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.

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The New Yorker Radio Hour · Sam Gold’s “Romeo + Juliet” Is Shakespeare for the Youth · 12 Nov 2024 podcast

And then we think of Ibsen as, when we close our eyes, we see some Richard Eyre production. But it's 40 years later, 30 years later, and that's a convention. It's not like that

It has nothing to do with it. And I'm actually just reading the play and engaging in the play. And I'm doing a ton of homework on what Elizabethan theater was like, what Elizabethan culture was like, what Elizabethan politics were like. I'm understanding what's going on in religious battles and political battles of the time.

And then I'm thinking about what the playwright was trying to do vis-a-vis all those things and thinking about our own world. And how that play could best affect the audience that doesn't have those politics from 400 years ago has a different set of politics. So, I mean, with Romeo and Juliet, there will be people that think I have the sound too loud. The sound is loud. It's loud. It's fun.

It's loud in there. And there will be audience members that say that is too loud. Yeah. That's fine with me because I have an interest in connecting this text to this specific audience that does not think it's too loud. Right. And I'm willing to hear the complaints because I have a sort of risk tolerance that I think has come from starting downtown. Right.

The reason why I really love it is the proscenium theaters, the Broadway theaters, they were built in the 19th century with the idea that there was going to be an actor standing downstage center declaiming. I'm happy to see Ethel Merman stand down center. Like, if I could be taken back in time, I would enjoy going to those shows. It's not that I dislike it. It's that it's an old convention.

And because of technological advances... It doesn't really make sense for every play to be done that way. A proscenium doesn't really speak to how a contemporary audience will best engage with storytelling live. And the round is much closer. You get this sort of over-the-shoulder shot that you're used to in a film. And you get intimacy that film has given us to actors.

Like after the close-up, it's hard to sit at the back of a 1,000-seat, 2,000-seat theater. And at Circle in the Square, everybody's in a close-up. There's no bad – there are zero bad seats at Circle in the Square. And so you get that experience because I'm trying to do these plays that I'm saying they're kind of – grief rituals, right?

We're trying to depict a trauma so that the audience can process their own trauma. That's sort of the basic idea. And I think they work a lot better when you can have intimacy, when you can feel close to the actors, when you can feel them breathe. So to me, the smaller the theater, the closer you can be to the actors, the more I'm able to do my job.

I mean, mostly what I'm doing is I'm trying to tell a story live with people and use every tool I can to make it as powerful as possible. And film is now deeply embedded in our psyche. But, like, there were all sorts of other kinds of popular entertainments, culture, storytelling that he's engaging with. So I'm just doing what I feel like Shakespeare's doing, you know? You know, wit.

This idea in Elizabethan England, it's like a game, a sport, a thing to do after school. How are we to understand that when they, when Romeo and Mercutio and Benvolio wit as a verb? Yeah. How are we going to feel the sort of after-school activity of it the way Shakespeare's society did? And so I'm trying to pull from a toolbox. And one is film, you know.

I kept referencing Quentin Tarantino during the Romeo and Juliet rehearsals. That's a populist, a populist adventurous artist, right? There's something about the way Shakespeare works that sort of reminds me a little bit about the way Quentin Tarantino works. They have some things in common about Shakespeare. willingness to go from something serious to something funny and back quickly.

So you say, like, oh, how am I going to do this? How am I going to go from this super sad moment to this funny moment? And you think, oh, people aren't going to be able to do that. They won't be able to ride that wave. We don't do that anymore. But then I think, no, we do. Like in a Tarantino movie, we do, right? So I use film that way.

I think I've maybe overemphasized that what we are making will stand alone, and people will just enter, they'll suspend their disbelief, and they will stop seeing Kendall Roy the second Jeremy enters, and they will start seeing Thomas Stockman. Yeah. I don't know that that's always been successful because you can't rip that away from people.

And listen, theater is too obsessed with celebrity, but it's also saving the theater from financial ruin to be so obsessed with celebrity. And listen, Jeremy Strong was a brilliant actor 20 years before he was in Succession.

have done multiple plays together. We grew up together. We've been friends since college. I don't think of him as Kendall Roy from Succession at all. That's like very low on my list of references in my mind to the work of Jeremy Strong. So maybe I... underestimated that most people's relationship to Jeremy is much different than mine.

And I didn't really think about Kendall Roy, and maybe I should have.

Yes, we have made this term and sort of... You know, when Richard Burton was playing Hamlet and Elizabeth Taylor would sit in the balcony to watch... everyone would line up around the fucking block to try to see Liz Taylor, right? They weren't coming for Richard Burton's Hamlet. They were coming to see Elizabeth Taylor. And that's always been the case.

And I think it was the case in Shakespeare's time. And there's nothing I'm enjoying more right now than the fact that there's 19-year-old audience members hearing and understanding the poetry of Shakespeare and then being so excited at the end that they want to stand for an hour to meet the person that delivered that language. And I do think that's part of it.

Part of it is that they love Heartstopper. Part of it is that they're addicted to their phones. But part of it is that the play lit them up. But I don't think it's a bad thing for the theater that these young people are – I mean, our stage door is crazy. I saw it, dude. And I don't think that's a bad thing. No, it seemed like a sign of health.

Yeah, like if those people come see another play, people need theater. Yes. We know we need to get in a room and tell stories. It is not good. No one thinks, like the Surgeon General is telling you, it is not good to be at home looking at social media all the time. We are in a mental health crisis. Teen suicide. I'm doing a play about teen suicide, right? I'm doing a play about teen suicide.

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