Ira Glass may have overstated his case when, after attending a performance of Shakespeare in the Park this summer, he tweeted that he found King Lear “not relatable.” But Glass is surely not alone in finding the Bard hard: all those byzantine complexities of plot, all that highly wrought language. Might it not be a relief for Shakespeare to be presented in a way that emphasizes the lower entertainment values of the plays? Such was the thinking of David Hudson, who is one of the co-founders of the Three Day Hangover theatre company. Since 2013, Hudson and his colleagues have performed textually divergent interpretations of “Hamlet” and “Romeo and Juliet,” not behind a prissy proscenium but in the differently challenging arena of a crowded bar.
“We discovered that there is this…
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The New Yorker (Digital) - 1 Issue, Oct-06-14