Interview: Bill English of AS YOU LIKE IT at San Francisco Playhouse Loves Everything That Theatre Can Do

Bill English wants you to know that "all are welcome here" at San Francisco Playhouse, the theater he co-founded with Susi Damilano two decades ago, and where he serves as Artistic Director. Actually, that exact phrase comes from one of the songs by Shaina Taub in the new musical adaptation of Shakespeare's As You Like It that English is directing at the Playhouse. Taub teamed up with The Public Theater's Laurie Woolery to transform the Bard's beloved comedy into an exuberant testament to acceptance and diversity and set it to an infectious, original folk-pop score. Taub is on quite a roll these days with her musical about the suffragist movement, Suffs, proving to be a big hit at the Public last spring and her collaboration with Sir Elton John on the musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada now wending its way to Broadway. After the much-in-demand composer's Twelfth Night was such a success for San Francisco Playhouse last season, English figured why not go back to the same well?

I caught up with English by phone last week just as he was headed into San Francisco for rehearsal. Not only Co-Founder and Artistic Director of San Francisco Playhouse, he also frequently directs and/or designs the sets for its productions, and in fact is doing double duty for As You Like It. We talked about why he was drawn to this new musical adaptation of the classic Shakespeare play and how it speaks to contemporary audiences, and how he and Damilano managed to found San Francisco Playhouse two decades ago. English is one of those people who just seems to naturally eat, sleep and breathe theatre, and he readily expresses gratitude for the community of supporters that makes it possible for San Francisco Playhouse to pull off the wildly ambitious and eclectic seasons it is known for. The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

What excites you most about this new musical adaptation of As You Like It?

Well, I'm a big Shakespeare fan, and I think Shaina Taub is one of the most exciting young composers currently working. We did her version of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night last holiday season, and it was such a success and we had so much fun doing it we thought "Oh, why not just do this again?" I hope she'll write another one, but I don't know - her star is rising fast. She's currently collaborating with Elton John on a musical adaptation of The Devil Wears Prada. She's a force.

Shaina and Laurie Woolery put together this adaptation and there are many things I love about it. All of the dialog is Shakespeare, and the songs are all Shaina Taub, but a lot of the themes of the songs are borrowed from lines and phrases and monologs from the original play. For instance, the famous "All the world's a stage" monolog has become a song. The lyrics are not all Shakespeare, but the idea is clearly inspired by Shakespeare. You know, a lot of Shakespeare's plays have songs, but nobody knows what the original tunes were; there's no written music.

The other thing I like about the adaptation is that in As You Like It there are four love couples with a quadruple wedding at the end, and Laurie and Shaina have turned two of them into gay couples. Touchstone's forest lover Audrey is now Andy, so that's a gay male relationship. And Phebe and Silvius have become Phebe and Sylvia - so that's a gay female relationship. It's interesting because it complicates things considerably. The head over heels love of Silvius for Phebe, which is rejected by Phebe because Phebe thinks Silvius is not good enough for her, becomes more Phebe sort of being in denial about her own gayness. Phebe does end up marrying Sylvia, but it gives it a really interesting kind of queer twist.

As director, how do you balance the Shakespearean language with the contemporary music so that they seem to fit together naturally?

I think the key is that the Shakespeare has to be very contemporary. You can't make any kind of concession to stage speech or heightened speech or Elizabethan qualities of gesture or vocal adjustment. You've gotta talk like you're living in 2022 and you're just a person who happens to be using these words. We work really hard on getting the cast to come up with sort of contemporary paraphrases. For instance, when Oliver says, "What make you here?" he doesn't mean "What are you making?" He's frustrated that Orlando is singing and getting in shape for a wrestling match instead of working, so it's more like he's saying, "What the hell are you doing?! I've told you to come clean up the garden." So you don't want to say [declaims in a plummy accent] "I say, what make you here?" You want to try and bring that frustration and tone of "What the hell are you doing?!" to the line [without changing the language]. You've gotta get your body and your own personal self into the line so it doesn't come off as archaic language.

