When Bill Rauch applied to become the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in 2007, he pitched an ambitious ten-year project: the festival would commission thirty-seven new plays about moments of change in American history, on the model of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven-play canon. “Shakespeare wrote the history of his people onto the stage,” Alison Carey, who directs what became American Revolutions: The United States History Cycle, told me. “Why don’t we do that?” Last week, O.S.F. announced eight more commissions, bringing the total to thirty-two, with five to go. So far, the commissioned playwrights—who include David Henry Hwang, Paula Vogel, Lynn Nottage, and Young Jean Lee—have written dramas about immigration, Presidential elections, the slave trade, Roe v. Wade, radical politics, and the decline of American industry. The results have raised a tricky question: Is Shakespeare still a useful guide, or do playwrights need to create a new kind of drama if they want to depict American history?
One of the most successful entries in the cycle so far suggests the vitality of the Shakespearean model. Robert Schenkkan’s “All the Way” is a thrilling chronicle of Lyndon B. Johnson’s rise to power in the year following John F. Kennedy’s assassination. Schenkkan told me that he set out quite consciously to write a history play in the Shakespearean vein: a large-scale exploration of leadership and morality at a moment of national crisis, centered on a flawed, charismatic hero who fights, schemes, and soliloquizes his way to victory. Schenkkan reread the Henriad—Shakespeare’s second tetralogy of succession battles, from “Richard II” to “Henry V”—and noted its dramatic techniques: economic staging that relies on the audience’s “imaginary forces” (to quote “Henry V”); a relentless pace that zips from humor to tragedy, the tavern to the battlefield; the embodiment of political questions in personal encounters (think of King Harry cloaked as a soldier, visiting his skeptical troops on the eve of Agincourt); and a ceaseless interrogation of how leaders should gain and wield power. “All the Way” opens with Johnson delivering an earthy soliloquy, like a honky-tonk Richard III. Then he becomes a down-home Harry, with a whiff of Falstaff, barrelling through threats and compromises to corral Congress into passing the Civil Rights Act of 1964, to secure the Democratic nomination, and to defeat Goldwater. “Any jackass can kick a barn down, but it takes a carpenter to build one,” he confides, as he rips the voting-rights section out of the civil-rights bill. “When the carpenter picks up his saw, if wood could talk . . . it would scream.”
Shakespeare’s history cycle fed English appetites for a heroic national past while also addressing thorny topics—the politics of succession, the threat of rebellion—that pricked the Elizabethan present. Similarly, “All the Way,” along with Schenkkan’s potent sequel, “The Great Society,” satisfies contemporary nostalgia for a golden age of progressive deal-making while spotlighting the very social fissures—a devastating entanglement overseas, mounting racial conflict over the thwarted promise of civil rights—that we have lately seen cracking open anew. This Shakespearean cocktail has proved immensely popular: “All the Way” went from Oregon to Broadway, with Bryan Cranston assuming the role of L.B.J., and there it broke the weekly box-office record for a straight play. Cranston told the Times that he wanted to play L.B.J. “because he is the King Lear of modern theater in this play.” (“King Lear” was initially published as a history, and “Richard III” was first printed as a tragedy; the genres seem to have been relatively fluid for Shakespeare’s audience.) “All the Way” went on to win Tony Awards for Cranston and for Best Play and it was made into an Emmy-nominated HBO movie produced by Steven Spielberg.
But that Shakespearean model, with its focus on kings and the high-born, is wedded, one might argue, to the Great Man theory of history. Commoners must fight for space on Shakespeare’s stage—and it’s not obvious whether the drunkards and prostitutes who populate the tavern where Prince Hal escapes the burdens of court, for instance, serve as rehearsals for responsive sovereignty, critics of royal ideology, or comic baggage to be shed on the way to the throne. It’s hard to know how sympathetically to view Jack Cade’s populist rebellion against the crown in “Henry VI, Part Two”; or the soldier who complains, of Henry V, “When our throats are cut he may be ransomed and we ne’er the wiser”; or the ferocious warrior women, Joan la Pucelle and Margaret of Anjou, who haunt the first tetralogy. Did Shakespeare prop up the royal system that gave him patronage or expose the crown’s hollow core?
