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W.S. would feel right at home at Virginia's ASC
You can't teach an old dog new tricks, but can you teach a new dog the old tricks? That's the question posed, in a manner of speaking, by the American Shakespeare Center, the 17-year-old company that's rocketing along-fueled by "vaulting ambition," as the Bard might say-in the tiny town of Staunton, Va. Originally conceived as a touring company by an English professor and his precocious student, ASC (formerly Shenandoah Shakespeare) aims to resurrect the performance practices of Shakespeare's day, casting light on the particular genius of his writing, for the benefit of both scholars and regular Joes.
"We consider ourselves a living laboratory," explains artistic director Jim Warren, who co-founded the company in 1988 with his professor at James Madison University, Ralph Alan Cohen. The two men point with pride to the company's historically based aesthetic, which favors minimal sets; the delivery of lines and speeches directly to the audience; and-most strikingly-house lights that shine at full strength during the entire performance, accentuating the presence of spectators in a way that more conventionally lighted venues don't.
But the ASC's pièce de résistance is the five-year-old Blackfriars Playhouse, a recreation of the indoor theatre the King's Men used in early-17th-century London. A 300-seat complex with gleaming white oak woodwork and wrought-iron chandeliers, situated on one of Staunton's quaint sloping streets, the Blackfriars houses 50 weeks of theatre a year-mostly but not wholly Shakespeare-performed in repertory by two troupes of actors, one of which tours for part of the year.
For the next eight weeks (Feb. 1-March 26), the programming will consist of the Actors' Renaissance Season: four productions rehearsed by the performers without benefit of a director. The approach, which the ASC first experimented with in 2005, is designed to mirror the circumstances in which Shakespeare's plays were produced. As in early-17th-century England, too, each actor memorizes his or her lines using "sides": handouts printed with just the lines for a single role (plus relevant cues), rather than the entire play text. Back in the era when Hamlet was hatching, executive director Cohen explains, "Copying out text was too labor-intensive to even consider giving an actor the whole play."
Oxford University scholar Tiffany Stern, who travels...