Interview with Hawaii Shakespeare Festival

Enjoy this new interview with Tony Pisculli, the co-founder and Artistic Director of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival, now entering its 20th season. Tony shares how the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival has grown over the years to serve both the acting talent on the islands but also the community theatre goers. (More interviews here.)

Follow the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival here:

Website: Hawaii Shakespeare Festival
Facebook.com: @hawaiishakes
Instagram: @hawaiishakes

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If you’d rather read the interview, a rough transcript is below.

Interview with Hawaii Shakespeare Festival

Michael Van Osch: Hey, it’s Michael Van Osch. Welcome again to the HARK Journal. Thanks for joining us. If you don’t receive our daily email, the HARK Journal is a daily meditation based on Shakespeare’s wisdom to help you have a better day. So if you haven’t signed up for that, check it out, see what you think of it. And we’d love to have you.

And today we’re continuing our interview series and this time we’re going to Hawaii, glad to have Tony Pisculli here, the co-founder and artistic director of Hawaii Shakespeare Festival. Hi Tony, how are you?

Tony Pisculli: I’m good. Thanks for having me, Michael.

Michael Van Osch: Thanks so much for joining us. How are things going over there in Hawaii?

Tony Pisculli: They are going very well. We’re very much in the swing of things here, our production seasons in the summer. So we’re right in the thick of it. We have one show opening in two weeks. And one about two weeks after that, I just had my first live rehearsal last night. Since the pandemic start has been very active.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Yeah. And you mentioned before we got going on the air here, that Hawaii has done very well. COVID-related, it’s a very safe state and you guys have done very well, but obviously still a that probably had some bearing on what you did last summer.

Tony Pisculli: Oh, absolutely. We did an entire virtual season last summer all three plays online and that was it.

I got to say, I’m, I’m really proud of the work we did. It’s a fascinating new medium. I think that this really sort of taken off in the wake of the pandemic. I think it’s going to be around for a while, this idea of, of online theater. And in fact, our first show up Twelfth Night directed by R. Kevin Garcia Doyle.

He chose to make that an online show. We had an option to do a live in-person show and he said, no, this is a format that he wanted to continue to explore. He did it last year and he just felt like there was more there to do and more to tease out of that format wanted to play with some more. So we’ve got our technology game with regard to that.

It’s gonna be a little bit more sophisticated, better video and audio quality, but it’s that same sort of, you know, online Yeah.

Michael Van Osch: Okay. Sounds good. I don’t think a lot of theaters are not going to throw that completely out either as they move forward. A lot of people have told me, no, this is now a part of what we do.

It won’t be the mainstay, but you know, it’s got a place which is very interesting.

Tony Pisculli: Yeah. Absolutely. It allows you to reach a whole new demographic. You know, it’s like people last season. I worked primarily our mission is to reach people in Hawaii. We want to make Shakespeare accessible to the people of Hawaii, but at the same time, we have a lot of ex-pats in Hawaii.

People who love to see Hawaii actors on stage, which you’re not going to see on the mainland. And we reach people. And I think, I don’t know, a dozen states and like four or five different countries with our season last year, which is exciting.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, very nice. Exactly. And, and I think I read correctly that this is your 20th season and your co-founder tell us how did it all start?

Tony Pisculli: It started I mentioned our Kevin earlier and I think it was his idea. Harry Wong is the other co-founder, he’s the artistic director of Kumua theater. And we were all out at an improv show or something like that. And just walking down the street and Chinatown and. Hey, we should do a Shakespeare festival.

That’s how it started. Pretty much that question. We were like, yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Let’s do that. And we did it as a one-off. It was just, we were just going to do it one time just to do it. Just let’s do three plays all at the same time. And in fact, it wasn’t called the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival at the time it was called the Summer Shakespeare Festival and we said, Hey, that was a blast.

Let’s do it again. Let’s make it a thing. And so it really became the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival in our second year.

Michael Van Osch: Love it. And you’re in Oahu. Am I right?

Tony Pisculli: We’re on Oahu. Yeah.

Michael Van Osch: Sorry. Of course. So, and we discussed something briefly before we got on the air, and I find it very interesting.

Tell us about your casting practices because of because you do female-driven shows.