It doesn't mean completely forgetting iambic pentameter, because iambic pentameter is endemic to the English language, you know? English is kind of spoken in that duh-dot-duh-dot [rhythm] naturally. So I think of iambic pentameter as sort of a clue to how Shakespeare intended the line to be done, as opposed to a rigid rule.

You founded San Francisco Playhouse with Susi Damilano about 20 years ago, correct?

Yeah, this is actually the second production of our 20th anniversary season.

What was your original vision for the company? Has it evolved over time?

Our original vision of the company was just "let's have a company." We didn't have a real clear vision, but we were inspired by theaters like The Donmar Warehouse in London, Steppenwolf Theater Company and New York Theatre Workshop. Susi and I both love everything theatre can do, so we've never restricted our operation to doing exclusively world premieres or cutting-edge pieces that challenge the audience. We also do classic American plays, we do musicals regularly. That's one thing I love about the Donmar - they'll do Shakespeare, they'll do Ibsen, then they'll do Cabaret, right? They'll do anything they want.

We sort of think of ourselves as San Francisco's off-Broadway theater, in the sense that we're about the same size. New York off-Broadway theaters are all in the 200 to 250 seat size, and it's a great size for what we do with our emphasis on empathy and calling ourselves "The Empathy Gym," where people come to practice their powers of compassion. When you're in an intimate space, your opportunity to draw the audience into the moment is much enhanced, so it fits our interest in really sucking the audience into empathy for the characters.

The breadth of our interests was always a part of our programming. In the first year we started out by doing kind of a silly little American potboiler, It Had to Be You, because it was a holiday show and we were starting at holiday time, and we already knew the play because we had produced it a couple of years before. We threw it up in a couple weeks because we'd rented the space and realized "Omigod, we need to do something to make money!"

And then my daughter, Lauren, who was a big part of our founding the theater, wanted to do this very difficult, gritty play by Rebecca Gilman, The Glory of Living, which was about a girl living with her hooker mom who runs off with one of the mom's johns, who then gets her to get him other girls and kill the girls. It's a rough story. Lauren wanted to play the part, and we should maybe have been a little more cognizant of doing something so challenging right away. We really didn't have an audience, so we really didn't have anything to lose, you know?

As it turned out, Rebecca Gilman was super popular at the time. All the theaters around the Bay Area were doing her plays, but no one had done this play because everybody was terrified of it. [laughs] So we just did it, and because we did a good job with it, all the critics had come to see it. They wouldn't ordinarily have gone to this little two-bit, nowhere company in their second production; they wouldn't even bother. But they all had to come because it was a Rebecca Gilman play no one had seen, and they wanted to review it. And all the artistic leaders had to come, because who is this upstart, nobody little company doing this important play, and why are they doing it instead of us?

So it put us on the map - like bam, everybody knew who we were. We followed that with a play Susi wanted to do, a black comedy called The Smell of the Kill which was about these suburban housewives whose scumbag, slimeball husbands were in the basement looking at a new meat locker that one of them had purchased for their hunting expeditions. The men inadvertently lock themselves in the meat locker and the women have the tough decision about whether to let them out or not, which is funny, but it's also pretty black, right? They're becoming collaborators in these men's deaths. Susi wanted to do that, and then I thought "Oh, I love musicals and I've always wanted to play El Gallo in The Fantasticks so why don't we do that?" So without really intending it, we had done a kind of American classic, a very challenging piece, a black comedy and a musical - in the first season.

We had inadvertently discovered our modus operandi with these four shows. And the next year we did five, and then six, but we never really have deviated much from that norm of doing really challenging work, and then adding world premieres to that and developing new plays. So there's generally one really risky play in the season somewhere, a successful off-Broadway play or two, and a musical or two. So it's funny that what we did in the first year pretty much defined who we became.

