Emerald Coast Theatre Consultant

I had a lot of stress when I approached directing my first Shakespeare. On the advice of friends who know him well, I chose As You Like It. After doing a year of research, and that was before the Internet and it’s immediate resource, I auditioned, cast and started work. Even tho I had seen a lot of Shakespeare at the Stratford Festival in Canada, I felt totally inadequate handling the Bard. I know I projected my feeling of inadequacy to the cast and crew at the theatre. But I worked each scene as best I could and in the end it was the best that I could do at that time of my career. And I was able to handle that. Much to my surprise, someone wrote a letter to the editor of the local paper. When I read it, my ego inflated way beyond what it should have been given my lack of experience staging Shakespeare. What appeared in the paper was an anonymous note apparently written by an unnamed visitor from London traveling through our town and just wanted to see some local theatre and chose our theatre to see Shakespeare. Go figure. It was written in a flowery style by someone schooled in England who wrote in a grandiose style. It was a short note but it made the point that our production was superlative, it was fetching, and that everyone for miles around would or should be flocking to our theatre. And I fell for it hook, line, and sinker. It was years later when I found out, during a casual conversation with a friend, that one of the theatre scribes had written it and sent it to the local paper. I was furious that I had been duped into believing such a charade that gnawed at the very integrity of the theatre. That is the kind of self-promotion and self-aggrandizement that should never happen. But it does happen, and it happens all too often. Newspaper editors can spot that kind of amateurish marketing at fifty paces. But they print it because they think it really hurts no one. But they are dead wrong. Dead wrong. The very core of the theatre is truth and that kind of self-promotion eats at the very heart of the theatre, trying to fool everyone but fooling no one. Other people who read it, a board member for example, will at first glance think that is great, but in reflection, and after a re-read, will not be fooled, but will say nothing because it is “good for the theatre’s reputation and financial stability.” Again, wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong. By not saying something and by not taking the time to find the author, they are giving tacit approval. But the most damaging that kind of marketing can do is to the perpetrator. They think they have gotten away with it when in truth they have damaged themselves by thinking they are more clever than most and they have exposed themselves to the world. Their inability do deal truthfully in the theatre will, in the end, damage that gentle fiber of truth that must exist in any art. So, if you need to do theatre, do it carefully, do it honestly, do it with a quest to get better, do it to learn, but above all do it with resolve that makes your efforts and the efforts of other honest and true. Again, a quote from Shakespeare: This above all, to thine own self be true!