Interview with Seattle Shakespeare Company
Interview with Seattle Shakespeare Company
Enjoy this new interview with the Artistic Director of the Seattle Shakespeare Company George Mount. We discuss Seattle Shakespeare’s return to live productions with The Comedy of Errors directed by Mount as well as the history of the company, educational programs, Wooden O, and more. (More interviews here.)
Follow Seattle Shakespeare Company here:
Website: Seattle Shakespeare Company
Facebook.com: @seattleshakespeare
Instagram: @seattleshakespeare
Twitter: @seattleshakes
Youtube: Seattle Shakespeare Company
***
If you’d rather read the interview, a rough transcript is below.
Interview with Seattle Shakespeare Company
Michael Van Osch: Hey, it’s Michael Van Osch. Welcome to the HARK Journal. We’re here with our interview series again. And if you don’t subscribe to the HARK Journal’s two-minute Shakespeare meditation every morning, please check that out. See if you like it. And a lot of people seem to, so but again, I said, this is our interview series, and today I’m very pleased to announce that we’re talking to the west coast again, and I’d like to welcome the Artistic Director of Seattle Shakespeare Company, George Mount. Hi George, how are you?
George Mount: I’m doing well, Mike. Thanks for having me on your podcast.
Michael Van Osch: Thanks for doing this. I mean, this is a busy day, obviously, because you guys are opening your summer season. Well, and this is first time back from COVID. Am I right?
George Mount: That’s correct. Yeah. We like so many other folks, early March came along and we were about to go into – we were literally on the first day in the theatre to start tech for production of Troilus and Cressida. And we would have started rehearsals for a production of the Scottish Play just about a week later.
And it wasn’t meant to be. And then all the dominoes just kept falling. You know, you remember those uncertain times, we just thought, well, it’ll just be a couple of months. And we still got Valpone and Much Ado About Nothing coming up. And then those went to the wayside and then it was like, well, we, we have our, we have our park shows and they’re outside.
So maybe they’ll be okay, we’re going to do Othello and The Comedy of Errors and those had to get canceled. And then it was just the pivot to online digital content. Until, until just now we brought back The Comedy of Errors - figure that it would be sort of a no-brainer.
And I do mean like a no brainer as like, you don’t have to use your brain very much to enjoy The Comedy of Errors after you know, a year and a half of just. Sort of staying inside and doing a lot of reflection and just trials and tribulations that everyone was going through. A lot of loss, a lot of suffering, a lot of awakenings to things beyond just pandemic with the George Floyd murder and the Black Lives Matter and upheaval at the election and all that, that coming back, slapstick comedy in the park.
In Seattle, in the summertime it’s - I’m not much of a snow or mountain person, even though arguably you know, some people say the best part about being in Seattle and the Pacific Northwest, but I love the summer times here. Yeah, they’re gorgeous.
The weather is just perfect. I know that some of the rest of the country is going to be suffering this weekend with some pretty intense heat. And we’re not, we’re going to have some lovely outdoor park weather and that’s just, it’s, it’s kind of the best gift to give to our folks who have been waiting for a year and a half just to see some live performance.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. So The Comedy of Errors that you’re coming back with that, and, and you mentioned a little bit about doing some online stuff. So is that essentially what you guys did? Like a lot of other theatre companies during, during the pandemic rely on that, on the online stuff. And then we spent a lot of time. Of donors and that sort of thing.
George Mount: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, just in any kind of way that we could maintain a presence for people either, you know, not only, not just our long-term fans and supporters, but we actually, with some of the work we did we were able to garner some attention and some views from people around the country and even internationally.
We did some of the classic stuff, just doing a zoom reading of some shows that, you know, shows that we planned to do. If we did, we did the Troilus and Cressida reading. We also experimented with podcasts and we did a couple of audio dramas, one of Richard the Third and then some original audio dramas that were developed that were what I call Shakespeare adjacent.
A one of the most interesting, what are the cool ones was a play that was, had been written by someone who we’d worked with before as an actor performer Meme Garcia. They wrote and been working for a long time on a play that combines some of their personal history from coming from Latin America and family trauma, interwoven with the story of Hamlet as a very intense kind of psychological ghost story in the best, that’s familiar to a multi-episode podcast, audio drama out of that.
And that was, that was really exciting to get to sort of Shakespeare adjacent. But also just audience engagement ways to say, well, maybe if we’re not telling whole stories, other ways to…because one of the things about live theatre that was missing in all of this podcast and zoom stuff was like that actual audience connection.
