Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company

Co-authored by the resident dramaturg at Shakespeare Theatre Company and a long-time scholarly consultant, this book chronicles how a small repertory troupe at the Folger Theatre on Capitol Hill became an internationally renowned company performing in a lavish, multi-venue performing arts centre in downtown Washington, D.C.

The artistic vision and business acumen of Michael Kahn, the founding Artistic Director, largely catalyzed this transformation, but so too did the forces of neoliberalism and, more recently, globalization and new media. Accordingly, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company not only examines directorial decision-making but also 3 decades of social and economic change in the nation’s capital, from the complexities of gentrification to the arts policies of successive administrations.

In addition to discussions of directorial practice, this book examines the ambivalence of American theatre artists toward their British cultural inheritance. Analyses of representative productions and interviews with Kahn and his British successor, Simon Godwin, illuminate this complex relationship: one that aspires to a cosmopolitan Anglophilia while positioning classically trained American actors as worthy rivals to their counterparts at the RSC and the National Theatre of Great Britain.

This is a timely and valuable study, for the story of Shakespeare in America is inseparable from that of the nation’s capital. It was in its theaters that President Lincoln went to see, time and again, the greatest Shakespeare actors of his day (and where his assassin knew where to find him). It is there that the Folger Shakespeare Library, the most important hub in the world for early modern scholars, now stands. And it is there that a tradition of staging plays animated by their proximity to power, law-making, and protest, has informed decades of productions, some groundbreaking, others forgettable, at the Folger’s theater and then the Shakespeare Theatre Company, under the leadership of Michael Kahn and his successor, Simon Godwin (both interviewed at length). It’s a fascinating history, with many twists and turns, and Drew Lichtenberg and Deborah C. Payne do a superb job of bringing it to life. James Shapiro, Professor of English, Columbia University, USA, and author of Shakespeare in a Divided America.
Rarely is a theater’s history redolent of such a rich interplay of political figures and venerable institutions and written with both sharp prose and subtle wit. Lichtenberg and Payne detail the forces that culminate in STC’s rise to preeminence and Shakespeare’s role in forging the character of Washington, DC. Carla Della Gatta, University of Maryland, USA
[Drew Lichtenberg and Deborah C. Payne’s] eminently readable history of the Shakespeare Theatre Company is a beautifully written, nuanced paean to DC, to theater, and to the role of Shakespeare in America. DC Theatre Arts

Drew Lichtenberg has been resident dramaturg at the Shakespeare Theatre Company, USA, since 2011. He has worked as a dramaturg, literary manager and translator-adaptor with the Royal National Theatre, Public Theater, Roundabout, La Mama, Oregon Shakespeare Festival, McCarter Theatre Center, Yale Rep and Baltimore Center Stage. As an educator, he has taught courses at Catholic University of America, David Geffen School of Drama at Yale University and Eugene Lang College at the New School. His publications include The Piscatorbühne Century (2021).

Deborah C. Payne is Professor Emerita of Literature at American University, USA. She was the Humanities Research Consultant at the Shakespeare Theatre Company from 2000 – 2009, and she has dramaturged for Studio Theatre, Arena Stage, the Kennedy Center, and the Bach Sinfonia. Publications include The Business of English Restoration Theatre, 1660 – 1700 (2024), Revisiting Shakespeare’s Lost Play (2016), Four Restoration Libertine Plays (2005), The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre (2000) and Cultural Readings of Restoration and Eighteenth-Century English Theatre (1995).

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