My Long-Time Fascination with The Bard (Eileen Lundy)

Shakespeare, what a man! How could he know so much about human nature, so much about you and me and all of us, seeing ourselves, our friends, our families in the plays? When did my fascination with drama and Shakespeare begin? Oh, so long ago—when I was in elementary school and loved to put on our little plays, or when kids used to stage plays in a friend’s basement and charge a few cents for the performance; when I was ten and wrote a play about St. Francis of Assisi taming the wolf of Gubbio and made my boyfriend play Francis; when I played roles in our high school productions. Drama was in my blood. My big brother said I’d go to anything on a stage. And I would.

Eileen Lundy

Scroll on to much later, and I’m a professor in the English Department at the University of Texas in San Antonio. Every year, the Actors from the London Stage would come for a week or so to visit our classes and to stage a Shakespeare play. I remember the time they came to my amphitheater style classroom where I had class of over 50 students. The play that year was The Tempest which, as you know begins with just that: a tempest. The actors lined my students up the sides of the room, telling one side to sway one way and the other the opposite way to simulate waves. Then an actor stood on the professor’s desk, holding on to an imaginary mast and we weathered the tempest together. No casualties, although one student said she almost got seasick doing the waves.

There were so many other years when those actors would captivate our students. One time, my students had prepared scenes for them, and the actors themselves were captivated. Those students grew to love the works of Shakespeare and to see themselves in the plays, themselves, their friends, their families.

But why am telling you all this? Because we have a treasure here in Austin. We do not have to wait for a yearly visit from an acting company. We, our friends, our families do not have to depend on some group coming from somewhere. We have a treasure here and that is our very own Austin Shakespeare company. Right now, they are performing a Bollywood production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, and it is a rollicking good time with beauties and comics, heroines and villains, and it is a wonderful time in the theater.

Another delight the Austin Shakespeare group brings to us here in Austin are works that show, as their slogan says, “The Bard is only the beginning.” Works other than Shakespeare’s people the stage, classics by such playwright s as Tennessee Williams, Tom Stoppard, Oscar Wilde. And that isn’t all. To add to our joys, on occasion we can hear Austin Shakes with cabaret music at Parker Jazz Club. This summer, Austin Shakespeare will produce A Midsummer Night’s Dream on the stage in Zilker Park, free to all of us. And last summer, the Young Shakespeare actors, students from middle and high schools, performed Much Ado About Nothing at the Curtain Theater, the replica of the Bard’s Globe Theater. And they were amazing! Were I a kid again, that’s where I’d be, playing with that group.

Live theater is back! With care, masks and proof of vaccinations and air-cleansing care by the Rollins Theater, live theater is back! And it is oh-so-great to have it back.

And this summer, Austin’s collaboration with Austin Chamber Music under the co-directions of Ann Ciccolella from Austin Shakespeare and Michelle Schumann from Austin Chamber Music, that wonderful yearly collaboration will be back in July.

As you can tell, I love it all. From those kid-days when I had so much fun with drama, simple as it was, to now when I can see, right here, without traveling to New York or anywhere else, right here, wonderful performances of Shakespeare’s and other great playwright’s works. This truly is an Austin treasure.