Tony Pisculli: We do. This one of the things we do. In in the very first season, we realized we were putting up three plays at the same time. We were going to have a real struggle casting, three plays, you know, a Shakespeare cast is large, you’re like 15 to 20 people, a piece.

And you know, we tend to get more women than men at auditions anyway, but there are many, many fewer roles for women in Shakespeare. Yeah. And so I made a decision that I’m just going to do mine as an all-women production. That was Two Gentlemen of Verona, not having ever done anything like that before, but it just seemed like this is the best way to make use of the available talent.

It wasn’t a political thing. It wasn’t, you know, any of the theology behind it was just like, how can we get the most talent on stage, make the best use of the active pool that we have available to us. And that’s become a thing. We do that every other year. Now, at least I’ve done I think about half of my productions have been all women productions, but R. Kevin’s done at least one or two, I think at this point Harry has done at least one.

And, and it’s really kind of shaped the demo and the dynamic of our casting process. Yeah. It’s been interesting. It’s been fascinating.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. And I love to hear that too. That’s making use of the acting pool. I mean that’s what it’s all about for us as actors, it’s like, give me a chance and let’s do something.

Tony Pisculli: Well, absolutely. You know here’s my chance to confess something. 20 years ago, I had this bias that men, for whatever reason, tended to be better actors than women, especially when it came to Shakespeare. And that was my, I guess it was an unconscious bias at the time.

And as we looked to cast a Shakespeare play, it’s like, well, let’s get as many women in there as possible. Let’s cross-cast some roles and whatnot, but the big roles that heavy roles are going to have to be men because they’re just, there’s more talent there. There’s more bench depth there with the men.

And after doing this for 20 years, of doing these all women’s shows, no, it’s just that women have not had the opportunity to grow in those roles. If you do something like Henry V, you know, you’ve got so many great roles for men to get experience doing a great Shakespeare role, and you’ve got Kate and her maid, that’s it.

So two women are going to get a chance to play 200, get a chance to develop and grow. And as we’ve been doing this, the women turn out in droves when we do an all-women show and they’ve had great experiences and they’ve come along. And now when I cast the show, having done so many of these, my bias has completely flipped. It’s just like, there’s so much talent on the female side that it’s easier. It’s easier now for me to cast an all-women show than a mixed show. Right.

Michael Van Osch: That’s fascinating. Yeah, absolutely. And you’re also a premier fight director. I read your bio and you do a lot of that as well.

And you’ve won multiple awards for directing and for fight choreography. And you’re also a playwright. Tell us about that.

Tony Pisculli: Yeah, you know, I used to do a lot of writing. My intention was to become a playwright before I got involved with the Shakespeare Festival and then, you know directing, it’s just one of those things that take over your life.

It’s so easy to say yes to directing. And it’s so easy to push writing to the side while you’re working on that, because it’s so immediate, it’s so visceral and tangible, and writing as you just, you’re stuck in a room alone by yourself. And I really, my writing career that sideline for a long time, but I’ve recently rebooted it with the help of a friend Stephanie Keiko Kong and we write plays together.

And we’ve had one play. We wrote specifically for the pandemic called Enigma. There’s a local theater in town TAG, The Actor’s Group. And they had canceled their season because they just couldn’t figure out a way to bring their plays online. And I was talking to them and I said, you know, what you need is needed a play that’s specifically for the circumstances.

And so we wrote a play for them, which is just one actor alone on stage. So we filmed in the theater on the stage, cause it wouldn’t be, we wouldn’t have the worry about social distancing. We had off-stage voices as well. And it was really about that sense of isolation that we were all feeling and how your identity starts to crumble when you’re isolated from the community.

And so that was a wonderful experience for us. So yeah.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, congrats. I believe it that’s. That was the thing that we were all dealing with and, and all, all manner of projects came out of it too, including HARK Journal. This was a COVID-related project for myself too.

Tony Pisculli: Was it really? Oh, fantastic.

Michael Van Osch: You know, so I noticed on your website too, that the festival is dedicated to Dame Judi Dench. Tell us about how that came about.

Tony Pisculli: Almost. Dame Judi Dench is our patron and the Festival is dedicated to Terrence Knapp. Terrence Knapp was a professor at the University of Hawaii at Manoa.

He taught all three of the co-founders, myself, R. Kevin Garcia Doyle, Harry Wong. He was instrumental in instilling in us a love of Shakespeare in his particular brand of Shakespeare. And then he really, we dedicated the festival to him fairly early on and he appreciated that enormously. He passed away a few years ago, sadly, but he was terrific friends with Dame Judi Dench.