This question has long been a pressing one in America. When Alexis de Tocqueville visited the U.S., in the eighteen-thirties, he found a people still in thrall to British literary culture, with volumes of Shakespeare in many a pioneer’s hut. “I remember that I read the feudal drama of Henry V for the first time in a log cabin,” he wrote. Shakespeare’s own humble origins, as the son of a Stratford glover, made him a popular democratic hero, and Abraham Lincoln liked to read from “King John” and “King Henry VIII.” Walt Whitman, on the other hand, derided Shakespeare’s verse as “poisonous to the idea of the pride and dignity of the common people, the life blood of democracy” (though he granted that Shakespeare may have anticipated democracy by exposing the failures of feudal rule). A notorious 1849 riot in New York pitted supporters of a distinguished British actor’s production of “Macbeth” against a working-class American actor’s turn in the role—it was billed, in a contemporary pamphlet, as a clash of “the aristocracy against the people.” A century later, Arthur Miller defended “Death of a Salesman” with an essay in the Times, arguing that “the common man is as apt a subject for tragedy in its highest sense as kings were” for Shakespeare. Within a few years, Joseph Papp began presenting Shakespeare’s plays in New York as a free, democratic birthright for all Americans.
Oskar Eustis, who runs Shakespeare in the Park and the Public Theatre, told me that he considers “Hamilton,” which he helped to develop, the most successful American version of a Shakespearean history play. Lin-Manuel Miranda “is writing verse drama,” Eustis said. “What rap is for our culture, iambic pentameter was for the Elizabethans; it is heightening the speech of ordinary people.” Although “Hamilton” adheres to the heroic model, Eustis sees it opening up our national myth to become a patriotic immigrant story, much the way that Shakespeare depicted Irish, Welsh, Scottish, and English captains forming a band of brothers behind Henry V. The diverse cast of “Hamilton” can lay claim to the Founding Fathers’ legacy, and to Shakespeare’s. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace from day to day,” Hamilton, “son of a whore and a Scotsman,” sings to his sister-in-law when he’s beset by opponents. “I trust you’ll understand the reference to another Scottish tragedy without my having to name the play.”
The O.S.F. originally planned its history cycle to feature a play for every President, on the pattern of Shakespeare’s titular kings. But that structure was soon scrapped for a more impressionistic tapestry of transformational moments, chosen by the playwrights. (“All the Way” is the only play centered on a President so far.) “It’s been very important to us to show different ways that change happens,” Alison Carey told me. A focus on individual leaders would ignore or disallow, she said, “a lot of the ways that change actually occurs, especially in a democracy.” But taking that wider perspective creates theatrical challenges. “It’s much different to dramatize a group of people bringing about change collectively than it is a single person, because that’s the dramaturgy we’re all raised on.”
When “All the Way” ran at O.S.F., in 2012, it played in repertory opposite “Henry V” and “Party People,” an American Revolutions commission from UNIVERSES, an experimental New York ensemble. “Party People” fuses hip-hop, salsa, and jazz to probe the legacy of the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican Young Lords; it served as a collective counterpoint to Schenkkan’s White House-centered take on the sixties. Lisa Loomer’s “Roe,” the commission featured this summer, follows the plaintiff and her lawyer after the landmark abortion case, with nine stools, for the Supreme Court Justices, placed in a line upstage: historical foreground and background reversed. In Tony Taccone’s radiant “Ghost Light,” a 2011 commission, the gay son of George Moscone, the San Francisco mayor who was assassinated alongside Harvey Milk, wrestles with his father’s shadow while trying to direct “Hamlet.” “How we tell our stories is incredibly affected by the way Shakespeare told his,” Carey said. “And that’s a beautiful thing in some ways, and that’s a tragic thing in other ways. It’s a thing that the American stage needs to constantly be in conversation with itself about.”
