Next chapter podcasts. Ready to launch your business? Get started with the commerce platform made for entrepreneurs. Shopify is specially designed to help you start, run, and grow your business with easy, customizable themes that let you build your brand. Marketing tools that get your products out there. Integrated shipping solutions. Sign up for your $1 a month trial at shopify.com. Hi, my name is Michael Goodfriend, and I'm the executive producer of the Play On Podcasts.
I have two exceptional guests with me here today. Amy Freed is the author of True, the monster builder, restoration comedy. The Beard of Avon, Freedomland, Safe in Hell, The Psychic Life of Savages, you, Nero, and other plays. She's the recipient of the Charles MacArthur Playwriting Award. in DC. She's the New York Arts Club Joseph Kesserling Award winner. She's a several-time winner of the LA Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize finalist.
Her work has been produced at South Coast Repertory, at the New York Theatre Workshop, Seattle Rep, American Conservatory Theatre, Yale Rep, California Shakespeare Theatre, Berkeley Rep, The Good Men, Playwrights Horizons, Woolly Mammoth, Arena Stage, and other theaters. I didn't know that there were more than those. She has been a playwriting resident at South Coast Rep, Arena Stage, and The Old Globe, and is currently artist-in-residence at Stanford University.
Art Menke has had a long collaboration with Amy Fried and has directed the premieres of her Shrew and The Monster Builder. His work has been at South Coast Rep, Pasadena Playhouse, Denver Center Theater Company, Milwaukee Rep, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, Mark Taper Forum, American Conservatory Theater, Seattle Rep, Chicago, lots and lots and lots.
and lots of places. He's also the co-founding artistic director of A Noise Within, and he oversaw more than 50 productions during the first 10 seasons of that company from 1991 to 2001. and he is a frequent guest at conservatories throughout the country. He is the author of a stage adaptation of D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, written with Douglas Langworthy, and a new comedy, Art Attack.
He is a five-time winner of the Los Angeles Drama Critics Circle Award, and he has an MFA from the American Conservatory Theater. He teaches at the Stella Adler Art of Acting Studio in Los Angeles. And he and Amy are both here with me today to talk about the PlayOn podcast series Shrew. Art. amy welcome to the bonus content interview for that series thank you thank you okay uh how did shrew come into being amy
Tell us the story. Well, oh, in addition to all that glorious introductory material, I don't remember if we said that Art and I were classmates at ACT. No. Our collaboration and part of being the same cohort in that remarkable school and that remarkable time has also made our working and artistic relationship extremely gratifying. personal and artistic levels um i got interested i've been interested in shakespeare for a long time i was most interested in it as an actor i mean i really
thrived in my connection with classical work. I loved it on a performance level and I thrilled to it on an aesthetic level. And I ended up doing a fair amount of directing of those projects. uh after i finished my mfa i went back and i directed students in shakespeare's plays and i got to know the text and be quite curious from a directorial and a more outside point of view and how those plays worked and what the aesthetic register of them meant and how to bring them to life.
And I was fascinated by some of the bad plays that are the most loved plays. And it's not to be argued that Taming of the Shrew, from all of its wonderful offensiveness... these days is still, and still with young people, one of the plays that has the greatest appeal. And I wondered about that. And I think it's because that play holds in it some real truth that has not gone out of fashion and people have not yet disproved.
which is that there's a quality in some love relationships that have to do with when two impossible people find each other and live happily ever after. Not in spite of, but because of what makes them impossible. And it's still funny. And it's still a trope in romantic comedy. So the play is both problematic, as they say, and beloved. And when David...
hits approached with the invitation to translate a Shakespeare play, I thought, well, I can't make that one worse. I could only make it better. And I was interested in it. I wanted it to live without pain. Without the pain of what's awful about it, which we can talk about later. So you were tasked with translating Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. And did that give rise to shrew exclamation point?
