When the show ran for two months in 2008, did director David Muse receive many comments from audiences about his rearrangements?
“They have no idea,” Muse says. “They just think that’s the play.”
In fact, Shakespeare’s plays are seldom seen without directorial shaping that goes beyond staging, beyond what director Aaron Posner calls “where and when . . . Vienna 1848 or whatever,” and into the realm of editing. The result — even in traditional productions, not just radical adaptations — is referred to as a director’s “cut.”
In a Bard-happy town like Washington, the subtle art of cutting Shakespeare is on near-constant display. The craft requires nerve, stage savvy and scholarship. And time.
“Dozens and dozens of hours,” says Muse, a former STC associate artistic director who now runs the Studio Theatre. The job can involve rearranging scenes, prioritizing story lines, combining multiple minor figures into a single character, changing line assignments and wrangling with the magnificent but sometimes elusive language.
“I find it to be a major act of interpretation and authorship,” Muse says. “And it often goes almost completely unnoticed, except by people who are completely familiar with the text.”
Because the plays are long and the language is old, time and narrative sense are two routine starting points. For Cam Magee, a dramaturge who has cut 24 of the 37 plays, a running time of 21
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2 hours has been a typical goal at the Washington Shakespeare Company.
“You’re losing an hour to an hour and a half of material,” says Magee, whose cuts also have been seen at the Folger Theatre.
STC audiences have built up a greater endurance, so longtime artistic director Michael Kahn is comfortable with productions that sometimes run past three hours. But Kahn and Magee groan at the memory of Kenneth Branagh’s plodding four-hour movie “Hamlet.”
Some elements are easy pickin’s for the dustbin. Few directors bother with the induction scene in “The Taming of the Shrew,” which elaborately introduces characters who almost immediately vanish. When the nurse discovers the apparently dead Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet,” the rash of “O lamentable day” goes on and on.
“It’s very bad writing,” Kahn says. “And it’s impossible to act, even with Meryl Streep.”
Then there are punch lines that slayed ’em 400 years ago but can be impenetrable now. “It can take half an hour to figure out one joke,” Muse says. Kahn mentions a long comic exchange in “All’s Well That Ends Well” between the Countess of Rousillon and the clown Lavatch that frequently sounds alien to modern ears. The gags are bogged down by topical references and ancient words.
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