1.1 Investing in Shakespeare

Do you remember your first encounter with William Shakespeare? Did it feel like he was for you? I remember my first time; it was in junior high school. I was Mr F.’s star pupil in language arts class; on this day, whatever the lesson may have been, it ended with Mr F. invoking Shakespeare. We weren’t studying any of the plays but I wanted to try reading them; I asked Mr F. for advice. He told me I should wait until I started high school. At the time I was ashamed; I thought he was telling me I wasn’t smart enough to read Shakespeare by myself, that as a child of immigrants with no readers at home to guide me I wasn’t ready for the great weight and power of The Bard. Now, in hindsight, I wonder if Mr F. was cannily deflecting. I wonder if Mr F. – an immigrants’ kid like me – may have thought Shakespeare wasn’t really for him, either.

Who “owns” Shakespeare? Who wants to own him, and why? Who is prepared to give up ownership to Shakespeare, and how do they even begin? What alternatives to “owning” Shakespeare might we discover if we turn away from our current industry model, in which Shakespeare operates as a form of global theatrical currency?

These are not rhetorical questions. Historically, the figure we call “Shakespeare” is an icon of colonial power, a figure whose works were used to advance the march of civilization across the British Empire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His plays and poems intentionally embed white supremacy (something I talk about in more detail in Section 4), and they have long been used to demarcate firm lines between “high” and “low” culture at the theatre, as well as to structure hierarchies based on social status and educational experience beyond the stage.Footnote ³ Today, Shakespeare continues to sit in pole position atop the sector we broadly label “the culture industries.” For many theatre makers and lay theatre fans, he remains, foremost, a figure of elite, literary authority. As W. B. Worthen writes in Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance, “While the theatre is often described as licentious, promiscuous, innovative, imaginative, or merely haphazard in its representation of texts, to think of performance as conveying authorized meanings of any kind, especially meanings authenticated in and by the text, is, finally, to tame the unruly ways of the stage” (Reference WorthenWorthen 1997, 3). In contradiction to the inherent instability (and democracy!) of playtexts cobbled from sides (actors’ individual parts) and quartos edited by several hands into bound folios and eventually “complete works” over the course of the long early modern period, Worthen argues that both scholars and practitioners of elite Shakespeare (think the Royal Shakespeare Company [RSC]) use “the stage” as a place authorized to produce “authentically Shakespearean meanings” (3) – meanings from which both scholars and practitioners then borrow authority in turn, deploying their grasp of Shakespeare as powerful cultural capital to be spent elsewhere.

This marks the second key function today of the figure we call “Shakespeare”: he is by now a global industry that promises access to significant social status and economic gain. “Shakespeare”, as Why Not’s Ravi Jain put it to me, “is Kleenex”:Footnote ⁴ ubiquitous, familiar to everyone, useful to have around if you need a sell-out. “Shakespeare” is money in the bank. And this bankable ubiquity is one very good reason why so many people – people whom we might otherwise imagine would want nothing to do with colonialism’s star export – are still interested in making and consuming Shakespeare’s plays in the wake of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Land Back, and other decolonization movements. But it’s also not the whole reason.

This is something I want to be clear about right up front: for the artists in this Element, Shakespeare is also a writer, an artist like them. At the end of the day, his legacy is also personal. These artists are women of colour; they are Black and Indigenous women; they are trans and non-binary women; and they are Deaf and blind women. They are committed anti-racists; they are disability justice advocates; they are advocates for trans rights. They fight every day for accessibility, inclusion, and decolonization – for them, that fight is personal. And they love Shakespeare; they choose him in this fight. Shakespeare’s plays lie embedded in their early memories of reading together with family (Alex Bulmer; Emma Frankland; Yvette Nolan; Jani Lauzon) or working with an inspiring teacher at school (Dawn Jani Birley; Nataki Garrett). Shakespeare represents, for them, not the locked gate of high culture but rather an early experience of access. His words – alongside the cultural power they hold – are a part of how these women became the artists and leaders they are today.

But then, at some point (often more than one), every one of these women also received the message that Shakespeare just wasn’t for them, after all. At drama school, in auditions, or in the persistent challenges they face when trying to make work on their own terms even now, at some point the gate to Shakespeare closed. These artists, as we’ll see throughout this Element, make their work at the coalface, the exposed seam of contradictions that haunts us every time we try to account for the “authority” attached to Shakespeare. Their art and their fight benefit from recognizing both how it feels to claim a figure like Shakespeare – to love the verse with which “he” is synonymous; to see their own imagination and artistic potential refracted in his works – and also what it feels like to have access to those works and their accrued cultural authority taken away, as those with greater social, historical, and embodied privilege say, It’s not that you’re not good, it’s that you just don’t fit the part. These artists actively choose Shakespeare as a fellow traveler toward equity and social justice, but they combine their personal interests in everything “he” might be with a strong political awareness of how the very idea of Shakespeare has always been organized and gate-kept for the benefit of some and at the expense of others. Their love is necessarily dissonant, and their artistic processes – intersectional; cosmologically Indigenous; decentralized and non-hierarchical; committed to resource-sharing and mentorship – proudly foreground that dissonance as an equity-seeking move.

The question of just who or what “Shakespeare” is, what “his” authority means and can mean in the future, thus remains an open one – malleable, transformable, even transformational. As we meet these artists and explore their practices in the pages ahead, let’s hold close the question of which Shakespeares they choose to activate, how, and for whose benefit.

1.2 Sustainable Investments

In a recent essay about Shakespeare and decolonization, Andrew Hartley, Kaja Dunn, and Christopher Berry ask, “Can [the history of Shakespeare as a tool for performing white cultural superiority] be circumvented or – better yet – rewritten, and what means might be attempted to accomplish this decolonizing process?” (Hartlet, Dunn, and Berry 2021, 171). My guiding question, “Who owns Shakespeare?”, reframes this question to shine light on a paradox.Footnote ⁵ Shakespeare, especially when he is held up as a synonym for “great theatre” untouched by crass materialism, is always, first and foremost, about money, resources, and power. Our current economic climate is governed by neo-liberalism, a form of global financial capitalism that places ultimate faith in free markets to determine the distribution of resources and ultimate responsibility for economic failings on individuals. This framework primarily benefits those who already have significant resources; it values shareholder expectations over labour force needs and encourages individual wealth accumulation over community support and the equitable distribution of capital (Reference HarveyHarvey 2005). Neo-liberalism’s runaway success since the early 1980s has guaranteed that, no matter where you live, access to resources will be tied in some way to race, class, gender, and the other key status markers that determined how much you had to begin with.

In 2017, I published an essay called “Shakespeare’s Property Ladder” (Solga 2017). In it I investigated how Britain’s directorial landscape, as late as 2015, remained reluctant to allow all but the most “bankable” women artists the opportunity to direct major Shakespeare plays in mainstage venues. The inspiration for my title came from high-profile British director Katie Mitchell. In a 2011 National Theatre (NT) Platform discussion with Dan Rebellato, Mitchell explained why she has refused to direct Shakespeare across her substantial international career. She reflected on her one and only Shakespeare, Henry VI: The Battle for the Throne (at the RSC, 1994). She chose Henry VI specifically because it was obscure, less likely to provoke comparisons to past productions at the RSC, and thus less likely to draw the ire of the old guard at the RSC whom she knew regarded her youth, gender, and experimental practice with suspicion. She told Rebellato: “[There is a] deep sense of ownership of this material, maybe related to gender, owned maybe by men more than women (maybe)” (Reference Mitchell and RebellatoMitchell and Rebellato 2011). This sense of ownership is exactly what Worthen would call, three years after Mitchell’s Henry, the bulwarking of Shakespearean authority, and – as Mitchell might have predicted – RSC stakeholders excoriated her choices in Battle for the Throne, accusing her actors of sloppy verse speaking and her design concept of being contrary to Shakespeare’s intentions. From that point on, her response to Shakespeare became: why bother?

Mitchell’s declaration at the National still feels daring to me, however couched her language; it takes courage to tell the establishment to sod off and tenacity to go the distance on your own terms. But walking away from power is only possible when power and privilege are, on some level, yours already; as a white, cis-, Oxford-educated woman whose international star was in 1994 already rising, Mitchell lost comparatively little from turning her back on Shakespeare’s currency. What of those without that level of existing privilege? What of those for whom the route isn’t around Shakespeare but through?

The idea of ownership that I’m animating here has two valences. One is economic, to do with how resources are distributed in the staging of Shakespeare and whose interests that distribution serves. The other, however, is political, to do with both whom we think of when we think of his works – and also who doesn’t come to mind. Shakespeare’s political ownership is often tied to what are called the “universal” qualities of his characters and themes. But who comes to mind when we think of Shakespeare’s verse? White, classically trained bodies, speaking in a very specific (British-accented) manner. Calling Shakespeare “universal” sounds inherently inclusive, a way of devolving access to everyone; several of the artists in the pages that follow would agree. But, as Ayanna Thompson reminds us, the very notion of “universal” Shakespeare has operated, historically, as a slick cover for the perpetuation of white colonial ownership. In her essential book about Shakespeare and race, Passing Strange (2011), Thompson writes that arguments about Shakespeare’s timeless and placeless qualities have often been strategically connected to white supremacism via the practice of “colourblind casting,” a version of tokenism that invites actors of colour to participate in productions of the plays only on the tacit condition that they not bring their own histories and experiences into the creation space with them (see also Reference CataneseCatanese 2011). After all, if the production doesn’t “see colour,” and Shakespeare is already “for everyone,” those stories can’t be relevant, right? Reference ThompsonThompson (2011, 38) notes that when we make this argument, “Shakespeare is taken to mean two contradictory, but not mutually exclusive, ideas: the exclusivity of Western civilization and the fantasy of the racial homogeneity of that civilization.” In other words, Shakespeare’s cultural capital – his economic power as a titan of today’s culture industries, not to mention his legacy power as a civilizing emissary of the British Empire – derives directly from the assumption that his works and their authority “exclude everything that is not Western,” but also that Western “civilization, culture, and society, which Shakespeare helped to create, have nothing to do with issues of race” (Thomson 2011, 38).

So how do we dismantle these deep-seated power structures, structures that let us pretend that doing Shakespeare is about skill and talent (rather than money, education, or inherited privilege) and that access to his work and its inherent acclaim is unfettered (rather than systemically racist, classist, and gendered)? In these pages I seek a wide range of possible answers in the testimony and examples of artists already engaged in the work of this dismantling, and from the fieldwork I was privileged to undertake I can offer three guiding principles for us to bear in mind.

First, we must confront the reality that Shakespeare has not been “for everyone,” ever. Only when those historically excluded from the feeling that Shakespeare is “for them” are given a proper opportunity to lay claim to Shakespeare, to call Shakespeare “universal” on their own terms (see Reference KnowlesKnowles 2007, 63; Reference Fowler, Solga, Awo-Mana, Canning and AnanFowler and Solga in press), can we achieve equity. Importantly, “equity” here does not mean a generic equality of access to Shakespeare’s works or Shakespearean stages; it means generating the scaffolds required to provide formerly marginalized artists and creators a fairness of footing so that they might even begin to imagine what access to Shakespeare and the “classical” canon could mean on their own terms. Equity in this sense is about resource, it is about democratizing notions of story, and it is about uplifting voices that have been too long silenced.

Thus my second guiding principle: the Shakespeare industry, having profited from it so fully, needs to make good on the idea of a “universal Shakespeare” by transferring money, material resources, rehearsal and creation space, and the power to hold that space safely, into the hands of historically excluded artists. Again, this does not just mean “giving space” to such artists; it means sharing without condition and supporting without insisting on control, using company models like those pioneered by Nataki Garrett at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF)Footnote ⁶ (Section 4) and by Why Not Theatre in Toronto (Section 3). Decolonization is not a metaphor but an active and intentional practice of returning land and resources taken without consent (Reference Tuck and YangTuck and Yang 2012); making Shakespeare properly equitable therefore requires those of us with power and privilege to “share everything,” as Why Not’s motto states, “because more artists means more stories” (Why Not Theatre n.d.b). This resource return must prioritize hiring and mentoring strong leaders from equity-owed groups, and then supporting those leaders fully as they undertake their stated mandates so that they might build a ladder upward. Every one of the examples in this Element will demonstrate how important artistic leaders of different genders, abilities, and racial experiences are to uplifting the next generation of such leaders, making the move toward Shakespearean equity not just possible but sustainable.

Finally, we need to meet in story. Shakespeare’s plays are all based on stories taken, magpie-like, from other sources, and this is story’s power: it is communal, adaptable, accessible. Story is how we make ourselves and how we build our communities; it offers a way to reimagine our worlds. Playing “with words and story” is how we make things better for everyone,Footnote ⁷ how we “change the story for good” (Why Not Theatre n.d.a). Shakespeare’s most significant power, for many of the artists in these pages, lies in his capacity to “play with words and story” and then inspire others to do likewise. Their Shakespeare isn’t (just) a guru or a boss but also a fellow storyteller, another participant in a democratic devising process. As Adjua Andoh writes:

1.3 Changing How We Tell the Story; Changing Whose Stories We Tell

My goal in this Element is to amplify the voices of women-identified creators who are actively making Shakespeare differently, in line with the principles I outline in Section 1.2. I strive to relate the fundamentals of their creative practices, the social ethos and the political goals behind those practices, and wherever possible I let these creators speak in their own words. This Element is not, therefore, about representations of Shakespeare’s plays that look or sound or feel different, more inclusive, decolonized; it’s about what happens long before the stage lights come up on those productions.

In order to centre artists in this way I use an ethnographic approach, drawing primarily from interviews I conducted for this research in collaboration with my research associate Dr Sheetala Bhat, as well as from interviews with artists and their collaborators broadcast or published elsewhere.Footnote ⁸ As a scholar trained in the reading and theorizing of literary and theatrical texts, I have had to learn a significant number of new things, both practical and ethical, in order to undertake this work in a wise way. My learning has also been, to some extent, an unlearning, a necessary recalibration of the unspoken centres and margins of scholarly work. How often have literary scholars, for example, been told that an author’s intentions do not matter to the meanings of their writing? How many of us who work in theatre programmes know all too well the entrenched divisions and the subtle hierarchies that divide the “scholars” from the “practitioners” on faculty? How many of us have been trained to mistrust the convictions of the artists whose work we read or hear or see, to treat those convictions as either naïve or irrelevant to critique?

