Interesting column by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times today about the fact that New York has much less Shakespeare going on every season than Washington, D.C. — or, I might add, Ashland, Oregon, or Cedar City, Utah.
Isherwood’s idea is that the Royal Shakespeare Company, which is erecting a huge theater inside the Park Avenue Armory for six weeks of five Shakespeare plays there in the summer of 2011 — should stay there on a permanent basis. Without the RSC, he says, New York often doesn’t see five Shakespeare plays during an entire year. Some of the rest of us in the boondocks, in fact, are doing better Shakespeare-wise than the country’s so-called cultural capital.
Which makes me remember back to when Orlando Shakespeare Theater was just a gleam in the eyes of Stuart Omans and Sara Daspin and there was no Shakespeare here except an occasional production at Rollins or, even more rarely, at UCF.
Twenty-plus years later, we’ve seen most of the Shakespeare canon here (and will add to it beginning this week with All’s Well That Ends Well). And I, for one, feel that my life has been enriched.
Isherwood’s idea is pretty pie-in-the-sky. But if New Yorkers are lucky (and put up a whole lot of money), maybe they”ll get what some of the rest of us have already.
