The Seven Sides of Shakespeare

An actor, a writer, a pandemic, a play. In the Time of the Plague. Everyone is wearing a mask, including the ACTOR. He’s from Chicago. And he’s a long way from Chicago. He’s old now too and the plague is a special threat to him. Not just because it might kill him, but because it has already killed his way of life. There’s nothing special about his predicament. It’s happening everywhere. People kept saying the theatre is dead, the theatre is dead, and when it finally died they realized it had been alive all that time, and now they try to revive it, like Krapp listening to his last tape. So, he’s looking back, in the foreground is Chicago and his own crooked path that leads south into a swamp, but constantly and gloriously thrusting into the picture is Shakespeare’s theatre, the one in Shakespeare’s mind, the one with a company of actors of which the ACTOR is now one. And the characters that Shakespeare wrote start to blend with actors who played them and he remembers his hero, Patrick, who directed Shakespeare like a maestro, and he remembers his best friends, Romeo and Tybalt, only he knew them better as Greg and Bob, he remembers Sid, the Shakespeare scholar brave enough to stage the plays. He has another life beyond the stage, in the home he is, for the most part like many, confined to, with his wife and two restless boys. He had a life he lived for decades before as a lowly public-school teacher, in thrall to Shakespeare and thus elevated in spirit above the mundane mendacity of power. He is old, but hanging in there like a rusty fishhook, vulnerable, but defiant. He goes out there and bares his soul. Howls. He’s been at it a long time, long enough to get good at it. He’s lived seven lives in Shakespeare’s mind and in his own, and there will likely be no more after this because the ACTOR is old, and the play takes place in the time of the plague. He’s half a dozen years into retirement, with nothing left to lose but his life. The life of his world has ended. Ironically, they had just closed the play when the plague shut all the theatres down and quarantines went into effect. It had all happened before. To Shakespeare. He retreated to the theatre in his mind. He always wrote parts with the actors of his own company in mind, so his friends were there in his mind then too. He wrote Lear then, which is an apocalyptic play. So is this. A man alone, sometimes on a stage and sometimes the stage disappears. The ACTOR takes off his mask and speaks to the audience in his mind. - Shamrock McShane