Notes from the Directors
The SUNY Sullivan theater program is a Minority Majority program, meaning that there are more people of color in our program than there are European-American/Caucasians. It is important to us to produce all the types of theater that our students may encounter and receive work either on or off stage. Shakespeare is the most produced playwright in the world, and as some college pivot to producing modern-language translations of Shakespeare, we will still be producing Shakespeare in his 400+-year-old iambic pentameter and prose. We do this because the work is challenging and we do not want to deny any future work from our students, even if the work may feel staid and old to them.
In Justin Emeka's essay "Seeing Shakespeare Through Brown Eyes" in the book BLACK ACTING METHODS, he discusses that the language in Shakespeare is the same language in the King James Bible, and is not as far removed from our students' zeitgeist as we might assume. He offers up that we can provide a way into the work by asking the cast and crew how they want to interpret the production, utilizing the langauge as a starting point.
It is daunting in our fast-paced theater world to have a concept for a production that must wait for the cast/crew's input, but we did this in order to answer the clarion call that Justin Emeka sent out because Shakespeare can be accessible to our emerging artists, but we might not know the best way to make it accessible to them.
We offered up the movie SHREK as a jumping off point. We said, "If there is a song, or a moment where you want to make the text and context more modern to help the scene, let us know." Anachronisms that help the audience enjoy it are okay. The songs, and ad libs began to abound and create a quilt that connected our students and Shakespeare's play. We see this as a quilt that will create a bridge for our students to become emerging artists that have Shakespeare as a part of their life and bag of tricks.
So...please enjoy seeing TWELFTH NIGHT throught the eyes of our SUNY Sullivan community, largely comprised of black and brown people and people from generational poverty. This community can understand these characters and they can perform them; they just need the space and time to learn the techniques.