San Francisco Playhouse certainly has the most eclectic and ambitious lineup, season after season, of any theatre company I'm aware of.

Wow!

I mean, you just tackled Follies for God's sake! Most companies are afraid to attempt that show because it requires a prohibitively large cast and tons of lavish costumes. So how do you manage to pull that off financially?

Well, we have tremendous support among our major donors for doing ambitious work. We had four executive producers for Follies because people really wanted us to do it. Two years ago, when we announced the season that included Follies, we also announced The Ferryman, the Jez Butterworth play that has 20 people. We had three people raise their hand at the executive producer level because people want to see us do that ambitious work. Our constituency supports it.

Another good example - we're doing a world premiere that we commissioned, after As You Like It, called Cashed Out. During the pandemic we did a Monday night series called "Zoomlets," a Zoom TV show our patrons could attend, and we did little 10-minute plays which the director would cast and then we would have kind of an open rehearsal. We did an open rehearsal of this little 10-minute play by an indigenous Native American playwright and our people were just crazy about it, so we commissioned that playwright to turn it into a full-length play. Now we've workshopped it and developed it and we're gonna produce it in our season as a world premiere. That's an incredibly risky thing - nobody's ever heard of this play, nobody's ever heard of this playwright. It's a tough play to sell from a producer's point of view. But when we announced it, we had this huge outpouring of financial support for it.

When you think about it, the people that subscribe to the theater and the people that choose the plays become a community, defined by their tastes in theatre. So it's not surprising that this group of people supports the kind of ambitious programming which attracted them in the first place.

As artistic director of a theatre company, what is the very best part of your job?

Oh, gosh... I love developing new plays, I love finding playwrights that I believe in and committing to help them develop their craft by commissioning them, I love picking the season, I love directing and designing - which I get to do because I founded the theater company, right? I get to pick what I'm gonna do. I'm incredibly grateful for the opportunity to pick a play like Heroes of the Fourth Turning, which is about the right-wing Christian Catholic movement in Wyoming, and if I want to direct this play, I can do it. Even though it's a risky, challenging piece to our liberal San Francisco audience, I thought we need to hear something from the other side of the aisle; we just can't preach to the choir all day. It ended up being a critical and artistic success, but I wouldn't have been able to do that if I hadn't been artistic director, you know? Or I wouldn't be able to say, "We're doing Follies. Deal with it!" [laughs]

I tend to be the sort of lead fundraiser for the company, and I really enjoy the relationships with the audience and relationships with the major stakeholders - our board of directors and people who are the major supporters of our work from outside the board. Over the years, these people have become my cherished friends, and they're part of the leadership of the community as well. So that's the surprising part. I didn't really think that I was ever going to enjoy working with stewardship and cultivation of giving, but I do.

That's interesting to hear because I don't imagine that most artistic directors actually enjoy that part of the job.

Yes, I think a lot of people dread it, but every time I get into a group of people who support us, my heart starts to jump out of my chest with gratitude and appreciation - and fun. It's nice to be in a room with people who love you, and who you love, right? It's a big circle of goodwill that is part of what I think of as a community.

The San Francisco Playhouse community is not just Susi and I and the employees. It's the board of directors and all the subscribers that are part of a family that all kind of believe in the same things, and I think As You Like It is such a perfect way to express that. It's this magical adaptation with music and dance about transformative love and about how everyone belongs. "All are welcome here" is one of the primary lyrics in the song "In Arden" and the chorus sings that over and over again - "All are welcome here." I couldn't think of a better mantra for the San Francisco Playhouse than that.

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NOTE: San Francisco Playhouse has paused performances of As You Like It until Saturday, December 3, 2022. All performances between Wednesday, November 23 - 3pm Saturday, December 3 are cancelled. Performances resume 8pm Saturday, December 3, 2022 and continue through January 14, 2023. For more information, please visit sfplayhouse.org.

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