Interview: Christopher V. Edwards Director of ART at Shakespeare & Company

Located in The Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, Shakespeare & Company is one of the largest Shakespeare Festivals in the country, operating year-round. The Organization attracts more than 60,000 patrons annually, with a core of over 150 artists.

Shakespeare & Company embraces the core values of Shakespeare's work: collaboration, commitment to language, visceral experience and classical ideals, expressed with physical prowess and an embodied contemporary voice.

The Company develops and performs Shakespeare, classics, contemporary, and new plays of social and political significance, generating opportunities for collaboration between actors, directors and designers of all races nationalities and backgrounds.

The upcoming production in Shakespeare & Company's Roman Garden Theatre will be ART, a play by Yasmina Reza that premiered in 1994 at Comédie des Champs-Élysées in Paris. The play subsequently ran in London in 1996 and on Broadway in 1998. This production will be presented in English with translation by Christopher Hampton. The play revolves around three friends-Serge, Marc and Yvan-who find their previously solid 15-year friendship on shaky ground when Serge buys an expensive painting. Christopher V. Edwards, Artistic Director of Actors Shakespeare Project, directs. Chris took some time out of rehearsal to answer some questions.

Both the venue and you are particularly known and associated with Shakespeare, is there some connection between Shakespeare and ART?

Let me start by saying that I had nothing to do with the choice of the show. That was all Allyn (Burrows, Shakespeare & Company Artistic Director). My sense is that the initial choice of this show probably was not because it has some correlation to Shakespeare or to some particular theme."

"Personally, I think that for so long, there has been this thought (albeit arguable) that Shakespeare was an amazing writer - perhaps the best in the English language. There is a particular group of people that have been invited to the party, and traditionally, that group did not include BIPOC and Non-Binary folks. And when they do get invited to the party, they are not asked to dance. Both my company and this, have that word (Shakespeare) in our titles. Over the last year or so, it has become a word that is not necessarily associated with a positive experience for some people. Where I am finding a correlation with ART is that I'm questioning what I understood about Shakespeare's work. What the meaning of the "art of Shakespeare" is. There is a prevailing notion that its "high art" or that one has to be smart to understand it because it's on a higher level. It is kind of what we have all been taught. ART looks at the idea of how we put value on this thing that is prescribed as something you should be putting value on. I see a correlation because, in my lifetime, Shakespeare has been prescribed as something you should put value on. It is intellectually stimulating, it will make you a better actor, reader, communicator...all these things.

In ART we have this contemporary piece, and the price of such things in today's market is absolutely absurd. From both the monetary value and also the human everyday person perspective. What is the value we put on things, personally? I'm in this place where my questioning of Shakespeare is revolving around some of the same issues these three characters are dealing with as they look at this painting, then consequently, as they look at each other. What's the cost of a contemporary painting and what's the value of that painting? What's the cost of friendship and what's the value of that friendship? While this comment isn't about ART, I will add that for me, exploring and interrogating the material and NOT just giving them a pass because they are from Shakespeare. We tend to give Shakespeare a pass, like - oh, that's a misogynist play but he was a writer of his time, so we let it pass, because its Shakespeare. Oh, that's a racist play, but he was a writer of his time, so we give it a pass. That's an antisemitic play but ... Well, what if we really interrogated the play and had that conversation? We'd say, there is an antisemitic play, let's look at the language, let's call it what it is. But I still think that doesn't mean we shouldn't do them. I still think there are things to be learned, even under that construct. I think the most interesting thing about Shakespeare is that its infinitely interpretable. That is a similarity between ART and Shakespeare."

"This may get me into some trouble, but I don't know that Shakespeare necessarily had anything to teach us about who we are today. I think we fill in the meaning to make the play say what we need it to say. ART was hugely popular back in the 90's. It was translated into several languages. It is very accessible. To some extent, you can interpret it for yourself. It is such an intellectual conversation. Yes, they are talking about art, but (for me) the play is about friendship, and I think just about all of us can get to that". We agreed that in ART, the play, as with Shakespeare - there is an element of art imitating life; and moreover that art is subjective. It means / says something different to everyone which depends on what one brings to it.

In the past performance that I saw, the cast consisted of three white men. This production has been cast with one white male and two of color. Perhaps, to better fit as part of Shakespeare &Company's Inclusion, Diversity, Equity, and Accessibility initiative. Can you speak to that a bit?

"As I understand it, the playwright, Yasmina Reza, is French, Iranian, and Jewish. I am not, nor do I know what her original intention was for this play. There is a feeling around it that the characters are of a certain economic strata - a high one. Two of them make a lot of money and the other does just okay. My sense is that the play has been performed predominantly by men and you get the sense they are privileged people. As far as race is concerned, I don't think this play really deals with race. It deals more with privilege than anything, I think. I just want to see more people of color on stages in roles not traditionally played by people of color. Yasmina talks about accessibility for her plays. I think if it is to be truly accessible, then perhaps we need to see different people than we typically do in this sort of a production. I know there are people of color and non-binary people who are doctors, lawyers, engineers, but we don't often get to see that. That was important to me. Quite often, when we do see a person of color, they are the focal point of some trauma. There is no reason we can't see a black man who is an engineer, and he is friends with a white man, and they happen to have an argument, and it has nothing to do with race. That said, I am not blind to the fact that there may be a metaphor in there. We are setting it now, in the Berkshires. There's two black men and one white person. In this world, what does it mean if I go out and spend $200,000 on a painting right now? I'm going to be under a different kind of microscope, if my friends (maybe we're woke, maybe we're not) but, if my friends feel there is a revolution or a problem in the country and that kind of money could help but, I go out and buy a painting that they see no value in... "

We spoke a bit about how powerful his comment was, particularly coming within 24-hours of the second of two billionaires having returned from a few brief moments in space flight. Edwards said, "that has some racial economic resonance". "A lot of that is subtextual to the play for me, and I'm reading into that. I don't know that Yasmina intended that, or that everyone coming to see the play will pick up on that. But that is there for me."

The conversation wrapped up with a brief discussion regarding challenges posed by the unusual frequency and intensity of thunderstorm activity recently in the area, given that ART, like so many productions in this pandemic period, is scheduled to play outdoors at the Roman Garden theatre.

"We have to do this outdoors and the play is so obviously written to be performed inside a theatre where you can have lighting cues and scenery denoting different spaces, etc. We are doing this outdoors, so we've had to adjust that way. The only changes we've made are related to the space, we are in. We are setting it in the Berkshires, on a patio or porch at the second homes of people who come here from the city." He specified that they didn't change much. Then added: "We didn't go out of our way, to make this a mixed-race cast or piece, it reflects what I know today's society is."

William Shakespeare is attributed with having said "the object of art is to give life shape". Berkshire area audiences will have the opportunity to see what this form of ART gives to them when the production plays July 30 - August 22 in The Roman Garden theatre at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. Visit https://www.shakespeare.org/shows/2021/art for information and tickets.