Interview: Play on Shakespeare’s Tracy Young Talks About Making Shakespeare Accessible to Everyone

Playwright and director Tracy Young has had a lifelong fascination with Shakespeare. Over the course of her career, she has sought to bring his works to audiences who might be initially intimidated by the challenges that the plays’ language presents.

TheaterMania recently spoke with Young about what drew her to Shakespeare, what it means to translate his work into contemporary English, and what she loves about her most recent project, The Winter’s Tale.

This conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

How did you come to focus on Shakespeare?
I love to work with Shakespeare’s writing, but sometimes in life you look back and go, “I didn’t plan that.” Maybe the biggest reason in general is my ongoing collaboration with Bill Rauch, who currently is the artistic director at the Perelman Center in New York City. For many years he was the artistic director of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.

Your work as a translator of Shakespeare is also interesting. How do you translate to make the work more accessible without compromising the integrity?
Translation was a focus in the graduate degree program that I recently completed. But that is translating from another language versus what we call “translation,” modern translation of older English. Some who speak English find Shakespeare opaque.

There’s been so much interest in writing from so many different folks who are translators. What it means to translate, what the purpose of it is, what the guidance for it is, the inherent pitfalls, the questions, the responsibilities, the licenses. Are there any? What are they? All that and how to calibrate all of it is an endlessly fascinating topic.

Some people have a frustration with going to [Shakespeare’s] plays: loving them, but feeling challenged by the language at a lot of points in the productions, even with a skilled, top-notch acting ensemble. The actors are the ones who bring the meaning forward, who are the bridge. However, I completely agree with the premise that there are just aspects to Shakespeare’s writing—colloquialisms, references, historical contexts—that, unless we’re scholars, we don’t readily know what that is.

I’ve seen nothing to counter the notion that Shakespeare was a populist. All about the people, and the audience’s kind of theater guy. He wasn’t a scholar. He was a theater maker who wanted people to come and enjoy the show and not just the elite, not just the royalty and the aristocracy, but the groundlings, the regular folks who were not highly educated. That to me was the real affirmation and guiding light of why Play on Shakespeare is worthy. I have no complicated feelings about the rightness or wrongness of it.

Tell me about The Winter’s Tale.
I think for the people who love it, they really do love it. It’s got certain things about it that I find very touching, and even though all of Shakespeare’s plays contain aspects of comedy and tragedy, the comedies contain some tragic aspects and heartbreak, and the tragedies often contain those great moments of humor coming from whatever source. In The Winter’s Tale, two very different kinds of tonalities and stories are happening, and you kind of visit one and you play out this whole very tragic and ugly and terrifying scenario.

Then you go over to this other place and there’s this big party where they’re shearing sheep and having a lot of amusements. The two [worlds] come together in this kind of fairy tale way. There’s a lot of other things going on in that play. It’s got a kind of a childlike wonder in it. I remembered so strongly that story of the Snow Queen when I was a child. That terrified me, this idea that a person you know or you think you know and that you love, that you think loves you, one day changes and turns into some person you don’t recognize and means you harm and doesn’t love you anymore. I remember being so disturbed by it. With the character of Leontes [in The Winter’s Tale], what happens to him and why? There’s so much that we could unpack about all that.

Why did you choose this play?
I directed The Winter’s Tale in Minneapolis with the amazing company that primarily would take classics with small ensembles into the prison system and present plays for prison inmates. So I took a five-member acting ensemble to a women’s incarceration facility. I chose that play in that case because of Hermione’s track of being literally or figuratively put into a stasis, put on hold for 16 years. Then she is brought back when the child returns, but that reunion, where she says to her daughter, “I waited for you. / I’ve been waiting for you. / And now here you are. / And now we’re together.” And, you know, the joy of that moment, the elation, it’s beautiful.

I’ve worked closely on this play for decades now, and I’m still learning new things about it. It’s still offering me food for thought things to consider and question in the text. Shakespeare was so unbelievably, improbably able to paint the picture of human nature and the human heart and the mysteries and the horrors and the beauty and the resilience of that. We look at these different characters, whoever they are, in The Winter’s Tale, it’s Leontes, it’s Hermione, it’s Paulina, it’s Perdita. It’s all of them. He gives you just enough to chew on and consider.