Directing for an Outdoor Audience

LIBBY APPEL: Well, when you do Shakespeare outdoors, you really need a much stronger technical base to produce the sound, get your mouth around the words, be articulate, and reach a 1200-seat audience, including a huge balcony. It just takes a bigger instrument and a stronger attack on the text in order to produce it. And also, one of the tricks of producing Shakespeare outdoors is to be able to keep the subtleties of relationships within the scenes. That's very hard to produce when you're outdoors, because you're trying to reach to the back row.

We produce Shakespeare's plays in three different venues. We produce it outdoors in a 1200-seat theater, and we produce it in our 600-seat theater, and we produce it in our small experimental theater, and that view of Shakespeare changes completely in each one of the venues. And when you produce Shakespeare outdoors, what you're doing is, you're really getting in touch with the Shakespeare who produced outdoors for so many years in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century. In other words, he produced for an audience of groundlings on the bottom, and people of nobility and of a certain economic class in the bench seats that surrounded the theater, and those people were talking and they were running out and coming back in, and he and his plays had to capture the attention of a large audience, outdoors, doing all different kinds of things while the plays were going on.

Well, outdoors now, we don't have people running around and people are seated, but it is a large audience who comes with a kind of a jolly spirit in the same way, I think, probably an Elizabethan audience came to see the plays—feeling, "gosh, this is going to be a great event! I'm going to have fun." Because the outdoor audience comes, and they still have their coffee with them and they have their cookies and sometimes they'll even have a glass of wine, because outdoors you can do that. Indoors, it's a far more polite audience. They're more focused on the plays. You can take more risks with the production of the plays, you can interpret the plays a little bit more subtly. Outdoors you're really throwing it out there at them, and it produces a great deal of energy between the audience and the players.