Artist's conception of James B. (Doc) Ayres
approaching theatre in 1975 production
of Much Ado About Nothing
SHAKESPEARE
EXPOSED
JAMES B. AYRES Ph.D. TELLS ALL
James B. Ayres , UT English professor, founder and chief architect of the ground breaking Shakespeare at Winedale program, had just come back from Houston. He and his wife JoAnn had attended her son’s graduation from law school. "Doc", as he is called around Round Top, was tired...but as he talked, he came alive and leaned forward in his chair. He is a man of honest emotions. From time to time, as a certain memory struck him, his eyes would cloud and he would be unable to speak for a few moments. When he talked about his students, it was obvious he was talking about family.
Where were you raised? What was your childhood like?
I have to correct you immediately. Corn is raised and people are reared.
Then where were you reared?
I was reared in San Antonio in Alamo Heights...a lot of wealthy families. They were the leaders in government. My grandfather and uncle (Atlee B. and Robert M. Ayres) were the most famous architects in Texas history. They designed ...many buildings including the Municipal Auditorium in San Antonio. My father, I guess, was the black sheep. He didn’t want to be an architect.I didn’t know him very well. He died when I was seven.
My mom was a nurse. She had five children. I was the second eldest...I played football and baseball and track and worked after school to help the family out.
I was a great baseball player. I hit eight homeruns before I hit a single in semi-pro ball in San Antonio. I played in the Bluebonnet league... against some really good players. As a matter of fact, that's how I joined the Lutheran Church. My mother was Catholic. The Lutheran baseball team was really good...and I joined it and we won the city championship. The Pastor came to me and said "It’s about time you joined the church so we can legitimatize this." Every college I went to, I‘d try out but I had to give that up because I got serious about education.
I was also a Juvenile delinquent. I was on probation before I got drafted for shooting street lights out..but that was what people did. The prank that gained us the most fame was when there was a Baptist revival at the Sunken Garden and we climbed up top, stuffed a dummy...screamed and yelled and threw it over during prayer.
Do you remember any events from your childhood that foreshadowed your later interest in literature?
No, not one bit. I played a lot of sports. The only time I enjoyed role playing...I worked at a bank, in fact, I was the first drive-in bank teller in Texas...we had parties at the bank. One year at Halloween, I dressed up in a dress and won first place.
How did you become interested in literature and Shakespeare?
Through teachers, certain teachers. My sophomore English teacher, she was one of those people that sort of took people under their wing. That’s the old tradition. We don’t have that tradition today. It’s sad. She introduced me to William B. Hunter Jr., a Miltonist who worked my butt off. When I graduated from Baylor... my major was history. I agreed to go into a Ph.D. program in history at Michigan and I eloped. I went to California on my honeymoon, getting ready to go to school. My mother didn’t know where I was! No one knew where I was! Somehow William B. Hunter found me at the Sands Motel and said "You're crazy to go to history, we want you in Literature. I got you a job with my old teacher at Florida State." So I went. Then my teacher at Florida State sent me to Ohio State to his teacher.. so I went from teacher to teacher to teacher. Since my major had been history, I didn’t know much about literature, except for Milton. My first paper (at Florida State) was on Beowulf. The professor said "Mr. Ayres writes in unrelenting gobbledegook ostensibly about Beowulf."
I'll never forget that.
Tell me how Shakespeare at Winedale started.
Shakespeare at Winedale hit me on Oct. 8, 1970 which was the occasion of a barbecue retirement celebration for Robert Sullivan who was president of the Hogg Foundation for Mental Health. I was Vice President of the University at that time. I got in the receiving line and walked up to Ms. (Ima) Hogg and she said "Well, what do you do?"
I said "I teach Shakespeare."
And she said "Well, I know Shakespeare." and she told me a few things about Shakespeare ‘cause her dad used to take her all over Europe everywhere to see the plays. She said "There’s a barn over there. I want you to go in and look around."
Her baby grand was sitting in the middle of a dirty barn catchin’ dust and their were some seats out there and Jimmy (Dick) played a concert there. He played that afternoon. I came back to her and I said "You know, that’s amazing. It’s about as big as Shakespeare’s theatre."
She said "I want you to do Shakespeare in there."
I had been trying to understand since 1960 when I went to Ohio State what (my professors) had been telling me ...that Shakespeare was not intended to be read and studied to death but to be free from that and that the only way you could truly understand it was through performance...they said that there was a tremendous gap between the academic understanding... and the theatre... and that those groups will never get together.
So, I made my mind up to break through that...and I think I’ve done that.
What were the first years like, and were they different than they are now?
The major difference of course was the generations.
I should point out that we were coming out of the sixties into the early seventies and the students at that time were really something. I mean the first five years...they were really intelligent, inspiring and creative. The improvisations we would do would take you apart. Then the 80’s started coming around and we expanded.