New York audiences can see “Party People” at the Public Theatre this fall, along with another play from the O.S.F. history cycle, Lynn Nottage’s knockout “Sweat,” about the collapse of a Pennsylvania factory town. Nottage often plays with traditional forms. Her play “Ruined,” which won the Pulitzer in 2012, started as an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s “Mother Courage and Her Children” set in the Congolese civil war; “Crumbs from the Table of Joy” and “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark” expanded the Tennessee Williams-style memory play and the Hollywood screwball comedy to include the voices of black women. She told me that, for O.S.F., she had no interest in writing something along Shakespearean lines. “I wanted to write a very different kind of history play,” she said—a people’s history. Nottage learned that Reading, Pennsylvania, had been deemed the poorest city in America, so she spent two years there, interviewing factory hands who lost their livelihoods when steel and textile jobs went overseas. “Sweat” places a fictionalized—but decidedly realistic—version of their wounded stories center stage, tracing the interracial friendships that form between women and their sons in a steelworkers’ union, which fracture as economic pressures erupt in violence. “It’s not the story of heroic men who lead the march,” Nottage said. “These are the men and women who are trying to find the courage to march.”
Taking Miller’s tragedy of the common man a step further, Nottage writes the tragedy of the community, an ensemble play without a protagonist. The women whom we follow in the first act don’t even make it to the final scene; political figures appear only on the TV at the bar where the workers congregate. You might make a case for “Sweat” inverting the legacy of Shakespeare’s Henriad, telling the chronicle from below—the riotous, doomed world of Mistress Quickly’s tavern, instead of Henry’s court. But Nottage said that she drew more from August Wilson’s Century Cycle: the music that he found in the aspirations of African-Americans, she said, helped her shape the “gritty poetry” of the conversations she had in Reading. Although her characters are fiercely funny, they never become comic butts like Pistol or Nym. Instead, Nottage tells their stories with an almost overwhelming empathy. There’s an avuncular bartender in “Sweat,” portrayed at O.S.F. by Jack Willis, who also originated the role of L.B.J. in “All the Way” and played King Lear a season later. By the end of Nottage’s play, he is shattered, stumbling across the bar with the tentative help of younger guys who are slowly learning to give him a hand. His slumping presence suggested not only the end point for generations of rust-belt workers but also the collapse of the Shakespearean protagonist. Nottage replaces heroic individualism with a fragile ethos of communal care.
But even if Shakespeare the royal chronicler might be played out in America, Shakespeare the theatrical innovator lives on. That, at least, is the perspective of Quiara Alegría Hudes, a Pulitzer-winning playwright who collaborated with Miranda on the book for “In the Heights” and is now trying to figure out what to write for her American Revolutions commission. She’s best known for a trilogy based on the experience of her cousin Elliot, a North Philly combat veteran who struggled to find direction at a moment when, as Hudes describes it, the war on drugs and the war in Iraq defined the options for many urban communities. “You just want to fill in the spaces that haven’t been told yet,” Hudes explained. She likes to experiment with form: each play in the Elliot trilogy takes its structure from a different musical genre—a Bach fugue, Coltrane jazz, Puerto Rican folk music—which gives her poetic dialogue an almost ritualistic resonance. She has considered writing a play about the time Dolores Huerta met Gloria Steinem, or one about Thomas Jefferson. But she wants to get away from naturalistic settings and conventional story arcs. She admires Shakespeare’s “bold aesthetic experiments”—writing a history play, for instance, that challenges the audience to fill in the action with its imaginary forces.
Hudes said that she sometimes wishes she were inclined to write a familiar Shakespearean hero—a member of the ruling class whose personal crisis plays out on a national stage—since that might yield the sort of commercial opportunities that “All the Way” has enjoyed. Like Nottage, though, she is drawn to characters on the other end of the social spectrum, “those who find the levers of change puppeteering their lives, often unfairly, and must retrieve their humanity and still effect change within their hearts and communities, even with severely limited power.” Still, even if she doesn’t want to write Shakespeare’s sort of protagonist, his theatrical style inspires her. “When I get a little down, when I feel a little bit like, ‘Why am I always writing toward something that there is more aesthetic resistance to, that’s not quite the palatable meal that would be a little bit more Broadway accessible?’ I just think about Shakespeare, and I get a little bit of courage to keep going.”
