Rick:

Hello, and welcome to Northwest Philly Neighbors.

I'm Rick Mohr, and my guest is Alex Burns, Artistic Director at the Quintessence Theatre in Mount Airy.

He's the creative spirit behind their terrific fresh productions of classic plays that are always true to the heart of the story, and he shares all kinds of rich details and insights from his inside perspective.

He's out to show that classic theater is not elitist, where everyone who walks in the door feels transported as they experience the story together.

Hear how, after being certain he was leaving Philadelphia forever, a chance meeting on Germantown Avenue made him choose Mount Airy for Quintessence.

How he created a power-charged version of Hamlet by taking out all the parts where you're told what's going to happen before it happens.

And lots more.

He's a pleasure to hear, articulate, down-to-earth, and full of heart and humor, whether he's talking about big ideas or the real-life challenges of keeping a small theater afloat.

And don't miss part two next time with great stories that really open up how Quintessence productions come to life.

Enjoy!

You wrote that when you were 11 or 12 in London, you saw Wind in the Willows, and that it went a long way towards ensuring you'd spend your life in theater.

Yes.

Can you say more about that?

Alex Burns:

Well, I was very lucky because my father was working in London, and I got to live in London for almost three years, and the British have this education system where they keep you in school for a longer day, but then when you're done, you don't really have homework.

And my mother is a costume designer and was the drama teacher at Germantown Friends School, and so she would take us to the theater every night after being in school.

Rick:

Every night?

Alex Burns:

Pretty much every night.

I mean, London is just a city where there is just so much being offered all the time.

And it wasn't mandatory.

She would say, I'm going to go see this tonight.

Does anyone want to come?

And I would always say yes.

And I got to see the most really amazing theater, a lot of which was sort of way above my capacity as an 11, 12 year old, but it gave me so much curiosity both for the art form of theater, but also for the world as a whole.

And I think that kind of wonder is the best way to go to the theater, not trying or needing to have control over it or understand everything that happens, but just sort of experiencing the world that's being created for you.

And The Wind in the Willows was being produced at the National Theater in England.

And I read The Wind in the Willows as a child, and I had this book on tape of a recording of it that I would listen to pretty much every night when I went to sleep.

So the story was so dear to me.

And then to get to see it created on stage at the National Theater was one of those experiences where I was like, oh, my God, you can do anything on stage.

And granted, in England, they literally can do anything on stage because they have the resources to pretty much do anything on stage.

And the set was it was in the Olivier Theater, which has this famous technology called the Drum Revolve, which is this turntable that goes down, like, I think, 10 stories below the theater.

So they can bring up these huge sets and sort of rotate them into place and they can change them underneath.

So these just massive worlds can sort of grow out of the floor.

And in a play like or story like Wind in the Willows, where there's all of these underground layers of the animals and there's the river and there's the prison, and they could really sort of take you on that journey, both in terms of storytelling, but also they could actually create it for you.

And so once I had seen that that in tandem with a production of Christopher Marlowe's Tambur Lane that the RSC was doing, which is a very bloody four and a half hour long Elizabethan epic, I was just like, where else would you want to spend your life?

Where else would you want to be telling stories?

In England, going to the theater is part of like a cultural duty, almost.

That sounds like it's a burden, but it's part of the civic life of the people of England.

It's theater has been part of their culture in such a primary way for so long that I mean, I don't have, I think, a British friend who doesn't go at least once a month, if not more to the theater.

And it's part of the conversation of London is did you see this play?

Did you see this actor?

Did you see this playwright's new thing?

Even still today, despite the advances of technology and Netflix and all of this kind of instant access to to entertainment.

And so to be in a room with an audience that was there for that reason was so different than anything I'd ever experienced.

Rick:

And you can sense that as a young person.

Alex Burns:

Yeah, it's such a thrilling experience as an audience member.

And I've realized that so much of what I'm doing in my life is is not just for the sake of me trying to create and tell stories, but also to create that experience for the audience where they feel transported as a group and they have to they have to watch and experience a story together, which is something that you don't have that experience when you're watching it at home alone or on your on your device or even in a movie theater.

It's still a very passive experience compared to when you have a human being in front of you in front of a collective of other human beings.

So, yeah, so I do really think about the Wind in the Willows as one of those moments where it sort of burdened me with believing that truly anything is possible in the theater.

