All the world's a stage for Brustein

Two actors in a Suffolk University rehearsal room work through a scene from the new play ``The English Channel," set in a lover's bedroom. One actor moves from a desk to the bed, and the couple change their approaches and inflections as director Wes Savick offers suggestions.

``It's pillow talk," he says encouragingly, ``You have to find the playfulness and effervescence." The actors start again. ``My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun; Coral is far more red than her lips' red . . ."

Wait a minute. This is Shakespeare's Sonnet No. 130, being given a particularly passionate reading under the watchful eye of the playwright: critic, director and American Repertory Theatre founding artistic director Robert Brustein. Have we gone from ``Shakespeare in Love" to ``Shakespeare in Lust"?

At a rehearsal break, Brustein smiles at the notion that ``The English Channel" is sexy and bawdy. ``I hope that's the impression audiences get," he says. ``Shakespeare is very bawdy. He was a naughty schoolboy. You can't read a speech without finding puns, and all the apocryphal stories about him involve sex."

In ``The English Channel," which is having its world premiere at Suffolk's C. Walsh Theatre starting Thursday before moving to the Vineyard Playhouse, Brustein weaves some of Shakespeare's sonnets and snippets from his plays into a story of friendship, sex, and betrayal. The time is 1593, the year the plague closed all London's theaters. In that claustrophobic atmosphere, Brustein gathers Shakespeare; fellow poet, playwright, and sometime rival Christopher Marlowe; Emilia Lanier, the woman Brustein believes is the Dark Lady of Shakespeare's sonnets; and Shakespeare's patron, the Earl of Southampton, into the Mermaid Tavern, where plots of sedition and seduction run wild.

Although the particulars are fictionalized, Brustein says most of the situations are based in historical fact. ``I moved one plot against the queen forward six years, and the identity of the Dark Lady has not been firmly established, but I'm convinced she was the musician Emilia Lanier," Brustein says. ``Shakespeare didn't invent his stories from whole cloth, and neither did I."

The channel of the title, he says, refers to Shakespeare's penchant for lifting or channeling other people's words and works and refashioning into something that became his own. ``I've lifted liberally from the plays and sonnets," says Brustein, ``I've even written the play in blank verse, but I've tried to make the language contemporary."

The idea for ``The English Channel" grew out of research Brustein has been doing for his newest book, ``Shakespeare's Prejudices" (Yale University Press, 2008), which was in turn inspired by the work of Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt, an adviser on the Oscar-winning film ``Shakespeare in Love" whose book ``Will in the World" places the poet and playwright in the thick of the political and social milieu of his time.

In ``Shakespeare's Prejudices," Brustein also explores the social and political issues that surrounded the playwright. ``Of course, Shakespeare's writing is ``not of an age, but for all time,"' Brustein says, ``but it's fascinating to look at the influences that run throughout his plays. His treatment of women, his misogyny, his ferocious anti-effeminism, his admiration for the straight-talking machismo man, his perception of religion; these ideas repeat throughout his plays."

The year 1593, when the poet was just 29 and still honing his craft, was also a rich creative time for Shakespeare.

``I've always been fascinated by 1593," Brustein says. ``It was a time when all of these competing elements came together for Shakespeare, but it was also a time when he was focused on writing his sonnets, believing that they give you immortality while plays are something you do to earn a living."

The period was also filled with rich characters Brustein says he didn't need to embellish. Marlowe, for one, in the last year before his death, was a wild man. ``Marlowe was one of the first bohemians," says Brustein. ``He had incredible panache and was fearlessly open about his homosexuality because he was employed by the queen as a spy. The Earl of Southampton was an important patron to Shakespeare, but he was also determined to remove Elizabeth from the throne and was later imprisoned for his plots. Emilia Lanier was the first woman to publish a book of her own poetry."

Brustein says he was so steeped in the attitudes and action of the period, he dreamed several of the scenes. ``I have a line in the play when Shakespeare says characters come to him in his sleep and plead for life," Brustein says. ``I really did wake up with the complete scene in my head."

Brustein, who turned 80 last April, certainly hasn't slowed down. He continues to write criticism for the New Republic (which he's done since 1959), has a blog on Huffingtonpost.com, and will be lecturing at Suffolk this year, all while finishing his book. He says he thinks he also has two more plays in him about Shakespeare.

``Each decade is not as frightening as it's made out to be," he says. ``Except maybe 80. I don't know about this one. All I can say is my singles game isn't what it used to be."

``The English Channel" is presented by the C. Walsh Theatre in association with the Vineyard Playhouse, 55 Temple St., Sept. 6-16. Tickets: $30. 866-811-4111, theatermania.com.