Bigger Than We Are: An Interview with Rebecca Goodheart of Elm Shakespeare Company

Rebecca Kemper Goodheart has been a director, actor, and teacher specializing in Shakespeare and Voice for over 25 years.  She is a designated Linklater Voice teacher who has directed over 30 professional and 50 educational productions.  Currently serving as the Producing Director of Elm Shakespeare Company in New Haven, CT, she has worked with a dozen Shakespeare theaters around the world, and is a proud lifetime member of the Shakespeare Theater Association who chaired the global 2016 Celebration of Shakespeare's Legacy.  Other leadership positions have included Director of Training at SF Shakespeare Festival, Producing Artistic Director for Maryland Shakespeare Festival (an equity theater she founded in 1999), Artistic Director of the Metawhateverphor Theater in NYC, and Director of Education for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival.  She is a classical text and voice teacher at Shakespeare & Co. in Massachusetts and on the theater faculty of Southern CT State University.  She holds a BFA from NYU/Stella Adler Conservatory, a Master of Letters in Shakespeare & Renaissance Literature and an Master of Fine Arts in Directing (both from the American Shakespeare Center). She has presented her research into Shakespeare’s dramatic use of rhetoric at numerous national conferences, and theatrical workshops across the country, as well as having her scholarship published in the Wooden O Journal and Shakespeare Criticism, online. 

Kimolee Eryn: Can you share the origins of Elm Shakespeare Company, the vision behind its creation, and how it has evolved over the years? What impact do you hope your productions have on the local community? How do you envision the company contributing to the cultural landscape in the coming years?

Rebecca Goodheart: The mission of the organization, it’s a long story. 29 years—there’s been a long history under my tenure— we really have simplified mission statements. I think they can be long and complex sometimes. Ours is really simple at its core, which is bringing people together through Shakespeare.

New Haven is a super diverse city and there’s a lot of what I sort of call micro-communities. I realized early on that we have this unique opportunity because we were working with lots of the different little bands— but they weren’t talking to each other. And so we really started looking at how our programs can help the different communities talk to each other. So we go out of our way to make sure in our education programs that groups from different parts of the community are working together, different age groups, we bring the kids to work with, witness—and then we work to make sure that Edgerton Park is welcoming and actually, that we get the word out and part of it is through our community outreach programs, making sure all of our camps do the show that’s for the summer.

We help the families to make sure they can come and see the show and they already have a stake in the show—we have an apprentice program that gets pulled from many. Then there are no brainer things that, in the last few years have become hot button, but since I stepped foot in the company, who’s on the stage needs to reflect who’s in our audience. We’ve done gender parody and racial parody since I got here— we really do try to make sure that everybody’s full self is welcome in the rehearsal room. We work very hard to make sure that our diversity is off stage as well as on stage. Shakespeare is a tricky thing. It’s been used to really shut people down and it can be used to make people feel stupid, and I’m not interested in that.

Kimolee Eryn: Considering that you solely do Shakespeare, how do you select which plays to do? Has the production choice ever conflicted for you with the local/state/national climate?

Rebecca Goodheart: It’s tricky because I don’t have the luxury of having a five-show season. Well, actually, we’ve now expanded. We’ve doubled our programming. So we brought in two other productions this spring and we’ll do a youth festival this fall in addition to the summer. But we were founded 30 years ago as a summer Shakespeare in the park, so that’s our bread and butter. That’s what we were founded to do. So it’s tricky in terms of growing our company. There’s a level at which we want to play, so it becomes tricky. So I really get to pick one big title a year, and we apply for the NEA grant a year in advance— though that’s not an unusual problem. Many people do that.

One, there are 37 plays to pick from and so there is a cycle.

Two, there are things that work outside. I really want to direct Othello, but I think that Othello is a really intimate play that I don’t want to do outside for a thousand people. So there are things that limit. There are a host of artists that I want to work with and that have history with the company and so I’m in conversations with those people.
Then there is listening— you know, the big, the real art, which is what is right for our community. Last summer we did The Merry Wives [of Windsor] because last summer, people needed to just laugh. The world was so hard, and so we picked a show that could just be sort of a guilty pleasure coming right out of the pandemic.

So this year, we hadn’t done anything in more historic, tragic, dark or in the period vein in a very long time and there were portions of the community that wanted that. I finally admitted that I wanted to do [King] Richard [III]. I want it as an artist. It was a story I was ready to tell.

So I think how we choose plays is by listening to our community and listening to ourselves as artists because as artists, we are conduits— we’re conduits to our community.

Kimolee Eryn: What is the main takeaway you want from this Building a Brave New Theatre Series? How does it tie in with your youth education programs? What do you want toe impact of this series to be, and what doe you want the impact to look like for the students based on these initiatives?

Rebecca Goodheart: Well I don’t think Building a Brave New Theatre can be divorced from its origins. It was born out of the summer of 2020— the murder of George Floyd. I, as a privileged, middle-aged, white woman who does Shakespeare— that’s who I am. I can’t change that. It stopped me in my tracks and I, like many other people, thought, where am I blind? I’ve been working in may of what is considered DEI work for about 20 years. I was running midnight Shakespeare in San Francisco for five years— I’ve put my money where my mouth is for a long time, but we all have things to learn. I’ve got blind spots. Coming out of that time, I started reading and asking questions and really, it was almost an existential issue in terms of, “I’m giving my life to something that is not a force for good in the world. Should we even be doing Shakespeare anymore?” So I started going deep into that question. Then I stopped and thought, “if I’m going through that conversation, my job as an arts leader is to take that conversation to my community.”

So I started taking the private conversations I was having with my friends of color and my collaborators, and I started asking gently, “can we have this conversation in public?” And so the first iteration of Building a Brave New Theatre was ‘Race and Shakespeare’. The second was people that were using Shakespeare in ways that really served the world— ‘Shakespeare in Spanish’, ‘Shakespeare in Prisons’—

Then our students got excited by it and the Youth Advisory Council came to us and said, we want to take over Building a Brave New Theatre. And so they did the next generation theatre—so we just supported them and they did it. It was all from a youth voice.

The second is to give voice and give opportunity to the people that are affected by those big societal questions a chance to have their voices heard—so that it’s not just us talking about it.

And I think the goal, how I want it to tie into education is that it models what artists do, which is that we take what’s going on and we bring it out and we look at it through performance, through conversation, through rehearsal, through creation. I’m hoping that they learn that—that we have a responsibility to look at those big pictures. It’s not just about entertainment. That art is actually about serving our world.

In some ways, having the conversation, but in some ways, just doing it and being the conversation.

Kimolee Eryn: If there’s one thing you can share that reflects the heart of your organization, your mission and vision for the future, what would it be?

Rebecca Goodheart: You know, if I was a neuroscientist, I’d be working on brain cancer. But I’m a Shakespearean. It’s what I like. It’s what I do. So how do these stories serve our world and our community? I will say that the only way to do that is if they’re done really well. It serves our community to create, because these plays are bigger than us all, and if done well, they call us to be bigger than we are.