Bringing the Bard into the 21st century

Jeff Donn

Saturday, Jan. 22, 2000 | 10:10 a.m.

LENOX, Mass. -- In a Berkshire wood where day turned foul for Dick Clark, Barry Manilow and Bob Dylan, lovers of Shakespeare fancy building their own brave new world.

Shakespeare & Co. insists that the 436-year-old playwright's work can win public favor where the backing of big names in the music industry could not. The theater troupe is buying an idyllic 63-acre site from the National Music Foundation, which boasted Clark and others as backers but failed to erect a museum and performing center for all styles of American music.

In a swamp of soaps, sitcoms and other stale plot lines, the Bard still tells "the best stories in our current millennium," Dan McCleary, marketing director of Shakespeare & Co., said.

In addition, the theater company's leaders say that unlike the music group, they have built a broad base of contributors and grants since their founding 21 years ago at the Mount, where writer Edith Wharton lived. Their main goals and prime subject -- Shakespeare -- are also more easily grasped than the music foundation's nebulous aim of a shrine to American music, complete with retirement housing for musicians. Who beats Shakespeare, after all, for name recognition?

Elsewhere, too, Shakespeare has hardly seen so fair a day an ocean away from his homeland, according to those who perform, promote and sell his work. A clutch of popular movies and videos, more teaching projects, and even the Internet are demystifying Shakespeare, who has been associated by so many Americans with iambic pentameter, annotations, spit balls and boredom.

"It's really burst upon the scene with a new vitality," Adriana Mnuchin, co-founder of the New York-based Shakespeare Society, said.

Her group, which promotes Shakespeare's works to the American public, is a case in point: In two years since its founding, it has swelled to more than 450 members.

But Shakespeare's name has perhaps never smelled sweeter to the film industry than in recent years. Moviegoers have watched Leonardo Di Caprio as an urban Romeo and also seen Denzel Washington as a dashing Don Pedro in "Much Ado About Nothing." Gwyneth Paltrow has been the focus of Shakespeare's longings in "Shakespeare in Love." Michelle Pfeiffer played queen fairy Titania in "Midsummer Night's Dream." Screen heavyweight Al Pacino has wrestled with the essence of "King Richard III" in the documentary "Looking for Richard."

Dollars were made. "Shakespeare in Love" collected seven Academy Awards and more than $94 million in North America. "Much Ado About Nothing" and several other Shakespeare films also charmed mass audiences, often with spirited use of the original language.

Shakespeare & Co. is banking on that appeal with its $9 million plan to redevelop its new site in the Berkshire County town of Lenox, which is also home to the Tanglewood classical music festival. The Shakespeare troupe -- one of about 120 Shakespeare festivals in North America -- takes over its expansive new home in April, eventually performing live theater and training actors there. It will give its first performance in summer 2001.

Last season, at the Mount, the troupe put on "As You Like It," "King Richard III," "Love's Labor's Lost" and a smattering of other fare, including adaptations from the writings of Wharton.

The troupe, with a $2.8 million budget and 170 employees at peak season, also teaches Shakespeare in public and private schools, reaching about 30,000 students. Some of the company's programs help inner-city teenagers around Massachusetts work out their problems by acting out Shakespeare's universal tales of greed, hatred, folly, foolishness, love and lust.

"These are kids who ... probably couldn't put together two sentences with a subject and verb, who are speaking Shakespeare not because they understand the words, but because they understand the experience," McCleary said.

Jonathan Epstein, who has acted in Shakespeare's plays around the country, said that more children and adults will learn about themselves and human relations through Shakespeare in such workshops.

But he fears that the mass appeal of television and some new media, while broadening familiarity with the Bard, will tend to crowd out live performances. He added that some festivals may founder without an Elizabethan stage or engaging actors with magic to stir the dull ear of a drowsy man.

"We as actors have to think of ways to be much more dynamic -- or it will die," he said of live Shakespeare.

At least Shakespearean actors have some better-than-average slings and arrows to work with.