Writing “Shakespeare’s Property Ladder” (Solga 2017) convinced me that the stories I wanted to tell about Shakespeare were increasingly not on the stage but behind and before it – stories about access, resource, power, and accountability. This in turn meant that my approach to talking about making Shakespeare had to change. In 2018, my colleague Dr Erin Julian and I shadowed Chinese-Canadian actor and director Keira Loughran as she strove to build a non-binary production of The Comedy of Errors at Ontario’s Stratford Festival. We chronicled our journey in a 2021 article about Loughran’s struggle to practise diversity thoroughgoingly at Stratford (Reference Julian, Solga, Kirwan and PrinceJulian and Solga 2021). After composing our first draft we shared the article with Loughran, who offered frank and firm feedback that challenged many of our initial conclusions. That process of interlocution was difficult. It required us to recognize that Loughran’s intentions did matter to what we made of the resulting show; they required us to reconsider our criticisms of the process and the eventual production while holding her point of view clearly in mind alongside our own. This did not, I will stress, require us to change what we saw as some of the most fundamental problems the production faced, but it did require that we assess those problems multidimensionally and with compassion, while understanding that we were not the only stakeholders whose version of events mattered. Having a challenging dialogue about the fundamentals of collaborative practice, and about our points of disagreement over its core tenets, allowed all three of us to deepen our understanding of the issues at stake and to recalibrate how to communicate them effectively (see also Loughran in press).

This Element, like that essay, strives for both nuance and generosity. Its primary mode is relational, and it shares practitioners’ stories to make some claims about what is needed, both materially and politically, so that Shakespeare can become sustainably equitable, even possibly, someday, decolonial. I begin in Section 2 with Indigenous artists from Turtle Island: Jani Lauzon (Métis), Yvette Nolan (Algonquin, Irish), and Reneltta Arluk (Inuvialuk, Denesuline, Gwich’in, and Cree) and their entanglements with All’s Well That Ends Well, Julius Caesar, and MacBeth, respectively. In Section 3 I focus on intersections, exploring the making of Prince Hamlet with Deaf creator Dawn Jani Birley, the making of R&J (an adaptation of Romeo and Juliet [Shakespeare 1597/1599]) with blind actor and voice coach Alex Bulmer, and the making of Galatea (a play by Shakespeare influencer John Lyly) with transwoman and force of nature Emma Frankland. In Section 4, I turn to two institutions helmed by women at this change point: Shakespeare’s Globe (Michelle Terry, artistic director) and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) (Nataki Garrett, artistic director 2019–23). In Sections 2 and 3, I explore the utopic power of decentred, community-focused creation spaces, paying attention to the role that practice-as-research (PaR) can play in advancing our understanding of a much queerer and less conventionally conservative Shakespearean universe. Later, in Sections 3, 4, and 5, I turn to issues of money and resource, exploring models that work, and models that falter, in uplifting the next generation of early modern makers.

2.1 Learning to Talk in Circles

The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario, is not the kind of place where you expect to find a sacred fire burning on the front lawn.Footnote ¹³ Stratford’s Shakespeare festival was established in the early 1950s to bring “the best” of British theatre to Canadian soil in what its founders broadly construed as a civilizing mission couched in a new nationalist language.Footnote ¹⁴ While long-needed change is now finally underway at Stratford, the festival’s colonial roots are systemically entrenched, making any process of decolonization a huge structural challenge. Stratford works on a repertory model: both cast and crew work in “tracks” on two or three shows a season, and their labour as well as their time are scheduled accordingly. Casts are announced months in advance, and by the time the actors arrive at rehearsal the set and costume designs are largely fixed and the directors’ visions are firmly in place. Under these conditions, holistic collaboration across a creative team becomes very hard.

Jani Lauzon refers to Stratford as a series of theatrical “silos.”Footnote ¹⁵ Many theatres built on the European model forged in the long nineteenth century work this way, and this way of working reflects and reproduces those theatres’ colonial-era entanglements. Lauzon explicitly links the “silo” model and the land grant system that carved up and parcelled out the Canadian prairie to settlers in the nineteenth century: “just like the whole basis of colonial thinking, [it’s] here’s my little square, and here’s my little square,” she says.Footnote ¹⁶ While many Turtle Island first nations traditionally treated the land as a communal source of sustenance, when the British colonial government pursued its settler-based system of Indigenous genocide in the nineteenth century it drew square borders to make parcels of arable land and installed settler farmers on individual patches. The square then suffocated those who had farmed in circles: “you put a square over top of a circle and suddenly somebody [for example, Indigenous communities forced onto reservations] ends up with a piece of land where it’s Canadian shield and you can’t grow a thing and they starve.”Footnote ¹⁷

Jani Lauzon is an Elder in the Indigenous theatre communities of northern Turtle Island. Lauzon’s father (Métis) was an artist and her mother (Scandinavian, whom she lost at twelve) was interested in spiritualism and the occult; she was raised by a foster family that included a high-school drama teacher with a deep, inspiring love of Shakespeare. She subsequently trained in a rich, eclectic mix of Japanese ritual and Indigenous spiritual practices (with Yoshi Oïda and Floyd Favel), alongside traditional Western theatre models including Shakespeare (which she calls “her thing”) (Reference Lauzon, Nolan and KnowlesLauzon 2016). Her contemporary practice is multimedial – she is an award-winning musician, a puppeteer, a director, a stage and screen actor, and a playwright – and her influence is extensive. During the Covid-19 pandemic, she was appointed one of more than a dozen members of Stratford’s anti-racism committee; the committee heard testimony from all corners of the Festival and issued a report packed with guidance on ways to adjust and begin to dismantle the structures that normalize racist aggression, keep artists sequestered from one another, and keep young creators working in fear of reporting aggressions that might impact their future at the Festival or beyond.Footnote ¹⁸ One of the most important recommendations to arise from the report was how to make the first day of rehearsals at the Festival better for everyone involved.

That’s why Lauzon and Kaitlyn Riordan, her 1939 co-playwright, built that fire outside their rehearsal building and convened a conversation around it in summer 2022. During a panel talk that September, facilitated by their research dramaturg Sorouja Moll (mixed-race, settler), Riordan – who is a co-founder of and long-time director with feminist and social justice-oriented theatre company Shakespeare in the Ruff (Toronto), where Lauzon has played Paulina in A Winter’s Tale and Shylock in The Merchant of Venice – described the surprise the fire brought to their Stratford peers: “everyone else at Stratford was like, ‘you had a fire?? What?? We want to have a fire! We just talked about how to put on our wigs” (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). Instead of starting with wigs or a tour of the design maquette, Lauzon and Riordan invited Elders Liz Stevens (Anishinaabe) and Phil Davis (Haundenosaunee) to lead both cast and crew: “Instead of talking about the play we just talked about ourselves, and we talked about each other, and we smudged together, and we sat around a sacred fire together, and we just got to know each other” (Lauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). For Lauzon, this work of gathering in a circle and sharing our most grounding stories is the first step in the reconciliation process in settler spaces like Stratford, and also the first step in creating a good play together. Only after this sharing process concluded did Lauzon place their script – including parts of Shakespeare’s All’s Well – in the middle of the circle, where it could join the stories already offered there.

2.2 Who Discovered Who?

The play 1939 was conceived when Lauzon and Riordan met for coffee to talk about the possibility of Lauzon directing for Shakespeare in the Ruff; the gig didn’t work out, but after the two spent ages “geeking out” over their shared love of Shakespeare, they determined to write a play together (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). Five years of extensive research and workshops later, 1939 received its world premiere at Stratford’s Studio Theatre in August 2022. Set in a residential school modelled on the Shingwauk school in Sault Ste-Marie, Ontario in the year in which King George VI made his first royal visit to Canada, the play follows five students – brother and sister Joseph (Richard Comeau) and Beth (Tara Sky, who is Lauzon’s daughter), Susan (Kathleen MacLean), Evelyne (Wahsonti:io Kirby), and Jean (John Wamsley) – who are chosen to perform All’s Well That Ends Well for the Crown. Their teacher Sian Ap Dafydd (Sarah Dodd) is a Welsh woman who has internalized her own experience of British colonial oppression and insists on forced English accents and pronunciation à la Ellen Terry; the students, however, develop other ideas as they begin to work with the play in the rhythms of their own languages and ancestral teachings.

From this cursory description, 1939 sounds like a feel-good show in which some underdog kids prove their teachers wrong as they discover themselves through Shakespeare. “Discover yourself” in the play is a typical request made by white directors of Shakespeare to actors of all kinds; Reference CataneseBrandi Wilkins Catanese (2011) relates exactly such an experience in her book The Problem of the Color[blind]. Playing Rosalind from As You Like It for a scene study in college, she had to swear by her “white hand”; she stumbled repeatedly trying to make sense of the line for herself and her Black skin. Finally, she chose to make the “mistake” of her mismatched hand funny: laughter seemed the easiest, least painful way out for performer and spectator alike. “I didn’t quite know what to do,” she writes, “so I took it as my responsibility to demonstrate my awareness of my nonnormative performing body, and to diminish its significance by laughing it off. I was, as David Wiles puts it, ‘trying to live in the “world of the play” while performing in the world of race’” (Reference CataneseCatanese 2011, 10).

In 1939, this demand to erase the world of race (and Indigeneity) in service to the world of the play is confronted – and reversed. Beth, Joe, Susan, Evelyne, and Jean are unaware that they are not supposed to access Helena’s and Bertram’s stories on their own terms. When they are left by the exasperated Mrs Ap Dafydd to figure out how to improve their struggling speeches – to solve, like Brandi Catanese, the problem of themselves – they decide to do some practice-based research. In a pivotal scene, the students work together to map out an Indigenous community from the basics of the play’s plot and characters; it features a range of national identities, to account for the mix of Anishinaabe (Ojibway), Haundenosaunee (Mohawk), and Métis (mixed Indigenous and French) identities in their cohort. They plot this new community on a blackboard, adjusting and readjusting with input from everyone. As they talk and draw, they uncover important parallels between the play’s stories and their own lived experiences. Evelyne, who plays Helena, makes a profound discovery: Helena is an orphan, like her, whose father was a healer, like Evelyne’s grandfather, and now she alone holds the power to cure the King of France. Evelyne concludes that Helena has medicine, passed down through generations, and even though she has been lost to her own community, the medicine’s power remains with her. She declares, bold and overjoyed: “Helena is a Mohawk girl, like me!” Mrs Ap Daffyd is, predictably, appalled. Like Catanese, whose work on Rosalind was meant to be the work of Black erasure, Evelyne is supposed to work out how to erase the Indian in her performance of Helena. Instead, Evelyne uncovers the Haudenosaunee in Helena, the (literal) ground where their stories can meet.

“What makes ideas ‘real’ is the system of knowledge, the formations of culture, and the relations of power in which these concepts are located,” writes Tuhiwai Smith ([1999] 2021, 55). The European imperial project overwrote Indigenous land with borders and deeds of ownership (squares dropped onto circles), just as it overwrote Indigenous origin stories and ancestral knowledge-keeping practices with a logocentric, hierarchical framing co-authored by Christianity and white supremacy and cemented in “official” history books and in the dissemination of white cultural texts like Shakespeare’s (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2021, 36–8). Different stories can be told; we just haven’t yet learned that they, too, are “real.” In fact, the kind of PaR that Evelyne and her peers undertake in their creation process is increasingly used today by blended teams of early modern artists and scholars to help tease out the stories of gender non-conformity, ability difference, and pervasive non-whiteness that is rife in the early modern canon. In action, PaR is an “iterative” (Davies in press) and process-oriented methodology that brings diverse artist and scholar bodies and their lived histories into dialogue with historical texts; it asks questions about what new realities emerge when history lands in our mouths, arms, feet, or when props animate historical assumptions in the space between two performing bodies.Footnote ¹⁹ As Peter Cockett and Melinda Gough remind us, early modern theatre history is “built on fragments” of evidence from a period in which “the power of cis-patriarchy” and its colonizing projects “could be violently enforced” (Cockett and Gough in press, introduction). When we bring fragments of the past into dialogue with present imagination, we reanimate stories hidden by design. In this way, PaR promises to uplift and render “real” the repertoires of knowledge suppressed by the textocentrism of colonial practice.

It was a healer from Manitoulin Island who first helped Lauzon see the connection between Helena and Evelyne, convincing her that All’s Well was the right play to place within 1939. And it was an Elder from Six Nations (a large Haudenosaunee community situated along the Grand River outside Toronto) whom Lauzon met at an Indigenous-led performance of The Tempest in the 1990s who told her, “when you are Indigenous and you do Shakespeare you need to be super careful” because “the energy around Shakespeare’s plays is so large and so spiritual that you don’t want to mess with it” (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). For Lauzon, this teaching was life- and practice-changing. It did not ask her to revere Shakespeare as an artistic or spiritual superior; it asked her to understand each of his plays as the holder of an embodied spirit, and the making of a play in performance as an act of ceremony in which each member of a creative team is equally responsible to the play, to their own stories, to their ancestors, and to each other.

From this and other Elder teachings (including from Pauline Shirt [Cree], Justine Enosse and Edna Manitowabi [both Wikwemikong First Nation, Manitoulin Island]), Lauzon’s “circular” rehearsal room dramaturgy emerged.Footnote ²⁰ The play goes “in the centre,” and all labour in the room is devoted to “feeding the spirit of the play” (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). This model of working in the round derives from a cosmology that prioritizes reciprocity and accountability to the spirit world, the land, and to one another, and that understands artistry as integral to all aspects of living, including the work of the law, practices of daily life, governance relations, and more (Reference Lauzon, Nolan and KnowlesLauzon 2016, 92). Lauzon’s “centring” of the play thus ironically enacts an important cosmological shift away from colonial ways of working (in which Shakespeare goes in the centre), and toward an understanding of the play as shared story, to which we all have access and to which we all have a shared responsibility that is both spiritual and artistic, as well as part of the art of surviving everyday life.

