In 2014, soon after OSF announced it would produce all of Shakespeare’s plays in 10 years, members of the artistic staff shut themselves in a room, covered the walls with butcher paper and started constructing a flow chart.

In past years, “passion pitches” had strongly influenced which Shakespeare plays were offered each season: a director’s yearning to reframe a familiar work, or an actor’s take on a challenging part. As a result, popular plays like Twelfth Night or Romeo and Juliet could crop up every four or five years while other, knottier works like Timon of Athens or Coriolanus might languish for more than a decade. Now, with a tight deadline to meet, the company would need a finer balance between strategic planning and artistic desire.

The chart was not meant to set 10 years in stone. Instead, it helped identify both the problems and the opportunities the company faced. For example, they would be launching the new canon project without having fully completed the old one; Timon of Athens was still waiting to be checked off, having been hanging about without a production since 1997. How could the Shakespeare Festival apportion its resources so that each year felt urgent and exciting, so that plays in the cycle’s final seasons didn’t look like leftovers on a plate?

Timon went up on the wall for consideration in 2016. So did Richard II. As Resident Dramaturg Lydia G. Garcia noted in a July phone interview, beginning a new canon cycle gave the company a chance to push the “reset” button on Shakespeare’s history plays. Producing Richard II would allow OSF to present eight of the histories in chronological order instead of by composition date, giving each successive production new narrative momentum. An open slot in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre offered another opportunity to shift perspective. Hamlet had last appeared in 2010 in the Bowmer in a production that focused on the intimate intricacies of family life. Setting the play outdoors would enable a treatment that viewed the work through a wider, more spectacular lens, one that could bring generational tensions more fully into play.

Pragmatism helped a fourth work, Twelfth Night, claim a possible slot; the season would need a strong Shakespearean comedy. But a director’s clear, compelling vision helped as well. Christopher Liam Moore proposed setting the work in 1930s Hollywood, an approach that would add an intriguingly different tone and texture to the season’s mix.

When OSF’s Boarshead committee—a multidepartmental group that reads and proposes play possibilities two seasons in advance—met to make final recommendations to Artistic Director Bill Rauch, all four plays made their list. But further dialogue with various OSF stakeholders revealed that something crucial was missing. In past seasons, culturally specific settings of Shakespeare’s plays had given the works a contextual richness as well as insight into particularly American experiences. For example, the 2012 Romeo and Juliet highlighted tensions between Anglos and Mexican-Californios; in 2014, The Comedy of Errors was set in the Harlem Renaissance. Yet OSF had never produced a Shakespeare play staged through an Asian-American lens. Unfortunately, none of the four plays under consideration seemed to offer an organic way in. So the selection process paused as Bill Rauch talked to Asian-American company and community members, asking which plays in the canon spoke to them most. The Winter’s Tale emerged as a favorite, with respondents calling its treatment of a daughter’s devaluation and eventual reclamation especially resonant. Setting the work in both dynastic China and the American Wild West would allow a particularly fruitful cross-cultural conversation. And so, late in the process, a fifth play joined the list.

Prophetic selections

While Boarshead sometimes discusses the topicality of plays under consideration, it’s often only later that members see how prescient their choices were. For example, says Garcia, knowing that 2016 would be an election year played almost no role in the selection process. Yet questions that will be preoccupying American voters about the nature of power, economic inequality, women’s roles and social change inform each one of the 2016 works.

Certainly the question of what a nation needs in its leader is central to Richard II. As England’s monarch, Richard II should be the embodiment of continuity and stability. He rules by divine right, as the Lord’s anointed as well as by hereditary right, the crown having descended to him in an unbroken line from William the Conqueror. But while he is a formidable symbol, Richard is a weak ruler and a worse politician. Secure in his sense of entitlement, Richard sees no need for accountability—or allies. He levies “grievous taxes” to finance his personal extravagance, losing popular support. His suspected involvement in the murder of his uncle unsettles his powerful kin. His violation of their property rights, the basis of their social status, pushes them over the brink into rebellion.

Does a more capable rival have a right to take the throne because he can, especially if he will rule more effectively? What part does morality play in good governance and what compromises are permissible, even critical, to secure allegiance and obedience? Shakespeare examines such questions with a typical mixture of shrewd appraisal and unease. As Richard loses power, and his challenger for the crown, Henry Bolingbroke, gains it, the play engineers a notable shift of sympathy. As in King Lear, deprivation gives the deposed king new awareness of the basic humanity that connects him with others: “I live with bread, like you; feel want, / Taste grief, need friends.” Imprisonment will deepen his emotional and spiritual growth. However, this personal growth, like Lear’s and Prospero’s in The Tempest, comes at a cost; he must give up his responsibilities as a ruler.

