My name is Brandon, and I am, sometimes, an actor. And I'm going to talk about acting.

In general, people who are not actors are often bad at talking about acting. There is nothing wrong with this: I know nothing about cars, so when somebody asks me about my car, I can respond with something like "it drives" or "we don't get along very well," which, while not lies, are also not accurate. Or at least, not precise. And certainly not helpful. So when people who are not actors talk about acting, I usually try to let it slide. Yes, I did memorize all those lines. No, I didn't think about dead puppies during the sad scenes. Thank you for comparing me to that famous movie actor.

But there is something that irks me tremendously, and it's usually said by people who should know better: when talking of a director (or writer) and an actor who work together frequently (usually on films), someone will say, "[specific actor] is [specific director]'s muse."

This is a lie.

The muses are Greek goddesses of the arts, who are typically credited with visiting poets and musicians and providing inspiration. Most often found in a group of nine, they inspire both things that you would expect, like dance and epic poetry, and things you wouldn't, like astronomy. Muses are beautiful, talented, and exist solely to provide artists with the inspiration they need to create great art.

The implication, then, is that an actor is not an artist who receives inspiration, but a vessel for inspiration for artists. An actor must simply exist while a work of art is created around him or her. An actor, then, is the equivalent of a person whose portrait is painted, or the girlfriend mentioned in a song. "I made this for you," they say. For you. Not with you.

The trouble is, that's not what acting is. Actors do not inspire works of art, they help create works of art. Perhaps it's because many people seem to believe that all actors do is learn their lines and do what they're told: an actor gets direction and follows direction, and has no more creative agency than a puppet.  And while there are some directors who cultivate those qualities in their actors, in general, that is not what actors are for. Perhaps it is also because our culture finds collaboration difficult, preferring to attribute even a work of art with as many varied contributors as a summer blockbuster (have you stayed for the entire end credits of one of those?) to one author, discrediting the others as mere vessels. The muse concept is especially pernicious with actresses, for sociological reasons that would take another whole article just to start talking about.

At Bare Bones Shakespeare, we reject this notion. When we act, we are not muses who express another person's artistry. We are artists of our own, creating characters and performances that combine with the efforts of other artists to create a larger, richer whole. Every BBS production is built on the idea of collaboration, the hope that a group of artists will meet together and create a work of art in harmony, not be corralled into one man or woman's inflexible unison.

Collaboration is what we do. And if that's something you're interested in, then you're exactly the kind of artist we want to collaborate with. Audition. Donate. Or talk to us. We're listening.

One of the goals of Bare Bones Shakespeare is to question stereotypes about gender in theatre.  It's no secret that women make up a large percentage of theatre degree-seekers and auditionees in the USA (in my experience between 70% and 95%).  What most audiences might not be aware of is that when it comes to roles and theatre administration hiring, that number is reversed: 5%-25% of theatre jobs go to women, and the most significant limiting factor is the cast list.  Most playwrights (and screenwriters, and authors) assume a world dominated, at least numerically, by men, and casting directors usually respond to these assumptions by only finding men to fill male roles, and only finding women to fill female roles.  (This doesn't even get into the issues and assumptions surrounding the casting of trans actors -- which, while important, will have to be a post for another day).  While Shakespeare wrote many intelligent, passionate female roles, only 15% of his characters were female.  We also often forget that since these roles were written for young men (often apprentices), the line counts pale in comparison to the roles written for adult, veteran actors in the company. 

It's not all bad news, though.  Here at Bare Bones Shakespeare, we like to look at both modern and early-modern performance techniques for inspiration.  400 years ago, casting men to play women's roles was the norm in England.  And several modern companies have tried reverse-gender, gender-blind, and re-gendered casting in order to achieve a variety of purposes from reconciling the cast list with the percentage of auditionees to teasing out revitalized readings of the text.  These progressive casting practices aren't really prevalent yet on the largest professional stages, nor in plays written more recently, but we're gaining ground. 

As a feminist I'm pleased, but as an Artistic Director, I can't stop at celebrating the forward movement.  I also need to look carefully at the resistance that hinders that movement -- resistance that comes from all areas, from the local communities to the largest professional companies.  Rather than dismissing this resistance out-of-hand, I think it's necessary that I seriously consider the detracting arguments (such as this article from The Guardian) and respond to them thoughtfully.  In my experience, most of these arguments complain that such casting practices are merely gimmicks, or the very worst kind of Equal Opportunity Employment -- the kind that considers the race and gender of applicants as head and shoulders in importance above individual aptitude and suitability for the job.  Honestly, I think this argument is correct, to a point: There have been many productions that suffered from casting the wrong actor in the name of Equality.  I have personally witnessed and been involved in several productions that responded to gender half-heartedly by casting actresses instead of actors for some or all of the roles, but treated the actresses' characters inconsistently, resulting in a muddy, confusing production. 