Well, no, Shrew had risen in my conception, and The Taming of the Shrew became the vehicle where I could go, I could really get to know the play. Because the translation mandate was not a rewrite, is not a rewrite. It was very... clear in its instruction that it was to make the play as Shakespeare wrote it, you know, comprehensible, not to inflict one's own agenda or tastes or disputes with Shakespeare into that translation.
it was to liberate the language for a contemporary audience to hear it in real time without feeling like they had to have a degree you know right um to understand it but i i had a thought about Shrew's need for an adaptation. And when David and Louis presented the opportunity to work on the translation, I thought, how fantastic. I will really enter the world of this and understand, you know, what's working about it, what's...
difficult about it and have a really informed platform to do my own re-entry into that material for an adaptation. That's what happened. Art, this is not your first time working on Taming of the Shrew or Shrew, correct? Correct. I have a very long history with this play as I... said not too long ago to someone, it feels like the play has followed me through my life.
It was the first Shakespeare play that I saw performed when I was young and impressionable in my early teens by the Free Street Theater in Chicago. They, you know, pulled a... semi-truck up to a park, lap down the side, created a stage, and off they went. And I had no idea most of what they were saying, but I got it on some...
non-linguistic level, and I immediately fell in love with Shakespeare and thought, this is what I want to work on for the rest of my life. I then went on to act in it, to direct it, and most... You know, then working with Amy on both her translation and the premiere of Shrew! And I was just looking through some papers recently, and I completely forgot this. The first episode of television that I ever directed, the title of the episode was If the Shrew Fits.
And I thought, like, how is it possible that this play is just like, you know, infiltrated my life? And I continue to love it and never get tired of it. What is it that you love about it? Well, I think it's everything that Amy said, which is that it's, you know, it is not an easy relationship. It's a complex relationship. The idea that these two human beings who are always the smartest people in the room, no matter what that room is.
And they are magnetic and sexy and dynamic and volatile and everything that human beings can be. And yet there's something about them that they complete each other. And the challenge always is, how do you find a context wherein that can be most fully realized? And in this case, Amy has found not only a context, but has created a world and a framing device that gives the...
play new life and new agency in a way that is, I think, incredibly satisfying. Amy, do you like the play The Taming of the Shrew? Are you fond of it? As the Shakespeare version, that is. I like Petruchio's speech about the adder and the eel. Come, my Kate. we will unto your fathers even in these honest mean habiliments our purses shall be proud our garments poor
For tis the mind that makes the body rich, and as the sun breaks through the darkest clouds, so honour peereth through the meanest garment. What, is the jay more precious than the lark, because his feathers are more beautiful?
or is the adder better than the eel because his painted skin contents the eye oh no good kate neither art thou the worse for this poorly furnished and plain array i like the comic construction of a woman of such wild force and unpleasantness being the lead and the romantic lead. I find the writing fairly primitive. I think the comedy is not worn well. I'm speaking about the withholding of sausage meat in this. I think a lot of it. Like literally starving. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, but what I do.
cherish about it is it took a very old trope that was a fairground play about wife beating that was done by puppets and he Shakespeare saw a human truth in that I mean, if you think of the distance between Punch and Judy, where all the laughs in the crowd came from like hitting that puppet over the head with a pig's bladder or whatever. And then you look at Taming of the Shrew.
where this is about people finding two weirdos falling in love. The leap that Shakespeare made with that old material is quantum. And so he was after something. And the truth he was after, I don't think was realized, but the truth was revolutionary of what he was after. So The Taming of the Shrew, the play, was revolutionary for its time and is now... antiquated, out of date. And is that accurate to say? Not entirely antiquated, not around my house anyway.
I think that people respond to the truth of the chaotic force of relationship. It's not a rom-com like today, which is all bullshit basically. You know, the human experience, the love experience between people that stick together in life is rocky and it's raw. And I don't think, again, maybe I reveal too much, but much of it would not stand up to public scrutiny.
And yet people continue to love and support. So I think I don't think it's antiquated. I think it's unfashionable for sure in those areas. I think comedy is always antiquated in about 10 years. So, yeah, I think the comedy has worn out its possibilities as written, and so has the rhetoric of the last speech, which has been tormenting.
female actors for a long time. You know, there's just no way to make that feel good anymore. Right. The original, yeah. So I want to just do a little compare and contrast here. that we're going to listen to the last speech as you translated it in The Taming of the Shrew, Shakespeare's version. Thy husband is thy lord, thy life.
thy keeper thy head thy sovereign one who cares for thee and for thy life's maintaining commits his body to painful labor both by sea and land to watch the night and storms the day and cold whilst thou liest warm at home secure and safe and craves no other tribute at thy hands but love fair looks and true obedience. Too little payment for so great a debt. That duty which the subject owes her prince, even such a woman owes her husband.
