Nick Sandys is the artistic director of Chicago’s Remy Bumppo Theatre and is currently playing both Victor Frankenstein and the Creature in the Nick Dear adaptation of Mary Shelley’s classic novel, which opens this week and runs through November 17, 2018, now also celebrating its 200th anniversary (he alternates roles with Greg Matthew Anderson). Nick talks about the power of this tale of monstrousness and how it fits into Remy Bumppo’s mission of great language driving great ideas. Featuring ways in which Shelley’s novel continues ideas expressed by Shakespeare in The Tempest, early modern analogues to rap battles, how one can highlight (and quite possibly confuse) certain issues, the precision with which one handles cultural negotiation, how the use of language — even in Shakespeare — tells you how a scene must be staged, how literature can also be a verb, how monsters are not born but made, and how one addresses the ultimate question: Who, really, is the monster? A star is shorn! (Length 22:42)

Episode 617. Remy Bumppo’s ‘Frankenstein’

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Michelle Ephraim – a Professor of English and (with Caroline Bicks), the cohost of the Everyday Shakespeare podcast and the co-author of Shakespeare, Not Stirred: Cocktails for Your Everyday Dramas – joins us this week to talk about her frank and funny new book, Green World: A Tragicomic Memoir of Love & Shakespeare. Michelle reveals she discovered Shakespeare surprisingly late; how “fun” is a a perfectly fine description of her sometimes fraught memoir; the shared curse of meeting hero Stephens; how Shakespeare became a source of both pain and solace in the wake of a parent’s death; how her relatively cushy job became surprisingly hazardous; and, finally, how Shakespeare – a dead European white man – became a very relatable force for inclusion. (Length 19:31)

Michelle’s ‘Green World’

Richard Schoch discusses Shakespeare’s House: A Window Onto His Life and Legacy, his wonderful new history of not only the building in Stratford-upon-Avon that William Shakespeare was born in, but how that building survived and became ground zero in the Shakespeare tourism industry. Schoch reveals how he discovered the dual focus of his book; how it took almost 200 years for people to realize the treasure that still stood in their midst; the shenanigans played by people who first depicted Shakespeare’s birthplace; the important distinctions between restoring a house and remaking it; the trick of hitting that sweet spot between writing an academic history and a popular one; and how the most important person in Shakespeare’s birthplace is not Shakespeare but the visitor. (Length 18:52)

Visiting ‘Shakespeare’s House’

Joel H. Morris discusses his debut novel All Our Yesterdays – no, not the penultimate episode of Star Trek: The Original Series – which tells the compellingly plausible story of the events that lead up to William Shakespeare's Macbeth. Morris reveals his multiple inspirations, both literary and personal; how investigations into the actual historical couple Shakespeare based his play on informed his novel; the ways in which writing is a process of discovery; how he balanced the political and the personal, the natural and supernatural; how he summoned the courage to explore one of literature's most famous characters; and the wonderful inability to let go of characters that won’t let you go. (Length 22:56)

All Our Yesterdays

What's Shakespeare's best speech? That question gets answered on this epic episode by director Nate Cohen and actor/educators Elizabeth Dennehy and Gregory Linington, who agonize over every match-up in this Sweet 16 selection of soliloquies and monologues. Highlights include remorse over the many speeches that didn't make the tournament; the differences between speeches and soliloquies; how Juliet is the female Hamlet; origins of the phrase “rolling thunder;” the unsurprising dominance of fulcrum speeches; a brief “Rap Othello” interlude; and most importantly, how a full March Madness field of 64 would have included many many more of your favorite Shakespeare monologues. (Length 1:22:47)

Ides Of March Madness

Washington Post humor columnist Alexandra Petri discusses her Shakespearean summer camp comedy Tragedy Averted, now having its midwest premiere at the IO Theatre in Chicago. Tragedy Averted showcases four Shakespeare heroines – Juliet, Cordelia, Desdemona, and Ophelia – who bond at summer camp while struggling with romance, friendship and difficult dads. In conversation with the production's director Dee Ryan, Alexandra shares the origins of her humor; the depth of her nerdery; inspirational messages from W.H. Auden and T.H. White; the comfort of knowing she always wanted to be a writer; spoileriffic exegesis; her firm belief that any crisis can be addressed head-on, Hamlet-like, by writing a play about it; and how fan fiction means you love the source text but have a significant bone to pick with it. (Length 19:14)

Episode 617. Remy Bumppo’s ‘Frankenstein’

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