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American Shakespeare Center Essay

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The American Shakespeare Center (ASC) wants to give their audience the experience and pleasure of what it would have been like to be a playgoer in the Elizabethan era. In order to keep the plays feeling authentic, they consider many aspects such as costuming, music, and having small acting troupes. One of the most important things they do to remain true is they “do it with the lights on,” meaning they have universal lighting just as the Elizabethan theaters would have had. With universal lighting, the audience can see the actors and the actors can see the audience and play their roles to fit the behavior of the audience. In the ASC’s production of Henry V, they used this to their advantage by handing out props to the audience, using the audience as a prop and even having us be extras for their play. By constantly interacting with different members in the …show more content…

Since ASC likes to keep the plays authentic, they use 15 or fewer actors to show what an acting troupe would have been like in Shakespeare’s time. Knowing that they don’t have the cast to make an army, they turned to the audience and made us be the army for King Henry. As the Chorus is giving the prologue for this scene, he is describing the night before the battle where the French soldiers are confident in their army and play dice as they wait for morning. Meanwhile, the English soldiers “sit patiently and inly ruminate the morning’s danger” (IV.24-25). While the Chorus is giving his prologue on the stage, the actor playing Henry is “raising morale” by shaking hands with the audience giving us “a little touch of Harry in the night” (IV.47) as if we were his soldiers. It was unexpected to see the main character be in the audience and using us as extras for their play. ASC didn’t change the script in any way, they made it work with the small cast they had by including us in the

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