The first year we took ten days. We did one performance Saturday night. We did posters with felt pens and passed them out...and the place was full. Miss Ima and her nurse, both of them, got together and made new dresses for the performance. The German people around here didn’t care for it. They weren’t used to long haired boys and braless girls and people running around out there in tights. They just thought that was weird. ..the kids were all eager to sacrifice themselves for this extremely rigorous thing. In fact they didn’t think of it as rigorous... They thought it was fun. "Play" they called it.
Tell me some funny things that have happened.
I remember little spots in time. I’m writing about it. One of my best memories of early Winedale 1972 was one night in improvisations, Marilyn Wagner and Gloria Jaster and a friend of theirs brought some beer and were watching the improvisation and they were breakin’ up. So we said "You be in it...help us...be in it." So they came over, and let me tell you what. They were super and they just blew us apart.
Another wonderful memory was in 1975 when we did Much Ado About Nothing and we had a parade...an actual parade. It (the play) begins with soldiers coming home from the war. We got Gloria and Rosalee and the gang to get us horses. We got the horses and saddled up...audiences (and local people) lined the road and we handed out balloons and noisemakers to welcome the soldiers home. We had a band to welcome us ( Burton High School Girl’s band). Then we all slid down and went inside and began the play. It was wonderful. It was sort of like the creative spirit of the play, of the students, of the community was all one.
Why do you do it? What’s in it for Doc?
I don’t do what I do to prove to the world that my approach to things is the only one. Their are alternative ways of doing things...professional theatre proves that. I am interested in teaching Shakespeare in its proper sphere, in the theatre.
Professional theatres, summer stock, all that...don’t teach anything, they do shows. I don’t do shows, we play at Winedale...we do plays and the connotation is very different. Show is very artificial, it’s contrived, it’s outwardly directed. Ours is genuine and to play is the hardest thing in the world to do. I’ve been teaching courses in the Theory of Play and the play of culture for years and play is one of the most demanding things to do. I don’t care if you’re Vince Lombardi or Sir Laurence Olivier...it’s hard.
One of the best books on play is Take Time For Paradise and it’s a magnificent book about the metaphysics of play. ... Do you know what baseball is all about? Coming home.
Winedale is a mythology, not a course...and mythologies are created every day out there. What I am interested in is the process. I do it for the process.
Working at Winedale is like painting a picture from inside it and that’s not easy to do. When we release these young people into that experience... that process is the interpretation. When you are free to express yourself in the process...that’s the highest achievement of it...that’s when it really works, when people reach beyond themselves. It’s an artistic achievement in its broadest and highest sense. Jimmy (Dick) experiences, probably, I’ve never talked to him about it, but I know at one point in the performance of a piece, his ability magnifies that piece...because he’s not subordinate to that piece, it seems to me. Some people are. You can hear them, they’re slavish in (their performance). There is a point (in the play) where a performer and the character meet somehow and have a have a kind of conversation that we can’t explain.
What happens is, you don’t conquer the character. You just find a way of expressing the character or the language on a level that is way beyond the things we pick up to read and ...it’s yours. My function is to make sure it’s theirs and that’s hard because selfishly, I want it to be mine.
That why some of them are such great experiences and maybe a lot greater than the audience realizes. We realize it. We’ve transcended; we’ve grown, we’ve seen that moment and we know what we did. People say to us "It must be hard to memorize all those lines." and we think "Jesus Christ, that was the easiest thing we had to do...the whole experience began beyond that."
I do it because, every year, it’s just the best thing that could ever happen.
Resistance is the worst villain at Winedale. In order to be true and creative, what we’ve got to do... everybodies got to do...is get completely lost. That’s where we really begin. All true learning begins with ignorance and failure and the phrase "I don’t know." That’s the best thing you can do. I tell them "At Winedale, the first thing we’re going to do is fail...but we’re going to learn how to do it gracefully."
People with 4.3 GPA’s don’t know what failure is but they do it here...then they understand another side of something. I like to tell a story about Peter Brook, who took a group of professional actors to Africa to do a play in the aboriginal jungles, an improvisational play about a shoe. They (the natives) didn’t know what a shoe was. He was trying to bring meaning to something that is alien. That’s a task. That’s what Winedale is about...trying to communicate something that is extremely difficult, almost impossible.
It’s like the inner worlds of Shakespeare,..Denmark is a prison. In As You Like It, the forest of Arden is where everybody finds out about himself... so Winedale is an analogy.
Few of your students are drama majors...
No, I have never had a drama major.
Why is the program set up like that and what does an engineering major get out of performing Shakespeare?