And and that the power of that possibility is just awesome in its limitlessness.

And though I don't have a theater like the National to work in, I allow myself to dream on that level when I'm creating things.

And then I slowly cut myself back because of reality.

But it's a great way, I think, to start when you're when you're dreaming about a story you want to tell.

Rick:

Yeah.

So so you studied theater in college.

And what what drew you to directing rather than acting or other?

Alex Burns:

I just never really wanted to be performing myself.

When I was a really little kid, I was obsessed with playing Gavroche and Les Mis because I was a singer as a kid.

And I was in the Philadelphia Boys Choir.

And I loved being in the operas just because I loved singing my heart out with an orchestra.

But I never wanted to like take the stage, even when I very famously stopped a rehearsal of an opera to like comment on something that a director said.

I pretty much got fired for doing that.

I was like a nine year old or whatever.

So my mind was always sort of looking at it from the outside.

And I feel like that's the thing that for a lot of theatrical directors that they realize at some point in their journey that where they would like to be is sort of watching and building a world with the actors and finding the right people to put together these events or create these events.

And that's what I've always loved to do.

And part of me thought for a while that I would actually go even more into just producing and creating the sort of systems through which these theatrical experiences could be created.

But when I put myself in that seat, I so desperately missed being in the rehearsal room and working with the actors and then watching the show grow and sharing with an audience and seeing what needed to change or how I needed to adjust something.

And that the thrill of that part of it really was why I wanted to do it.

And so the only way you can do that is by being a director.

And I think for me, the world sort of kept opening up opportunities for me to meet and work with people that were directors that were really essential for my own kind of development and journey that I almost wasn't in control of.

And a lot of the times when I would get an offer to work on a project or when I'd say I want to work with this person and they'd say, Oh, what about working with this person?

I'd be like, No, I don't like that director.

I don't.

That's not how I work.

And then I realized subsequently that it was some sort of larger force that was directing me in the right way to sort of to learn what I needed to learn as a storyteller and in this very bizarre but specific art form that is theater.

And so that was also something where once I saw the universe sort of pulling me, I trusted that, I started to trust that and allow that to be sort of a guide for me in terms of, no, this is what I'm here for.

And I almost, I do almost curse that feeling sometimes because being in the theater is not the easiest profession in 2019.

The world is certainly pulling away its resources and its focus to many other things.

So it's interesting feeling on one level so guided into this life and this career and having no other choice.

I mean, there's truly nothing else I want to do with my life and my energy, while also at the same time as an intelligent sort of fiscally minded person, seeing the reality being more and more challenging.

And so that's a funny kind of paradox in the game of it all.

But also thrilling.

It keeps you alive.

It keeps you on your toes.

Rick:

Yeah.

Was there among those people that you worked with along the way, one that was particularly inspiring that you want to mention?

Alex Burns:

Oh, my goodness.

I feel particularly blessed in this area of getting to have these mentors who just sort of opened up the world for me in different ways.

I think one of the most profound moments for me was working with a Welsh director named Michael Bogdanoff, and he was most well known for two things.

He founded the English National Shakespeare Company with Michael Pennington, and they did these modern dress productions of Shakespeare's history plays and took them around the world as called The War of the Roses.

And at that time, the idea of seeing the kings and queens of England in jeans and leather jackets was mind-blowing.

And they really sort of revolutionized this idea of modern dress Shakespeare.

In tandem with Michael was a director who just kept the entire focus of his work on the language and the structure of the language, specifically with Shakespeare, and felt that if there was any lack of focus on the clarity of the text or the force of the verse, the ambic pentameter, it was a worthless exploration of Shakespeare, which is a very British vision of Shakespeare.

But as a young American director who loves Shakespeare to get to live through that and to understand that and see the truth of that focus and the need for that focus was something that I could never have taken a workshop or a class on.

And I got to assist him at the Shakespeare Theater in Chicago on a production of The Winter's Tale.

He had written a number of amazing essays on Shakespeare and this incredible book about running the English National Shakespeare Company.

So I walked into the room excited to meet this god, and he was just this human being who was very funny and very acerbic and very sexual and very present.

And he, I'll never forget, at the end of a very first difficult day of rehearsal, he was like, we're going to the pub, and we just sat there and drank Guinness and talked about the world.

