Review: "Polishing Shakespeare" Gleams from Beginning to End

Polishing Shakespeare

Written by Brian Dykstra

Directed by Margarett Perry

Presented by Twilight Theatre Co. in association with Kitchen Theatre Company at 59E59

59 East 59th Street, Manhattan, NYC

July 10-August 10, 2025

A portion of the Shakespeare industry is devoted to products rooted in the idea that the Bard is just too hard for modern audiences. The No Fear Shakespeare line of books, for instance, promises the original text side-by-side with "modern English translations," despite the fact that Shakespeare's English is already modern English, the early modern and late modern English difference being, linguistically speaking, largely confined to vocabulary. One of the characters in actor, poet, and playwright Brian Dykstra's Polishing Shakespeare is bankrolling a similar project, except focused on theatrical productions, and over a fleet, funny, and fantastic 90 minutes, the show digs into the larger cultural and political implications of such ostensible concern for accessibility.

Harpsichord gives way to hip-hop as Polishing Shakespeare begins, introducing us to billionaire Grant (Brian Dykstra), who is disbursing grants–allowing plenty of puns on Grant/grant in the vein of Shakespeare's own punning on Will/will–for modern translations of Shakespeare's plays, to be staged–maybe–by a prominent theater company of which Ms. Branch (Kate Levy) acts as Artistic Director. Grant plans ultimately to have more than thirty writers each working on a play, and he is making his latest pitch about participating to playwright Janet (Kate Siahaan-Rigg) when the play opens. While Grant and Ms. Branch both insist that what they are asking for are translations, not adaptations, Grant is much more willing to acknowledge that "dumbing down" is the real goal here. Janet is initially resistant, but as the trio debate one another, Grant ups the ante, throwing in an offer to pay off Janet's student loans, pushing her to consider whether she can simultaneously sell out and retain her artistic integrity and whether resistance (to the force of capital) is in fact futile.

The characters in Polishing Shakespeare butt heads over some compellingly thorny issues, from whether Shakespeare in someone else's words is still Shakespeare or whether lit-crit-informed directors scare general audiences away from enjoying Shakespeare to the role of art that hasn't been made "easy" in creating a public capable of and invested in thinking critically or whether corporate money is inevitably a trap for artists–and all of it is incredibly entertaining. Part of the immense fun of this production–and one of its meta layers–is that it is entirely written in Shakespearean verse: it both is and is not the kind of Shakespeare play that Grant wants. Within this compositional structure, allusions that rely on familiarity with lines from Shakespeare's plays sit comfortably alongside questions about the extensive paratextual apparatus we build around those lines: does it really matter for someone watching a play whether something is an aside as opposed to a soliloquy and what the difference is?

As Grant, Dykstra wears the character's power with the air of someone accustomed to being in control–he can appear friendly and reasonable because he feels assured of getting his way. Siahaan-Rigg's Janet, whose cadence occasionally modulates into that of a slam poet cadence, is clever and conflicted, and Siahaan-Rigg masterfully delivers more than one standout monologue, while Levy gives us a Ms. Branch whose narcissistic tendencies do not necessarily negate artistic impulses that go beyond fundraising for her company. These terrific performances are framed by a set, designed by Tyler M. Perry, that features a wall of built-in bookshelves sporting a number of tastefully arranged Shakespeare tchotchkes: physical signifiers of the Shakespeare industry that represent, for the most part, the commodified signs of the playwright without the substance of his words themselves.

In the play's last third, its focus on Shakespeare organically opens onto a larger consideration of the potential of and pressures on theater, and art more generally, in our current moment. Polishing Shakespeare both speaks very directly to that moment–as when Grant mockingly says that Janet could always apply to the NEA for funding–and highlights the long history of some of the issues that it raises: as the play itself points out, Shakespeare too modified his art to align with the interests of his patrons (and to avoid jail). Even Janet's desire to critique the capitalist funders of her translation in her translation has analogues in the early modern playwrights putting recognizable public figures onstage in their plays, sometimes satirically (and sometimes with unfortunate consequences for said playwrights). Such history suggests that Polishing Shakespeare will continue to be timely for some time yet, including in its marvelous encomium to the blackboxes and basements, church halls and community centers of indie theater as vital third spaces. Wedding virtuosic writing to impeccable staging, Polishing Shakespeare reminds us, both in its narrative and as a theatrical experience, that plays, in the Elizabethan period as now, not only can move or entertain but also can be tools to think with.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards