Let us introduce you to William Edson and Naomi Cranston Haag of BARd Shakes
Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
BARd Shakes is the Minnesota off-shoot of the Chicago-based Backroom Shakespeare Project, which does Shakespeare’s plays with professional actors, in bars, with no director, and only ONE rehearsal.
BARd is a kind of controlled chaos, somewhere between fine art and a sporting event, where the crowd is encouraged to be raucous, the actors are allowed to take big swings (and occasionally miss), and you can grab a beer or a burger whenever you’d like without judgment your fellow theatergoers. BARd has been putting on shows since 2015.
Since 2021, BARd has performed exclusively at The Market at Malcolm Yards.
Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not, what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
We were a week away from our only rehearsal of what would have been our first performance of “The Two Gentleman of Verona” when the world shut down in March of 2020. At the time, I knew of a lot of fellow actors and theatremakers who were completely convinced that this would end theatre as we know it.
And especially for a company that thrives on packing people into bars and then performing right in front of them and around them, we figured we would be the very last thing to come back if we ever did. Until that point, our main venue had been Republic on Seven Corners, which closed permanently in 2021.
But just like Shakespeare came back again and again after the plagues during his writing career, we too were able to come back even better than before at a new location, with a new energy, and a new appreciation for the beauty of bringing people together to share a timeless story.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
William Edson has been performing Shakespeare since he was 9 and teaching it since he was 16. He feels so lucky to have such a clear passion in his life from such a young age and to have been able to pursue it this deeply for this long. He just finished teaching his first professional workshop, and it’s an amazing feeling when artists that he knows and admires are there in the class. Most of the time, he feels like he should be the one paying them for listening to him ramble on about this one writer who has been dead for four centuries!
Naomi Cranston Haag had a rocky start with Shakespeare. On her first day of Text Analysis class during her first semester of drama school, she raised her hand and said, “I just don’t get Shakespeare.” Thanks to a fantastic professor named David Gardiner, she came to not only “get it” over the next few years, but love it and respect it. As a poet at heart, Naomi gets emotional seeing how words from the late 1500s and early 1600s still viscerally affect our audiences today.
We’ve always been interested in how Shakespeare would have been performed back in the 1500s. BARd is a way of getting back to some kind of similar atmosphere to what theatre would have been like at the time. His actors would have had very little time to rehearse, the audience would be loud and drunk, and there would have been a man right below the stage reading the script by candlelight in case the actors went off the rails and had to be reminded of their lines.
We incorporate all of those elements (other than the candlelight), and you can see the results when moments that usually get a dull laugh or a deep breath in a dark theatre instead get applause breaks and deafening boos in the bar. In those moments, we feel like we’re a part of a truly human tradition of storytelling.
What matters most to you? Why?
As Captains of BARd, we’ve come to realize that the community we’ve built out of these silly bar shows is what’s important about what we do, and serving that community through our shows, through skill-sharing, and mutual support is far more fulfilling and worthy of applause than any kind of vocal dexterity or comic timing will ever be.
There’s a wild, child-like sense of fun that people can feel at BARd shows, and for so many people that’s the hook – but over the years we’ve developed so many relationships with amazing artists here in the Twin Cities, and it’s those friendships and those shared experiences that keep people coming back to the bar.
Contact Info:
- Instagram: @bardshakesmpls
- Facebook: www.facebook.com/bardshakesmpls
Image Credits
Emily Garst Photography