So, we did a couple of sort of Shakespeare-themed, digital scavenger hunts, where the people had to play along and answer some questions or go out and look at their neighborhood, see their world outside or do some online research. And so, the audience was engaged, not just sort of passive screen receiving of storytelling.
Michael Van Osch: Sure, sure. I like it. And calling back that was House of Suenos, was it?
George Mount: House of Suenos as I should have definitely mentioned the name of that. It was a, it was a great piece of material, and I know that they are going to continue to develop it. I’m sure.
Michael Van Osch: Fantastic. Yeah, I’ll put some of that info in the show notes because I have not seen that, but I’ve heard a lot about it at the time, so congratulations.
George Mount: Not entirely sure it’s still available to be listened to just because of some of the agreements we had with just how long it could be hosted with, with the actors and the creatives behind it. It’s just up for a while and then we may, we may relicense it at some point.
Michael Van Osch: Gotcha. And how long has Shakespeare Seattle Shakespeare company actually been going?
George Mount: Seattle Shakespeare company was started in the early nineties. And I’m gonna - that’s it predates my involvement. I’m trying to, I believe it’s about ‘91, ‘92. Started as an artist-driven group of folks, recent college graduates here in the Seattle area who wanted to start a professional Shakespeare Festival.
In fact, it was actually at the time called the Seattle Shakespeare Festival and started employing union actors. And with a kind of classic traditional bent towards Shakespeare performance, but rather quickly evolved to something that was multiple shows in a year and not just in the summertime, but became a Fall to Spring operating organization and growing to multiple shows. and the strong education program has always been a key ethos for our company is being able to encourage the next generation of theater fans, Shakespeare fans.
And then apropos of the show that we’re opening tonight, a couple of years after Seattle Shakespeare company was started, around 1994 I started an outdoor park show series that I called Wooden O, separate of Seattle Shakespeare company entirely, but just operating with one, eventually, two shows that would play in our local Seattle area parks and built a reputation of some fairly quality performances and some of the best actors in town and eventually equity actors as well.
And multiple parks around the area and come 2008 – 2009, the two companies merged to form one year-round, continually operating, continually producing, Shakespeare classical theater for this greater Seattle community.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. So you had started your own productions with Wooden O productions doing outdoor stuff.
What, what was the spark for you to do that? Had you always been involved in Shakespeare?
George Mount: I remember gosh, it all like a full-circle thing. When I was in high school, the first high school play that I did was a production of The Comedy of Errors. When I was a freshman or sophomore and I played, I had the tiniest part. I was like, literally the officer, the jailer that has to arrest Angelo, the Goldsmith, and Antipholus. And I like, I think the one line, like 200 ducats he owes to Angelo, the Goldsmith. And I practiced it and rehearsed it. And I remember coming home after the first performance and my mom was sitting at the kitchen table, asked me how it went.
And I was just beaming and said it was the best night of my life. Yeah. I felt really lucky, not a lot of … And then I went to college first show at college was a Shakespeare play and all of us sitting around and talking with a lot of other young college actors and asking about our previous experience with Shakespeare for a lot of those college kids, it was their - this Macbeth production that we’re doing is the first Shakespeare that they’d done. And I had been lucky in high school, I’d done two or three Shakespeare plays. And they really appealed to me even more than sort of the more recent contemporary works or musicals, that the classical work really resonated with me.
Michael Van Osch: That’s so interesting. It really does come full circle on it and all, and you know, I interview people almost every week and that’s exactly what keeps coming up. It’s like,
George Mount: Yeah. I did not expect comedy of errors would be such a leitmotif of this interview.
Michael Van Osch: I love it. So, so around 2008-2009, it sounds like your organization in Seattle Shakespeare festival combined?
George Mount: Now my day job was working for Seattle Shakespeare Company in their education department, and then I’ve spent evenings and summers putting up the plays in the parks. And I would, you know, during the regular year, not only doing education work for Seattle Shakespeare Company, but I was an actor for Seattle Shakespeare Company and a teaching artist as well.
And there ended up being a lot of cross-pollination between the actors you know, in town who, you know, during the summertime, if they’re not getting the work on the main stage at Seattle Shakespeare Company well, I had some offers that I could offer actors in the summertime and some of the directors.