And it was just such an amazing moment as a 21 year old living in Chicago to have that gift.

And the other gift that he gave me was American actors are trained largely through what is thought of as like a post method system, which is sort of a derivation of Stanislavsky through the method system that came to the United States.

So it's largely driven on a sort of idea of emotional truth in the actor.

It's very hard for an actor who's being driven by their sort of feelings to then engage with heightened language, which is inherently artificial.

It's a totally different sort of approach.

So watching him wrestle his approach to language with an American acting tradition was quite brutal.

And a lot of there was a lot of conflict in that sort of marriage.

But the result was something that was really thrilling to have the kind of emotional truth of the American actor with a kind of control of language created a theater to me, which was where I think American Shakespeare is at its absolute finest.

That was my maiden voyage into this world of American Shakespeare.

And it was I don't know who I would be if I hadn't had that opportunity and seen the actual techniques and the craft that he had to give that to the actors.

Rick:

Is it possible to think of an example of a particular line and the way somebody was inclined to say it, but the way that he guided or somebody else guided them to say it?

Alex Burns:

I think the main thing that was so fascinating was his adherence to the actual pentameter in terms of the unstressed stressed and the idea of pentameter being five feet and the idea that pentameter is always moving forward and the energy is always building.

Rick:

And to say it in meter.

Alex Burns:

In meter, yeah.

And so he would actually sit there, and I know that for anyone who's ever worked on Shakespeare, a lot of people will cringe when they hear this, but he would have either a ruler or like a book, and when the actor would fall off the verse, he would start slamming the ruler on the stressed words.

And when they would miss the line ending and just jump through to the next line or stress an inappropriate word, he would slam down on the next beat.

And so imagine if you're Hermione or Paulina in Winter's Tale, and you're going through this emotional speech and you have this man sitting there with a ruler like slamming the pentameter down.

It creates a kind of conflict, obviously.

But what was profound to me from the outside of watching that battle was that once the actors inherited the rhythm and had the rhythm in them, the clarity of the text went from 10 to 80.

And the words that were the key words that you needed to understand what was being said became the words that you were hearing first.

And then the emotional life of the actor, which was filling those words, met that sort of rhythm, the music of the language, which to me was the revelation in how Shakespeare works.

And I personally don't ever use a ruler or slam my fist or anything to create that pentameter sensation.

But I do insist upon the rhythm and spend a lot of time that a lot of people don't always understand why on clarifying how the rhythm works and how the rhythm gets passed between the actors and how the melody arrives through this kind of structure of language.

You can do like the key lines, but those are obvious, like to be or not to be, that is the question.

Sometimes people break that up in some kind of bizarre way to like think through the emotional truth of it.

But in reality, the pentameter is telling you be not be is quest.

So those are the key words that you get to use as you're exploring that.

And what's interesting is those key words be not be is quest is the event of the line.

The existence of being or not being is the search.

And people are like, there's no way Shakespeare was sitting there writing this and thinking this.

But that is also how poetry works, right?

I mean, that's how the structure of language when it is structured is functioning to give you that kind of elevation or energy on top of the thought and on top of the beauty of the word.

Rick:

I have a great love of meter in poetry and song, and the most of the world doesn't.

Alex Burns:

Right.

Rick:

And I really appreciate it.

Alex Burns:

I always find it really fascinating when an artist says, oh, my impulse, which is not following the meter or the verse, is better than the meter of the verse.

To me, it's like when somebody is singing a song and says, so the composer wanted me to live in this word, but I prefer to live in this word.

So I'm going to shorten this beat and I'm going to elongate this beat.

And sometimes there's revelation in that and you learn new things.

But a lot of the times, I think there really is reason and beauty in the actual structure as sort of given.

And I really love when artists are able to, actors and singers are able to use the limitations or the constraint of the rhythm to bring new meaning to it as opposed to ignoring it.

And that's a funny, it's a funny conversation because we're living in this moment very much right now about like, this is my truth, this is what I feel.

So therefore it's right, you know, let's ignore this 400 year old poem.

I'm always fascinated to say, well, what's the truth in the 400 year poem for you to find a new truth from?

What's the truth of the rhythm here?

Why is this word the word that gets sort of the emphasis or the energy?

And what does that teach you about how your journey is potentially maybe misfocused?

Or maybe you're off in some other space and you need to come back to this moment or this space.

