Sets:  Shakespeare’s company performed on a large wooden platform unadorned by fixed sets or scenery.  A few large pieces – thrones, tombs, tables – were occasionally used to ornament a scene.  Like Shakespeare, we rely on the audience’s imagination to create the “set” and to “piece out our imperfections.” 

  Costuming:  Costuming was important to the theatre 

companies of Shakespeare’s day for three reasons.  First, the frequently lavish costumes provided fresh color and design for the theatres.  Second, costumes made it easy to use one actor in a variety of roles.  Third, as they do now, costumes helped an audience “read” the play quickly by showing them at a glance who was rich or poor, royalty or peasantry, priest or cobbler, ready for bed or ready to party.  Costumes are important to ASC in the same way.  But costumes were NOT important to Shakespeare and his fellows as a way of showing what life used to be like in a particular historical period.  They performed primarily in Elizabethan garb.  For them, as well as for the The American Shakespeare Center, the play always spoke to the present.  Sometimes ASC will use contemporary costumes, sometimes Elizabethan, and sometimes a mix of everything in between.

Music:  Shakespeare had a sound tract.  Above the stage, musicians played an assortment of string, wind, and percussion instruments before, during, and after the play.  The plays are sprinkled with songs for which lyrics but not much of the music survive.  ASC sets many of these songs in contemporary style.  The result is emblematic of the approach:  a commitment to Shakespeare’s text and to the mission of connecting that text to modern audiences.

Because women didn’t take to the English stage until after the Restoration (1660), all the women in Shakespeare’s plays were originally played by boys.  Shakespeare had a great deal of fun with this convention.  In a production of As You Like It in 1660, a boy would have played Rosalind, who disguises herself as a boy, then pretends to be a woman.  Because The American Shakespeare Center is committed to the idea that Shakespeare is about everyone – male and female – ASC is not an all-male company, but they try to re-create some of the fun of gender confusions by casting women as men and men as women.

The Interior of The Blackfriars' Playhouse

During a performance . . . .

Doubling:

Shakespeare’s Macbeth has more than forty parts; Shakespeare’s traveling troupe may have had fewer than fifteen actors.  With a troupe of fifteen or fewer actors, ASC doubles parts, with one actor playing as many as seven roles in a single show.  The practice, which was customary in Shakespeare’s time, is called doubling.