Shakespeare, Word for Word

The Bard and his plays can take a snipping and keep on ticking well into another millennium, says Thomas F. Bradac, the Shakespeare Orange County artistic director who returned recently from a gathering of leaders of North American Shakespearean theaters held in London and Stratford-on-Avon.

Bradac emerged as president-elect of the Shakespeare Theatre Assn. of America, which held its annual January conference on Shakespeare’s home turf for the first time. Bradac says the association has 75 member theaters, out of about 125 in the United States and Canada devoted primarily to producing Shakespeare’s plays.

Wither Shakespeare was one of the key topics of discussion and debate, Bradac said, as the conference took a millennium’s dawn look at what might await the greatest body of work in the English language.

In a controversial keynote address, Sir Peter Hall, the famed director who founded the Royal Shakespeare Company 40 years ago, urged the American theater delegates to stage Shakespeare’s plays as they were written, without the trimming that commonly is done here and in England for the sake of comprehension or to accommodate modern sensibilities, attention spans and bladder capacities.

“We wouldn’t think of cutting five or six bars of Wagner or Mozart, yet we cut Shakespeare,” Hall complained, according to the Independent newspaper of London.

Hall also opined, Bradac said, that there are five directors in the world and maybe 50 or 60 actors who can “do it as it’s supposed to be done.” He didn’t name names.

Bradac, who is starting his 21st year presenting Shakespeare in Orange County, disagrees that any cut to a Shakespearean text is, as Julius Caesar groaned when Brutus stuck the final sword in him, “the most unkindest cut of all.”

“I’ve always cut ‘em,” Bradac says. “There are colloquialisms that don’t communicate to an audience, and [communicating] is our responsibility. Most of the time when I cut, the references are archaic, or to ancient gods and goddesses, where they don’t have a modern context. It isn’t wholesale cutting, it’s [for] clarity, to make sure it comes across to an audience.

“There certainly isn’t going to be any legislation, so it will be done as it always has been done--truncated, or with happy endings [imposed] and otherwise,” Bradac said.

A broader, if less immediate concern discussed by Hall and others at the conference was whether plays written in the late 16th and early 17th centuries still will make sense to readers and audiences by the late 21st or early 22nd. Will linguistic evolution render Shakespeare’s plays hopelessly inaccessible?

Bradac said the conferees mulled the possibility of Shakespeare needing translation into contemporary English, much as medieval old English works such as Chaucer’s 14th century poem “The Canterbury Tales” often are today.

After 400 years, Shakespearean drama is a growth industry. Film adaptations are movie house staples--the latest is “Titus Andronicus”--and the Bard-derived fantasy, “Shakespeare in Love,” was a big hit and winner of last year’s best picture Oscar.

“Everybody feels whatever raises the profile of Shakespeare is a good thing. A great service is being done. The work is getting out there, it’s helping students understand it a little better,” Bradac said. “But to truly experience it, the plays are an actor-to-audience [live] experience. They were never designed for the level of realism that film takes them to.”

Among the challenges of his tenure as president-elect and president of the Shakespeare Theatre Assn. of America, Bradac said, will be giving the organization an online presence, including a guide to Shakespeare productions across the country.

At the organization’s annual conferences, Bradac said, Shakespeare experts typically exchange ideas on subjects such as whether “The Taming of the Shrew” remains valid in an era of women’s rights, and how to handle objectionable portrayals of Jews in “The Merchant of Venice.”

Bradac, who chairs the theater and dance department at Chapman University, says his involvement in the association since its founding 10 years ago has paid off for his students. Some of his contacts have come to Chapman as visiting instructors, and that has led to opportunities for student actors to land work or further training with Shakespeare companies in other regions.

“Everybody feels there’s more Shakespeare going on now than there ever has been,” Bradac said. “We feel that’s only going to continue to grow. It isn’t something people automatically appreciate, but for those who want to find it, this organization can steer people where to go.”

Among the places to go this summer will be Chapman University’s Waltmar Theatre in Orange. Shakespeare Orange County will present “The Taming of the Shrew” June 29 to July 15, with Daniel Bryan Cartmell directing, and “The Tempest,” directed by Bradac, July 28 to Aug. 12.

* Thomas Bradac discusses “Shakespeare In & Out of Love” on Thursday in Room 209 of the Argyros Forum Lyceum at Chapman University, 333 N. Glassell St., Orange. 11:30 a.m. $20. (714) 997-6563.