Amy Freed's The Beard of Avon confronts the Shakespeare authorship question head-on. Did a country bumpkin from Warwickshire with a grammar-school education write those mostly wondrous 37 plays? Or were they the work of the classically trained 17th Earl of Oxford—and the Bard of Avon merely a beard, or front, for the real creator?
“I was fascinated by the idea that it might, in fact, have been Edward de Vere because he was a terrifying character—profligate, violent, expelled from the court,” Freed told a full house in Stanford’s Pigott Theater in January, the week before her comedic mystery opened at the Geary. “And what would all those poor Shakespeare festivals do, if it turned out to be the dirty earl?”
Freed, who earned her master’s degree at the American Conservatory Theater and now teaches acting and playwriting in Stanford’s drama department, remains agnostic on the question. The issue that intrigues her is the linguistic path Shakespeare—or whoever—took. “It’s really about the transformative hunger that enables somebody to write like that,” she said, noting the bard’s use of almost 20,000 words and close to 200 rhetorical forms. “Shakespeare was such an exciting and vital theater writer, who wasn’t afraid to aim high but pitch low. So I tried to play with the things theater aims to do, and sometimes stoops to do.”
A 1998 Pulitzer finalist for her play Freedomland, Freed writes with the kind of textured muscularity director Carey Perloff seeks, slipping in and out of blank verse, colloquial speech and iambic pentameter. The Los Angeles Times named Beard one of the top 10 plays of 2001. “Part of the pleasure was vamping with the metric devices Shakespeare uses—exciting heartbeat rhythms that drive the energy and action forward,” Freed told the Stanford audience. “In The Beard of Avon I could explore the music and density of theater that the Elizabethans had. And that was a big pleasure for me because the language of modern theater and modern life is much, much thinner.”
At the Geary, with its enormous wings and fly space, Freed was still making final adjustments during preview week. That followed an opening run at Southern California’s South Coast Repertory Theater and productions in smaller houses in Salt Lake City and in Seattle—where she dropped the final two scenes and came up with a new ending. Says Freed: “That was a horrible time in the script’s life, when I realized, ‘That’s the best thing I ever wrote and it’s gotta go.’”
