There’s something beautifully, recklessly insane about dragging potted trees across America so you can stage Lear in someone’s backyard. It’s the kind of mad devotion that makes you wonder if Ben Greet wasn’t just performing Shakespeare but embodying the whole gorgeous, doomed enterprise of art itself.
Think about it: here’s this Brit at the turn of the century, looking at the pristine theatres with their velvet seats and gas lamps, and he says nah. He says what if we just… didn’t do that? What if we found a clearing, or better yet, made a clearing, hauled in some greenery like we’re setting up the world’s most pretentious yard sale, and let Puck loose while mosquitoes feast on the audience?
That DIY ethos, the understanding that the frame matters as much as the picture, that context is content. Greet got what every hack director forgets: Shakespeare wasn’t written for climate controlled auditoria. Those plays were birthed in the mud and the daylight, in spaces where you could smell the groundlings and feel the weather turn.
The thing that elevates it from gimmick to gospel: those portable trees. Man, those trees. Can you imagine the sheer bloody-mindedness? “The grove isn’t quite right, lads, unpack the birches.” It’s simultaneously the most artificial and most honest thing you could do. He’s literally manufacturing authenticity, and somehow it works because he’s so committed to the bit. It’s theatre admitting it’s theatre while still demanding you believe.
And people did believe. They showed up in summer dresses and shirtsleeves, sat on blankets and benches, and let themselves be transported. Not despite the artifice, but through it. That’s the covenant, isn’t it? The agreement between performer and audience that if you meet us halfway, we’ll meet you there too, in whatever forest, real or fabricated, we’re pretending exists.
Ben Greet understood something essential about longing and displacement. About how art needs friction, between inside and outside, between the staged and the spontaneous, between the script written in 1600 and the grass stains on your pants in 1905. He made theatre physical again, made it something you attended in your body, not just your mind.
And then he vanished, in a way. No permanent address, no monument. Just echoes, all those summer Shakespeare festivals still happening, still dragging “The Dream” outdoors every June, still banking on the idea that given the right conditions, with the real stars overhead and the real earth underfoot, something true might break through all the performance.