Washington, D.C., has been called many things over the centuries, from swamp to asylum, from the District of Crime to Dream City. While these descriptions are debatable, there’s one adjective so obvious it might come as a surprise: Shakespearean.
“We have per capita more Shakespeare in this city than in any other city in the United States,” says Drew Lichtenberg, the associate producer of Shakespeare Theatre Company, the District’s marquee classical theater company. “We could rival Stratford-upon-Avon,” he adds, referencing the Bard’s birthplace.
Discovering why the District has become William Shakespeare’s American home and how Shakespeare Theatre Company contributed were twin motivations behind Shakespeare in the Theatre: Shakespeare Theatre Company, a new book about the company’s history published by the prestigious U.K.-based Bloomsbury in September. Lichtenberg co-authored the book with Deborah C. Payne, a professor of literature at American University and a research consultant for STC from 2000 to 2009.
Drew Lichtenberg; courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company
“We wanted it to be a scholarly and critical history that was well researched and, at times, evaluative of the successes and the failures of different eras of the company,” Lichtenberg says. Lichtenberg and Payne, both accomplished scholars, pored over history books, articles, reviews, programs, and other sources to uncover a web of cultural, political, and economic forces, as well as civic and artistic leaders, that have shaped the course of theater in America in general and STC specifically.
From the colonial and Founding eras to today, one particularly strong theme the pair discovered is the cyclical fight over arts funding and the values of the political combatants, from those who champion public subsidies for the arts and those who cut them from budgets. “We go into not just how each political administration sponsors change but specific economic policies,” Payne says.
When STC began in 1970, it was an impecunious program at the Folger Shakespeare Library. Cuts to the National Endowment for the Arts in the 1980s led the Folger to attempt to close the theater for good, which in turn sparked congressional hearings in what the Folger’s then-artistic producer John Neville-Andrews dubbed the “The War of 1985.” The Folger backstepped, restoring enough funds to hire the New York impresario Michael Kahn in 1986. Six years later, the company split off.
Kahn was the right man at the right time. Not only was he a gifted director of Shakespeare, he was incredibly skilled at dealing with Washington power brokers, according to Payne. President Bill Clinton’s economic policy, which incentivized private-public partnerships, helped fund STC’s first downtown theater, the Lansburgh Theatre (today the Michael R. Klein Theatre) at 8th and E streets NW. “The city was giving developers huge tax breaks if they dedicated a portion of their building to the arts because the NEA wasn’t handing out much money,” Payne says. In the next decade, the money flowing in and through D.C. from the country’s “War on Terror” helped build STC’s second downtown theater, Harman Hall which opened in 2007 with an $89 million, entirely privately funded price tag. “After 9/11, there’s this rapid period of building these monolithic glass buildings for the arts,” says Payne. “Lots of money was washing through D.C., and Bush’s policies made money really cheap.”
By the time Kahn retired in 2019, STC had grown into one of the premier classical theaters in the country, with a $16 million annual budget and a star-studded and hit-filled production history, and, according to Lichtenberg, a bipartisan subscriber base that included Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Samuel Alito.
Deborah C. Payne; courtesy of Shakespeare Theatre Company
To celebrate the book’s publication, STC will host a conversation featuring the co-authors, Kahn, and his successor, the British director Simon Godwin, on Oct. 15. The event will be moderated by the New York Times’ political and pop culture columnist Maureen Dowd.
Beyond the stage, Payne and Lichtenberg see other ways D.C. earns its Shakespearean bona fides, including how frequently his name and works appear in discussions of politics. “Washington is a city of desire, of incredible power shifts, and Shakespeare writes about these, fulfilled and unfilled, better than any playwright,” Payne says. “He gives you a language, a lens, to describe what is almost indescribable.”
“Shakespeare is a great forum,” Lichtenberg concurs. “His plays are great opportunities to stage a conversation about ideas that might be challenging to people in power. We saw that with STC’s recent productions of Merchant of Venice, King Lear, and Macbeth. There’s a sense that Shakespeare, who wrote about the human condition, has a lot to say about the problems that our country is going through now.”
As for STC’s next act, both authors point to Godwin’s ambitions to make the company not just a regional or national company, but an international one. After 2020’s Save Our Stages Act, the largest federal funding of the arts since the New Deal, helped keep the theater’s doors open, Godwin is reinventing the model of what a classical theater can be, complete with Broadway-level production values and possible commercial transfers. The Britney Spears musical Once Upon a One More Time played at STC in 2021 before opening on Broadway two years later. What a brave new world, baby.
The book talk with Drew Lichtenberg, Deborah C. Payne, Michael Kahn, and Simon Godwin, moderated by Maureen Dowd, starts at 7:30 p.m. on Oct. 15 at Klein Theatre. shakespearetheatre.org. $25.