on and on and on. It's
just binaries everywhere. But here's the thing. Shakespeare's practice is
to collapse these binaries, to expose them. Sometimes he likes
(19:24):
to show the way that binaries are restrictive, even false,
and gender is the ultimate false binary, Isn't is the
one we're taught to believe in since birth like so
many of these others. And Shakespeare's characters are always fighting
against his false binaries. But then in the comedies there
are these big weddings at the end that feel like
they're restoring what the characters have worked the whole play
(19:45):
to undo. It's a part of as you Like It
that always tortured me after Rosalind has found this profound
liberation and fallen in love and broken gender binaries and
worn a shepherd's outfit. Then she has to put on
what she calls her women's weeds, her female nobleman attire,
and get married. Even in the production that change my
life as a kid. I really winced at this moment.
(20:09):
It felt like all of the freedom of the play
suddenly got stripped away, the binaries were reinforced. But then again,
him speaking of Rosalind, she's girl boy girl in the play.
But remember, on Shakespeare's stage she would have been played
by a boy actor, So really it's boy girl, boy girl.
(20:30):
And it occurs to me him that maybe this kind
of double helix of gender wrapped around gender, and maybe
that's the central metaphor on the subject in all of Shakespeare.
Oh completely, it's this weird and wonderful spectrum. It's totally confusing,
and more than anything, it's fun and it's entertaining, and
it's sexy. And what's more important than that, which brings
(20:52):
us to the very end of As You Like It,
in which in the final moment, Shakespeare asks us to
consider the boy girl boy girl helix, and in an
ultimate intellectual pirouet. He reminds us that gender is nothing
but a mercurial game of who wants to kiss who? When? Ah?
I love that speech. Rosalind gets the last word. Yes,
(21:13):
it's so fun and meta. Is this actor a man
or a woman who wants to kiss them? Maybe? Everyone?
It's a full of sexual innuendo and dirty jokes and
a whole lot of possibility. I would kind of love
to hear that speech. Am I think there's any chance
I might ask you to read it? Well, you heard
(21:34):
my very good bottom performance, so I'm not surprised you're
asking me to return to the stage, Barry, But for
you I will. And as you listen, I want you
to pay attention to the word if. What if we
saw gender not as a binary but as one big if.
I'm going to skip the beginning of this and go
straight into the magic part. I mean literally magic, because
(21:55):
our boy girl boy girl Rosalind ends the show with
a sort of spell. My way is to conjure you,
and I'll begin with the women. I charge you, oh women,
for the love you bear to men, to like as
much of this play as please you. And I charge you,
(22:17):
oh men, for the love you bear to women. As
I perceive by your simpering, none of you hates them.
That between you and the women the play may please.
If I were a woman, I would kiss as many
of you as had beards that pleased me, complexions that
(22:38):
liked me, and breaths that I defied not. And I
am sure as many as have good beards or good
faces or sweet breaths will for my kind offer when
I make curtsy, bid me farewell. Am. That was fantastic. Thanks.
I just love that speech so much, and I really
(23:00):
did hear that if if I were a woman, I
would kiss you. It's one of the most powerful words
in Shakespeare, and it's in one of my very favorite
Shakespeare lines. It's from this play from As You Like It, Touchstone.
The clown does this long speech about the power of if.
He sums up his whole approach to life by saying,
(23:22):
and I love this much virtue in if. Oh yeah,
he's saying that IF has good in it. It's a
little word that's great and powerful. It's a word that
sets imagination in motion. I wonder what would happen if
if is the dreamer's word. If is how we propose
(23:46):
that things don't need to be forever the way they've
always been. If is the prompt toward progress and growth,
wouldn't it be great? If that's really what we're talking
about here, Barry, I mean, it's what we've seen throughout.
Where there's a will, Shakespeare can open a door to
transformation and change. Maybe that can inform how we think
(24:08):
of gender. What if we could understand gender the way
Rosalind does. What if it's not this socially constructed, restrictive,
rigid thing, but what if it's a joyful, open, playful,
fluid way of being who we truly are? Much virtue
in If, Much virtue in If? Where There's a Will?
(24:37):
Finding Shakespeare is written and hosted by me Barry Edelstein.
My co host is m Weinstein. Our show is produced
by Buffy Gorilla and Nisha Vencott, with assistant producers Jennifer
Sanchez and Salman 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
(24:59):
engineer is Justin Burger. Our theme is an original composition
by Hannis Brown Samuel Buzid is our fact checker. Vicki
Merrick is our voice coach. Our show was recorded at
Bill Corkery Productions, Leopard Studio and The Old Globe. Where
There's a Will is a co production of Pushkin Industries
and The Old Clobe. Our executive team includes Jacob Weisberg,
(25:21):
Malcolm Gladwell, Heather Faine, John Schnars, Carrie Brodie, Carlie mcgliori,
Christina Sullivan, Jason Gambrell, Litalmolad, Greta Kohne, and Mia Lobell.
Our marketing team includes Eric Sandler, Maggie Taylor, Morgan Ratner,
Nicole Morano, Mary Beth Smith, Jordan Macmillan, Isabella Narvaiz and
(25:43):
Sean Carney. We couldn't make the show without operations and
licensing support from Nicole Optenbosch, Maya Kanig, Daniela la Khan
and Jake Flanagan. Our development team is Lital Mulad and
Justine Lange. Barry Edelstein. That's Me is Erna Fincy Veturbie
artistic director and Timothy J. Shields is audreaesqu Geisle, Managing
(26:07):
director of the Old Globe. For the Globe thanks to
sound director Paul Peterson and assistant to the sound director
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
(26:28):
winning the Old Globe, one of America's leading regional theater companies,
visit the Old Globe dot org. If you love this show,
consider subscribing to Pushkin Plus, offering bonus content and add
free listening across our network for four dollars and ninety
nine cents a month. Find the Pushkin Plus channel on
Apple Podcasts or at pushkin dot fm. To find more
(26:50):
Pushkin podcasts, listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
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