And it just got to feel like while we had a different enough aesthetic and a different of mission with each respective organization, they overlapped. And it was very, it was kind of a two- or three-person operation and it was getting big enough that it needed either me to give up other work and just dedicate myself full time or get some sort of infrastructure behind it to sustain it and merging with an already existing - at that time, I think they were an $800,000 annual budget theater, and Wooden O, it was $150,000.
So yeah. It made sense that there was already book-keeping and managing, you know promotion marketing and efforts to publish, you know, get publications for programs and all that. And we didn’t have to think about it. And Seattle Shakespeare company was starting statewide touring small-cast shows.
It would go to primarily middle and high school, community centers around the state of Washington. Seattle, Washington has a highly concentrated arts center here in the Seattle Puget Sound area, not nearly as much on the Eastern part of the state and it’s a pretty big state. And there’s just a lot of folks who were not getting served by the performing arts and particularly classical performing arts. So Seattle Shakespeare Company had this program and they wanted to make it a little bit more robust. And so when we merged, I became the Director of Outdoor and Touring Performances, overseeing the Wooden O and the statewide school touring.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. And then it sounds like as some of the more years went by, then in 2011, if I’m correct, they asked you to run the whole show.
George Mount: So there was an organizational shift in the leadership and I applied to take over the job as full Artistic Director. I was interim Artistic Director for a brief period and I had to, we had to go through a budget cycle while I was interim Artistic Director. And It was either the best gamble or the best way to prove how indispensable I was, but with the budget that I created, I could see a redundancy that there was no reason to have a separate artistic director and an artistic director of the outdoor and touring program.
So, I combined them essentially. If I didn’t get this job, I would have eliminated my own position and had no job.
Michael Van Osch: Gutsy move. I like it though. That’s great. And, and, you know, you said you were an actor, you’re also a director too, and you’ve directed a lot there at Seattle Shakespeare. I mean, I’ve read your bio here and some acclaimed productions of Shakespeare productions: Shakespeare in Love, Much Ado, Waiting for Godot, Henry IV Part One, Midsummer - are you directing The Comedy of Errors?
George Mount: I am directing The Comedy of Errors. Yeah. I can tell you that people often will ask, like, what is my favorite Shakespeare play? And I do have three different answers because we all have different hats when we’re in the theater world.
Yeah. Of course, as an actor, I, I got to play Hamlet once and there’s just nothing, there’s nothing that can compare with, with the effort to play Hamlet, that just a transcendent for an actor. I personally love seeing and reading Much Ado About Nothing. I think it’s probably my favorite play, but my favorite play to work on is always The Comedy of Errors.
Cause you just, whether the production ends up good or not, you spend the entire rehearsal process just trying to make each other laugh and coming up with the dumbest possible jokes you can. And it’s just a delightful way to go to work. It’s so fun to be that silly for that long and create the comradery and the laughter in a room.
And we’ve had that experience with this, with this production as well. It’s, it’s lived up to that reputation in my mind and heart.
Michael Van Osch: Again, one of those spots where we go, oh, thank God. Thank God. We can do this again. Thank you. No, I mean, it’s just like, it’s been too long for everybody and you know I’ve heard other people coming into the rehearsal room for the first time and people start crying.
George Mount: I did. I absolutely did. Yeah, I certainly did. It was the same rehearsal room that we had just left a year and a half before when we cleared out of that rehearsal room at the start of our tech for Troilus and Cressida. We’d only been in the theater two days and then I would really, you know, so we spent most of the process for that show that that sort of experience that was cut off in that room, in that rehearsal room - and walking in the door to start a rehearsal inside it was, it was an, a kind of an uncontrollable, emotional moment.
Michael Van Osch: Absolutely. And let’s hope that we don’t have to go through it again. Yeah. But so, what I’m gathering here is that we’ve got the outdoor productions during the summer, and you’ve got an indoor season as well. And then an education wing.
George Mount: Right and get all those, right. Okay. Yeah.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. So are you still were you able to do much, well, not, not with the schools obviously, but you probably did some online stuff for the schools and then back to it now, or, I mean, will you be in the, in the coming year?
George Mount: We are hopeful everything.
It’s still shifting sands. We’re going to plan for a touring show. We, what our touring shows usually are six actors learn two different plays, usually a Romeo and Juliet cause it’s, you know, it’s curriculum fodder for most ninth grades. So, we will always do a Romeo and Juliet and then any other play. Oftentimes in the last several years, our other play has been a bilingual adaptation of a Shakespeare comedy to our tragedy.
