Transcript

Welcome to Swords and Scrolls, the Bard Podcast. I’m Lori Ann, I’m your host, and I’m delighted to be here with you today. Thanks for joining me. In this podcast, this is our very, very first episode, and we are going to talk many things Shakespeare. I will not say all things Shakespeare, because there are some things about Shakespeare that I’m not that interested in talking about. However, if someone brings it up, I will absolutely have a conversation with them. The goal is to talk with people who do Shakespeare, love Shakespeare, study Shakespeare, promote Shakespeare, hate Shakespeare. Yes. If they are interested in coming on this podcast, I will talk to them. Shakespeare is a universal in a lot of ways in that the topics he writes about can still affect folks today. There are some that will find him inaccessible because of the language or those very same topics. He has covered topics we would consider problematic in the theater. He wrote in a time where single genders were on stage. It was all male and the males played females. And that was how it was done because women were legally not allowed to be on stage. He has addressed many topics that we find popping up in our current.

Cultural conversations. Some of the conversations I know we will have will be with our artists. Coming up in a future episode, I have a conversation with one of our assistant designers for the Zarcomo Innovation Festival. I hope to talk to the festival director, and I also wish to bring on my Wildflower co-founders at some point and get a conversation going with them about we did what we did in 2015 to create Wildflower There will be a quick little episode on history of the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival coming up, and a quick little episode of Ruby’s Ensemble and Apocalyptic Shakespeare which spun off of Wildfire during the pandemic. Just to give you an idea of who we are and where we are, I have, I started studying the Shakespeare in college and I had the opportunity to spend I think the equivalent of about three and a half weeks studying, teaching Shakespeare at The Globe in London, which I feel honored to have done. And then I also am part of a Shakespeare Producers Association where we talk Shakespeare, we talk best practices, we talk how do we do this, what’s going on with our audiences, what’s going on with our actor pools and our designer pools and our technician pools, how do we survive in a post-pandemic way? Definitely something I’d like to talk to in there, Isabel. And bringing Shakespeare to our community in a way that people get engaged and excited about, even if it’s just a conversation on a podcast that you listen to on your drive into work, which is exactly what I hope you do. So that’s me, and that’s this podcast. And I’m really appreciative of you being here. And one of the cool things is, I’m not sure which platform it will be on, but.

If you have a question or a topic that you’d like to suggest, or someone you’d like to suggest we talk to, or yourself, if you are part of the Shakespeare world, I would love to talk to you. There will be an opportunity to leave messages for us on the Callcast website, which is where these are initially hosted. And those may be, if you do that, some of those recordings may be used to prompt a.

A monologue like this where I answer a question and that we don’t have to be a guest. So if you are not interested in having your question played on air, please leave that in the message. If you’re okay with your question being read but not played on air, please also leave that in there. We will respect those. We may also just answer your question if that’s what you prefer. Anyway, that is enough for today. I just wanted to give a quick.

Introduction to Swords and Scrolls. And I hope that you join us again, and we’ll talk too.