And when she is bulky, peevish, sullen, sour, and not obedient to his honest will, what is she but a foul-contending rebel and graceless traitor to her loving lord? I am ashamed to find our minds so simple to offer war where we should kneel for peace or seek for rule, supremacy, and sway when we are bound to serve. Love and obey. Why are our bodies soft and weak and smooth?
unfit for toil and trouble in the world, but that our gentler natures and our hearts should form the whole with our external parts. Come! Come, you pushing and unable worms! My mind hath been as proud as one of yours, my heart as hot and short, my reasons more to bandy word for word and frown for frown. But now I see our lances are but straws. Our strength as weak, our weakness past compare. So we demanding most, which least we are.
Strength is in surrender. It is of love the root. So place your hand below your husband's foot. as token of our duty, if he please. My hand is ready. May it do him ease. And now we'll hear the version that you did in Shrew. What if she says this instead? Just before, it goes, Shall I tell you the true duty and meaning of marriage? And Petruchio says... If it please you, Kate.
a right that then began in force hath come to its conclusion in our day now In the private chambers of our hearts we find our real counterparts, whom only we can recognize by seeing not with others' eyes, but with our own. And join in true mind's marriage, where every shrew, which is me, and which is you, must... Melt in the heat and warmth of love. Burning red, then burning white. A steady flame through all our stormy days. And...
So praise the Lord and swallow hard your pride. Remember, we were taken from each other's side and tender to your other all your care. whom all your fowl doth know, yet finds you fair. Husband, have you ought to say? Wives, shall we wager that our husbands will come and kiss us? Amy... Was that speech the sort of the entry point for you with Shrew wanting to do the play a different way or do a complete adaptation, a change?
It's certainly working on, I worked on two plays for the translation project and in both, and the two plays I chose were the ones that I personally felt were the ones that were going to need an active intervention to continue to be produced. I felt both of those plays had areas that could not be handled by direction.
that could not be reinterpreted in a way that we could live with. What was the other play? There's Taming of the Shrew and then... Titus Andronicus, which I felt the inherent racism of Aaron's text, the self-inflicted racial tropes. were not justifiable in any way anymore. And I didn't think Shakespeare would object himself, whose heart was always ahead of the fashions of the times and the blind spots of the times.
So, yeah, I guess you could say the last speech is the one I felt was unsupportable. And as we know, people have been doing productions of The Taming of the Shrew in every way, including sort of S&M and bondage versions that were tragedies that landed as tragedies. to reckon with it. And I thought if you're reckoning that hard with an aspect of text, it's time that text, you know, got a little, got to grow light and spread some green shoots and turned into something else. You know, it just...
There's nothing lost when that speech is rewritten. There's only gain. And it's true of the racism in Titus Andronicus, which is quite a good play and a much better play. When you just honestly say, you know, this language doesn't serve us anymore. And you have to contort a whole production approach around sometimes what's left over in that way. So how is that artistically beneficial for anybody, including an audience? Art, you have directed the original...
the Shakespeare version of Taming of the Shrew. You also directed Shrew. Can you talk a little bit about what the experience is like when you're working on it, on both of these? What do you lean into? What is your sort of the driving force with Taming of the Shrew itself? And how is it different? How was it different working on Shrew? Well...
The original, as you know, and I'm sure many of your listeners know, was inspired by both the Punch and Judy things that Amy was referring to, but also then... It was very popular in the Cometa dell'arte. And both Amy and I were sort of steeped in Bill Ball's famous production of The Taming of the Shrew at ACT, which was... completely reconceived to fit into a Commedia dell'arte framework. None of the language was changed, but the play came to life in such a...
vivid and theatrical and exciting way and actually ran in the repertory for like three seasons non-stop. It was so successful. So that has... had a huge imprint on my consciousness as far as how the play works. The difference between the original and then Amy's shrew is that It has a modern sensibility that informs the play, but it is still rooted in that Commedia dell'arte form. So it's an interesting...