2.3 No More Hungry Listening

In the spirit of PaR, Lauzon’s research practice mirrors her circular dramaturgy in its ability to hold many stories and realities in view at once. The 1939 research team included those from traditional research backgrounds, like Sorouja Moll, who offered “academic knowledge and access to documentation” about the history of Shakespeare in colonial Canada, as well as an “oral research team” of Elders including Pauline Shirt, Shirley Horn (Cree and a survivor of the Shingwauk school), and Liz Stevens (Anishinaabe) who provided “research through lived experience” (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). Tuhiwai Smith explains that “research” is a “dirty word” for many Indigenous communities because they have long been “subjects” (or indeed objects) of academic research that has sought to extract knowledge from them without reciprocity or respect for ontological differences (Tuhiwai Smith [1999] 2021, 1). Stōlo musicologist Dylan Robinson calls this form of colonial knowledge extraction “hungry listening.” The hungry settler-listener,Footnote ²¹ in Robinson’s framing, is a kind of Windigo, the insatiable cannibal spirit that crosses several different Indigenous cosmologies. Hungry settler-listeners, then as now, consume Indigenous artistry looking for any number of extractable morsels: aesthetic pleasure; a frisson of the exotic; stories of trauma and healing; a path toward reconciliation; the erasure of settler guilt (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2020, 106). This extraction is one-sided: the auditor understands themself as a consumer and imagines the art is “for them.” This extractive mentality comes at a severe cost.

Robinson explains that, while much Western music is primarily aesthetic, Indigenous music is both “aesthetic” and “functional” (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2020, 95): “This is to say [Indigenous songs] are history, teaching, law that takes the form of song, just as western forms of law and history take the form of writing” (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2020, 100). Indigenous sonic practice is world-making through sound, just as Anglo-European written histories, for example, are world-making through text. Indigenous sonic practice, importantly, also includes “listening as a component in the act of making something happen, of bringing something into being” (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2020, 100) – the auditor not as cannibal or thief but as fellow storyteller, as participant.

The lived experience of 1939’s oral research team included experience with languages, and with the knotty problem that, for many Indigenous residents of Turtle Island (including many in the cast and crew), ancestral languages and the knowledge contained in their soundings have been lost. During the play’s rehearsal period, Elder researcher Liz Stevens’ experience as an Anishinaabek speaker led to discussions with Riordan and Lauzon about what language means for Indigenous communities. “Language is culture,” Stevens noted, echoing Robinson; “A language holds its culture within it, its values, its point of view in the world” (Reference Lauzon, Moll and RiordanLauzon, Moll, and Riordan 2022). This teaching in turn led the creative team, in collaboration with Wahsonti:io Kirby (the actor playing Helena), to translate pieces of text, including Helena’s pivotal “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” speech, into Kanyen’kéha, in which Kirby is fluent. Part of the team’s realization in the translation process was that the speech could not directly be converted; the culture, values, and point of view were distant enough to make literal translation from the play’s verse into Kanyen’kéha meaningless. Instead, the words passed from seventeenth-century Shakespearean English into twenty-first century Canadian English and then into twenty-first century Mohawk, modulated by speakers of Anishinaabemowin, Kanyen’kéha, and English. Kirby was then able to articulate Helena’s experience refracted through the kaleidoscopic cultures, histories, and points of view of two young Indigenous women (her own self and this play’s Helena) based not in fictional seventeenth-century France or in Shakespeare’s England but on Turtle Island in 2022.

Indigenous sounding takes over near the end of 1939, when the students’ show finally goes up. Beth, Joe, Susan, Evelyne, and Jean may have successfully imagined an Indigenous world for their All’s Well, but it gets taken over by the colonial thrust of their teachers and by local settler women (in an ironic nod to theatrical silos?) who costume them in “beads and buckskin” without consultation (Reference Nolan, Gilbert and GleghornNolan 2014, 228). Lauzon is interested in realities that are generally invisible, though, and thus audiences to 1939 see the performance from backstage: we watch as the frustrated student actors skitter back and forth in Pocahontas-style outfits carrying ridiculous prop canoes, and we hear music-hall sounds blended with canned audience laughter to reinforce the goofiness. At the interval, the student performers are exhausted, well and truly fed up with this painful mockery of their story. They look at each other; then, one by one, they pull off their faux headdresses. They form a circle, lift their voices into the air, and perform a resounding round dance in the middle of the Stratford Studio stage (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 From left: Richard Comeau as Joseph Summers, John Wamsley as Jean Delorme, Kathleen MacLean as Susan Blackbird, Wahsonti:io Kirby as Evelyne Rice, and Tara Sky as Beth Summers in 1939 (Stratford Festival, 2022).

Photography by David Hou.

This was the first time in the Festival’s history that a round dance had been performed at Stratford – but, as Lauzon notes, without any doubt round dances would have been held on the lands Stratford now occupies for centuries before European arrival. The students’ round dance re-sounds the ancestors who would have danced on the land beneath the building beneath their feet, echoing the contemporary round dances associated with the Idle No More and Land Back protest movements across Turtle Island. Sitting stage left of the Studio’s thrust, I felt the dance in my body, reverberating through the floor. The sound blanketed us all, energizing our shared space, our collective bodies. It was the co-creation of a historic moment: a call to witness, and a demand for reciprocity in the re-sounding of a seemingly familiar story.

2.4 “Tee-Hee, Brutus!”

Yvette Nolan knows all about settler resistance to hearing Shakespeare’s stories differently. In 2008, she and an all-Indigenous creative team opened Death of a Chief, their adaptation of Julius Caesar, at the National Arts Centre (NAC) in Ottawa; the NAC acted as a co-producer of the work alongside Toronto-based Native Earth Performing Arts (NEPA), which Nolan led as artistic director from 2003 until 2011. The reviews were practically caricatures of the hungry listening Reference RobinsonRobinson (2020) describes, and Nolan has written eloquently back to them. Reviewers (including two white cis- men from two leading national newspapers, as well as an Asian woman) wanted the show to explain to them the symbolism of its set design (the central circle was a medicine wheel), what Julius Caesar could possibly have to do with contemporary “Native” concerns, and they really (really) wanted the actors to sound more “Indian” (they wanted “rez speak,” as Nolan puts it) (Reference Nolan, Gilbert and GleghornNolan 2014, 226). The show did not offer them the kind of “Native” they expected, and they certainly never expected Indigenous voices lifted in Shakespeare’s verse. They didn’t hear what they wanted to hear, and they didn’t even try to understand what they were hearing. Despite this “critical” reception, Death of a Chief played to near-capacity audiences at the NAC, and Nolan and her team received plenty of anecdotal feedback that what they were sharing was deeply wanted by both settler and Indigenous audiences.Footnote ²² This was, in many ways, a show made for a community hearing. It was, in fact, a show made in order to build a community – in exactly the way Indigenous art practices are literally performative and “do” things like enact laws or treaties (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2020). Death of a Chief was not just about making a play; like 1939, it used Shakespeare’s language and story as tools of community creation, in the service of building a shared path to Indigenous artistic survivance.

When my research assistant Sheetala Bhat and I met with Nolan on Zoom in December 2021, she was eager to tell us the story of how she first met Shakespeare. She’s told this story before (to Reference MollSorouja Moll 2006), but like any good Elder she loves to retell it. Like Lauzon, whose foster father was a high-school drama teacher, Nolan benefited from parents with literary foundations. Her mother was a residential school survivor who (like the students of 1939) wasn’t aware of what she wasn’t supposed to learn; she borrowed volume after encyclopedia volume from the library, developing a lifelong love of wordplay. Nolan remembers sitting down, about age three, with her mom and Julius Caesar on TV. When her father came home from work and asked about the day, Yvette declared gleefully that when Caesar died he said, “Tee hee, Brutus!”Footnote ²³

Playing in and with Shakespeare’s plays, and especially his words, has been central to Nolan’s lifelong practice as an artist. There’s nothing “precious” about Shakespeare, for her, and “if it’s not precious it can be playful.”Footnote ²⁴ Trained in literary criticism, Nolan was never told at the University of Manitoba that Shakespeare was off-limits, and she excelled at studying the plays. In Winnipeg, working with the Theatre Alliance, she made short pieces as part of a series designed as a “testing ground,” including a four person Othello with Black and Indigenous actors that was cross-gendered. At just twenty minutes long, this was Shakespeare “boiled down to the story.”Footnote ²⁵ Arriving in 2003 at NEPA, Canada’s oldest Indigenous theatre company, Nolan soon had actors coming to her to tell her they could not get auditions for Shakespeare, and, if by chance they did, they did not know how to “get the gig.” Nolan asked Kennedy C. McKinnon, a voice coach at Stratford, to do a Shakespeare intensive for all interested NEPA artists; after the workshop they returned to Nolan and said: “Okay, so now we need a production to use the tools!” Death of a Chief began from a clear and basic community need – the need for theatrical tools to get good, higher-profile jobs for working Indigenous theatre artists – and it was always designed to be a place where a group of actors who had been gate-kept away from Shakespeare in their childhoods, training, or careers could build new skills. The process of moving the show from intensive, through workshops, and finally into production took three years; along the way it became a framework for “developing the community” that was growing up around it.Footnote ²⁶

Nolan didn’t just choose Julius Caesar because it was familiar to her from her childhood; the choice was political. Caesar is a story about leadership structures, about what happens to a community when it grows disillusioned with its leaders, and about how better models of governance can emerge from the “tearing down” of leaders no longer fit for purpose.Footnote ²⁷ The growing Chief community talked together about First Nations Band politics, the challenges of leading those historically oppressed into effective self-determination, and the importance of reckoning with the colonial imposition of patriarchy across many First Nations communities (Reference MollMoll 2006). Nolan – who at the time of our interview was pursuing a master’s degree in public policy at the University of Saskatchewan – saw in Caesar another kind of tool: a rehearsal for more equitable Indigenous self-government. Of the Chief process she writes:

While not all members of the Death of a Chief community came from matrilineal nations, the initial shaping of that community was fully matrilineal. The process began with Nolan, alongside Kennedy McKinnon and Michelle St John, convening workshops for all interested cast members. The women (it was all women) who had taken the initial intensive came consistently; men also came, but not all were invited to return. (“If they were not willing to learn to play the way we were playing … according to the values [of] generosity and humility and courage,” then, Nolan exclaims with characteristic glee, “we would be, ‘okay, these guys are out!’”Footnote ²⁸ (see also Reference KnowlesKnowles 2007, 57). Nolan describes the resulting room as a collaborative space of peer teaching, with members of the cast who had done significant amounts of Shakespeare (like Lauzon, who played Marc Anthony, and Monique Mojica, who played Caesar) supporting and coaching those new to the tools.Footnote ²⁹ She also points out that since she, too, had no formal theatre training, let alone training in directing Shakespeare, authority over form, content, and technique was shared across the room. Discussion, while not always easy, could make space for what everyone had brought with them into the room, as well as what was missing.

Of course, even a room with a novice director can be less than equitable; what made the Death of a Chief room different was the same circular economy that I described earlier in relation to Jani Lauzon’s dramaturgy. (As a member of the Chief community, Lauzon was no doubt learning throughout that process as well.) This room ran as all other NEPA rehearsal rooms did during and after Nolan’s tenure as artistic director: as a circle, not a triangle, and according to the Seven Grandfather Teachings (wisdom, love, respect, bravery, honesty, humility, and truth; Reference ManitowabiManitowabi 2018). Lauzon’s circle is based on the divestiture of ego: if the play in the centre has a spirit, and the spirit is our collective responsibility, we must place its and one another’s needs before our own, secure in the knowledge that our needs will be held in the same way by all others undertaking the work with us. Nolan’s circle, similarly, is based on a principle of shared investment in community because the making of the play is conceived as literally the work of building a new community, based on Indigenous creation principles negotiated in the room together. Along the way, the story of the play helps give that community shape, coordinates, and a direction in which to negotiate shared values. Nolan describes a moment later in the process when the fundamentals of the Caesar story became an obstacle for the community in this self-actualizing process:

All of this is what Death of a Chief’s reviewers chose not to hear as they listened for a “Native” Shakespeare. The Toronto Star reviewerFootnote ³¹ wrote that he could imagine some plays done this way – he singled out A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“because apparently fairies can be Aboriginal”) and Coriolanus (“because he struggles to adapt to a consensus-based community”) – but not Caesar (Reference Nolan, Gilbert and GleghornNolan 2014, 223). As Nolan notes, this “pronouncement raises a number of questions about how Indigenous creators are mediated, and by whom, and how the arbiter shapes the idea of Indigenous” (Reference Nolan, Gilbert and GleghornNolan 2014, 223), echoing both Tuhawai Smith’s comments on colonial research frameworks and Robinson’s theorization of extractivist settler listening practices. Later in the same essay, Nolan recalls learning about Shakespeare’s Globe’s search for “a Native Canadian Shakespeare” for the Globe2Globe festival that ran in conjunction with London’s Cultural Olympiad in 2012. She emailed festival producer Tom Bird with the suggestion of Chief. “He asked me what language the production was in,” because Globe2Globe’s hook was thirty-eight plays, thirty-eight languages. Nolan replied:

Bird passed. “We won’t get away with doing a show that’s mainly in English, just because it’s not really fair on all the other companies who’d like to do that!” he wrote back. Setting aside for a moment the painful irony of a (white, male) representative of a major British theatre calling out an Algonquin woman for wanting to make a Shakespeare play in the language forced upon her community by the nation he represents – even as she reminds him that British cultural genocide means “we have not got our languages” – what has always stood out for me in this exchange is Bird’s singular hang-up: words. He only hears the surface of language; he cannot hear Nolan’s ontological claim, which precedes her linguistic one:

Nolan tells Bird: our play does a thing – it makes a world, a world we want! – and we would like to share it with you. The hungry listener politely turns away. A more reciprocal listener, however, catches himself in his own bias. Reflecting on his experience of watching a workshop production before the NAC premiere and then revising his initial skepticism of using Caesar for decolonial purposes, Ric Knowles writes of Nolan’s claim, on her own terms, to the power the other Chief reviewers seem so reluctant to relinquish:

2.5 Community Telling

Reneltta Arluk’s Pawâkan (2015–) inherits the power of Nolan’s Death of a Chief to build a community from the bones of Shakespeare’s stories, and then multiplies it. Like both 1939 and Chief, Pawâkan represents a specifically Indigenous version of PaR, a re-embodiment of colonial story via a community’s shared cosmology, dramaturging survivance from the “scraps” of Shakespearean inheritance (Davies in press). Pawâkan has been in process since 2015, when it began as a two-week workshop with young people in the community of Frog Lake, Alberta; it now exists in two versions, both in constant conversation. One of these is a full-length play, adapted from MacBeth by Arluk and under contract with the Stratford Festival; the other is a community telling version, supported by the Canada Council for the Arts and the Banff Centre, and built by six actors with support from Arluk. In the latter form, Pawâkan has toured across Treaty 6 territory (which includes parts of the colonial province of Alberta), receiving a full production in Edmonton in early 2020. The story of Pawâkan’s doubled creation is the story of how Arluk strategically leveraged her various relationships with Stratford, the Canada Council, and the Banff Centre to use colonial Canadian arts money to transform MacBeth into a Plains Cree story, and then return it to Plains Cree communities as their own. Pawâkan is no less than an act of restitution: a return of colonial story, as contemporary resource, to Cree land.

