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Shakespeare & Beyond

Excerpt - Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars

Avant-garde director Peter Sellars is the subject of a new book for Arden Shakespeare’s “Shakespeare in the Theatre” series. Written by George Washington University professor Ayanna Thompson, Shakespeare in the Theatre: Peter Sellars is an in-depth look at the American director’s stage work: his approach, process, and technique; his casting decisions; the tension between innovation and accessibility; and the context of his art.

The excerpt below explores Sellars’s “uniquely American take on William Shakespeare” and a 1980 production of King Lear that addressed “the dysfunctional ways Americans addressed race and class at that time.”


“Yet Sellars has a uniquely American take on William Shakespeare – an American take that renders William Shakespeare as a uniquely American playwright. This is an idea that Sellars has espoused throughout his career. For example, in a 1998 interview, Sellars explains his belief in pragmatic terms – Shakespeare has always been popular in the United States so, therefore, he should be understood and approached as an American author. ‘Shakespeare is still the most produced playwright in America, so I consider him an American author, because clearly there’s something there that America responds to very deeply, and always did – in the 19th century these touring companies were doing Shakespeare in the mining camps’ (quoted in Bates, ‘Directing a National Consciousness’, 87). In fact, Sellars’s most recent opera, Girls of the Golden West (music by John Adams with a libretto by Peter Sellars), which is set in the 1850s Gold Rush in California, contains a scene with a touring Shakespeare company in a mining camp (San Francisco Opera, ‘Press Release’). The American fascination with Shakespeare extends back to its colonial days, and Sellars uses this long history to bolster his argument that Shakespeare is American.