And Michael Magdanoff, he recently passed away.

And I was really sad because I was so eager to do a play by Shakespeare for him to come see because it's funny when you don't realize it in the moment, but how much someone sort of implants themselves in you and their belief system becomes part of your belief system.

And he really had that effect on me.

And just the theater is about sort of the ancestors more than almost any other art form because everyone passes down the traditions of their fathers and mothers of the theater.

I feel a lot of the stuff that came through him to me and I'm always interested whenever I'm working specifically with actors or with young directors on Shakespeare, what they see my focus being and how they get connected into this sort of tradition, especially doing it in America where it's not, I mean, it indirectly is our cultural heritage, but it is an indirect reclaiming of Shakespeare.

Rick:

So you started Quintessence in New York and then this idea emerged of moving to Mount Airy.

How did that arise and what did your friends think of it?

Alex Burns:

We're in our 10th season now, so I've been asking myself this question a lot actually.

How did this happen?

The dream for Quintessence as an idea, as a company, was how do you build a classical theater that is looking at the classics for today?

What is my generation and the next generation?

What do we need from the classics?

Why do we need the classics?

And how do we make sure that we share that with our generation who is no longer choosing to actively engage with the classics?

I don't in any time question the need for that engagement.

What I question is how do I as an artist make it clear to the rest of my generation and future generations that there is that need?

So we thought New York was the right place to try and do that, and there were a number of companies at that time who have continued to do progressive classic theater is what I like to call it.

And we realized we were part of a whole group of young artists who all had different interpretations but the same kind of idea.

And I had always, having come from Philadelphia, when I got on the plane to go to college at Northwestern, I was like, I'm done.

I'm never coming back to Philadelphia.

Thank God.

Here I go to Chicago.

The theater scene out there is amazing.

I thought I was never ever coming back.

But what I realized really quickly was that I'm very much from Philadelphia.

I'd go to a party in college and I'd always end up in the corner with the kids from DC., Philly, and New York.

So that was very clear to me.

So I did go to New York.

And then in New York, it became very clear to me that there just was no financial way, economic way that young artists could live in the city of New York anymore and be artists first and foremost.

You had to have umpteen jobs or some kind of extreme personal wealth if you were going to actually be able to just focus on your craft as an artist in New York City.

And I didn't realize that until I got there.

And then once I was there, it was very clear that I was going to have to go elsewhere if I was going to be an artist, not an entertainer, or an employee for some other larger organization that wasn't focused on theater.

And so I kept thinking, where do I go?

What do I do?

And then I was here in Philadelphia visiting my parents and the Sedgwick Theater was a space that I've always had in my head from when I was a kid because they had just begun to reopen it as a community arts center when I was in high school.

I had met with the owners and said, I've started this thing in New York.

We're doing the classics, but we're adapting them for today.

And Philadelphia doesn't have currently anything that sort of has that kind of mindset.

What would you say if we built this new classical theater for Philadelphia here at the Sedgwick?

The Sedgwick needs a lot of help.

It needs a lot of love.

It's currently just this one room in the front of the building.

But if we can grow as an organization with this vision, I think our vision could take over the whole space and bring the whole building back to life and bring the community a new kind of life.

Rick:

So were you walking down the street one day and saw the Sedgwick and this kind of came to you?

Alex Burns:

Yeah, no, no, literally I'm walking down Germantown Avenue and the owner, Betty Ann Felner, is in the lobby vacuuming and I knock on the window and I'm like, Hey, my name is Alex Burns.

I know who you are, Betty Ann Felner, and it's so amazing what you guys have been doing here and what's happening now and can I start doing theater here?

Rick:

Like it just came to you in that moment.

Yeah.

Alex Burns:

And we thought we'll do a trial run and it went well enough to think about doing a season.

And then we did a season and that went just well enough to think about doing a second season.

And so it's really been this kind of trickle of believing and having a very clear sort of mission statement and vision for the organization.

And then every time we're about to die, something shifts and a new resource arrives or a new idea comes in that enables us to keep going.

So it's been incredibly intensive and incredibly exhausting, but incredibly rewarding in that it does feel like it's been a very organic process, both coming here and then the growing that has happened to us.

And I still feel like we're only at the very beginning of what this could become.

I still feel like Philadelphia cherishes music and cherishes fine art in a way that it doesn't yet know how to cherish theater.