Reneltta Arluk grew up in the Northwest Territories; she first encountered Shakespeare in junior high school. Like Nolan she was drawn to the playfulness of the language; an avid reader of all kinds of texts, she found “Shakespeare was saying words that were different than the words that I was reading in other places.”Footnote ³² She later had the opportunity to attend the Centre for Indigenous Theatre in Toronto (as did Lauzon, years earlier when it was known as the Native Theatre School), where she developed a love for the sonnets, and for the rhythms of speaking the text aloud. She went on to become the first Indigenous woman to graduate from the University of Alberta’s Bachelor of Fine Arts (BFA) acting programme, where she played the queen in Two Noble Kinsmen. After that, Arluk “never did Shakespeare [again]” because “I’m [from] the era where colorblind casting didn’t exist.”Footnote ³³ Like so many equity-owed artists who find themselves frozen out of the Anglo-European classics, Arluk founded her own company, Akpik Theatre; it focuses on Northern Indigenous stories and was designed as an umbrella company to help funnel money and opportunities to other Indigenous artists (Ontario Performing Arts Presenting Network 2021). Working via Akpik to bring the arts home to underserved Northern communities, Arluk kept Shakespeare on hiatus – until Frog Lake.

Akpik’s youth outreach programme was called What’s Your Story in its early years; it brought

Over time, however, Arluk realized that it was hard to work in depth with young people on such a tight time frame; she began to imagine what it would mean instead to go into a community for a couple of weeks, to do “deep relational work.” Akpik was invited by Theatre Prospero to go to Frog Lake; the plan was initially for Arluk to work with students on The Tempest. Quickly, the students spoke back: they wanted to do MacBeth, and they wanted to include the Wihtiko (the Plains Cree version of Windigo, the hunger spirit) as central to their telling.

Frog Lake’s school, like those in many Northern communities where governments have invested resources in Indigenous cultural spaces (if not in the basics, like paper towels in the bathrooms), had a cohort of students who knew their traditional stories, as well as a group of active, supportive Elders and community knowledge keepers. Arluk, along with Akpik associate director Barry Bilinsky (Métis, Cree, Ukranian), immediately gathered both students and Elders into a cross-generational collaboration. Wary about the huge energy (not unlike Shakespeare’s!) that the Wihtiko carries, Arluk asked drama teacher Owen Morris to invite Elders to come to the workshop. Arluk imagined the Elders baulking at the students’ request, cautioning them not to materialize such a dangerous figure as Wihtiko. But the Elders were eager to share their stories, and “the youth received them and then the youth shared with the Elders their own stories … and then [they] talked about other creatures within the Treaty 6 area. … This is a really healthy community that knows its history and knows its cosmology, and that was really inspiring,” Arluk remembers.Footnote ³⁴

The students’ initial work received its first community telling in Frog Lake, with Elders like Gary Berland bringing ribbon shirts, sumptuous robes, and an intricate Wolverine headdress for the performers to wear. The production enacted a celebration of community stories and traditions hung on the scaffold of MacBeth – as Evelyne and her peers try to do with their community-visioning practice in 1939. This was early 2015; that November, Arluk found herself seated next to Anthony Cimolino, artistic director at Stratford, during a playwright’s retreat at the Festival (part of the Foerster Bernstein New Play Development Program). He asked her about her work in process and she told him about Pawâkan – the Frog Lake artists had inspired her to take the play they built together to the next level. Cimolino was directing MacBeth in the upcoming Stratford season; they talked about the role of the witches, which Arluk was reimagining for Pawâkan as powerful Coyote-like figures who drive the action throughout the play. Called Wiyôyôwak, “literally the sound of howling in Cree,” these figures are Arluk’s own invention, representations of Cree spirituality and a reminder that good and bad co-exist in all cosmologies (“If we’re going to keep our stories alive, we need to keep all of our stories alive,” says Bilinsky [Reference MorenoMoreno 2020, my emphasis]).

Arluk then began a process of mobilizing funding and support from a range of sources to enable further development of Pawâkan. Keira Loughran, then director of Stratford’s Playwright’s Lab and the most senior person of colour in the organization at the time, invited Arluk back to the Festival to work the script at the Lab. Roughly concurrently, Arluk applied to the Canada Council for the Arts’ New Chapter program, “a special, one-time program created on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Confederation” (Canada Council 2017) and designed to showcase contemporary Canadian diversity. She received the money. Also in 2017, Arluk was invited by Stratford to direct The Breathing Hole, a Festival commission by settler playwright Colleen Murphy (and starring, among others, Jani Lauzon). After Breathing Hole closed, Loughran organized a private reading of Arluk’s script in process with both Indigenous and non-Indigenous members of the repertory company in residence. Not long after, Stratford formally commissioned Arluk to complete Pawâkan for a world premiere at the Festival.Footnote ³⁵ Pawâkan was at the point of commission the largest investment the Playwright’s Lab had ever made; the play in process also became, to some degree, Stratford’s property (that is, under her contract’s terms, Arluk was not permitted to stage it anywhere else before its Festival premiere). But she was also holding her New Chapter money; that money was earmarked for a community production and had terms and conditions of its own. She had to hack the funding system – and the “community telling” version was born. On Arluk’s request, celebrated performing artist and York University professor Michael Greyeyes (Muskeg Lake Cree Nation) was named director for the Stratford full Pawâkan; meanwhile, Arluk hired half a dozen Indigenous actors from Western Canada and set to work with them tearing the play apart. Together they built a completely different version of Arluk’s own story that could tour Treaty 6 territory, satisfy the Canada Council, not irk Stratford, and resonate fully in the communities Akpik Theatre serves.

The two versions of Pawâkan were always, of necessity, going to be different. The community telling version couldn’t be two and a half hours long, and it certainly couldn’t have an intermission. “We’re going into communities that don’t have much experience with theatre,” Arluk notes; “at intermission, the community might just go home, lol. So what I did was I gave them the script,” she says of her work with the actors she hired with her New Chapter funds.Footnote ³⁶ She intended for them to story-tell her adaptation to build the community version, but she quickly came to realize that they didn’t have traditional storytelling skills. (She chuckled, she says, at her own inherent bias: the actors relayed the action, but they didn’t know yet how to put themselves into the story.) The team pivoted and their shared work on the community telling version became to learn the art of Indigenous storytelling together. Arluk ceded the play to the actors fully; they improvised from scene to scene and “[threw] my text away” with her blessing. Eventually, they had ninety minutes of shared story, built from the bones of Arluk’s Pawâkan, itself built from the bones of Shakespeare’s MacBeth. “I actually don’t even really take credit for their community telling. It’s told by the actors,” Arluk says (see Figures 2 and 3).Footnote ³⁷

Figure 2 Allyson Pratt as Kâwanihot Iskwew and Aaron Wells as Macikosisân in Pawâkan Macbeth (Community Telling Version).

Photography by Donald Lee, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

Figure 3 Mitchell Saddleback as Otepwestamâkew in Pawâkan Macbeth (Community Telling Version).

Photography by Donald Lee, The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity.

When Sheetala and I interviewed Arluk in late January 2022, she was at the Banff Centre, where she had recently taken up the role of director of Indigenous arts. It was there in January 2020 that she worked the community telling version with actors Sophie Merasty, Joel D. Montgrand, Allyson Pratt, Mitch Saddleback, Aaron Wells, and Kaitlyn Yott, going on to tour Treaty 6 territory just before the Covid-19 pandemic shut theatres.Footnote ³⁸ At that same time, Greyeyes and his cast had been in residence at Banff too, working the full script. “So we took over Banff!” Arluk says delightedly; “we must have had 40 or 50 Indigenous artists at the Centre, all working on Pawâkan” – co-creating a new community story, a new community, with MacBeth as just another member of the team.

Making community from the bones of colonial text. Treating elite literary inheritance as shared sustenance. Arriving in the circle, together. These are some of the principles that the Indigenous women whose practices I’ve discussed here bring to their relationships with Shakespeare: their Shakespeare is a tool, a source of inspiration, a raw material for new making. A fellow researcher in a specifically Indigenous PaR exercise, his spirit is huge and it’s dangerous, but held in community hands it can also be rich and revealing of this Turtle Island today. As we’ll see next, these same principles – Shakespeare as re/source in a democratized, playful creation room – apply for those dedicated to making Shakespeare intersectionally.

3.1 Intersectionality: Mobilizing the Metaphor

Dawn Jani Birley first met Ravi Jain on a video call. She asked if he wanted a sign language interpreter; he said no: they could figure out how to speak together. This made a deep impression on Birley; it marked Jain as a hearing person “that you can work with.”Footnote ⁴³ Birley asked Jain which lens he intended to bring to Prince Hamlet, in which Birley appears as both translator/adapter of the text and a culturally Deaf Horatio. Was he aiming for an inclusive lens or an intersectional one? He didn’t know. She explained:

Birley’s intersectionality mobilizes the term to describe a process for mutual theatrical creation that can bring Deaf and hearing artists together to challenge what dominant theatre culture perceives as an intractable Deaf–hearing divide. Developed over the course of her master’s degree in the UK, Birley’s intersectionality builds on the work of Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw, the legal scholar who brought the term to critical prominence in two landmark papers. Crenshaw’s intersectionality derives from the historical legacy of Black feminist thought (Reference CarastathisCarastathis 2016, 124) and is grounded in the experiences of Black women enmeshed in the US legal system. In her 1989 paper, Crenshaw uses two metaphors – a traffic intersection and a basement – to demonstrate how these women’s experiences are doubly discounted because “both are predicated on a discrete set of experiences [being a woman or being Black] that often does not accurately reflect the interaction of race and gender” in shaping their lives and their experiences of harm (Reference CrenshawCrenshaw 1989, 140).

Think of an intersection, Crenshaw suggests in that paper: traffic comes from all angles, and if a car in the middle of the intersection is hit, it may be hit from any angle – or from multiple angles, compounding the injuries sustained (Reference CrenshawCrenshaw 1989, 149). This is the metaphor of intersectionality that has endured in simplified form, leading to our popular understanding of the word as meaning multiple identities = multiple forms of oppression. However, in the same paper, Crenshaw offers a second metaphor. Imagine a basement: folks experiencing discrimination are stacked shoulder upon shoulder, with those who experience multiple, compounding forms of discrimination on the bottom, and those disadvantaged by only one form (say, Black, cis- men, or white, straight women) hitting the ceiling. Let’s say a hatch in the ceiling opens and that first layer squeezes up; the structure can then celebrate its capacity for inclusivity. Those from below with the most relative privilege can join those above who have always benefited from proximity to existing power structures; thereby, those structures endure. Meanwhile, the folks on whom the entire structure literally rests are left in the dark below.

In her 2016 reassessment of Crenshaw’s work, Anna Carastathis recovers two important valences of the original “intersectionality.” First, intersectionality is designed to be “a provisional concept, meant to get us to think about how we think” (Reference CarastathisCarastathis 2016, 4). Second, in its provisional status, intersectionality requires a politics of coalition (Reference CarastathisCarastathis 2016, 5), an active rethinking together of how we have systemically been taught to imagine the world. Understanding intersectionality as ongoing, provisional, coalitional labour designed to move us toward the collective dismantling of harmful social structures also means, for Carastathis, that we must be prepared to become “disoriented” as we unlearn our own biases and expectations: “in order to transform our thinking, let alone institutionalized practices, our current axiomatic assumptions, cognitive habits, and unreflective premises have to be at once engaged and disrupted” (Reference CarastathisCarastathis 2016, 108–9).

Carastathis’s rereading of Crenshaw through intersectionality’s provisional and coalitional dimensions rematerializes Crenshaw’s original metaphors. It reclaims their radical potential as a doing: as the work of intersecting with others and adjusting as needed, not the satisfaction of being willing to “include” others without adjusting at all. This is also Birley’s intersectionality. It heeds Reference CrenshawCrenshaw’s (1989) call to “place those who currently are marginalized in the centre” in order best “to resist efforts to compartmentalize experiences and undermine potential collective action” (Reference CarastathisCarastathis 2016, 167). After all, centring those normally marginalized works safely at an intersection only when we fundamentally rethink what an intersection should look like, who it should be for: think a pedestrian scramble crossing, not a highway interchange. Only when we make the metaphor literal, a matter of real bodies sharing space together, can properly equitable alternatives appear.

3.2 Building the Room

Many participants in Emma Frankland’s creation rooms have described the very same feelings I share above: a sense of being encouraged to bring as much or as little of themselves into the room as they feel able to do; of feeling included in a level playing space rather than ranked according to the privilege traditionally attached to theatre vocations (director, then actors, then designers … tech support and academics quietly at the back); of feeling that the differences we bring (racial, ability, or gendered, social or in terms of work or life experience) are assets, not detriments. So, when I sat down with Frankland to speak to her about her work on Galatea, I asked her about how she builds and holds this space.