Melange is a fancy word for mix-up, I guess, of the two worlds. And I don't know if I'm answering your question, but that's where my brain went. Yeah, absolutely. So it sounds like you really, you were inspired by the Commedia in both versions. And I think that probably the biggest challenge of working on both of them is thinking. through, okay, now, was that in Shakespeare's original? Was it in the translation? Or is it in Shrew? But trying to keep the specific given circumstances and text.
of the three plays separate when working on each of them now doing it for the podcast, you lose the visuals, right? How was it for you going into both of these, The Taming of the Shrew and Shrew, knowing that the audience wasn't going to be able to see so many of the things that you rely on to tell the story? story well just uh you know coming to this format to the podcast format has been such a learning experience for me which i i love uh learning new tricks and it had it forced me to
reconsider how it works because I am primarily a visual person. That's my... My easy way into my brain is by the visual aspects. So to have to switch that off and focus exclusively on what I'm hearing. taught me that you have to find ways to Adjust the text where necessary so that the audience knows, for instance, that a character hasn't left the stage yet or has left the stage or that there's certain physical Lhotse being performed.
in a way that they would ordinarily see. So it's really, the challenge for me was how do you make that oral and not visual? Can you think of any instances where we were able to accomplish that or you were able to accomplish it with the cast? Well, some of it Amy did just in how she prepared the text. In other cases, you know, we would just be in the middle of recording a scene and realize, oh.
For instance, Bianca's reaction is necessary to what's going on at this moment, but there's nothing scripted. So how do we get her voice? to be present or a laugh to be present or a sigh in a way that lets us know she's there and reacting to the situation. So there's lots of examples of that throughout. Introducing June's Journey, a hidden object mobile game with a captivating story.
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To Art's point, you had written in a lot of things to cue the listener, but also in Shrew itself, you wrote in backstory to some of the characters. Can you talk a little bit about that? i took from what shakespeare wrote in terms of petruchio there were like hints or tracers and i think he meant absolutely nothing by them but petruchio says in the original have i not heard the cannons roar
Have I not in my time heard lions roar? No. Have I not heard the sea puffed up with winds rage like an angry boar cornered in the hunt? Haven't I heard the cannon shake the field and heaven's artillery? Rattling in the skies, haven't I in a pitchet battle heard drums of thunder, neighing steeds and trumpets clang? And do you tell me of a woman's tongue?
That gives not half so great a blow to hear as a chestnut popping in a farmer's fire. Tush-tush. Fright boys with bugs. Indicating he's been in wars, right? But I gave Petruchio. a backstory that involved trauma, and that trauma being military. My joy abounds to see you here. Hast thou come again to join the living world? Why, when last I looked on you... I well know when twas, dear friend. Oh, you find me better now than then. I'm glad of it.
How we all feared for you when your lady died, and not a word to any of us. I'm sorry for it, Hortensio. Wild in grief I foreign legions sought. Oh, it was terrible. And I, not to leave him to himself, went with him. Oh, the frights and terrors, wild deeds of desperation, born rough men and perils every instant. That was just the boat to Amsterdam. A fighting force became to me a home. My own force gone and silent grown my house and cold. I know.
Oh, he just rattles around that old castle, works outside each day like a cantatina. I can only ever get a smile out of him when I take him unawares. I took it farther and made Grumio his comrade in arms from those days. So that for me, as a re-imaginer, something about the horseplay of violence had some root in a...
