Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s audacious move to gender equity

“Shakespeare was writing for an all-male company,” said Ryan, who ran the company alongside co-artistic director Marco Barricelli in SCS’s first season. “He didn’t write a lot of women’s roles because he knew they would be played by boys anyway. But there’s no reason to think that he wouldn’t have (written more women’s roles) if he were, say, writing during the Restoration when women were on stage.”

Ryan stressed that the new policy does not mean a casting free-for-all in which a character’s gender is entirely disregarded. In the new season, selected roles cast cross- gender include the warrior Banquo, the prince Malcolm and the lord Ross in “Macbeth.” The supporting characters in “Much Ado” will have more a female tilt as well. In a small way, by changing gender pronouns and other gender references, the new policy is a break from Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s long commitment to keep Shakespeare’s words inviolate.

But, said Ryan, adapting Shakespeare to modern audiences means reflecting modern values. “There’s no reason we need to reflect a world whose power structure was very different than our own. What we’re doing is plays in the 21st century for a 21st-century audience, and those stories should be inclusive as possible.”

A few months ago, a medium-sized law firm in a city near me bought out a performance of some kind of play about Oscar Wilde. All partners and associates were encouraged to invite anyone they knew to the show, and to the cocktail party beforehand. It was a rainmaking exercise, I guess.

Anyway, my wife and I know one of the partners, so we were asked to go, and we did.

The whole play consisted of a passionate acting out of Wilde's problems as a homosexual in Victorian England, particularly in a notorious/celebrated case in which he accused the father of his young lover of libel, lost the case, and was in turn prosecuted for gross indecency, for which he was convicted.

It was basically a waste of time. The actors (all male) had obviously worked very, very hard on it, and put everything they had into it, but on the whole it was entirely uninteresting, unconvincing, and boring.

There was no discussion between anyone afterward. The audience members filed out without a word. I think many (like myself) were embarrassed by the ham-handed ideological/emotional drubbing we had just endured. I believe the reaction of most was something along the lines of "well, that was special."

It seems to me that the entire world of theater in the United States has basically been turned over to the task of drilling into the head of anyone who can be forced to listen the idea that homosexuality is normal, and that we are all parties to the most heartless and cruel crime in history by not retraining our minds to see homosexuality as equivalent in every conceivable way to heterosexuality. This they will do for a pittance, or even for nothing, as long as they can experience the sensation that someone is paying attention.

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Well said. I have no desire to see any theater these days because of the agenda. Even if it is not pro-homosexual, a play is likely to slanted in some other way against the traditional values of Western Civilization.

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