She talked first about deep listening: about what it has meant for her, over the multi-year Galatea creation process, to discover from others what they need in a secure, functional room, and then to treat the room-building process as one of unlearning her own assumptions. Frankland grew up in an artistic family with lots of Shakespeare around, but she first met John Lyly and Galatea (c. 1584–8) at Shakespeare’s Globe during the Read Not Dead project that ran in the mid-2010s. Having recently studied acting at master’s level at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and having also recently begun transitioning, Frankland’s perspective toward Lyly was tentative. She was trained to engage with Galatea, a Shakespeare-adjacent early modern text, “very much through a cis white patriarchal lens,” and yet she was also beginning to feel “the slow decline in my involvement with organizations such as the Globe and with the classical performance world in general” that occurred alongside her coming out as trans.Footnote ⁴⁵ In the play, aspects of which Shakespeare borrowed for later plays including As You Like It and The Tempest, two virgins are disguised as boys and sent to the forest to avoid being sacrificed to the god Neptune’s monster Agar; in the forest they fall in love, and at the play’s end, thanks to the goddess Venus, they are invited to live happily ever after. As Frankland began to build “her own relationship” to the early moderns via Galatea, she explored the play’s latent queerness; she found in Lyly a trans ally and trans stories in his characters (Frankland and Kesson 2019). The play became a bridge between the box-office classical theatre world that had decided it was not “for” Frankland anymore and the world of contemporary experimental performance in which her art practice since transitioning has largely lived (see Frankland 2019a).

The first Galatea R&D workshop, in 2016, was supported by the Jerwood Foundation. Frankland decided that the room should include artists she would normally collaborate with as part of her contemporary practice, rather than trained actors familiar with classical spaces:

That first room allowed for a series of crucial discoveries that have shaped both Galatea’s development and Frankland’s spacing process ever since. Because of the range of lived differences in the room, and because all of the participants in the room had received the explicit offer to bring both their artistic expertise and their whole selves into the room, the team were able to have frank conversations about the play’s queer and trans dimensions, its imbrications with race and racism, and the ways in which it codes for Deaf as well as hearing experience.

All subsequent R&D periods shifted or added new artists and collaborators according to the dimensions of difference that had been explored in earlier workshops. Frankland treated these periods as opportunities for her to learn more deeply about her white and ableist privilege, as well as about trans experience across intersections beyond her own. Thanks to discussions with collaborators of colour, the team has reckoned with the language of “fairness” (i.e., whiteness) in the play and rewritten passages or eliminated phrases that do not serve Black and people of colour (POC) actors. Thanks to ongoing collaboration with a group of Deaf actors including Nadia Nadarajah, the team has also moved away from the notion of “integrating” British Sign Language (BSL)-speaking actors into the project and toward “making an equitable production that works for the Deaf actors and hearing actors equally” (akin to Birley’s practice). The process, as Frankland describes it, “hasn’t been straightforward,” but it has been marked by her “taking ownership over” both successes and mistakes, as well as over the work required to produce genuine equity in the room.Footnote ⁴⁷

Built from her willingness to become disoriented, and her commitment to listen and learn from her own mistakes, Frankland’s room encourages the very same from its members, so that we all may be moved to think carefully: is this world we are building together a place we really want to be? The room agreement we used at the NT Studio in November 2022 reads as follows:

• To recognise our intersections/differences while maintaining community we will:

  1. ◦ Give permission to disagree

  2. ◦ Where relevant, socially position ourselves

  3. ◦ Hold affinity spaces if desired [spaces in which members of a specific group, for example Deaf or trans participants, can go to be with each other, recalibrate, reaffirm security and safety]

1. – We give permission to leave

2. – We will take care of the group and ourselves

3. – We will not use language that is problematic or appropriative

4. – There will be confidentiality (stories can be shared, identities will be protected)

5. – We can use the ‘oops/ouch’ tool

6. – It’s our responsibility to articulate our needs where possible

7. – We are moving towards decolonising space/language (making space for all ways of identifying)

8. – Moving through discomfort but adjusting before harm.

Both specific and highly flexible, the agreement holds in tension two promises: that we will take care of one another, which includes actively taking care of ourselves; and that we will create the conditions possible for us to become uncomfortable with each other while avoiding harm. The “oops/ouch” tool offers an ideal example of this tension in practice. If someone causes accidental harm – for example, a misgendering – and then realizes the mistake, they can say “oops” to signal responsibility-taking. They to whom harm is caused may then say “ouch,” which acts as acknowledgement and as permission to take the lead on next steps. Both parties can speak more, if they feel this is needed or wanted, but it is not required. The tool allows that small harms may happen without intention but reparations can still be made with intention; the community can move on, simultaneously taking responsibility and offering care.

Long-time academic collaborator Andy Kesson describes Frankland’s room as “somewhat counterintuitive”: Frankland’s ethos encompasses both a drive toward community and its simultaneous disruption, a deep safety coupled with genuine discomfort.Footnote ⁴⁸ It is typical, he notes, for Frankland to spend time building trust and security in the room, and then to send a small group of participants away “with an entirely contradictory task” to work on. Later, she will invite the rogue group back, specifically “to disturb the world” the main room has been building by introducing unexpected conflict. The goal is to produce “a community building itself up and having an understanding of who they are, and then being forced to redefine itself.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The healthy navigation of difference and the development of skills that make a community more porous, more flexible, more resilient, and ultimately more open: this is the work of Frankland’s creation room (see Figure 4).

Figure 4 Emma Frankland and Kemi Coker mess around during group warm-up activities. Galatea Research and Development Workshop #7, NT Studio, 20–24 November 2022.

Photo by Joe Twigg.

3.3 The Art of Starting Over

Pauline Oliveros defines “deep listening” as taking in, and then acting upon, what those around you tell you they need. Kathleen Fitzpatrick, in resonance with Robinson’s work on Indigenous sound practice, describes hearing as “something that happens to the ear,” but listening as “a cognitive act in which one must participate” (Reference FitzpatrickFitzpatrick 2021, 74). Taken seriously, listening hails us, demands that we do something. Fitzpatrick quotes Krista Tippett: “Generous listening … involves a kind of vulnerability – a willingness to be surprised, to let go” (Reference FitzpatrickFitzpatrick 2021, 76).

With Miriam Fernandes, Ravi Jain is co-artistic director of Why Not Theatre in Toronto, and he is an important ally in this section’s story. His creation room, like Frankland’s, is a product of deep listening: he centres those who are typically not given the opportunity to create on their own terms in dominant culture spaces because of systemic oppressions and the barriers erected by elite tradition. Jain founded Why Not in 2007, after returning to Canada from years abroad training and working. Even with credentials from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA), New York University, and the Lecoq school, Jain found himself “hitting hard systemic racism in a massive way” as he sought work in the industry.Footnote ⁵¹ He built Why Not on the principle of access: creating the kind of work he found exciting by giving artists like himself opportunities to exercise their creativity freely. He maintains Why Not’s profile and industry currency, as well as its war chest for artist uplift, in part by turning to audience-friendly fare (A Brimful of Asha), mythical classics (Mahabharata), and blockbuster Shakespeare. Jain, a Canadian-born South Asian and a drama kid from the start, regards Shakespeare as “Kleenex”: a bankable resource that enables his company to support other creators, as well as a place to learn, play, and reinvent as an artist. Regardless of project, profile, or producing partners, however, all of Jain’s projects begin with Why Not’s guiding question: who gets to tell the story?

Hamlet was Why Not’s first show, cut and directed by Jain, in 2007; “ten years later” he was interested in discovering what the company had learned, not by remounting it but by making it “again, but better.”

Working across the ability spectrum hadn’t been on Jain’s radar until he found himself at a US conference focused on equity, diversity, and inclusion. Via Black creator Lisa Karen Cox, Jain got in touch with Birley, and the meeting I described earlier in this section took place. The wheels were in motion; importantly, though, the vision wasn’t fixed. “I didn’t have a clue what we were gonna make!” Jain exclaims. For R&J, Jain worked the script with frequent Why Not collaborator Christine Horne; he was interested in exploring “the tension between young and old [in the play] … what is this future that we’re fighting for?” But R&J only began in earnest with the casting of fourteen-year-old Eponine Lee as Juliet and blind artist Alex Bulmer as the Friar. “The people will help determine what the project ends up being,” Jain notes.Footnote ⁵³

Why Not’s four-year span of work on Prince Hamlet (2017–19) and then R&J (2021) makes a superb case study in what Frankland describes as the “not straightforward-ness” – the well-intentioned but inevitably error-strewn challenge – of working in a genuinely intersectional way. Prince Hamlet was created twice: in 2017, which Christine Horne describes as “getting the idea of the show,” and again in 2019, which she calls “THE show” (Birley describes the span between these productions as “a world of difference”).Footnote ⁵⁴

At the start of the 2017 process, the room worked in separate spheres, only one of which included Birley; Jain anticipated being able to integrate the two later in the process. Birley pressed Jain on this separation because, from her culturally Deaf perspective, none was plausible within the world of the play: “as I began to analyze the story, I thought, if Horatio and Hamlet are best friends, then what does that mean? If Hamlet and I, Deaf and hearing, had grown up together and continue to be best friends then we must be signing to each other to communicate.”Footnote ⁵⁵

Further, Birley reasoned, if Horatio has long been part of Hamlet’s life, then the King and the Queen, too, must have some knowledge of sign language; so may Ophelia and Laertes, and even members of the guard. Birley recalls bringing this up often in the first few weeks of rehearsal only to be “put on hold” while work continued on lines and devising in the other spaces in the room. Jain asked her to comment on the emerging first half around week three. “I looked at it and said, ‘I don’t know what they’re saying,” Birley recalls; Jain had scored the scenes physically and visually according to his hearing perspective, aiming for universal readability. Birley’s response was: “maybe, right, if you can hear [what they are saying] too, but to me I don’t see what you’re trying to tell me!”Footnote ⁵⁶

The above paints a familiar picture of what happens when you centre difference in a way that is more tokenistic than holistic, regardless of good intentions. But it’s also a familiar picture because, for those of us approaching intersectional work from learned dominant culture perspectives, mistakes are inevitable – they are, as Alex Bulmer notes, both expected and necessary in the process of learning to work well across vectors of difference.Footnote ⁵⁷ Jain’s response to Birley was telling: “Okay! We go back to the drawing board!” Birley notes how, again and again, Jain was willing to recognize his mistakes, own them, and then just start over. She describes the above moment in the Prince Hamlet process as pivotal: “I had to ask, Who do you think this audience is? Is [the show] for both Deaf and hearing audience members? If so, you have to think of how both [groups of] patrons are going to experience it.”Footnote ⁵⁸ She explained that, in its current iteration, their work in progress pointed to her, a Deaf spectator, as a problem to solve in the dramaturgy of the text. What they needed for an intersectional production was a solution to the real problem: how both hearing and Deaf audience members could encounter the story on equal, shared terms.

This realization spurred the team to change course completely. In the resulting final production (Why Not Theatre 2017), sometimes Deaf audiences were privileged to understand what was going on in a way that hearing audiences could not, and vice versa. However, to ensure that this experience of knowing or not knowing was shared equitably across a bilingual platform – and to do so with less than two weeks until opening – Birley’s labour had to push into overdrive. Horne recalls: “Dawn would have to teach us everything! Not only … being like sort of the Deaf cultural consultant for the production and doing all the translation, but … anything any of us had to sign, Dawn had to take time to teach us. … that was a ton of work.”Footnote ⁵⁹

All of those I interviewed about Prince Hamlet acknowledged how excessive Birley’s labour was in 2017, but that acknowledgement also fed a deep sense of respect and a spur to learning. Ahead of the 2019 rebuild, several members of the cast took the time to learn some ASL, and Why Not funded a full three weeks of rehearsal (versus the one-week norm for a remount) so that Birley might revisit her original ASL translation to deepen the story for Deaf spectators. Horne learned significant ASL, enabling Horatio and Hamlet to really begin to play with the language and each other; Horne’s initiative came directly from her respect for Birley’s initial investment of time and labour. She recalls: “it felt like I have to do what I can to, to meet Dawn, to bring what I can … there’s only so much I’m going to be able to learn but I have to do my best to be able to come back and balance those skills” (see Figure 5).Footnote ⁶⁰

Figure 5 Dawn Jani Birley (left), Rick Roberts (centre), and Christine Horne in Why Not Theatre’s Prince Hamlet.

Photography by Bronwen Sharp.

Ravi Jain likes to ask his collaborators, “I need you to be your fullest creative self. What do I need to do [to enable that]?”Footnote ⁶¹ From Prince Hamlet, Why Not “learned a lot” about working intersectionally across ability, and Jain and Horne put their learning into practice curating the room for R&J (Why Not Theatre 2021a).Footnote ⁶² I’ll speak in more detail about R&J in Section 3.4, but for now it’s worth highlighting changes that the company made to their creation process so that Alex Bulmer (blind) and Eponine Lee (a minor) could both show up and just make theatre. Why Not produced R&J with the Stratford Festival, and Jain used his power and privilege as a sought-after theatre maker to ensure that conversations between Why Not and Stratford took place well ahead of rehearsals to guarantee safety provisions for Bulmer and Lee both onstage and off. Horne worked with Lee on the text ahead of time to help her feel prepared coming into rehearsal with a group of adult actors. Blind consultants and youth consultants were hired to anticipate Lee’s and Bulmer’s needs ahead of time. Jain and Horne cut Romeo and Juliet for the rehearsal process, but provided several versions of the possible script as offerings, granting the cast strong creative agency in developing the final cut. The room contained a “question box” that invited artists to share thoughts privately with Jain and Horne as needed. The result? The team felt “entirely safe,”Footnote ⁶³ empowered (Dante Jemmott), never judged (Lee).Footnote ⁶⁴ Tom Rooney, the only Stratford veteran in the cast, described to me the way the centring of Bulmer’s and Lee’s respective needs disrupted expectations about who gets to take up space in rehearsal, who gets to contribute to storytelling in a place like Stratford: “Voice people and movement people often come into rehearsal and feel like they need to be a little bit invisible,” he told me, “whereas in this situation, they had to come in and say, ‘I, Tom, am in the room’ [so Alex would know]. There was something very wonderful and very democratic about that.”Footnote ⁶⁵

3.4 “I Am Not a Metaphor”: The Text as Collaborator

Like Birley, Alex Bulmer also tells a great story about the conversation she had with Ravi Jain when he phoned to ask her if she’d like to play the Friar in R&J. Jain asked Bulmer about the famous lines with which Mercutio and Benvolio tease Romeo in Act 2, scene 1. Did she think “love is blind” was an ableist metaphor?Footnote ⁶⁶ “And I said, well if you think of blindness as like an absence or unawareness, which is how most people use the metaphor, then yes of course it’s ableist. But if you mean blindness as infinite possibility, then I wouldn’t call it ableist.”Footnote ⁶⁷

The Mercutio–Benvolio exchange codes for both readings: Benvolio references darkness as the safest place for love to find some freedom in a combative society organized around surveillance, while Mercutio claims that blind love “cannot hit the mark,” presumably because, without its eyes, it is disoriented. Bulmer’s “infinite possibility,” like Benvolio’s take, does not begin from the assumption that darkness is a problem, so she countered Jain’s question with an analogy of her own. Imagine you throw a rock into a pond. If you are sighted, your journey starts when you pick up the rock; it ends when the rock hits the water. If you are blind, “it starts when you hear PLOP into the water, and then you imagine ripples … and then all of a sudden your imagination fills with a whole story.”Footnote ⁶⁸ (See also Why Not Theatre 2021b.)