However, not all productions that resist gender norms do so at the expense of artistic clarity.  The reasons for casting more actresses can be separate from how we use those actresses in performance.  When I was in grad school for Shakespeare and Performance, I joined a company-model MFA program at Mary Baldwin College.  Due to the accident of who auditioned and was accepted that year, our company consisted of eleven women and one man.  Rather than conceding this fact as a weakness, or ignoring it and hoping no one noticed, we embraced it as a strength.  We decided to treat gender differently in each of our five plays: regendering in Dr. Faustus, full drag in Fuente Ovejuna, and an all-female production of Richard II, just to name a few.  From the other artists I worked with that year, I discovered that the ways to treat gender in performance are not limited to a small number of choices.  I also learned that each production can have its own internal logic about how to treat gender, and that the more clear the directors and designers are early in the process on what that logic is, the clearer the production, and the stronger the acceptance of the audience. 

I tested these ideas in the production of The Taming of The Shrew I directed this summer.  While I didn't initially set out to create non-traditional casting choices for this production, I found myself needing to since not enough male actors auditioned, but we had more than enough female actors.  I decided to re-gender three characters: Baptista, Vincentio (Vincentia) and the Pedant.  However, there were also some characters, like Tranio, whose apparent maleness was central to the plot.  My production team and I decided to treat the female actors in lower-class male roles as women who chose to live their lives as men for their own safety and financial security.  The world of the play supported the decision to present upper-class characters such as Baptista and Vincentia as female, since these privileged women would have more power in their communities and thus could live their lives as cis-gendered without facing the same dangers as lower-class women.  This logic guided decisions that we made in production meetings and in rehearsal.  It was not something that we published in the program, nor did we try to force these gender politics into a more central role in the show's concept.  We simply examined our extant approach to the play and added this element to it, so that our approach to gender complimented but did not dominate our approach to the text as a whole.

Now Bare Bones Shakespeare gets to try a different approach, one that is new to us.  We have decided to make our upcoming production of Macbeth entirely reverse-gender.  Rather than change the pronouns or put the actors and actresses in drag, though, we thought we would simply switch which roles we cast men and women into, and then use this environment to explore what the text says to our actors and our audiences about relationships within and across gender lines.  If you're interested, you can watch a video of the Macbeths discussing Duncan's Murder or check out audition information.

Most of the staples of the modern theatre aren't the foregone conclusion that we treat them as.  

Proscenium? Nope.
Set? Nope.
Stage lighting? Nope.
Director? Nope.
Designers?  Nope.
Multi-week rehearsal process? Nope.
Table work? Nope.
Huge casts? Nope.
Actors get the whole script? Nope.

So that leaves... What? A close company of actors and their manager using cue scripts to bring the play to life in one crazy week of anything-goes ideas and no time for second guessing.  Each actor has the opportunity (or more accurately, the duty), to invent her performance on her own -- there's no time for her to wait until rehearsals to start discovery.  But even while she's preparing on her own, acting as designer and director for her part (no matter how large or small), she also has to leave space for the contributions of her castmates.  "No director" means that the acting company has to work together, taking initiative and giving in to each others' ideas by turns in order to bring the production to life. So let's take a look at what "company-directed Shakespeare" means, and where the idea comes from.

The early modern scholar Tiffany Stern has written several valuable books about what the theatre world was like in early modern England.  The book that most concerns us right now is Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, in which Stern distills epic amounts of research into an accessible guide to the rehearsal processes of Shakespeare and his successors.  In this book, Stern points out that many of the trappings of the modern rehearsal process simply didn't exist in Shakespeare's day.  There wasn't a clear division between actor, producer, director, and designer.  Actors didn't audition for a specific role, or even for a specific play -- they joined the company and performed in all of the productions, usually keeping dozens in repertory at a time.  Instead of getting the whole script and doing weeks of read-throughs, table work and blocking rehearsals, actors would receive only their own lines and the one-to-three word cue immediately preceding their lines.  They would then take these "cue scripts" or "parts" and work on them individually or with one other actor (especially in the case of apprentices).  When the actors did come together to rehearse the play, they would often have as few as three days to form the production.  This rehearsal structure meant that actors had to arrive memorized.  If this description sounds terrifying to the modern actor, Shakespeare's company has good news: there is also a "prompter" just offstage who has the whole script.  The prompter's job is to keep the actors on track, so that the lack of rehearsal doesn't mean that the production dissolves into chaos. 

If you're interested in taking part in such a production, we're holding auditions for our reverse-gender Macbeth at Katie Jackson Park in Dallas on Saturday, 9/19 and 9/26.  Email barebonesshakespeare@gmail.com for an audition appointment.