Dear Mr. Glass,
My name is Emma Couling, I’m twenty-four years old, and I have been listening to your program pretty faithfully since the age of eleven. I grew up in the beautiful Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where I listened to CMU Public Radio’s Sunday Programming every week (“This American Life” comes before “Prairie Home Companion” and after “Fresh Air”). I went to college at Northern Michigan University where I listened to WNMU, and where I gained a degree in theatre. I now live in Chicago where I work part time as a marketing assistant and part time as a freelance theatrical director. I listen to WBEZ every day.
Around the same time that I started becoming your biggest fan, my family started taking vacations to The Shakespeare Festival in Stratford, Ontario. It’s a beautiful drive from Sault Ste. Marie, MI to the middle of Ontario where there is this little town that’s completely dedicated to William Shakespeare. It was through this early exposure that Shakespeare has become an incredible passion for me. I read all his plays before I entered college, directed my first production of Hamlet before I achieved my undergraduate degree, and now I am proud to write to you as a company member of The Unrehearsed Shakespeare Company of Chicago.
One of the reasons I love Shakespeare is, according to your twitter feed, in direct opposition to your own opinions regarding him. I find Shakespeare inherently relatable. But don’t take it from me—in her response to Julian Fellowes ill-advised comment that the only people who can understand Shakespeare are people, like himself, who “had a very expensive education [and] went to Cambridge.” Fiona Banks, head of the Education Department at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London said, “Shakespeare's for everybody. If we've ever been in love, or fallen out with a friend or been jealous, we can understand him.”
Ms. Banks goes on to say: "To see Shakespeare in the original, in its absolutely unchanged form, we need nothing more than a performance space and a company of actors who are able to share his stories in a way that engages their audience,"
In your critique of John Lithgow’s performance of King Lear on your twitter feed you said that he was “amazing” but that Shakespeare was “not good. No stakes, not relatable… Shakespeare sucks.” This makes absolutely no sense to me.
See, in my experience the thing that makes Shakespeare relatable—the force that shatters the idea that Shakespeare is difficult to understand—are the actors who perform it. It’s an actor’s job to create the world of the play around us. It’s their duty to show us what these 400 year old words mean through their interpretation, or the movement of their bodies or the intensity of their motivations. It’s an actor’s task to show us the searing force of words that were scratched on to parchment centuries before we were born. Shakespeare, when read, may not be relatable but when spoken with passion and understanding, when performed with earnestness and realism and feeling: how can we not relate to that?
While teaching an Unrehearsed Shakespeare workshop one of my dearest friends said that at least part of the reason why Shakespeare is so intimidating for the proletariat is because they are told that it’s intimidating. One’s 9th Grade English Teacher pulls out Romeo and Juliet and starts her boring speech about it with, “I expect this play will be difficult for most of you to understand…” I would argue that if she started her speech with “This is a play about you…” she would get a lot further. And I’m not talking about the love story, though it is an incredibly relatable one for most fourteen-year-olds (if you don’t think teenagers can fall deeply and madly in love and then proceed to do a lot of really stupid things then you don’t know a lot of teenagers); I’m talking about the dick jokes, and the fascination with sex, and the young violence, and the hatred that young people inherit from their elders.
I have always seen you as a man who would never stop asking questions until he found the articulate and essential ideas behind both sides of an argument. It’s this persistence in discovering every day truths that has made you a personal hero for me. And so I have I favor to ask of you: give Shakespeare another go. Walk down the Pier from WBEZ to Chicago Shakespeare and talk to Gary Griffin and Barbara Gaines. Grab a plane across Michigan to the Stratford Shakespeare Festival and see if a very intimidating Canadian named Antoni Cimolino can’t change your mind. Or if all of that seems like the kind of Shakespeare you’ve already seen and deemed “not relatable”; come to Mrs. Murphy’s and Son’s Irish Bistro off the Irving Park Brown Line on August 16th, where I and my fellows attempt to find every sex joke and impromptu moment in Comedy of Errors. And if none of that works, don’t give up. Keep going to Shakespeare, keep searching for something, anything, to relate to. I truly believe that you’ll find it.
In great admiration,
-Emma Couling
Dedicated Fan of This American Life
Company Member of The Unrehearsed Shakespeare Company of Chicago
http://www.unrehearsedchicago.com/
Co-Founder of 906 Theatre Co.
http://906theatreco.weebly.com/