They toured Africa with a production of Twelfth Night and he would frequently go back and visit her in England. And one of his visits, he said hey would you be willing to be a patron of this festival and she said, yes patron in name only. So she doesn’t support us. She doesn’t fly to Hawaii and see the shows.

People always want to know; do you get to meet Dame Judi? You know we don’t, we do put her name on the posters and that’s a lovely, lovely gift from Terry. So, yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

Michael Van Osch: Fantastic. So let’s talk about this coming season then. You mentioned you’ve got Twelfth Night coming up and that’s a online, only.

Correct. Is that right? Yep. And then what else are you doing for the rest of this year?

Tony Pisculli: So the second production of the season is going to be interesting. It’s something we’ve never done before. We’re calling it Shortcuts and it’s going to be three, one acts by three different directors. One is a skit by Molière that’s being directed by Harry Wong.

One is a very, very brief cutting of Henry VI Part III directed by Tori Kinoshita. And then one is a fascinating brand new mashup between The Comedy of Errors and Hamlet by Malia Wessel. Malia is a first-time director for us. She’s an actress for us before she’s a phenomenal actor and she put together this script on her own. It’s Hamlet with the twin mix-up stuff and it plays out so brilliantly. I don’t wanna, I don’t want to give anything away but you can imagine what having twin Hamlets would do to Ophelia’s relationship with Hamlet, you know, and why he seems to be always like two different people with her.

Yeah, it’s wonderful.

Michael Van Osch: When does that take place?

Tony Pisculli: So Twelfth Night opens July 16th. And then Shortcuts opens July 30th. They both run two weekends each. Yeah. And Shortcuts is also streaming.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, that’s online only. So anyone anywhere in the world, anyone in your audience can watch those again, what’s the website really quick?

Tony Pisculli: Hawaiishakes.org.

Michael Van Osch: I’ll put it in the show notes as well, but, and then you have a live show coming up this summer.

Tony Pisculli: Yeah, that’s Henry IV Part I. I think it’s Shakespeare’s most accessible of the history plays. I mean, I love the history plays, you know, and anybody who loves Game of Thrones would be into the history plays.

They were very much Game of Thrones was very much inspired by English history and this time. But there’s a lot of geopolitics in history plays. And this one is very personal, you know, the relationship between Hal and Falstaff and Hal’s father and Hotspur is the foil. It’s wonderful.

It’s passionate, it’s very visceral, very fast-moving. And we’re going to have this outdoors under the stars at the Hawaii Mission House’s museum. It’s going to be really fun.

Michael Van Osch: That sounds great. Is that where you would normally perform?

Tony Pisculli: Normally we’ve been performing at the Arts at Mark’s Garage, which is a tiny little venue downtown Chinatown, in what’s called the arts district.

And that’s not really a theater. It’s kind of a multi-purpose art space, we build an 80-seat, thrust theater every year. We just, we put it all up and assemble it and it’s there for about six weeks. And then we’ll tear it down and put it in the basement until next year. Yeah. We figured this year, you know, even though I dunno, I think 60% of Hawaii is vaccinated at this point.

People are still not comfortable being in small, small spaces yet. So we figured we’d just do the online and outdoors. Yeah, hopefully, next year.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. Well, that sounds great. Again, Hawaii shakes.org for people to check that out. What where do you see the company going in the next number of years?

Tony Pisculli: That’s a good question. One of the things we really want to do is bring in more directors. And that was the idea of the Shortcuts Program is to bring in some people who haven’t directed for us, try them out on smaller projects. Although we ended up using two directors we’ve used before, but Malia is brand new.

We also have some people who are going to be coming in and doing a sonnet. Which will be prerecorded and there’ll be directing for Shakespeare Festival for the first time. But for so long, for 20 years, it’s been mostly the co-founders directing and we need to bring in some new blood and we’re thinking about how, how we’re going to do that.

Yeah. So that’s our main goal over the next couple of years to transition some new directors and to think about what the festival can be. How can we make Shakespeare accessible to the people - who, why, what does that mean? What does accessible mean? So yeah,

Michael Van Osch: Let me ask you this, something on that question right there because I ask everyone about this.

