By Sarah Garic
Why do we go back to Shakespeare? Time may pass, whole centuries even, and yet these plays continue to show that we humans are working through the same things… over and over again. So then, what changes? I like to think that you can never listen to a song and hear it exactly the same as you did before. Maybe there’s something new that sparked – a chord, a thought, a color… because the day, time, setting, potentially you were different. And in this particularly interesting moment in history, I wonder… what will resonate with the audience – with you! – in a play in which a king exerts violent power over his family, his subjects, at the harm of those he holds most dear, potentially even himself?
Tracy Young first lifted The Winter’s Tale into modern verse through Play On Shakespeare, a non-profit company promoting and creating contemporary modern translations of Shakespeare’s plays. For Tracy, a director and playwright with a deep portfolio spanning new plays to translations and adaptations, accessibility is a driving force: “Shakespeare wrote for everybody to be able to enjoy the plays; he was not an elitist.”
Now, you may be thinking, “I don’t know if I buy that; Shakespeare isn’t for me.” And you’re probably not alone in that sentiment. My mom once told me she would have to take a class before she could understand Shakespeare’s plays. I feel you mom! I’ve taken many Shakespeare classes, acted in his plays, and feel like I’m barely scratching the surface.
Tracy hears us, she hears my mom, and all those who may think that Shakespeare stands on a lofty pedestal unreachable for us mere mortals. That is exactly why she is doing this work. Her goal is to render this play as something that can and should engage everyone. So the question is, what might spark with you now in Tracy Young and Lisa Wolpe’s adapted The Winter’s Tale, playing at the Skylight Theatre Company? And what will you hear in 5, 10, 15 years down the road if you chance across this play again? Here’s hoping that the tyrannical king will resonate a bit less.
And on that note, Tracy and I dove right into the juicy stuff.
Sarah Garic: What is resonating now, in the rehearsal room, with all that is happening in the U.S., in the world; metaphysically, spiritually…?
Tracy Young: The original theme is about a man who gives in to false thinking. He suspects his wife and best friend of having an affair… Hmm we’ve definitely seen that storyline before! Horrible consequences role out as a result of conspiratorial, paranoid, and destructive thought processes. This really resonates with the rampant online ecosphere of disinformation, conspiracy-minded thinking and weaponized information that we are living through right now. And this play is asking, what are the consequences of weaponized information? Time will reveal the long-term harms, but certainly the characters’ and people’s ideologies are being shaped by things that may not be true.
Sarah: Is there a particular character whose story was emphasized in this adaptation?
Tracy: We emphasized the role of Perdita, which means little lost one. She is the daughter of King Leontes and Queen Hermione. Royalty is her curse, and she is sent away and uprooted from who she is, her home, her original place in the world. She grows up in these other places and with other people.
In our adaptation, the actor who plays that role is trans and the character is trans. We focus on the theme of trans-ness and trans-identity, ensuring that there is textual support. In fact, a lot of Shakespeare’s plays integrate trans-ness.
This culture currently has heightened weaponization of language against trans-culture and trans-identity. The character’s marginalization has resonance with her trans-ness as well.
I find that no matter who we are or how we identify, we can recognize ourselves and what it means to be alive and navigate ourselves and the world with these plays as a support. This is why I find Shakespeare’s plays incredibly adaptable to the exploration of modern themes and language.
Sarah: I want to hop back to the idea of being displaced from community. How do you address the question of whether we have agency in choosing who is our community and where is our home? Is Perdita – and the broader “we” – forever stuck with who our father is, etc.?
Tracy: That is really interesting because in the original text, the characters all reunite after a 16-year flash forward. Time has been a factor, and the king is sort of welcomed back into the community. There is a controversial ending in which they are all reunited and there is forgiveness and even happiness maybe.
In the adaptation, we’ve changed some of the way that the last moments play out. We, and particularly the character of Hermione, wrestle with the question, Can you embrace your husband after experiencing such trauma? Should you? In the original, Hermione embraces Leontes.
Sarah: She embraces the monster. I am really curious by how we deal with monsters. If Hermione embraces Leontes in the original, is it possible that Leontes becomes less scary to her?
Tracy: A lot of times when Leontes is portrayed, he is the villain until he’s not. Somehow the monster is able to find humanity at the end of the play; it lets people off the hook for complicity with the own monsters that we may carry.
In this adaptation, I try to humanize Leontes from the beginning. Leontes has a lot of internalized trauma. The play wants to relate to all the characters in some way; no one is excluded. Shakespeare creates worlds where there are complexity and nuance because humans are so complicated and contradictory.
In the journey that Leontes takes, you see how hideous and destructive he is, and yet, you see and track what were the things that contributed to that … what kind of things set the stage? And we explore that without forcing forgiveness or diminishing the culpability of what the person has done.
In this adaptation, we are actively reckoning with the complexity of doing harm in all the different ways.
Sarah: Going to need to soak that one in… Switching gears here, what does a modern translation and then adaptation entail?
Tracy: For a modern translation, the first directive is do no harm. When you think it needs to change, the goal is to really interrogate why it needs to change before you change it
Then, the overarching goal is to make the writing more accessible, which of course is going to be subjective. I used my own sensibility and experience being a theatre-maker for many, many years.
For example, with the syntax: often we don’t speak that way anymore; we use a different vocabulary, a different way of forming phrases. I’m looking to unravel the syntax knot while keeping the iambic pentameter structure. With a modern translation, we can stay in time with the play rather than struggling with the language being too antiquated.
There are also events of the past that the audience would have recognized back then, but that are not recognizable now. In some cases, there is a modern equivalent that speaks in a similar way. My mission is to try and find a modern-day analog while keeping the verse intact.
Sarah: Whew, that’s not for the faint of heart!
Tracy: Oh! And the comedy! One of the main challenges is the comedy; comedy needs to be situated in the present-day for us to understand it. Jokes have their own timing and construction of syntax; they also require content accessibility. Ever been in a theatre when some people laugh, but most don’t get it?
Sarah: Yup, that’s been me… once, twice, thrice?
Tracy: In this play, there are a bunch of moments that are comedic bits. I try to deal with the jokes by asking, what kind of a joke is it? And then you try to re-write it in a way that people will recognize!
“The Winter’s Tale” by William Shakespeare, in modern verse translation by Tracy Young, adapted by Lisa Volpe and Tracy Young and directed by Tracy Young, produced by Gary Grossman and Armando Huipe for Skylight Theatre Company in Los Feliz, runs through June 14th. For tickets call (213) 761-7061 or www.skylighttheatre.org