I’ve had engineering majors, even an A&M engineering major and a physicist who was also a clarinetist. I don’t believe that Shakespeare and the performing of Shakespeare are the exclusive property of any group...theatre group... acting company... whatever. That’s what has harmed it so much. The Bard is idolized... Bardolatry, they call it . Nor do I mean that we should water it down so that everybody can understand it or to follow a current notion. I go back to very simple principles. This program is a grassroots program in every aspect of the word. The grassroots support it, the grass roots are donors. The students are grassroots people. They are not performers; they are not experts. Shakespeare’s audience had not read Shakespeare. They didn’t know about it. I give preference to people who have never read it, never performed it. Shakespeare’s actors did not go to acting school. There weren’t any acting schools. They studied rhetoric like Shakespeare did and every other schoolboy. Acting companies were noted as outlaws in those days and if you read the schedules you can see that there is no way in hell that people could know all their lines because they had to do so many plays every week. They worked improvisationally. That’s exactly what we do. I enjoy the risk of it. The struggle. I’m just interested in developing new things, fresh approaches. The reason I did Pericles two years ago is because somebody told me I couldn’t do it. That’s the only reason we did Pericles.
What goals do you see still before you with Shakespeare at Winedale?
There are some practical things I’d like to see out there. I would like to see there be an academy of some kind. I would like to have visiting scholars come out and stay. I would like for their to be high school teachers in a graduate program. I would like to get into George Bernard Shaw and an Irish play ...I’m interested in going a little bit longer in the summers... I would like to get over to England to the Globe theatre. I think that would do us a lot of good. We have international recognition ...but we don’t have the money.
Now for another subject. Tell me about Eeyore’s Birthday, how it began, what it’s for...
In 1964 I was in my office and Lloyd Birdwell and Jean Craver, two students, English majors, came in my office and brought me a Batman poster.
They said "We heard from the students that you were the faculty member that might be interested in helping us. We’re throwing a party, Eeyore’s birthday party and we want to know if you will help us plan it."
The first Eeyore’s was about 40 people and a donkey from England sent over to us by the Duke of Bedford and we had one keg of beer and a maypole and everybody brought instruments and we had a good time. The curious thing is that we never asked why we were doing it. People asked us why but I don’t know that we could ever really explain.
Originally it was a "Happening". It was never advertised. It happened. On a Friday afternoon, if you drove by Eastwood Park behind the law school and you saw a red balloon, you knew it was Eeyore’s. Everybody wore costumes. Everybody had red balloons and it was just a lot of fun.
It traveled from 1964 into the rough times in the late sixties with drugs and all that. As the faculty sponsor, I had to deal with the law enforcement people a lot. We only had one problem. That was when the President of the United States decided to come unannounced.
We did invite him but we didn’t know he was coming. He didn’t tell us. He didn’t tell anybody as crazy as he was. He just decided instead of going to the ranch ... The FBI really got mad. We invited lots of people, the Pope, the Queen of England, Everett Dirkson, Adlai Stevenson and they’d write back. Everett Dirkson wrote a poem and the Queen wrote back and informed us that she had "another engagement". The Secretary of the Vatican wrote back for the Pope. We kept them all.
It grew. The generations changed. We had to keep politicians out because we didn’t want anybody pushing anything. It grew from one keg to 250 kegs. By ‘77 it was up to 20,000 people. Then the costume contest degenerated into nude and sexual acts on stage and people were fornicating in the woods and there was no way to control it. In ‘77, that’s when I walked away..
Lloyd went on to work for Mayor Lindsey in New York, did a beautiful poster, had the first Eeyore’s Birthday Party in Central Park one year...and the whole world came to it. The next year, Eeyore’s Birthday Party was at the Bronx Zoo and you wouldn’t believe how beautiful it was. Children and animals.
What I’m doing here (Eeyore’s Birthday Party at Winedale) is trying to keep the spirit alive.
You’ve been around Round Top for a number of years but you’ve chosen lately to have Round Top be your year round home. Why?
I’ve always wanted to get back to the country. I lived in the country with Mama and my grandmother. I worked on a farm and I always liked it. My tie with Shakespeare is country. Stratford is not a city. Shakespeare is a country theatre. It’s not black tie. It’s not Theater, It ’s play. It was in his day and is still in ours, rough and boisterous, full of noise from the audience.
The thing that has always brought me up here is the people. There are some really superb people up here.
People here are closer to the rituals of the human experience because they are concentrated down here. There’s not a day that passes that somebody doesn’t celebrate one thing or the other. You hear more about that...confirmations and birthdays and anniversaries. You don’t hear about those things in the big city because people lack identity.
If you could accomplish one more thing in your working life, what would it be?
I just want to take it one step further.
You’ve accomplished a lot in a lifetime. Have you done enough?
No. I have something inside of me that keeps me going. Pushing, questioning...Some people don’t like that. I don’t mean to be contentious. I just want to look at something a totally different way. I’m "satisfied" with it (Winedale) but I think it could do a lot more.
How do you want to be remembered?
I think I will be remembered as someone who is not satisfied with anything that is mediocre, average, or conventional...as one who really wants to make everyone responsible for his own actions... as someone who demands your unqualified love and commitment... and who wants to make sure that excellence is a part of our lives. as someone who tried to push people way beyond themselves... as somebody who is willing to risk everything.
This is the last question and the most serious because it could have long lasting consequences if you don’t answer it correctly...
You have died and gone to Hell. For your punishment, you must perform one play over and over for all eternity. What play would it be?
King Lear.