Alex Bulmer first met Shakespeare as a small child, attending Shakespeare Club with her beloved grandmother; it was while she was in rehearsals for A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Bishop’s University in 1987 that she flew home for the eye appointment at which she was diagnosed with retinitis pigmentosa, a degenerative condition. When she returned to school, her director Greg Tuck rolled with the challenge, fitting her with a headlamp and transforming her into a firefly; it’s this “way of thinking” – seeing “creative possibilities in disability” – that has shaped Bulmer’s interactions with Shakespeare ever since.Footnote ⁶⁹ When Bulmer arrived at the first R&J workshop in March 2021, she discovered what a huge impact her “love is blind” thoughts had had on Jain. He’d developed a provisional concept for the show in which Bulmer as the Friar would tell the story from her perspective, performing on an empty stage with only a chair. The first time they tried this out, Jain asked Bulmer if she had “an impulse” to move around. I do, she said, “but I don’t know where I am!” Jain immediately realized that the concept as he had imagined it – helping a sighted audience to “experience” love’s blindness through the Friar’s blindness – could never work for her, the living blind performer, “because my whole world is about making contact with things.”Footnote ⁷⁰ She went on to explain that “love is blind” may be a familiar metaphor and one worth unpacking, but “I am not a metaphor” (Why Not Theatre 2021b).

A metaphor is “a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, [it]” (OED n.d.). We associate metaphor with great poetry, but what that association often forgets is that metaphors are based on simultaneous ostension and elision. They lift one thing to our view in a new way, while diminishing or even erasing the materiality of the comparator thing: “love is blind” takes the meaning of blindness for granted. Metaphor thus emerges from linguistic privilege: to “get it,” you need to be fluent in the metaphor’s language – you need to know what “blind” means, and the meaning that most regularly comes to mind belongs to the dominant culture. Alex Bulmer’s body in the space of R&J physically changed the meaning of the story’s central metaphor and thus the orientation from which the story itself could be told. Jain and Horne, true to form and expectation, immediately started all over again. “The version of R&J” that they had to build, Horne recalls, needed to be the one that “facilitates [Alex] playing this part”: that meant (1) The Friar is always in a place very familiar to him and (2) the Friar never leaves the stage (to accommodate Covid-19 safety rules in place at the time).Footnote ⁷¹ The team settled on the Friar’s lodging as the set; designer Julie Fox collaborated with Bulmer in order to build a rich physical world that mirrored Bulmer’s use of her own private space.Footnote ⁷² The rest of the process resembled devising more than rehearsal. Each day brought new discoveries, followed by a new script from Jain and Horne the next morning; on many occasions, recalls Dante Jemmott, there was no acting, just a lot of discussion about what story of any given scene the group wanted to tell. The Friar’s relationship with Romeo and Juliet became central to the team’s concept for the play, which focused on intergenerational learning and the development of an ethically sustainable world; much of that story was inspired by improvising with one another, and much of it developed gesturally rather than through language (see Figure 6). Jemmott recalls rehearsing the moment when the Friar explains to Romeo that he is banished:

Figure 6 Dante Jemmott (left) as Romeo and Alex Bulmer as the Friar in R+J (Stratford Festival, Why Not Theatre 2021a).

Photograph by David Hou.

The creation of R&J, like the creation of Prince Hamlet, exemplifies what can emerge when, as Fernandes puts it, you “centre another culture” and that culture’s uniquely embodied experience of language, poetry, and metaphor in the making of Shakespeare instead of centering “the text” (much as 1939 did as it indigenized Helena’s story and translated its poetry into Mohawk; see Section 2). For both Prince Hamlet and R&J, Fernandes explains, “the portal in wasn’t language first … [and] that allowed us to meet the language [of the play] in a different way.”Footnote ⁷⁴ The physical requirements of the encultured bodies on stage became each production’s defining parameters, which in turn determined which elements of “the text” were of value and which should be disregarded. Birley and Jain chose to translate or discard metaphors from Hamlet depending on how they best saw fit to convey a metaphor’s intentions; often, words were simply not needed to say what the story wanted to communicate. Birley developed an entirely visual representation of Gertrude’s speech after Ophelia’s drowning, one that disregarded both English and ASL and chose instead to act out Gertrude’s emotions in a physical register unique to the production. The resulting scene “has most thoroughly stuck in people’s minds,” as Birley notes; it is appreciated equally by ASL speakers and by those who prize the original poetry. In 2019, with much more ASL in the room, the team cut more and more of the Shakespeare, working the story through hands, gestures, and facial expressions; ASL allowed the team to “liberate” Horatio’s story from the overdetermined text of Hamlet. Birley explains:

3.5 Remapping the Past, Funding the Future

After the first break on our first day at the NT Studio, Frankland introduces the room to the story of Galatea. She tells us, “This is a play about a town that has forgotten how to love, and a monster is coming.” Ferocious Agar comes every five years to take the town’s “fairest” virgin; Galatea and Phyllida are young people the community reads as female, and this year they are monster fodder. Their dads both decide, independently, to dress them as boys and send them into the woods to hide. There, Galatea and Phyllida discover that they love one another; they also discover the goddess Diana, who presides over a community of equals where love, not “fairness,” is the currency. At the play’s end, Galatea and Phyllida are still in love, even though unmasked to the town as ladies. Venus saves the day; she declares “I like well and allow it,” and states that she will “turn one” of the pair into a man. But we never learn who is changed – or if anyone is (Frankland and Joy 2023, 76–7).

This is the story behind the text, and we dwell with it before Frankland hands out any paper. She talks about how, over various R&D periods focused on clues about Blackness in the play, the trans potential of the lovers, the town’s structure as a community, and the role of Deaf experience in the play, the creation team has come to understand that Galatea isn’t a Deaf or trans or Black story – all of these stories exist within its world, but above all it is a play about a community filled with people terrified of difference. When we finally get our scenes for the week, Frankland is clear: the fact that “the text” is now here does not mean that it is suddenly the boss (I think of Lauzon: a text surrounded by present, human stories). Frankland then explains that the text is meant as a point of reference only; she says that it will be the job of the play and the characters to bend and flex around us, not the other way (see Figure 7).

Figure 7 Emma Frankland (foreground) and Subira Joy explore “the text” during the Galatea Research and Development Workshop #7, NT Studio, 20–24 November 2022.

Photo by Joe Twigg.

How much do we know of the context that we revere, when we revere the texts of Shakespeare and company? Andy Kesson tells me that our assumptions about the look and feel of the early modern period, based in colonial Bardolatry, are tenacious but generally wrong: “we [think we] know what historical theatre looks like, and what contemporary classical theatre looks like, and [they both] look like Shakespeare.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Recent research (including practice-based research) by Kesson and Frankland, Sawyer Kemp, Lucy Munro, Natasha Corda, Clare McManus, Callan Davies, Peter Cockett, Melinda Gough, and many others reveals a very different, much queerer early modern theatre ecology, one that rested to a significant extent on the power and influence of women, non-binary, and transgender folks (Reference DaviesDavies 2018; Reference Frankland, Sewell and SmoutFrankland 2019b; Cockett and Gough in press). Lyly wrote for a company owned by a woman and often named his plays after women – and those plays don’t end with marriages. “Shakespeare has fixed us with a world in which most plays are named after male characters, and in the case of comedies are moving towards heterosexual marriage,” Kesson notes, but “it’s possible to entirely remap our sense of diversity in the period” by looking away from Shakespeare and toward a much broader and more socially and sexually diverse web of early modern writing than we’ve previously admitted into theatrical consciousness.Footnote ⁷⁷ At the end of Sapho and Phao, Lyly’s prequel to Galatea, Sapho takes Cupid hostage and declares love “a toy for ladies only,” a “radical agenda” that sets the stage for Galatea to celebrate the social and political viability of two women-presenting humans’ love for one another.Footnote ⁷⁸ So, when Frankland asserts in the studio the importance of our contemporary agency as Galatea co-creators, she is not only positioning Lyly as a queer, Deaf, and trans “ally” and his text as our collaborator; she and Kesson are practicing a performative remapping that reveals a fresh theatre history, one that doesn’t look like Shakespearean heteropatriarchy at all.

Frankland and Kesson’s selection of Galatea is a clear, deliberate political choice; so too are Why Not’s choices of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet. Galatea invites us to reflect on why Shakespeare should be our early modern default when so many other, more gender-(and race- and ability-)inclusive options exist in the canon; meanwhile, Prince Hamlet and R&J invite us to see and hear our “default” Shakespeares through new languages, perspectives, and embodied practices. Why Not’s choice of the heavy hitters is political for another reason, too: because they sell. Jain is not shy about articulating Why Not’s economic calculus because when the company’s Hamlet goes on tour, and when R&J is co-produced by a well-resourced institution like the Stratford Festival, it means more resources for the company to funnel into accessibility and support. It also means money to direct at its community programs like RISER,Footnote ⁷⁹ designed to give independent, equity-owed artists the space, time, and professional administrative assistance to make whatever they want on their own terms.Footnote ⁸⁰ Why Not’s policy of “share everything” directly addresses the fact that the labour of making genuinely equitable theatre (and especially genuinely equitable classical theatre, with its large casts and multiple settings) requires extensive material support to ensure that artists are fairly compensated for all of their work, including unexpected “diversity work”; to ensure that accessibility mechanisms are in place for all members of the company who need them; and to ensure that creation and rehearsal timelines can compensate for the need to throw out ideas that cannot work for all company members, and start again.

Galatea was ambitious in scale, and Kesson and Frankland were deeply committed to ensuring equity and accessibility for all: their resource requirements were extensive indeed. In final production, Galatea included over 100 crew members at an outdoor site that featured multiple stage areas, food trucks, and a festival-like pre-show; with numerous trans, non-binary, Black, Indigenous, people of colour (BIPOC), Deaf, and disabled team members participating, the creative leadership had to support different groups of participants with often very different access needs, some of which were emergent as the rehearsal period continued and circumstances (including the weather) intervened. For independent artists and smaller companies (both of which are more likely to be, or to include, equity-owed folks), the financial support for such resource requirements can’t just come from the “top” down; it needs to be negotiated across partner companies in advance and supplemented with grants from government and/or academic organizations, making the accessibility supply chain extremely contingent. From the beginning, Frankland and Kesson were adamant that Galatea could be professionally staged only if that production were fully accessible and safe for all makers, and they spent significant chunks of time over the production’s seven-plus-year incubation period applying for grant and residency support to get the next few steps down the road. Galatea could finally be imagined as a full-scale production when Frankland and Kesson won major funding from both Arts Council England (ACE) and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) in 2022, accompanied by in-kind support from the Brighton Festival and sign-ons from several other companies as design and producing partners. Even then, there were no guarantees: after three weeks of rehearsal in Shoreham-on-Sea ahead of the show’s premiere in May 2023, fractures emerged around what Frankland called, in an off-the-record chat with me in July 2023, “ideas of so-called professionalism,”Footnote ⁸¹ causing one of Galatea’s directors to step away. This left Frankland, Subira Joy, Kesson, and other artistic leaders scrambling to ensure safety and continuity. The production was then hit by a new challenge, a long-term incursion onto the performance site that put its insurance cover in jeopardy. To manage these difficulties, a three-week run had to be cut to one week, though the resulting show was extremely well received by many audience members (as evidenced by Kesson’s research team’s exit surveys and discussions, shared with me anecdotally).

The precarity of the funding structure that made a full-scale Galatea possible almost tore it apart in the end. Why? Because the work of democratizing story is twofold: it is the work of establishing and funding the necessity of full access to the making and sharing of story, and it is also the work of mounting that story for a paying audience in a culture still driven by “European standards of excellence” – standards that still have a tenacious hold on many of us in the industry who are nevertheless committed to real equity and inclusion. The work of democratizing story requires navigating this paradox, which means that it requires more than just adequate provision – it requires stable, significant money, space, time, and administrative aid, all offered without creative strings attached to the artists it supplies. This is the kind of support Why Not is in the business of making theatre to fund, and it is a major reason it continues to choose Shakespeare in its fight for a richer, less cis-, less white, less ableist, and more dynamic theatre ecology.Footnote ⁸² In Section 4, I’ll explore how large Shakespeare institutions can follow Why Not’s lead and do their part to provision artists like Emma Frankland – as a matter of mission and vision, not gift or charity.