And I find I constantly meet people in Philadelphia who go to theater in London and go to theater in New York, but they don't go to theater in Philadelphia.

And I'm always really fascinated by that person, because I think that is the group that ultimately will find quintessence and help quintessence become a major theater within the sort of context of Philadelphia and more importantly in the context of the country.

And that's the long-term goal, sort of as we grow forward.

Because there isn't a space right now for people that are devoted to classical theater outside of these sort of regional pockets that can really have a lifelong sustainable career.

And my hope is really that quintessence can become one of those places on the regional map for artists that are devoted and trained to do the classics, because it really is an entirely different kind of approach to theater.

And we're getting closer and closer, which is both exciting and scary.

Rick:

And the crazy idea of, I mean, you perform in the inner lobby.

That required a leap of imagination at some point.

Alex Burns:

Yes.

I mean, the interesting thing about that to me, part of what I don't care for about a lot of American theater is that there really is the sense of a traditional theater space where there's a proscenium arch and there's almost a barrier between what's happening on stage and the audience.

And the audience wants to come and they want to sit there and they want to know what the play is.

They want a synopsis telling them about all the things that are going to happen.

And they want to be able to sort of passively watch an event that happens, which to me is the opposite of the whole reason why I fell in love with theater, which is this idea that the storytellers and the actors are putting this event into a space and everyone is engaging together in this event.

So getting to do the plays in this space that we're in gives us a huge amount of flexibility to really break down what we call in the theater the fourth wall, the barrier between the audience and the actors.

And that doesn't mean that we're throwing things physically at the audience or necessarily that people are coming and sitting in your lap.

That does happen sometimes when it's appropriate.

But it's really about just this idea that we're all in one room and we're all part of this event.

And we need the audience and their emotion and their reactions as much as the audience needs the actors to tell the story.

Rick:

So in a way, it was fortunate that there was this large, undefined space.

Alex Burns:

Yes, yes.

And I think the other thing too is that the building was built in the late 1920s with a very kind of bizarre art deco.

There's influences of Amish in the paintings on the walls.

It's very much of this place and of a pastime in this place.

And yet we're doing theater in it.

And that works for us for what we're doing because of the grandeur of the space.

It was built as a movie palace and it has that kind of grandeur.

So when a king walks in the room, it feels appropriate in a way.

And the building has allowed us to already take the audience out of 2019 on Germantown Avenue, where the septa bus is thundering past, to wherever we want to take them.

And so the building gives us a huge gift in that way.

And it's also dilapidated.

I mean, it was built in the 20s and it has received almost no care other than basic maintenance and cleaning.

So part of that too is inviting the audience to sort of engage with their theatrical imagination and go on these kind of fantastical journeys with us.

Which to me is so different than a lot of the new spaces that are being built in Philadelphia, which feel like a Marriott Hotel or a convention center or a high school auditorium where there is no fantasy.

There's nothing grand about it at all.

It's very kind of corporate, which to me is not helpful with most of the stories we're trying to tell.

So it really to me is a beautiful gift to us as artists to get to be in a space that resonates like that.

And we also have, I'm not really a superstitious person or believe in the supernatural entirely, but there is a presence that seems to be in the building that lives in what used to be the projection room of the theater.

And we've called him Robert because we had a sound designer who used to do the Ouija board and communicated with this energy.

And it's very interesting to feel that whatever that is, there is a force in the building that protects the building.

And right now it seems very beneficent to Quintessence.

So that's a lovely thing to have as well.

All theaters have ghosts and it's great that the Sedgwick also seems to have some kind of energy like that.

Rick:

Right.

And you might not find it in the beautifully built modern downtown.

Alex Burns:

Right.

Yeah.

Rick:

So you said that your challenge at Quintessence is to prove that classic theater is accessible and not elitist.

Alex Burns:

Yes.

Rick:

Can you say more about that?

Alex Burns:

Yes.

I mean it's almost an impossible challenge to prove today that bringing together a group of people and paying them a living wage to create a handcrafted item for an audience of say, on a nightly basis, 150 people over the course of a run, say 3000 people, that it's not elitist because it's such a specific thing that has great expense that's only being provided to a very small group of people.

So that's the challenge, right?

And there are many ways you can address that challenge.

