Bill Rauch, Artistic Director
Bill Rauch
Bill Rauch is the Artistic Director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Audio Excerpt
We live in a scary world, Bill Rauch says. But so did Shakespeare, Rauch points out, and he was able to create great work in the midst of that pain. Rauch talks about he hopes to do the same.
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Interview Excerpts
ON TIME SETTINGS
BILL RAUCH: When you are directing a Shakespeare play, there are really up to four different time periods that you can deal with—right? There’s the historical setting of the play, there’s the era in which Shakespeare wrote and—in which it was first produced, there is whatever era that the director has chosen to set the play in, and there’s the time period that the audience is sitting in and watching the play from.
So depending on the choices that are made, there can be up to four different time periods at play. And I—I just think that it is an endlessly fascinating and potentially controversial topic, is—is settings for Shakespeare plays; time settings.
The director, Mary Zimmerman, one of my colleagues was telling me that she always says, “I’ll tell you what period we’re going to do it in. We’re going to do it in the period of delightful.” Which I love, you know, that—that the best way to interpret a Shakespeare play is to create your own—your own period as opposed to saying, “We’re setting it in 1923 in this particular place.”
But I think there are just so many ways you can approach time and you know, Shakespeare’s play are so filled with anachronisms and they’re such already a complex interplay between Elizabethan England and whatever time and place the story purportedly takes place in, you know, that the plays are just full of those contradictions. And then you add in our 21st century perspective and then any ideas that the directors and the designers have about the settings, and it’s—it’s really rich. It’s a rich stew of possibilities.
ON SHAKESPEARE AND COLLABORATION
BILL RAUCH: Shakespeare was not an isolated, lone genius writing by himself. Shakespeare was a working theater artist, working in collaboration with a company. He was writing roles for specific actors. Those actors were interpreting his words, were helping him find what did and didn’t work, or, you know, improvising new ideas that got thrown into the work.
And really, when you think about it, all the great plays that have come down to us, certainly in the Western canon, were created in the context of resident acting companies. So the primary reason that I’m at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival is the fact that there is a resident company of actors that is—is at the heart of our work. And I believe that great work comes out of company settings.
In our country we have moved toward a more economically, feasible model of just jobbing in actors based on the needs of the play, but I think artistically it’s a disastrous model, to have gotten away from resident companies of actors. I think it’s not good for the work in the long haul.
