At Bridge Street, ‘Polishing Shakespeare’ explores the challenges of commissioned art
Jeffrey Borak is The Eagle’s theater critic.
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CATSKILL, N.Y. — In playwright Brian Dykstra’s comedy, “Polishing Shakespeare,” at Bridge Street Theater April 17-27, a dotcom billionaire makes an offer he believes neither the artistic director of a cash-starved regional theater nor a promising young playwright with significant college debt can refuse. Or can they?
As “Polishing Shakespeare” begins, the artistic director, Ms. Branch, has accepted a massive grant from the billionaire with the stipulation that the money be used to commission 30 young playwrights to rewrite all of Shakespeare’s plays:
“… to translate
The whole of Shakespeare’s canon for easier
Accessibility. No dumbing down …
Of course.
… Clarity desired over
Confusion so that there are clearer words
Put together more correctly, sounding
A little less like poetry. A form
Less flowery,” Branch explains to Janet, an emerging young Asian playwright who is being offered a commission to join the project.
“More friendly is the thing,” adds the benefactor, named Grant.
“Polishing Shakespeare” had a staged reading last summer at 59E59 Theaters in New York, followed by workshop performances at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Bridge Street’s co-founders, Artistic Director John Sowle and Founding Artistic Associate Steven Patterson, approached Dykstra about producing “Polishing Shakespeare” here after seeing the play’s official world premiere in October at Kitchen Theater in Ithaca, N.Y.
Sowle and Patterson hoped to bring the Ithaca production, whose cast included Dykstra as Grant, to Catskill, but plans did not materialize. So they decided to mount their own production with Sowle directing and Patterson as Grant. Also in the cast are Yvonne Perry as Ms. Branch and Angelique Archer as Janet.
“Comedies are always hard for us to do here,” Patterson said. “We want them to have something else going on.”
“An intellectual overlay,” Sowle added during an interview at Bridge Street’s offices, where he was joined by Patterson and Archer. Perry was unavailable.
There’s a great deal of overlay in “Polishing Shakespeare.” To begin with, there is the language. Dykstra has written “Polishing Shakespeare” entirely in verse — iambic pentameter. “(Because of the demands of the text), I really wanted my actors to begin our rehearsal schedule with all the lines under their belts,” Sowle said.
Secondly, Dykstra shifts styles as his play moves from one section to another.
“It’s a play within a play within a play,” Patterson said. “Trying to define the playing styles for each of the sections [certainly] is among the challenges.”
Then there are the play’s themes, which cover a lot of territory — commerce vs. making art; the influence of corporate money; the role and mission of not-for-profit regional theaters; the line between authenticity and selling out, between patronizing an audience on the one hand and acknowledging its intelligence on the other. In the midst of all that are intensely human characters.
“I think Janet is someone we can all relate to,” Archer said, noting that Janet, who is faced with formidable college debt, is caught between a rock and a hard place. “There is a cost to doing what we want to do and say. Janet is faced with the question of whether she would be selling out by accepting the commission. Can an artist sell out and at the same time be true to their art? Janet sees a way to create the art she wants to create and make a living doing it.”
Comedy has not been the only stylistic challenge for Bridge Street Theater since its inaugural season in 2014. Because of the theater’s budgetary and physical limitations, Sowle and Patterson have been unable to take on any of Shakespeare’s plays. So they’ve done the next best thing — plays they characterize as “Shakespeare adjacent:” — “Anything that is not an actual play,” Sowle said, “but based on something Shakespeare wrote … or Shakespeare characters or I suppose plays like ‘Rude Mechanics’ (produced in 2023), which had Shakespeare as a character.”
“Polishing Shakespeare” is Bridge Street Theatre’s fifth “Shakespeare adjacent” go-round.
“It’s a very funny play,” Sowle said; a play with, Patterson added, “meta theatrical elements.”