A barracks. That there was a rough horseplay that there was their way of processing something that was serious and scarring and traumatizing for Petruchio enough that he was something of a socially isolated outsider. I think that's supported in how he's presented in the Shakespeare world. And it flowed naturally and it helped the one good speech that I mentioned earlier.
that Petruchio has where he says with no irony and no attempt at comedy, he says, come, come, give up these outward things. Why does it matter? Is the adder better than the eel? because one has gilded skin yeah he's had a journey philosophically i took it from clues in shakespeare and i think the character supports and wants that kind of expansion
for what Shakespeare was after with those two. For Kate, there's nothing. She's the worst written character in almost maybe all of dramatic history. And if you try, I played that role in this, and I played Bianca when I was first acting. And I can... tell you you know from my molecular lived experience there's nothing there to build a character on um except that she's young and uh violent
And I didn't think that was sufficient. And I knew I was working around the great Susanna Rogers, who was capable of... any kind of nuance and conveyance of soul, you know, very soulful, skillful actor. And that also was helpful because Susanna could grab any little anchor and make it blossom into a real character attribute. So I really do feel like that she and I kind of developed that in a way.
I knew her well, and we worked together a lot and thought about her for the role. So Kate is a kind of a bookworm, an athwarted feminist, which also you might say the seeds are true to the Shakespeare original. That's what I articulated. Somebody who was absolutely, you know, destroyed by living in a patriarchy, who had much more to offer. At last I am alone. Is it not strange that only here, within this tiny tower, my room, I can a freedom dream?
Just reading in a wooden chair or writing sprawled upon the floor. Most eloquent in my own company. I'm interested in what I have to say. We get along, myself and I, I mean. No need for any other. I'm quite happy here and reading from the winter till the spring, till winter comes. And Petruchio is the man who understands that. You know, because Shakespeare's company was made up of male actors exclusively and the young boys would play the females, there are very few mother characters.
in Shakespeare's plays. And Amy also expanded the backstory that Kate and Bianca's mother, who also was Baptiste's widow. excuse me, late wife, was Baptista's late wife, and also Petruchio's had a previous marriage, a late wife, so that there is at least... if not a whole lot of specifics, certainly a presence of those women in the play that originally there was not. And Shrew does take place in the same period as The Taming of the Shrew in these two productions, correct?
yeah because the conceit or the framing device which seemed as i've the more plays more plays i've written the more um comfortable i am with explicit framings of the audience understands the rules of the game of the plays game and i thought um it was good to make the writer of shrew a contemporary of young shakespeare and actively correcting that text That's the additional character of Mistress, or the writer who talks to Mistress Slatbottom at the beginning and at the end. So I'm being quite...
literal in my setup that this is a play amended by a woman who couldn't take it anymore listening to it evolve in Shakespeare's year, in the year of the play's conception. He has been trying to fix a play and he is stuck. Although it dreadful is, the theme for centuries has seemed to please and always packs the house. It is called The Taming... of a shrew. Or twas when last it played. I know!
this comedy. It is goodly. Goodly! Nay, even you, who love to see the bear fights, cannot like of this. No! It will not do. It will not do. We can no longer bear to see this shrew. Now, good Mr. Slapbottom, I take up quill and ink, and I shall show thee how it should have gone. I want to applaud you for saying Mr. Slapbottom without laughing. Oh. Just the name alone. The name alone is enough to send me into giggles. Art, this cast...
in Shrew is largely almost entirely the same as the cast in The Taming of the Shrew, the play on podcast version of that as well. Not everybody's playing the same roles. But these are actors that you have known and worked with a lot in the past, correct? Yes. And actually, just a minor amendment to your description of that.
also included some members of the original company of Shrew at South Coast Rep who were not available to do the recording of the Taming of the Shrew. So this cast for Shrew is a little bit of a hybrid. of people who did one or the other of the podcasts and or the original production. But to answer your question, yes, they're all actors that I have worked with for and who have worked with each other.
many of them on past Amy Freed plays. So there is a long history with all of these actors and it was just a blast having everybody, not literally in the same room, but in the same rehearsal. Can we talk a little bit about that and why it helps tell a story so much? First of all, Amy's writing is... Well, as with any good playwright, there's a specific voice and a specific perspective on the world. And in Amy's case of.
a specific comic sensibility that is not easy to grasp on your first time at bat. So having people that have worked on her plays before, and specifically on these plays, just... sets you up for success from the get-go. And there's a comfort level and an ability to create right off the bat without having to go through the...
getting to know you steps. Likewise, just in terms of a company of actors, I've always believed that having an ensemble of actors who have worked together over a series of many different plays, many different years, allows you such... and an expansive level of creativity that you don't get when you just throw a bunch of strangers into a room together.
