Tread On Kings
Five years ago, I did a big dumb ambitious thing with some of my Shakespeare friends. This winter we’re doing something bigger, dumber, and ambitiouser.
From December 29 to January 4, we’ll perform our conflated Henry IV in four cities with four different casts in the Tread On Kings tour.
Trying to roll out something this big has made it painfully obvious that we need a better mechanism for announcing projects than just posting on IG and updating our website. So we’ve started a mailing list, which you can subscribe to HERE.
I know what you’re thinking, “Why are you using one mailing list to promote another? What is this digital marketing ouroboros you’ve unveiled?” To be clear, this Substack is about Shakespeare more generally, which would include reviews, essays, and personal musings on the text (if I ever had time to write any of those things), whereas the Elsewhere mailing list will only be to announce Elsewhere projects: shows, classes, and tours.
Fundraiser Raffle
We’re raffling off some amazing prizes to fund the Tread On Kings Tour. We have prizes in North Adams MA, Richmond VA, and Columbia SC. If you’d like to enter our raffle, Venmo @Elsewhere-Shakespeare ($10 for one entry or $25 for three) and specify whether you’d like to be entered into the MA, VA, or SC drawing.
North Adams, MA Prizes: A membership to MassMoCA, Art by Henry Kunkel, A copy of The Play’s The Thing, signed by Mac
Richmond, VA Prizes: Shakespeare tattoo by Nick Barnett, Art by Matt Lively, Art by Sophie Sallade, A copy of The Play’s The Thing signed by Mac
Columbia, SC Prizes: Art by Ann Anrrich, West Columbia gift basket, A copy of The Play’s The Thing, signed by Mac
For more info and pictures of the prizes, check out our Instagram.
Five years of Elsewhere Shakespeare
I wasn’t a theatre kid growing up, so when I started working in theatre, I didn’t start with a lot of the knowledge and assumptions that folks who grow up doing school plays and community theatre. Some of that ignorance was embarrassing, but some of it served to keep my mind open.
I always found the performances more interesting in the rehearsal room than they ended up being later on the stage. And I saw how much time and energy were spent raising money to pay for the things like lights and elaborate costumes that — in my opinion — only made the shows less engaging. There seemed to be an inverse correlation between the amount of time and money we spent producing a show and how much I ended up enjoying that show.
Growing up in the punk scene, we were always doing fast cheap shows in weird spaces. We noticed that there was a laundromat in town that never had an attendant inside. A large, open space with power outlets and no one supervising it? We booked two of our friends’ bands, promoted the show via word of mouth and xeorxed flyers. We loaded amps and drumkits into the Lost Sock Laundromat on Main St and spent an hour moshing on the linoleum tile floor and stage diving off dryers. We were honestly a little disappointed that the cops didn’t show up to kick us out.
I suspected that the same kind of energy could be applied to producing a Shakespeare play. I had never acted, never produced a show myself, but I had a sense that I could muddle through if I had a group of artists along for the ride. I was willing to ask dumb questions, propose absurd collaborations, and look like an idiot if it failed.
When I met Katie and Cole in 2019, I had a much stronger sense of the whys than the hows of what I would come to call Punk Shakespeare. I was also laboring under the delusion that we were reinventing the wheel to a much greater extent than turned out to be the case as I was only vaguely aware of Original Practices as a concept, and had never heard of Back Room Shakespeare Project.
[Aside] Thank god for that last point. When I first discovered BRSP I was so discouraged that if I had not already started Elsewhere, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. Their ideas were so similar, but elucidated with a level of technical and historical knowledge that I don’t think I’ll ever achieve, that it seemed pointless to try and re-explore a continent they’d already mapped.
These days we have a lot more tools in our toolbox, and also a growing sense of what separates us from other folks doing similar work. One of the advantages of a decentralized leadership structure, both at the company level and the individual show level, is that it allows us much more flexibility with our process. Each show’s ensemble decides what it needs, and we magpie at the company level. I’ve lost count of how many tools or exercises or ideas actors have brought into a rehearsal room only for them to become part of our repertoire for future shows.
This winter, we’re embarking on our biggest and most ambitious project yet. It is culmination of all the ideas I had in 2019. Over the years I’ve been able to trick enough artists of actual talent into working with me that now we finally have a few hows to accompany the whys, and we’re ready to open up the engine on the Elsewhere car.
This project represents our most radical script: two plays cut down into a single 90min show. It’s also our most limber process: 21 actors total will play the seven tracks in four vastly different venues spread over 500 miles. Harold Bloom — I don’t give a shit how you feel about him — says that the complete Henry IV story is the best encapsulation of Shakespeare, so if we’re going to take our biggest swing yet, I agree with Bloom that this is the story to tell. And if our process is going to work, it has to work under these circumstances because these are the exact kinda punk circumstances it was built to live in.
Elsewhere has always been about giving artists permission they may be afraid to give themselves. That’s why we give away all our production resources: we want more people to make more Shakespeare, and if we can put tools in their hands, we’re happy to let them benefit from our labor. We’re hoping that this tour provides a large enough and impressive enough proof of concept for an even bigger group of artists to to do this. If a white trash high school dropout with no institutional support can produce a tour like this, imagine what a respectable and competent Shakespearean could do!
If you want regular updates on Elsewhere projects, subscribe to our mailing list HERE.
And if you want to enter our raffle, Venmo @Elsewhere-Shakespeare ($10 for one entry or $25 for three) and specify whether you’d like to be entered into the MA, VA, or SC drawing.
If you’d like to support the tour but don’t want to enter the raffle, you can make a tax-deductible donation here.