Sam Gold
speaker
41 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Nov 2024
last heard Nov 2024
Sam Gold’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
The New Yorker Radio Hour · Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth · 12 Nov 2024
podcast
I want to think that in this moment, after the pandemic, and after people have had enough years, like, completely addicted to their phones, that young people are starting to really crave theater. I just was filled with... the desire to make something for young people. And I could see, you know, it was the spring and I was seeing November 5th coming, you know, we have this election.
What if I tried to open a play around the election that was gonna sort of put a fire under young people about what's really, really hard about life right now? Yeah. And I immediately thought of Romeo and Juliet, you know, two households both alike in dignity. That's the first two lines of the play. It's like we're more the same than we are different.
And theater becomes this place where we can come together. Even if you feel really differently than the person sitting next to you about who you're going to vote for, you breathe that same air. And Romeo and Juliet's a play where... Shakespeare is sacrificing these two kids with the idea that maybe the adults would wake up a bit to the ways they're hurting each other unnecessarily.
That's the thesis of that play.
I was like, what if we make a show where that generation of audience member feels spoken to, feels like this is for me, feels like I can come to this, I feel oriented. And then what you give them is Shakespeare, right? They want to be there and they want to take in this ritual that really reflects something deep about our society. And they do. Sort of 18 to 25 is sort of our audience.
And they are laughing at 400-year-old jokes. They are hearing – the wit, the poetry, the rhymes, the scansion, the sonnets, and they are responding to the language. They're not laughing at Kit's triceps. They're laughing at Shakespeare. You know, they're really hearing the play. So that was the goal. It was never... I did not mean to denigrate kids. It's not to be cynical.
I wanted the world on stage to reflect the world that that generation of audience member experiences in life, which is what Shakespeare did. Shakespeare was a populist, and Shakespeare was putting plays on to communicate very directly with his popular audience. The jokes were of the moment. There's a song referenced in Romeo and Juliet,
The nurse's servant, Peter, after everybody thinks Juliet's dead, says to the musicians, because there are always live musicians in a Shakespeare play, and they sort of break the fourth wall. And Peter says to the musician that is underscoring the Shakespeare play, will you play Heart's Ease? Because my heart is full, and we need a silly dump to comfort us.
Mm-hmm.
So I use a pop song from this generation's vocabulary because that's what Shakespeare was doing. He was taking a song everybody knew and making a joke using it to lighten the mood on stage. And that's what I'm doing. It's not cynical. It's genuinely trying to do for a young audience now what I firmly believe is what Shakespeare was trying to do with his audience.
How sweet... You, Sam, you've directed now all five of Shakespeare's tragedies.
Yes. And, you know, my sort of mentor coming up was the director, Elizabeth LeCompte. And the way Liz would work is... From the Worcester Group.
The Worcester Group. What she does is when she gets to the end of a project, she starts the next project sort of...
from there like the set from one project becomes kind of the raw materials to start making the next one like they're all one they're all sort of flowing one to the next on these shakespeare's it really goes back to a feeling i had when i was in school i went to grad school at juilliard and there were these really young companies of actors and they you know they lived and breathed
You know, 24 hours a day they were together. They knew each other so well. They were all having sex with each other and breaking up and getting drunk at night in their dorm rooms and then getting up at 7 in the morning to do fitness class. And, you know, they were like – they were just so in it with each other. You know, that is ensemble. And when I was at school, I just loved making –
these plays with these young ensembles. So I've been trying to do that with these Shakespeare's to bring these ensembles together. And they all, all five of them come from that same place. They all were, I don't know, almost like kind of rough and ready school plays.
I'm really inspired by specific actors. So, you know, Gabby Beans came in to audition and all of a sudden it's like... Mercutio and the Friar. And, you know, what if Gabi is kind of Shakespeare, kind of the storyteller, kind of like holding it down for us, the emcee. That idea of Gabi as a kind of the emcee of the evening, that's just Gabi. That's me responding to her talent.
A lot of people falsely sort of label me as like a deconstructionist or something because like they're wearing street clothes. Does that piss you off when people do that? It does piss me off because, well, it doesn't piss me off, but it's sad that they don't really know what they're saying when they're attributing that to me. I'm not deconstructing these plays. I'm doing the play. Right.
I've done plays where I think Ben Brantley said the playwright was rolling in his grave, which is not the most original piece of criticism. I think it's a gross misunderstanding of the difference between conventions and authentic engagement in a text.
Yeah, we have conventions, right? When you're going to go see an Ibsen play, this is what you picture it looking like. And those things come, those expectations come from some other successful period of theater history. You know, Richard Eyre does enough beautiful Ibsen plays at the Royal National Theater in the 90s.
Showing 1–20 of 41 · page 1 of 3
Next →