You know, you’re putting in all this hard work, you do a festival and you do it every year. What do you feel? Or what have you heard that it brings to the local community by doing this? Cause it’s a lot of work. A lot of people love it, but you know, it’s what does a community get out of it?

Because I always love to hear the answers of artistic directors and founders.

Tony Pisculli: I think there are two really important communities for us. And there’s the community of people who come. And for them, what they see is Shakespeare. Firstly, they get an opportunity to see Shakespeare and you probably know this - Shakespeare lives on the stage, not on the page.

And most people encounter Shakespeare in English class and hate it. I know I did. And it’s only when you see it brought to life by actors, that it really comes to life. And so that’s the main thing we’ve done. Every Shakespeare play. We did the entire canon in the first 12 years. So for a lot of people in Hawaii, it was their first time seeing these plays, the first time they ever had an opportunity to see these plays without leaving the state, because we did Hawaii premiers of probably half of the plays.

So I think that’s significant just having an opportunity to see live Shakespeare, but also to see Shakespeare done for this audience. We take our audience into account and we put these plays up and we have local actors in our plays. So, you know, if you’re a Democrat or Republican, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the demographics of Hawaii, but it’s about 25% white, I would say about 30% Japanese, 25% Chinese.

I don’t know the exact percentages, a lot of Filipino Korean Pacific Islanders, and so on. So, if you were to put a bunch of, you know, very talented British actors up on stage, that would not be in any way reflective of our population here. So we put the people who live here up on stage, and then the people who live here can come and see people who look like them up on stage doing Shakespeare.

And that means a lot. It means that Shakespeare is something that is suitable for a local population and not this remote other thing. So that’s how we serve the audience, but then I think there’s another important demo, which is the actors. I think the best way to experience Shakespeare is to play Shakespeare.

And so we tend to have very, very large casts. We cast a lot of beginners every year because we want to get as many people as possible participating in Shakespeare and creating Shakespeare because that’s how you really fall in love with Shakespeare. That’s how I did. I didn’t love Shakespeare until I first did a production and we have people who say, you know, I never thought I could do Shakespeare.

Or appreciate Shakespeare. I thought it was nonsense until I did it. And then it just opened up a whole new world for me. And that’s what I love to hear. That’s the best, that’s the best compliment ever. So, yeah.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah. And isn’t that the truth, whether you’re directing or an actor or whatever, every time you do a new show, I always found this, your world expands by multiple tens of people.

If not more. And then your mind expands because of the material that you’ve done and what the director works with you on and all that kind of stuff. So again you and your company are building community through Shakespeare, which is the theme that I wasn’t looking for, but keeps coming through all of these interviews.

Tony Pisculli: It’s kind of, yeah, yeah.

Michael Van Osch: Well this has been great. I appreciate you doing it. I have a final question that I ask everyone that I interview and that’s this, you may have seen it, but if Shakespeare was on this call with us and you could ask him one question, what would you want to ask him?

Tony Pisculli: Oh, man. I didn’t, I didn’t know this was on it, okay. Shoot. Okay. You know, I would want to ask about staging practices and I’ve read a bit about Shakespeare staging practices. But I would want to dig into that because I’ve found I actually did a production one year where we tried to as much as possible to replicate to the extent that we understood Shakespeare’s original practices.

And that was exhilarating. No more than 20 hours of rehearsal for each play. We use side scripts you know; the first rehearsal was a full run-through of the play. And where nobody knew what anyone else was going to say, let alone, who was even in their cast. And there was such incredible storytelling going on in that production because people had to know it’s like, who are they talking to?

Are they talking to me? What’s happening? What’s the story here? I don’t know. And the actors were all terrified, but you know when it was over, they said, yes in retrospect, I loved it. I learned a lot. So I would love to know, I would like to dig into that more because there’s only so much that we can tell from what we’ve uncovered.

Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Great question. And that sounds like a great project too, so well, thank you so much. For the folks who are watching, this has been Tony Pisculli. And you are the artistic director and co-founder of the Hawaii Shakespeare Festival on Oahu. Thanks so much. Stay on here after we say goodbye, but again, Tony, thanks so much for your time.

Best of luck this summer with everything and congrats on everything you’ve been doing over the years.

Tony Pisculli: It’s fun. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having us on. Yeah.

Michael Van Osch: All right. Take care.