Lue Morgan Douthit, Dramaturg

Lue Morgan Douthit is the Director of Literary Development and Dramaturgy at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Interview Excerpts

ON THE NINETEENTH CENTURY POPULARITY OF SHAKESPEARE

LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT: You know, I don’t think Mark Twain writes about – in Huckleberry Finn I don’t think Mark Twain says – brings the king – brings those two guys onto that raft and they’re reciting Shakespeare, if everybody in his audience didn’t know that it was Shakespeare.  What fun – who would he be making fun of if I didn’t get the joke?

I think it must have been very popular in the Eighteenth Century.  And they’re showing a lot of evidence that west of the Mississippi, as we expanded, everybody took two books: The Bible and The Complete Works of Shakespeare.  So there’s already kind of this industry and the assumption that this was sort of our cultural make-up, to have this — these two volumes with us.  And there are lots of stories — in the mining camps, you know, and every kind of camp of digging up iron ore, or whatever, in the west states.  I mean, there were traveling troupes of actors constantly.  And they weren’t just the people out to – certainly there was money to be made, but these were stars that went through.  So you had your – whatever the star of the Nineteenth Century – the equivalent to what we think of Hollywood today – they were going into those camps.  And they were performing Shakespeare.

ON FILLING IN THE BLANKS

LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT: And I’ll tell you what the brilliant thing is.  I don’t know if it was conscious, or not.  I think there’s a little Mozart in him.  I think it just was.  But there’s a gap in there that he asks us to fill in.  And often when we see plays now, or go to the movies, which is our contemporary version of the popular culture of Shakespeare plays, they give us all the answers.  There’s no need for us to be there.  Except they want our six, eight, ten dollars.

But Shakespeare requires that you fill in the blanks for yourself.  And it’s an interesting piece that I think sometimes we forget in contemporary plays – that the audience is there as part of the equation.  And so I don’t know that it’s anything that he consciously understood – I mean consciously knew – but he unconsciously understood.  That that was the dramatic event.

So, not letting us see Leontes moaning for eighteen years – and you know, in film we cut back to, “Here he is, he’s crying about his mistakes again,” you know, then jump cut back to Bohemia, “No, no, let’s go back.  There he is again.  He’s still moaning about what a dumb thing he had done.”  Or whatever.

That’s not what he’s interested in, I don’t think.  He’s interested in us, maybe, making those leaps for ourselves of what have we done.  And giving us the time for our own interpretation.  And that to me is the beauty of that – of his dramatic gesture, that he’s inviting us to have our own experience about it.

ON THE DIFFICULTY OF SHAKESPEARE

LUE MORGAN DOUTHIT: They’re difficult, these plays.  They are difficult.  I mean, you can have a bunch of actors in a room who, like I said before, have been in – it’s interesting the first day of rehearsal, we’re all in a big group, we’re going to read the play.  The director will often say, “Well, how many of you have been in this play before?”  Half the raise – you know, some people say they’ve done it four times and have been every — now I finally get to be the old guy, or whatever.  And there still are moments when we don’t know what he’s talking about.  They’re difficult.  They require a lot of work.

And what’s interesting to me, Steve, is that working on these Shakespeare plays, we say he’s right.  No matter what it is; no matter how complicated, how convoluted.  No matter how stupid some of these things are – you know, in our minds, that’s like, “That’s stupid . . .” – we say we’re not smart enough to figure it out yet.  But we will.  And that is not the privilege we give to new plays.  We say, “Oh, my God, the playwright’s wrong.  Let’s just cut that, or let’s just tell them we’ve got a better way to say it.  Because we know the characters better than they do.”  So, what has helped me bring to the work is giving the privilege to the playwright to say, “You’re right.  Until we all agree it needs to be changed,” which is what we give to Shakespeare.