JERRY PATCH: You grew up in New York, is that right?

BILL CAIN: I grew up in Woodside, Queens. For some reason they call it Sunnyside now but Sunnyside was the other side of Queens Blvd. when I was a kid – the side with trees and yards. Woodside was apartment houses and cement playgrounds and people hanging out of windows knowing everybody’s business. I loved it. When we opened the windows of our apartment, we saw – dead center in the middle of 47th Avenue – the Empire State Building. We thought we were the richest people in the world because we could do that.

JP: When does theatre fit into the equation?

BC: I think my real education in high school came from seeing plays. It was $2 or $3 for the back row of any theater then. When the price went to $8 for an orchestra ticket, I thought it was the death of theatre. So, for a couple of bucks, I saw an extraordinary series of plays – maybe 80 over four years. The plays taught me the world was a very big place. Bigger than Woodside. I never had any intention of working in the theatre, but the theater became a place where the world got bigger.

JP: You’ve described Equivocation as a “whodunit.”

BC: Shakespeare was the official playwright for the government of his time. Essentially, in Equivocation, the Prime Minister comes to him and says, “We want you to write the official history of a terrible crime.” As Shakespeare investigates the crime, he begins to discover that the official story might not actually be the truth. The question becomes: does he tell the truth and lose his head, or stick to the government line and become a propagandist? In getting to the truth, he finds himself caught between his own integrity and his position as an extremely successful playwright.

JP: He’s encouraged by both to take their side.

BC: And this is a man who didn’t take sides – so this is a problem for him. Shakespeare didn’t write morality plays; he wrote about humanity and its complexity. There were people behaving well and badly on both sides of the Gunpowder Plot. This play is about him trying to deal with the complexity of his own art in a political situation.

JP: As far as “whodunits” go, Equivocation is much more like The Maltese Falcon in that regard than, say a Sherlock Holmes. And Shag is a bit like Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, because his beliefs reveal themselves to him in the course of his investigation.

BC: Shag is pushed to examine his own values in the process. Garnett points out to him that the whole series of events he is caught up in comes from the fact that Henry VIII felt he needed a male heir and was willing to tear the kingdom apart to have a boy – and this has personal implications for Shag.

JP: Which is more about family than politics.

BC: Shakespeare’s political plays are family plays. For Shakespeare, politics is family writ large. Shakespeare’s final plays – though they involve politics - are no longer about politics; they are about the reuniting of family. In The Winter’s Tale, for example, the queen is falsely accused of crimes and the king has to spend a lifetime to repair the damage both to his kingdom and to his family. That balance of politics and family is essential to Equivocation.

JP: I’ve heard you talk a lot about the idea of minority viewpoints as something that interested you in this play. Clearly, King James and the English government didn’t want any kind of minority view. Certainly, George Bush or Dick Cheney weren’t interested in any kind of minority view. How does one include the minority view?

BC: America is the only country in history that takes inclusion for granted. We were founded to include everybody, though we drove a stake into the heart of that dream from the beginning. However, the country has been re-founded many times since. In our lifetime, the civil rights movement did exactly that. They imagined a new soul for the country, fought for it and we are now living in an age when we get to see some of the fruits of that extraordinary struggle.

JP: So you draw a parallel between what was happening in England in the era of the Gunpowder Plot and what went on in America after September 11th?

BC: Both situations, the Gunpowder Plot and our recent history, revolve around weapons of mass destruction which may or may not have existed. Shakespeare’s job – as the king’s playwright – was to make history accessible to the audience from a particular point of view. Part of the origin of the play was wondering if Shakespeare were on the government payroll in our time – what would he have written?

JP: I’ve heard you say the play was born as you watched the Towers on September 11th.

BC: I watched the Towers go down from 5th Avenue and 14th Street. As a New York City kid, I was enraged. I knew the only way to answer an act of such unspeakable anger was not with anger, but with tenderness – a tenderness as fierce as the anger. I knew that at the time but I couldn’t get to it. That’s the journey of Equivocation in some ways: the journey from rage and outrage to tenderness.

JP: How did you get from that to the story of the Gunpowder Plot as told by Shakespeare?

BC: I didn’t know what the play would be about until I was in another tower, the Tower of London. Over the rack, there was an official government sign that said something to the effect of “No one has ever been tortured for religion in the Tower of London.” This is technically true. You were tortured for treason, but what made you a traitor was that you had a different religion. And I thought what a slippery thing this “government speak” is. Then I walked into the cells of the Tower. The walls were covered with last words from political prisoners from the 1500s and 1600s. Short, clear and frequently very moving. Shakespeare’s theater was, at that same time, turning out words by the tens of thousands. What was the relationship, I thought, between these few words written by political prisoners and Shakespeare who was writing the history of England and becoming very rich from it across the river. That became the play. The play happened to me sitting in that cell, where I returned many many times - and sitting in the Globe Theater, where I also returned many times.

JP: How did you come by your fascination with Shakespeare?

BC: I’m not a Shakespeare scholar. I’m a Shakespeare practitioner. I was the artistic director of the Boston Shakespeare Company and directed most of the canon there. I’ve read a lot of course, but mostly I learned my art in Central Park - for free - from the New York Shakespeare Festival. As a kid I got to watch George C. Scott tear the hell out of Merchant of Venice and Colleen Dewhurst as Cleopatra and Lee Grant as Electra – and, yes, I know Shakespeare didn’t write Electra. As an audience we were changed by these extraordinary people. But we were really being changed from the moment we sat down in line for tickets. We were all there together, sharing and being a part of the story. As long as I live, I will never forget going in to the Delacourt at 8 o’clock one night and watching Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, and Richard III, all night long in the park. It was a celebration of the togetherness of what theatre is at its best.

JP: MTC’s production will be the third production of Equivocation. It was also produced by the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland and the Geffen Playhouse in Los Angeles. What did you learn from those two productions? How have they affected the text of the play?

BC: It’s a strange thing. You write a play – which takes a year or more of your life - and then you have no idea if it will mean anything to anybody but yourself. You write a series of words in private that people then speak in public. And like incantations or spells, they create effects in the world – and the effects change based on the people who speak them. Equivocation, from the very first reading, has affected actors because it’s about them. It’s about actors putting on a play. In Ashland at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, with Bill Rauch directing, we learned about the joy of the play. In Los Angeles, the play was treated in a more serious fashion. And we now start the third production, where it will be performed in the city which inspired it. It’s a play about doing theatre and now we’re doing it here where I learned it. I’m grateful to be home.

Want More? CLICK HERE for an on-camera interview with Bill Cain