Barry Kraft, Actor

Barry Kraft has acted and served as a dramaturg at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as well as at other theatres across the country.

Audio Excerpt

Barry Kraft and Kevin Lynch read from Julius Caesar

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Interview Excerpts

ON KEEPING SHAKESPEARE FULL

BARRY KRAFT: One of the things about people like Gielgud and Olivier is they had come from a long tradition of theater acting, before they went into the movies, and a lot of those theaters were really big. And if you’re going to get something across in a big theater, it’s different than having a microphone right in your face when you do this sort of thing.

So they brought over maybe things that weren’t so helpful when we started demanding more realism—what we call naturalism or realism—in—in films.

Okay. All right. Shakespeare didn’t invent his plots. Maybe two, maximum three. Right? So he took stories that were tried and true and worked for people and he put them into the medium of blank verse; poetry, if you will—right? For the most part. That was because his society loved that.

Now, we might say, well, now in the 21^st century, the stories are great, and a lot of the way he said it was great, but he said it at great length. You don’t have to talk about the red bull in four lines; we can all get the idea, it’s just a red bull—right? So why don’t we just really trim him? Which is usually done.

You know, when people get tired or—or lost, so we will get the best parts, the Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations parts of Shakespeare that have lasted, and we will do these plays and put a lot of modern stuff in. We’ll have like TVs on the set so people don’t feel that, you know, odd about what they’re listening to. And the stories are going to, like, work like gangbusters, even before Shakespeare got a hold of them. And maybe that’s the way we can make Shakespeare palatable to modern sensibility.

Now, I’ve been thinking with Shakespeare like opera. You know, for the most part people don’t understand what they’re hearing in opera because they read the—but they read the synopsis beforehand, like they do with—with Shakespeare—right? And I have a feeling that a lot of this blah-blah-blah-blah, blah-blah, blah-blah-blah-blah goes by like Holden Caulfield would say: you know, really a hell of a handsome guy and a great voice and everything but something isn’t stirring within us.

So we try to say cut the blah-blah-blah-blah out. Have some good close ups and throw some stuff in that weren’t even in the plays. Because I mean, for God’s sake, Shakespeare did that to his stories. He changed them like crazy. So then we have Shakespeare for our time.

Now, when you were talking about what writing is, I just thought of this great short story I read in The New Yorker recently, called Complicity, by Julian Barnes. And he—he doesn’t just say the red bull is a red bull; he goes off on tangents and he is, for me, a delight to read. I mean, that’s my taste. And I realize that my taste isn’t the normal taste.

I like my Shakespeare full; I don’t like directorial—what’s the word? Imposition? Maybe that’s too strong of a word—to make it reflect our times. I mean, well, for God’s sake, it has to reflect our times because we think he is saying something eternal. Except for the sexist and the racist and the dirty jokes—right? But there is something basically eternal that we think he’s the best. Give us—give us what Shakespeare said. It’s going to make us better, or bigger, human beings.

ON SHAKESPEARE THEN AND NOW

BARRY KRAFT: It was an aural society. And—I mean, that’s not to say that they were just doing stage—you know, readings. They would dress beautifully. You know, they would—clothes that weren’t their own. But often they would buy it from servants, who were given master’s clothes, after the master had died. And they—so when they walked out on stage, costumes were a huge, huge thing. But they—but the costumes were to enhance the actor who was walking there.

But there weren’t the special effects. Like you say, directors’ theater is really I think today not so much director but designers’ theater. So you have—you—you have things that Shakespeare didn’t have to worry about: lighting, sunlight—right. But now you can do a thousand things with artificial light.

A cast of thousands, how are you going to have them—in a movie or a big cast? He had like fifteen actors. Eleven to fifteen actors, doubling and tripling in roles, so you didn’t have that.

And you don’t have, like, all these wonderful props that we have today, you know, just like dazzling the eye. It’s the actor in this gorgeous costume in a blank stage under sunlight.

So, there were no people getting money for directors back then. There were no directors. I mean, Shakespeare undoubtedly told his company, you know, how to interpret things, but it—it isn’t the production that it is today.

Because it’s like opera, again. You go to see something—see an amazing set, you know, and—or an amazing way of looking at this new opera. So it’s like, “That’s how they’re doing it.” But the “it” to me is the most important thing. Not how they’re doing it, the “it” comes across.