And you can try and remove the barrier of the cost of the ticket to give more access, but you ultimately don't have that much supply.

And more importantly, if you can't make money off of selling tickets, how do you pay for the artists that are involved in the project?

And in classical theater, you have usually many artists involved to create something of value that honors the art and honors the scale of the art.

So to me, that's the economic barrier of that question.

That's just a very real one.

And without real patronage, it's very challenging to sort of figure that part out.

If the world continues to evolve in a way where the people with means are able to subsidize and underwrite and support these theaters so that they're not highly dependent upon the ticket costs and you can remove that barrier, I think the part to me that's not elitist is the fact that anyone who walks into the room and allows themselves to experience the story will feel their humanity engaged and hopefully transcended.

And it removes the barriers of belief or politics from a civic event.

The reason why people are in the room is not because they're on Team A or Team B.

Rick:

And we can go on a human journey together even though we have no pre-connection to each other.

Alex Burns:

Right.

And my favorite thing specifically about the genius playwrights like Shakespeare, like Chekhov, like Singh, who we're doing right now, is that you can have somebody who is a devout, fiscally, socially conservative person, and you can have an agnostic or atheist liberal socialist, and both of them can sit at the play, and both of them can thrill to the play and find both their own kind of support for their own ideology, but hopefully a collective understanding of the human experience or event.

And to me it's that collective moment where you take two people from completely different backgrounds and they see themselves reflected in the same character, usually in similar ways.

That to me is the most essential part about theater.

And I think that that's why the theater was part of the Greek civic life as it was.

And this idea of democracy was connected so closely with theater, was that if you are with everyone in your community and you have to watch a human event, either a comedy or a tragedy, that collective experience of that for all of us to be together and watch that is where we can actually process and ask really difficult questions about what it is to be human.

And I think a lot of these kind of more visceral, knee-jerk, black and white responses to things that are happening in our society and the sort of taking sides really quickly without a lot of sort of time to process is coming out of this inability for us to come together and to tell a whole story, which is what the theater is for.

So those are like really big lofty ideals for the theater.

And it's hard to say that when you're saying, and we have this little space that has 150 seats in Northwest Philadelphia.

But when we are at our best at Quintessence, I think you truly see our community of Northwest Philadelphia in the space.

And you see people from all different backgrounds in terms of class, in terms of race, in terms of political backgrounds.

And everyone feeling that that person next to you who laughs at that moment, and you're like, how could you laugh at that?

Or seeing that person next to you who's crying because of something and then suddenly feeling that emotion is such a huge part of what we need to figure out how to get back to.

And so that's the goal.

I don't see how you can call that elite or elitist.

I think the other thing that bothers me is that I think a lot of the cause of it being elitist is because of academia and intellectualism.

And this idea that in order to access these plays or understand them, you have to have read the book or you have to have gone to the class or you've had to have a degree.

And what hurts me about that is these plays were written in their own time for the people of their time.

And a lot of the times the barrier that people feel is not the fact that they don't have access to the characters, but a little bit of a lost in translation thing where they're not giving themselves permission to not understand every word or not understand every thought that's happening.

And I feel like we as Americans feel suddenly stupid or disenfranchised if we can't fully grasp something right as it's given to us, which is why I think things head to the lowest common denominator in formats like television because everything has to be on the surface, completely explicable using language that there's no barrier to.

And I wish and I hope that what we can do in the theater and specifically through the classics is giving permission to be lost, give permission to not understand something, be given permission to be the first step of a longer journey for an idea or a word or an experience and not have this need for gratification, immediate gratification, or sort of complete control.

There's a surrender that's required in theater.

And if all those things were embraced, I feel like people would very quickly not alienate themselves and think of this work and the scale of this work and the stories we're telling and the language we're using as one foreign or two somehow highbrow, but would see that it's as human and basic.

Rick:

And at the same time, it seems to me that your productions are very accessible.

Like you kind of go the extra mile to pull the accessibility out of whatever it is and really reach people.

Alex Burns:

And truly the attempt there is not to be accessible, but just to fulfill the desire of the play in my mind.

So when I'm doing a play, and I get blamed for this a lot, I'm usually not trying to serve it in a way that is necessarily more accessible or less accessible to our audience, but really just saying, what is the essence of this playwright's work that is most accessible, and how to use the piece itself to thrill?