So that to me is what, and you know, as you know, there's very little time to get these plays rehearsed and recorded. So having everybody know the material, know each other, know Amy's voice, just. was a gift and we hit the ground running. Amy, did you know that Art was going to be a lifelong friend from the beginning when you met at ACT?
I will say, and Art, you can put your hands over your ears so you don't hear this. You know, Art to me has a very special spirit, and it was evident when I first met him. One of the things that I cherish about him and I cherished immediately when I got to know Art was he was incredible positivity, great sense of humor and truly supportive and aware of other people.
Very quick, like we were all kind of fraught in our first year in that conservatory. It wasn't like one of today's safe spaces. I wouldn't say that at all. And to have a member of the cohort who was... frank generous supportive quick to notice other people as well as being a really gifted actor uh you know we i think we became friends pretty quickly and those qualities have only grown
with art's maturity, even though he's still a young, sprightly person. And so also the first time I saw art direct was right after we were out of school. And it was kind of already becoming clear that I was going, I had another kind of way into theater. I loved acting, but it wasn't going to be my thing. Enough so that when I saw...
What was it, Art? You did a musical. What was the musical? It was Sondheim's Two-Hander, Marry Me a Little. It was Marry Me a Little. And I went, oh, he's a director. And I don't even know how I knew that at that point, because, you know, I was still evolving my own tastes. But there was something very special there, an instinct for it. Maybe it was choreography, background and sensitivity.
So I don't know. On all levels, I think Art is a gift to the theater, and he's been a really good friend for a long, long time. Art, now it's your turn. Oh, I can't stop that. You've been running away from Amy. She's just been chasing you. No, but speaking of chasing, there was one of the seminal moments in our first year at ACT had nothing to do with school. We were at a bar.
In the hate, I think, with a couple of other of our classmates. I think it was called the Golden Cane. It was the Golden Cane. No, I think it was the golden cane because I remember a walking stick in the neon sign. But there was, I don't know if there were words exchanged with another patron, and I use the word patron loosely, but we were chased out of the...
bar and we ran for like a mile in the middle of the hate, just laughing and having the best time. I remember your very long legs outpacing us all. I wish we could. I wish you could remember what it was that was said to the patron or vice versa. Yeah, no, that's long since lost to history and the vapors of alcohol. But to answer your question, I can't go on as eloquently as Amy because she's the writer, but...
My earliest memories of Amy as an artist and collaborator... at school was that her brain was so sharp and so far ahead of most of the rest of us in terms of observing humanity, observing the world around us, and always with this. unique, pointed sense of humor. And I also felt that early on that her attentions and her passion was for the bigger picture. So it didn't surprise me that she turned into a Pulitzer finalist level writer. Do you know, can you...
Identify when that change occurred for you, Amy, when you knew you were going to be a writer. Yeah, I had been knocking around pursuing acting since I was 17. against my whole psychological disposition. My psychological and emotional makeup did not make me a strong choice for the acting profession. You know, I suffered too much.
you know i suffered on stage i suffered i suffered when i wasn't working i mean it was just suffering and uh i think where i started writing because when we were at act you could complete your mfa with a writing project And I wrote a one-person show that became a small cast show to perform in as an MFA vehicle. And that was how I got started. And I wrote about a dead newscaster.
which was my sense of humor at the time. And a classmate friend of ours produced it in a small theater in San Francisco without me, with me. working on the text at that point and for some reason that play theater was different and the way things traveled we had three uh reviewing newspapers in san francisco we had the examiner the chronicle the sf weekly and another couple the show got like wildly good reviews the next thing i knew i was getting a
contact from like Bruce Whitaker at Manhattan Theater Club. You know, stuff traveled via the critical network at that point. I don't think this would happen for a writer today. So it was like. it was acknowledged in a way that my acting never had been and never would be and i got i went oh no this is something and then somebody offered me a commission and then i got a commission from california arts council and then i got an out of the blue production
of a play at Woolly Mammoth in DC. And that was the launch for me, but I was led by it. I didn't chase it as opposed to acting, which I chased and never caught. Was it similar for you, Art, with sort of a transitional point that you can identify? Well, I can, but I will say that I fell into all of this, started acting when I was 13.