4.1 Shakespeare as an Institution

As Reference HarvieJen Harvie (2013), Reference BalmeChristopher B. Balme (2017), Reference McKinnieMichael McKinnie (2021), and other scholars of the public sphere note, even at its most independent and intellectually progressive, the constellation of places, people, and ideas we call “the theatre” is always bound up in a web of institutions. These institutions include things like civic, regional, and national governments, universities, cultural granting agencies, and real estate markets, to name just a few. Theatre companies that own their buildings are especially embedded, both physically and philosophically, in the institutions that organize the spaces around them. They operate at the nexus of a wide range of stakeholders and their interests: their boards of directors, their audience subscription base, civic leaders and planners, donors and trusts, and government grant schemes. These institutional enmeshments all converge at market capitalism – the ultimate umbrella institution that prefers fiscal stability, moderate risk, and social and political status quos. This network of institutions holds the power to determine what moves toward systemic structural change a given theatre organization is willing, or even able, to undertake.

Within this landscape, theatres like the Globe, Ontario’s Stratford Festival, and the RSC in Stratford-upon-Avon face a double bind. Market capitalism aside, they are also enmeshed in the web of socially, culturally, and racially inflected feelings about who Shakespeare is for (who “owns” Shakespeare, as I put it in Section 1) – feelings that form the basis of Shakespeare’s status as a powerful economic mover. Bricks-and-mortar theatres rely heavily on their audience subscription bases for funding stability, and subscribers to legacy Shakespeare theatres trend affluent, older, and almost invariably white. They are there precisely because Shakespeare reflects back to them their own sense of self. Corporate donors – which can include banks, insurance companies, asset management firms, big tech, and more – feel the same pull as they use Shakespeare’s elite cultural capital to burnish their brands. But this pull, as David Sterling Brown and Sandra Young write, is by no means racially neutral because “the Shakespeare industry is implicated in the colonialist habits of thought that shaped early modern culture and the racist inheritance that has continued to privilege whiteness and perpetuate anti-Black racism from early modernity to the present” (Reference Brown and YoungBrown and Young 2021, 531). When we “love” Shakespeare, what do we love about him or his work? When we see ourselves in Shakespeare, what do we see? These questions always have multiple answers, of course – and some of those answers can be profoundly empowering, as they have been for the artists I profiled in earlier sections. Other answers, though, can be challenging to face. In Shakespeare’s own historical moment, what people loved about him, what they saw in him, was often their own desire to be white.

In his introduction to White People in Shakespeare, Arthur L. Little, Jr (2022) argues that Shakespeare’s plays and poems “actively engage in ‘white-people-making,’” while white people themselves “have used Shakespeare to define and bolster their white cultural racial identity, solidarity, and authority” since his works first appeared (Reference LittleLittle 2022, 1). The cult of whiteness was everywhere in Shakespeare’s England: from the court of Elizabeth I, to the religious fetish for “the soul’s whiteness,” to that concept’s extension into secular humanist doctrine as “a privileged few linked their whiteness to the ‘light’ of knowledge within” (Reference LittleLittle 2022, 5). Cheryl Harris writes that through the seventeenth century “Whiteness was the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free human beings” (quoted in Reference LittleLittle 2022, 5, my emphasis). Whiteness was currency, a prized possession, traded as cultural capital; it increased one’s social standing within a heterogeneous human landscape in a busy trading centre (London) at the birth of modern global capitalism. Early modern London’s theatre ecology was a highly accessible, comparatively mixed public space in which actors and authors could perform whiteness as a core attribute and project it onto their audiences, challenging the exclusive claims to whiteness of the court and its elites. The central question of who gets to claim to be white is thus foundational to the work of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, is wrapped up in Shakespeare’s marketability, and forms a central component of his elite status: “The theatre lit onstage English bodies, painted them [white], and discoursed about them to the point where those looking on could with confidence and pride imagine themselves to be ‘white people,’” Little, Jr notes (Reference LittleLittle 2022, 6). The early modern theatre sold “whiteness” as a value you needed and an attribute you wanted – just as modern Shakespeare theatres sell access to Shakespeare’s social and cultural capital, the joy and pride of feeling like you are someone whom Shakespeare is “for.”Footnote ⁸⁵

This set of tricky institutional circumstances creates a pernicious dilemma for theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe and the OSF. Before anything else, decolonization for them must mean reckoning with the fact that your very reason for existing – to sell “elite whiteness” – is at the heart of the problem you’re trying to solve. Ayanna Thompson puts the question well: “How do you create an equitable theater space [within a space] that was founded and structured in an inequitable way?” (Reference Thompson, Karim-Cooper and BrownThompson, Karim-Cooper, and Brown 2021). The challenge, as we’ll see, requires a wholesale rethinking of these theatres’ business models – a prospect that is both terrifying and yet potentially liberating. It requires bringing existing, Shakespeare-attached audiences along while you deliberately question their attachments in productive, meaningful ways. It requires making space for equity-owed artists and equity-owed designers and crew specialists, and then finding the money and time to resource and support them as leaders – as central, not add-ons. Most of all, it requires a firm commitment to building new audiences from those constituencies never before invited to see themselves as part of Shakespeare’s institutional universe.

4.2 “One Globe”

In November 2016, after just a few months in post, celebrated physical theatre director Emma Rice stepped down as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe in what was widely reported as a dispute over her use of amplified sound and electric lighting. Rice had a different take: that her working-class status and her outspokenness about finding Shakespeare “difficult” were both factors that broke her relationship with the theatre’s board of trustees (BBC Radio 2017; Reference BrownBrown 2017; Reference HemleyHemley 2017). Whatever the nuances of Rice’s departure, losing a prominent, populist director in such a public way generated emotional upheaval as well as a reputational blow for a theatre company that believes that it was founded on democratic, knowledge-seeking principles and consistently claims that its mandate is to make Shakespeare available “for all” (Reference Fowler, Solga, Awo-Mana, Canning and AnanFowler and Solga in press).

Shakespeare’s Globe was founded in 1997 as a place of contemporary academic research into historical performance conditions on London’s South Bank. It has one of the most robust education and research mandates of any theatre in the Anglophone world, yet it earns no public subsidy; its revenue comes from box office, education, tour bookings, bookshop and restaurant sales, as well as donations and legacy gifts. This means that its research and education capacity, let alone its artistic programming, is always financially dependent on a mix of commercial appeal, market-driven circumstances, and individual taste. At the beginning, the Globe focused famously on “original practices” (OP): the material constraints (including costume, lighting, sound, architecture, the weather, male actors in all roles) that shaped the production of Shakespeare’s plays in the original outdoor theatre. While the OP commitment was sidelined by the Globe’s second artistic director, Dominic Dromgoole, in favour of a commitment to new writing by contemporary artists, the Globe was conceived and created as a true-to-historical-detail, reconstructed Elizabethan playhouse, and thus “original” playing conditions will always form a core part of its education and research programs, its artistic approaches, and its fiscal bottom line. As Research Fellow Will Tosh told me, a major problem with Emma Rice’s innovations was the damage they risked doing to the “fabric of the building”: if the physical space of the Globe’s iconic theatre is altered permanently, the organization’s larger research mandate, its educational capacity, its artistic appeal, and therefore its financial viability may become endangered.Footnote ⁸⁶

Shakespeare “for all” has long been the Globe’s unofficial slogan, a clear echo of the idea of Shakespeare as a “universal” artist. At the same time, of course, Shakespeare’s Globe is clearly not devoted to all – the clue is in the name. The Globe’s “for all” is a prime example of what Dawn Jani Birley describes as the logic of “inclusion”: all are welcome, but on the terms set by the institution. This is not to say that the Globe intends exclusivity, but the premise behind “inclusion” – that opening the doors to all simply equals accessibility for all – signals a lack of deep, lived understanding of what it takes to walk through an open door if you’ve never been invited. A prime example of “for all” at the Globe was the Globe2Globe Festival, which took place in 2012–13 as part of London’s 2012 cultural Olympiad to showcase “one Globe” as a source of British pride in a multicultural, post-colonial landscape (see Solga 2013 and other essays in Reference Bennett and CarsonBennett and Carson 2013). Yvette Nolan recalls being told that her Julius Caesar adaptation Death of a Chief could not qualify for the festival because it was in English, even though Nolan’s company had chosen deliberately to work with Shakespeare’s original text to serve their own needs as Indigenous artists (see Section 1). The exclusion – in the name of inclusion! – of Death of a Chief neatly represents what Elliot Barnes-Worrell described in a Globe panel discussion on race in August 2020: Black, Brown, Indigenous, and other global majority artists have been required “to go through whiteness” to be able to work at the Globe (Reference Karim-Cooper, Taneja, Finn and Barnes-WorrellKarim-Cooper et al. 2020).

The work of dismantling this barrier – having to “go through” whiteness, normate ability, binary gender presentation, European expectations of “excellence,” and more to walk through the Globe’s open doors – has now begun in earnest. In mid 2017, Michelle Terry was named the Globe’s incoming artistic director. Young, female, a frequent Globe performer, and an unabashed Shakespeare fan, Terry was an optically ideal replacement for Rice, yet quickly she proved herself anything but the expected “safe pair of hands.”Footnote ⁸⁷ First, she declared publicly that Rice’s tenure had been “the best thing that has ever happened to the Globe” because it generated a “healthy form of protest” and opened space for much-needed “self reflection” (Reference Bowie-SellBowie-Sell 2017). Second, she explained that her role at the Globe would be to widen access, “diversify the decision-makers,” and use her own cultural capital as a celebrated Shakespearean actor to “put social justice on our stages” (Reference CurtisCurtis 2019). Terry, who trained as an actor rather than a director, opted to play the artistic director role as an actor-manager. She quickly created the Globe’s first artistic council, a group of advisors made up of both artists familiar to the Globe and those who had not before worked (or had not been invited to work) at the theatre. The council advises Terry directly and operates as “part of the governance structure but not beholden to [it]”;Footnote ⁸⁸ the council thus allows Terry to take unmediated and multi-perspectival artist feedback directly to the theatre’s chief executive officer (CEO) and board of trustees. It balances the relative lack of artistic experience at trustee level and interrupts the senior leadership team’s market-driven thinking with a nuanced understanding of the larger value of taking “artistic risks” with the public good in mind.

Terry’s early initiatives – including some very bold programming choices, such as Morgan Lloyd Malcolm’s Emilia, Marlowe’s Edward II, After Edward, which was created by and for the cast of Edward II, and Andoh and Linton’s Richard II (see below) – directly targeted the existing logic of “for all,” both backstage and onstage, but they did not occur in a vacuum. Long before Rice’s departure, Globe head of research Farah Karim-Cooper had been pressing questions of race, access, and social justice as the lone person of colour on the senior leadership team. Karim-Cooper’s capacity to challenge status quos at the Globe derives in part from her separate academic appointment at King’s College London, which grants her significant autonomy, and in part from her prominent and respected position as a scholar within the academic Shakespeare industry. (Here we should note parallels with Kesson’s work on Galatea, which includes significant material support, and Sorouja Moll’s on 1939. Scholars can and should be a major resource for artists in the process of decolonizing Shakespeare and his spaces.) In the mid 2010s, Karim-Cooper made the decision to pivot her academic research directly toward issues of race, bringing “the [Globe] institution along with her” (Reference Thompson, Karim-Cooper and BrownThompson, Karim-Cooper, and Brown 2021, 540). While this work was ongoing, Rice’s departure in late 2016 raised urgent questions about who exactly counts as “for all” under the Globe’s banner of broad inclusivity; conversations ensued inside the organization about intersectionality and large-scale diversification at all artistic and leadership levels. Finally, in April 2018, after an external governance review, the Globe undertook a restructuring that placed Terry, as incoming artistic director, in a horizontal leadership band including co-directors of education Karim-Cooper and Lucy Cuthbertson, co-directors of development Amy Cody and Charlotte Wren, finance director Joel Moseley, and director of audiences Becky Wooton (all as of January 2023). This reorientation challenges the vertical hierarchy model of most repertory theatres (artistic director; associate artistic directors; producers; and so on down the line), imbricating all directors in one another’s initiatives, and in theory aligns the organization’s overarching commitment to social justice. In practice, it has led to publicly visible leadership sharing between Terry and Karim-Cooper on the latter’s high-profile anti-racism initiatives. These include the now-annual Shakespeare and Race conference, the ongoing Anti-Racist Shakespeare webinar series that curates race-conscious conversations about each play in the theatre season, social media advocacy, leadership on the Globe’s anti-racism task force, and season 6 of the podcast Such Stuff (Shakespeare’s Globe 2020).

From outside, the Globe’s decolonial future looks rosy; however, the truth is often more complicated. Karim-Cooper noted in early 2021 that much of the Globe’s current capacity on anti-racism comes from pressure she exerts; as an outspoken and resourced leader of colour, she has both the space and the motivation to keep those issues top of mind. “If I left tomorrow, I’d be worried about how they’d proceed with this mission,” she notes (Reference Thompson, Karim-Cooper and BrownThompson, Karim-Cooper, and Brown 2021, 539), exposing how much equity work relies on the labour and commitment of individual stakeholders from equity-owed communities, taxing their resources and risking burnout. Karim-Cooper’s experience represents an example of the “benevolence” or “charity” model of change, in which “equity” is seen as something that organizations “give” to Black people, disabled people, or trans people, rather than as something that must be built and sustained by all hands for the organization’s and its communities’ own future good (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019). The risk that theatres like Shakespeare’s Globe will remain mired in a benevolence model, rather than undertaking further, expensive systemic change to support intersectional equity, has only increased as the Covid-19 pandemic and its aftermath left many theatres on the economic brink, with travel uncertain and expensive, and subscriber numbers dwindling (Reference PaulsonPaulson 2023).