Because I think that most of these plays had an incredible impact on the audience in its original moment, sometimes for the positive, sometimes for the negative.

And to me, that energy is still present in the work today, if you honor it and do it the right way, and will engage an audience today.

Our big burden is, how do we get people just to step into the room to feel that, you know, and to surrender to that?

And it just, it's so funny to me, we're just so trained now, like, you give something like five minutes, right, and then you change the channel, or you turn it off, or you just disengage with it.

And what I keep asking the people that have invested in Quintessence, and the subscribers, and the people that keep coming back, is give us the evening, you know?

Trust me, I promise you that if you engage in the entire event, it will give you something back that will be unexpected and quite extraordinary.

But it's that agreement that is this part that's still challenging, especially with considering how much you have to choose from now.

Yeah.

Rick:

I was fascinated to read about your Hamlet.

Well, what you said was that all, everything that happens in Hamlet is foreshadowed.

And you took it all out.

Yes.

Alex Burns:

That was a lot of fun.

I directed a remounted production of Hamlet at the Shakespeare Theater in DC.

And while I was working on the play, someone sort of casually said, well, I don't like Hamlet because everything that happens in the play that's cool, you're told about before it happens.

And I remember thinking, initially doing that thing that you do when someone's being critical about something you love was sort of like, what are you talking about?

That's not true.

And then as I was working on the reading again and working on the play, I was like, that's actually like really true.

Like every single event you're told about the ghost, then the ghost shows up.

You're told about Hamlet's madness, then Hamlet's madness shows up.

You're told about, like everything is presented to you and then you see it.

You're told about Ophelia's death and then you end up at the funeral.

So what happens if, as an audience, you're just falling into everything?

And the thing that was really thrilling to me when I first took a pen to the script and just cut it all was, one, how short it was, two, it didn't cut any of the best poetry that Shakespeare wrote in the play, and three, the argument that people make about how the play is largely about stasis, as in Hamlet not taking action and being frozen, is suddenly gone.

And you're suddenly like, wow, he's actually moving pretty quickly through this series of choices and actions.

He's just taking us through each moment and then doing it.

It was for me one of the coolest pieces of theater we've ever made at Quintessence.

It was so kind of power charged and fast and just the emotion because there was no sort of pausing.

It was like just hitting all the big moments in the play, like boom, boom, boom, boom.

And then you're at the end.

But I love doing those types of, especially with the classics that people know or feel familiar with, taking the structure of the play and sort of inverting it in a way that doesn't in any way change the play or subvert the play, but just sort of refocuses it.

But I really hope I get to do that production again.

I personally enjoyed watching it that way.

And I loved, for people that weren't as familiar with the play, they were like, this is Hamlet, this is crazy, this is awesome.

Rick:

Has the word gotten out about that at all so that other people might be using your adaptation?

Alex Burns:

Yeah, I mean, a number of friends came to see it who run classical theaters from around.

The thing that's very interesting is when you that aggressively cut Shakespeare, a lot of people who quote unquote love Shakespeare get very angry.

And they're not really interested in that kind of exploration.

They're fine if you want to do something insane, like put it on the moon.

But if you're actually going to use the play, re sort of tell the tale through the play, then they're like, you can't do that.

Or I can't see this play without this speech or you can't do this play without this moment.

Or how dare you cut this, like all that kind of stuff.

And in that point, it's like part of what we're trying to do is open this play up in a new way for a new audience.

So I'm always interested when people get that kind of protective over it.

But yes, I really would like to find a way of continuing to do that play.

Another play that is interestingly similar that I hope to, when we present it in Quintessence, just to refocus it is Antony and Cleopatra, because that's one of my absolutely favorite of Shakespeare's plays.

And it's written like Hollywood blockbuster.

And it always gets sort of bogged down in itself and in its epicness.

So I hope to be able to sort of play with that one as well in a similar, losing parts of the story in order to really gain the larger event that's happening.

Rick:

We're going to pause there and continue next time, as Alex tells some great stories that really open up how Quintessence productions come to life.

Meanwhile, you're welcome to read more in the show notes or on our website nwphillypodcast.net.

And I love hearing from listeners.

You can email Rick at nwphillypodcast.net with your thoughts or just to let me know you're listening.

I'm Rick Mohr.

See you next time for more stories from Northwest Philly Neighbors.