The Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival

Abstract

On September 3d the Kennedy Center in Washington opened its third season with a four-week festival called and the Performing Arts. opening night (which I did not witness) provided Handel's Water Music from a barge in the Potomac, while on the patio of the Center members of the Washington Bass Quintet played the baroque sonatas of John Pezel. Throughout the month ensembles of recorders from the Collegium Musicum of Catholic University and singers from William and Mary played to early theater-comers in the Grand Foyer of the Center. These events seemed to characterize the Center's idea of festival, which may for some differ from other Shakespearean and dramatic festivals. For theater proper, there were the productions by the American Shakespeare Theatre of Measure for Measure and Macbeth (both reviewed in detail by Peter Smith elsewhere in this number). Measure opened the festival on September 3d, and Shakespeare/ Dance and Drama closed it on September 30th. Before discussing the idea of the festival, it might be well to indicate and discuss the full range of offerings. Eisenhower Theatre within the Center was utilized for the two plays, the Opera House for the production of Verdi's Macbeth by the Opera Society of Washington and for The Hollow Crown, and Love and Master Will. Concert Hall offered performances of six Shakespeare-themed concerts and one of Gounod's Romeo and Juliet (in English). In the American Film Institute Theater, showings included a Japanese Macbeth (Throne of Blood), a i964 Russian Hamlet, Franco Zeffirelli's Taming of the Shrew with Taylor and Burton, a science fiction film based on Tempest (Forbidden Planet), and a preview of Charlton Heston's new Antony and Cleopatra, as well as showings of the Olivier Henry V, the Brook Lear, and the 1934 Midsummer Night's Dream. A plenteous variety, certainly. Bringing two productions of the American Shakespeare Theatre to the Kennedy has raised talk of the AST's becoming a repertory theater in residence at the Kennedy. It seems that a range of possible developments in drama is under discussion at the Kennedy, especially after Richmond Crinkley's move to the Center as an assistant to Roger Stevens. All or any of these possibilities are of considerable interest to the history of Shakespearean production in the United States. Michael Kahn's production of Measure will have been discussed already by Peter Smith, and it was also reviewed at the time by Richard L. Coe in the Washington Post. It was, I agree, a production stressing clarity, but it did impose stage action at the beginning which makes an explicit state-