And I've always loved... all of the arts so in addition to acting when I was that young I got into a little bit of well maybe I could assist the choreographer and oh I could if I hang lights on the weekend for the lighting designer I can make extra money. And oh, they were willing to hire me to do graphics for the productions. So little by little, my interests and my skills expanded. And my goal was when I decided to pursue acting as a profession.
was that my goal was to never have to have a waiter's job now i did of course but i always thought well instead of waiting tables maybe i could you know design a set or i could do x or i could And also, it was all sort of wrapped up in the pursuit of my goal to found a classical repertory theater one day, which I did, which was A Noise Within, which is still, I think it's in its like 34th season.
currently in Pasadena in a beautiful multi-million dollar facility. But my goal was to understand all of the different departments so that when I was speaking to designers or speaking to actors or speaking to... I would understand what it was I was talking about. But there was a certain point where running a theater, directing, acting, choreographing, designing, etc., a lot of those pieces had to start to get whittled away to focus on the bigger picture.
And I ended up with just the directing piece. And partly, as Amy was saying, acting is hard. It's suffering. Even when you're in the middle of it, as you know, I'll never forget there was a day, the last role that I did was playing Leo in... cowards designed for living and there was an intern backstage at a noise within where i was doing it i remember him asking me questions about the process and i it was like i had an intermission break or something and i just
had this light bulb go off where I thought, I think I'm done. I think I've done my, and it wasn't because the intern was there, but I just remember that moment that I kind of thought. I've done all of the acting that I want to do and want to pursue. And I'm going to shift to directing and teaching primarily. I know we have to wrap up. I just want to ask both of you.
What is it that you hope listeners will take away having heard both The Taming of the Shrew and Shrew? These two things that we've collaborated on together over the past... really six months amy well as far as the translation goes i i think it is enough it's pretty true to the feel and form of shakespeare and i haven't made any effort to dumb it down you know
So I hope it affords the pleasure of hearing the Shakespeare play pretty much, you know, as Shakespeare intended without any of the struggle of dropping out because you don't get it. And I do think that's a strong form of pleasure with these translations that the old grammar, which works often in reverse from what the way it was intended to, like it sounds stuffier.
than it did then. And that's not part of the intention of Shakespeare's original. So I hope the speed, ease and efficiency of some of the old grammar that we don't use anymore or the word inversions that we don't understand anymore. With that gone, it's a fast track for listening pleasure and feeling like, you know, Shakespeare. For The Shrew, I hope it revives an old play with an adaptation that acknowledges the past and looks towards where we are now.
Art, how about you? I don't know that I have anything to add to that. I mean, other than the people listening to Shrew. appreciating the lengths to which Amy went to not only give this play new life, but to make it in many ways a new play. So you kind of get the best of both worlds. You both have been the best of my world working on these podcasts so, so generously. And I want to thank you.
for all the time, all the effort and the intelligence that you brought to making it happen. It has been an absolute pleasure working with both of you, and I'm so, so grateful that our paths intersected on these two projects. Thank you, Michael. It's been a wonderful opportunity, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it, too. It's been a consolation and a comfort as we began coming out of COVID and pandemic. all of that stuff. It's nice. It was very nice to work on.
You've been listening to the Play On Podcast bonus content series. You can learn more about the Play On Podcast at Next Chapter Podcast's website, nextchapterpodcasts.com, where you can find other Play On Podcast series and interviews along with... talk podcasts like The 500, Indecent with Kiki Anderson, Beef with Bridget Todd, and a whole lot more. I'd like to thank Jeremiah Tittle, the founder of Next Chapter Podcasts, and my producer, Pete Musto.
Our audio engineer, editor, and sound designer is Justin Cortese. Be sure to subscribe to Next Chapter Podcast for updates on all the latest content, and don't forget to rate and review our shows. I'm Michael Goodfriend, and I look forward to... sharing more incredible works in the Play On podcast series with you, along with lots of enlightening bonus content at Next Chapter Podcasts.
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