Ralph Alan Cohen and the American Shakespeare Center want to turn the sweet little town of Staunton, Virginia, into the world capital of Shakespearean theater.

BY DAVID SKINNER

As Ralph Alan Cohen sits in his office at Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, talking about how he thinks Shakespeare's plays should be acted and staged, his leisured Alabama drawl begins to turn rat-a-tat. A scholar of Shakespeare and the founder of a prominent theater company devoted to Shakespeare, he is complaining about how pretty much everyone else in the theater world approaches and stages Shakespeare's plays. That objection, it begins to dawn on his listener, is not simply that these other productions fail to entertain but, in a much broader sense, to do right by their audiences.

Imagine, Cohen says, “I'm the Royal Shakespeare Company. And we are the gold standard as far as everyone's concerned. And a guy comes in. He says he wants to be the artistic director for the RSC. He's applying for that job. He says, 'Boy, do I love Shakespeare. I'm going to do all the plays. All the plots, characters. In fact, we're going to do original costuming.'”

Read the rest in Humanities magazine.