What does “benevolent” equity look like in practice? In 2017 Michelle Terry commissioned Adjua Andoh to create Richard II for the Sam Wanamaker playhouse. Andoh and her co-director Lynette Linton conceived their Richard II as a response to Windrush, to Brexit, and to surging white supremacy in the UK. An all woman-of-colour production, from cast and creative team to backstage, photography, marketing, and more, its goal was to perform received history – English history, Shakespeare’s history – through the voices and experiences of the women “at the bottom of [the empire’s] heap” (Such Stuff podcast, Shakespeare’s Globe 2020). “[Andoh] walked into the [Wanamaker theatre], and she was like, ‘This is the space of empire. We’re going to change that,’” Karim-Cooper says, noting how much she and others on the leadership team learned from working with Andoh (Reference Thompson, Karim-Cooper and BrownThompson, Karim-Cooper, and Brown 2021, 551). Terry’s platforming of Andoh and Linton’s project was a major step forward for the Globe, but actually renovating the “space of empire” requires a lot more than goodwill and intention. It takes incredible work – work that ultimately fell to Linton and Andoh. The Globe’s back of house didn’t have a Rolodex of Black female artisans and crew at the ready and didn’t know where to look; Andoh and Linton plugged the gap and advocated for better. It was their authority as Black women theatre leaders and their being willing, like Karim-Cooper, to call the organization out (including publicly), to press hard for the support they needed, and to muster further resources that ultimately allowed the show to stand on its feet. One of Andoh’s conditions for the commission was that Richard II would be an invitation to “people who might not have come to the Globe before” (Reference JacksonJackson 2019). Her goal was audience development: to bring the women and others “at the bottom [of the empire’s] heap” into the emperor’s house, to let them see themselves and each other belonging there. She decided that the production needed to be filmed and widely disseminated; to make that happen, Andoh set up her own production company. The Globe has robust film resources in its in-house, fee-charging Globe Player, but it chose not to platform Richard II that way. The film was made independently by Andoh’s company and remains available free of charge – on YouTube.Footnote ⁸⁹

Michelle Terry provided Andoh and Linton with a high-profile and iconic space in which to tell Shakespeare’s history not as a universal story but as their story; in turn, the artists illuminated how much the Globe’s internal working structures continue to privilege certain bodies, identities, and experiences over others. They revealed what needs still to change at the Globe, and how much work that change will take. If a building isn’t intentionally built by or for equity-owed people, it probably can’t imagine what it will take for those people to feel comfortable and safe working there, to feel “at home” there, let alone to feel able to lead there (Nataki Garrett, in Reference DoyleDoyle 2020).Footnote ⁹⁰ Lasting institutional change in the Shakespeare industry can’t come from structures as usual; it will only emerge from a critical mass of diverse lived experiences inside organizations, coupled with a strong scaffold on which to hold, grow, and develop their talents and leadership skills. What “equity, really” needs is artistic leaders who are willing to use all of their resources to become “a ladder” for the talented but hugely under-resourced women of difference coming up behind them – and then to get out of their way (Oregon Art Beat 2021; Reference Thompson, Karim-Cooper and BrownThompson, Karim-Cooper, and Brown 2021, 552).

4.3 Becoming a Ladder

Nataki Garrett was raised in Oakland, California, by a family that showed her, every day, her worth, strength, and responsibility as a young Black woman. Her parents were “revolutionaries”; her grandmother was a ballerina who told her she would become a theatre director one day (Reference SmithSmith 2021). Her family was working class but educated; they lacked the economic resources of many of their middle-class peers, but they had knowledge, they had deep cultural roots in both Black American culture and the broader arts landscape, and they held within their community a powerful history of civil rights activism. “I come from a family of organizers – seeing them create spaces to enfranchise people got in my blood,” Garrett notes (Reference ChávezChávez 2020).

Like the other women I profile in this Element, Garrett had an early, formative experience with Shakespeare that made him her collaborator and ally, not a superior or a threat. In seventh grade, her class explored Romeo and Juliet; her teacher invited everyone to “respond artistically in whatever way we wanted.”Footnote ⁹² Garrett wrote a poem; others created dance. The experience stuck: “Any other Shakespeare I read after that I felt like it belonged to me, like it was mine. I was supposed to read it. I was supposed to understand it. I was supposed to be connected to the language. I wasn’t supposed to be intimidated by it.”Footnote ⁹³ Once she got to high school, the message changed. In English class she was steered away from playing Viola or Julius Caesar and toward Emilia or Juliet’s Nurse. She turned away from Shakespeare in scene study. She experienced similar pushback in grad school: during her master of fine arts (MFA) at CalArts, she chose to direct The Duchess of Malfi but was “curtail[ed]” by the program, which wanted her to work on an African American text to “capitalize” on her existing, perceived strengths as a young Black radical. Garrett wanted to work on a classic play precisely because she knew that “nobody is ever going to ask me to direct any classical text professionally in the world.” She received less money for her Malfi than previous student directors using the same space had been given, and she was denied her first choice of actors. Her teachers wanted her to fit into a box, to be the “other” they recognized; she refused.Footnote ⁹⁴

Garrett went on to become not just an award-winning director but a professor, an associate dean and associate artistic director at CalArts, and then a leader at the Denver Center. When the opportunity came up to apply for the artistic directorship at the OSF, she knew two things: that there was “no way” the OSF, one of the largest public theatres in the US, was going to hire her; and that she couldn’t “not apply.” The process was not an easy one; the OSF’s then board of directors tried at every turn to find reasons not to hire her, she says, including calling multiple former co-workers at the Denver Center, some more than once. “What I heard after the fact is that in the process of my applying and all of my interviews, there was really just no denying that I was the candidate,” she reflected to me. Once that fact was clear, the board worked overtime to find “a reason either to substantiate that I should be hired or for me not to be hired.”Footnote ⁹⁵

Garrett’s experience with the OSF board’s excessive diligence was just the beginning. Oregon is stereotyped as a super-woke place, but it was “founded with a racial exclusion clause in its constitution … unfair labor laws for migrants … and an active KKK presence well into the 20th if not the 21st century” (Reference QureshiQureshi 2022). Today, Ashland, the OSF’s rural southern Oregon home, is 90 per cent white and a place where the OSF’s BIPOC artists are routinely harassed by residents and the police (Reference QureshiQureshi 2022).Footnote ⁹⁶ During her tenure at the OSF (which ended in May 2023; see Section 5), Garrett travelled with a security detail and she and other OSF team members dealt with death threats; her changes at the festival, she recognized, generated significant outrage from those who felt that something “important to them … is being taken away” (Reference QureshiQureshi 2022). She told me that had she known what the experience of actually leading the OSF on the ground would be, she might not have taken the job; yet she came because the OSF was a company already on a path to change, and one she knew she had the skills to transform. Her sense of her responsibility to her community played a role, too: “How do I make sure that there’s a generation of people who come behind me who are like, ‘listen, I’m here because you were a ladder’?” (Oregon Art Beat 2021).

Like the Globe does today, the OSF has long identified as a “social justice theatre.”Footnote ⁹⁷ But how do you turn a “social justice theatre” into an anti-racist theatre? As Garrett describes it, the OSF had already “set itself on a path to shift culture” under former artistic director Bill Rauch (2007–19), becoming what she describes as a model for equity and diversity “across the theatrical landscape” (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019). However, “what [had] not shifted” was the attitude of “benevolence” I explored a little earlier: “‘We gave you a seat at the table, now don’t ruin it,’” she notes of those who hired her, “as though it was their table to give” (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019). To make the shift from “benevolence” to “equity, really,” Garrett developed a strategy of total systems change across every aspect of the 600-person strong OSF operation. Her strategy involved placing artists, their goals, and their needs at the heart of everything the OSF does; completely reorganizing the company’s administrative and fundraising systems to lessen the fear that “change” will result in bankruptcy; and changing the terms of audience engagement to “desegregate the other side of the footlights” (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019), widening spectatorship across a new digital platform and via other outreach tools. Garrett recalls learning, years into adulthood, that her Bay Area high school ran an informal annual trip to the OSF; she was never invited to go, her friends thinking she wouldn’t be interested (NEA 2021). Shifting the OSF’s centre meant, for Garrett, fundamentally addressing that ownership gap: the one that wrote her out of Shakespeare without her even knowing, the one that could not even imagine a body like hers in the audience.

Garrett’s artist-first approach derives from her practice as a director. “I actually walk into any rehearsal space with the understanding that the world of the play already lives inside of the actor,” she explains; especially when she’s working with artists who are used to being instrumentalized by directors, she “takes [tiny steps] to get an artist to a place where they feel like they can trust themselves and they can trust the emotion and they can trust … their own point of view.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Her job in the room, she tells me, is to “free the story forward”: when scaled up, this approach “create[s] a space for artists where they can respond to a multiplicity of impulses through whatever modality they want.” Like Emma Frankland, Garrett sees her role as holding space and mustering resources so that her artists can concentrate on making, not on chasing logistical details that should be a central, institutional responsibility. For example, theatre and virtual reality maker Shariffa Ali came to the OSF on a theatre residency, and then realized she wanted to make a film. Garrett moved money around to enable Ali’s modality shift, and the result was ASH LAND, a piece about Black female healing, joy, and embodiment that helped launch O!, the OSF’s new digital doorway. Garrett “gave her a residency and she created a film company out of it” (Reference SmithSmith 2021); the contrast with Andoh’s experience at the Globe is instructive. Garrett purposefully met Ali at “the intersection between what is important to you and what is important to us,” but then she asked a key question: “How do we bring those things together? How do we work together to create that space?” (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019).

Labour considerations lie at the heart of this artist-forward strategy; they also power the administrative changes Garrett made at the OSF. She leaned hard into fundraising as the best way she could resource the artists she wanted to uplift while bringing the company’s economic base with her. She arrived at the OSF an already strong fundraiser, and during the first six months of the Covid-19 pandemic she raised USD 6 million for the company and collaborated with other Oregon arts leaders to secure a further USD 8 million pandemic relief package (Reference DoyleDoyle 2020; Reference TaylorTaylor 2021). She flattened the OSF’s executive leadership structure to create a band including three associate directors (artistic programming; innovation and strategy; new work) alongside the existing director of production and a new director of inclusion, equity, diversity, and accessibility (IDEA); the leadership core also includes a director of audience experience and a director of development. As at the Globe, this horizontal structure creates tremendous opportunities for cross-pollination, but it also creates much more humane working conditions for all. “I needed a team in which I had no single point of failure and in which everybody could produce everybody else’s work,” Garrett explained to me.Footnote ⁹⁹ A team of equals ensures that the company community always has its members’ backs.

Garrett also expanded the long-held notion (since Libby Appel’s tenure as artistic director, 1995–2007) of the OSF as a “home” for its resident acting company, widening that concept so that “home” becomes known as a secure place from which artists can explore and grow within but also beyond Ashland. This home, in her words, is “not a club,” which “is a private space that excludes people,” but rather a place where “a lot of people can be connected” (Reference DoyleDoyle 2020). The OSF as “home” stretches the length of the coast from Seattle to San Francisco; Garrett worked with regional sister companies to develop opportunities for company members, allowing them to work throughout the year while also remaining based at the OSF. Her company-as-home model mirrors the strength she draws from fellow members of what she calls the “movement” currently underway to shift American theatre leadership at the topmost levels; as one of several high-profile artistic directors of colour newly in role circa 2021 (including Hana Sharif, Jacob Padrón, Eric Ting, and prominent industry leaders like Carmen Morgan at artsEquity, an OSF producing partner), Garrett is quick to point out that she is only one member of a growing, internally sustaining, activist BIPOC theatre community – a BIPOC theatre activist in the heart of Shakespeare country.

Garrett’s artist-centred approach also centres access and engagement on the other side of the footlights; for her, shifting the OSF’s culture also meant moving away from the traditional subscription model and the “exclusivized experience” it sells – that felt sense that this show “belongs to me,” where “me” is a specific group of middle-class white folks (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019). The pull of audience ownership at the OSF, as at similar institutions, drives season selection but also para-theatrical programming, as well as donor and grant support. The OSF has long held grants to diversify its audiences, but the logic behind those moves has historically been something Garrett describes as “additive”: “The [grant application] does not say what we’re doing is creating a space in which there’s equality at the centre. We said we’re centring this group of people [existing subscribers] and then these people [BIPOC or equity-owed spectators] can be additive.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Garrett’s most significant innovation at the OSF was spearheading the development of the company’s digital platform, O!, which aims to make the OSF’s audience base global as well as to widen access for local audience members who may experience mobility or financial constraints. Since O! received a boost from the Covid-19 pandemic’s turn toward digital theatre, it has streamed born digital content such as ASH LAND (2020), The Digital Sovereignty Project (2021), and The Cymbeline Project (2022–3) as well as select mainstage productions; it includes a mix of paid content, free streaming, and trailers for live work on stage. As of early 2021, O! was reaching 58 countries, with 10,000 views a month.

All the work that the OSF did under Garrett’s tenure was guided by the principles and demands of We See You, White American Theatre (n.d.); Garrett notes that it took the organization the better part of her first year in role to go through the collective’s documents, identify what work had already been done, and assess what work remained. During that time, she experienced “a lot of avoidance” driven by the fear of costs from members of OSF’s administration. Her response was blunt: “What can you afford not to do?” Diversity work is not charity; it is “a way of allowing our theaters to really thrive and meet our mandates, our missions,” she explains (NEA 2021). And just as the shift from “benevolence” to “equity, really” is a long game, Garrett sees herself as one leader in a long line of future leaders at the OSF, one member of a growing movement to shift theatre’s institutional centres. “It’s not just about me. I’m the figurehead, you know? I’m the front person for the band,” she told me in early 2022. “I think about the potential for shifting white supremacy culture at my organization as a shifting mantel. I’m going to do my part, and somebody’s going to do their part, and then behind them is somebody else” so that the OSF will eventually become a “historically white” rather than a “predominantly white” institution (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019).

Tom Cornford (2023) explains that directors operate “at the intersections of art and finance, organisation and creativity” (43): “a director’s fundamental responsibility is to shape the social relations of theatre production” (44). The power to shape a theatre’s culture and its relations of making is often bestowed on those who promise to make the least dramatic changes when change is warranted; diversification is wonderful, in theory. Hana Sharif notes that BIPOC leaders are frequently hired “with the expectation that we will revolutionize the financial structures of the theatre, that we will create new relevancy for our institutions, that we will solve systemic problems … and that we will do it without stepping fundamentally outside the box that our predecessors created” (Reference Morgan, Garrett, Padrón, Sharif and TingMorgan et al. 2019). The difference between a “social justice theatre” and an anti-racist, equity-focused theatre can perhaps be marked by the difference between hiring someone familiar-feeling, with the hope that they move the dial just a little bit, and hiring someone unfamiliar, with a genuine willingness to be surprised at what movement is truly possible.