A lot of the schools we go to, in particular in Eastern Washington, are rural and agricultural. And there’s a lot of bilingual students or even students who come from monolingual households but live in a bilingual world. And about six, seven years ago, we started thinking, well, if we’re trying to serve these students, we should serve them at least in some way where they are.
And as well as their non-Spanish speaking students, and as a bilingual English-Spanish, their non-English speaking peers might get a little more appreciation for their colleagues at school and the experience that they’re going through and a little bit better appreciation for that.
And just a way to say that Shakespeare is for everyone. So, we might not be able to do our two shows this year, but we did do an online for the first time Romeo and Juliet bilingual adaptation. And we’re, we think we might bring that back. If we are able to get live in schools, it’s just still uncertain.
In our Eastern part of the state, some of the case rates are low. But also the vaccination rates are low. I’m sure that’s not uncommon in a lot of states within larger metropolitan areas. The vaccination rates are a little higher. But also there’s a little more cautiousness about opening up the schools.
So we’re not sure yet. Our governor has fully opened up our state, but we don’t know what each school district’s rules are going to be.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Gotcha. One thing on, you know, that always comes up in that is serving community and that seems to be at the heart of what all the Shakespeare companies do and really look into that.
What else, who else needs to be served? What can we do? Where can we go? And congratulations, thank you for doing that. And cause I know it’s a lot of effort as well, but it’s so worth it. But from your perspective as artistic director and you’ve been involved in the theater for a long time, What does a Shakespeare company or experience bring to a local community?
George Mount: Right. What I always harken back to is what Shakespeare in classical theatre can do. And we’re learning a lot of different perspectives on how it achieves this, but by looking to the great stories of the past, they inform our present and guide us to the future. And Shakespeare is kind of an, it’s like a nexus event of a lot of that, the way so much of great theatre tradition is funneled into his work and how he exploded it and expanded it outward and then became such a kind of universal touchstone for a lot of stories and a lot of storytelling and hopefully a lot of storytellers.
Yeah. And so that’s always been my kind of guiding my lodestar, my touchstone has where and certainly in this last year and a half, some of the deep thinking we’re doing is you know, like I say if it’s a guide for the, if it’s, you know, the story of the past, informing the present and guiding us into the future, what is that past?
What is that present? And where’s the future we want to go to. And that is going to be opening up a lot of conversations and hopefully a lot of connections with storytellers that may have not necessarily thought that they were invited to be part of that continuum and that there are places and there should be places in that, in that continuum, that connection of humanity across time black and brown people, LGBTQ people, native Americans, disabled, other-abled Americans, non-Americans, international storytelling.
So that’s going to be the work ahead.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. And there are so many stories out there. That we will benefit from when we hear them told that that needs to be included. And hopefully, like you said, this will be one of the doorways to do so.
George Mount: That House of Suenos sort of was indicative of that this storyteller saw themselves in the story of Hamlet.
Not fully in the story of Hamlet. And they w they found a way to really get their story and Shakespeare’s story and Hamlet’s story to fuse together to create a new story. And that’s exactly, that’s the past, informing the present and guiding to the future.
Michael Van Osch: Fantastic. Absolutely. Well, you’ve got opening night tonight.
I’m not going to keep you too much longer. This has been great. I’ve got my final question that I ask everybody that I talked to, and that is if Shakespeare was on this call with you and I, and you got to ask him one question, what would you want to ask him?
George Mount: What happened to Innogen?
Where is Leonato’s wife, she’s mentioned as being onstage and like the first scene of Much Ado About Nothing, but she says nothing, and she’s never seen after that. What’s Innogen’s story?
Michael Van Osch: I’m writing it down. Yeah, absolutely. I love it. I appreciate it too. Well, thank you so much, everyone. This has been George Mount Seattle Shakespeare Company.
Opening night, tonight, The Comedy of Errors. How long does it run?
George Mount: We’re going to go through August 8th.
Michael Van Osch: I’ll put the website and everything in the show notes. I believe it’s Seattleshakespeare.org?
George Mount: That is correct. Yeah. If you’re in the greater Pacific Northwest and you got an evening on a weekend free, find us in a park.
Michael Van Osch: Sounds good. Thanks so much for your time. Best of luck with the rest of the summer. Stay on here after we say goodbye but thank you.
George Mount: You’re welcome. Thank you, everyone.
Michael Van Osch: Take care.