And Bolingbroke? His strengths as a leader contrast pointedly with Richard’s failings, but his own deficiencies come under scrutiny as well. He stepped in where Richard had checked out, and his actions save the state. Whether his rule will bring lasting improvement is left in question; the civil wars Bolingbroke began are far from over. Furthermore, his takeover seems to bring repetition instead of renewal, a pattern currently plaguing the Middle East, where one regime replaces another to little apparent effect. “They love not poison that do poison need,” Bolingbroke admits on learning that he is indirectly responsible for Richard’s death. Richard’s coffin occupies the stage in the play’s final moments, invoking the situation with which the work began, a king with blood on his hands.

Family business

Richard II is temperamentally unfit for the role he has inherited. So, too, is Hamlet. In Hamlet, Shakespeare ups the ante by making the obligation overtly filial as well as political. Richard’s father died when he was a child and is barely mentioned in the play. Hamlet’s father gave him his name and loomed over his youth and adolescence; young Hamlet describes him as a kind of god, a “Titan” and a “Mars.” The man loads his all-too-mortal son with heavy expectations, even after death.

For Hamlet the son is not quite his father’s child. The older Hamlet, as the epithets suggest, was a model of heroic, martial masculinity; notably, he appears on Elsinore’s battlements armed to the teeth, dressed just as he was when he killed old Fortinbras in single combat. Young Hamlet, by contrast, is a student and a thinker, not a fighter. His first offensive move is to put on a play.

But Hamlet’s father demands revenge, not revelation. In doing so he insists that his son repeat the pattern of old Hamlet’s past rather than move forward into a future of his own making. Revenge, after all, is about compulsive repetition, the taking of an eye for an eye, a life for a life. And as Hamlet suppresses his own nature to take up the burden of his father’s will, we see the widening cycle of destruction that comes from it: not justice, but a mistaken act of butchery that sets yet another son, Laertes, on the same compulsive path; two old friends sent to their deaths; and a stage piled high with corpses at the end.

As in many of Shakespeare’s plays, Richard II included, family politics are national politics, and tensions between a father and  child speak to the tensions between whole generations. In Richard II, fathers chafe at their king’s excesses but their obedience and reverence hold. Young sons rebel, nudging the nation away from feudal monarchy and toward the modern world. In Hamlet, this generational progress is short-circuited. When Hamlet finally gives in to his father’s demands, his soliloquies stop. His devotion to philosophy, to law, to art and to reason—all qualities crucial to a civilized society’s growth—is wiped away. “O, from this time forth, / My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” he cries.

“I am dead,” Hamlet will declare multiple times in the play’s final scene. Indeed, he dies in spirit long before his body does. And he is not the only one. Obedience to a father’s will so completely annihilates the younger generation (Ophelia included) that there is no one left to inherit. Denmark is left in the hands of an invader, Fortinbras, son of Fortinbras, made in his father’s mold. At the close of the play, he rewrites Hamlet’s life with his epitaph, imposing the values of an older generation—notably now foreign values—over the hopes of the younger one: “Bear Hamlet like a soldier to the stage, and for his passage, / The soldier’s music and the rite of war / Speak loudly for him.”

A woman’s office

The Winter’s Tale interrogates the destructive effects of male violence and absolute male power from a different perspective, that of the women subjected to them. Early in the play, the King of Sicily suspects his pregnant wife of cuckolding him with his visiting best friend. Leontes’ resulting rage is devastating. By Act III, his tormented wife is apparently dead; so too, it seems, is their daughter, Perdita, left to perish on the king’s orders. And so too is their son, Mamillius, who is literally sickened by his mother’s treatment. The boy’s name signifies how vital women are to men’s identity and well-being. Violence against women does violence to men—and to the nation, since Mamillius was the king’s heir and the kingdom’s future hope.

But The Winter’s Tale is a romance, and Shakespeare’s romances offer erring fathers and rulers a saving second chance to learn from the women they spurn. To turn the king from his madness is a duty that “becomes a woman best,” insists the Queen’s waiting woman, Paulina. Risking her own life, she challenges Leontes’ absolutism and his misogynist constructions, gradually bringing him to a new understanding of himself as a ruler and a man. She will orchestrate his final repentance, along with the near-miraculous reconciliations that make his family whole again.

His family’s restoration restores the nation’s future as well. Having obeyed Paulina’s mandate not to remarry, the king has no sons. His daughter’s discovery and return means that she will inherit. Furthermore, as Perdita is engaged to the son of the king’s former friend, she not only renews the two kings’ relationship but will also unite their two nations. It is true that, like the other women in the play, she functions primarily as the agent of men’s reclamation. But The Winter’s Tale insists women occupy a crucial role in their families’ and countries’ destinies, and men discount their value at great peril.

Timon time again

Money is the sole power respected in Timon of Athens, where the hyper-wealthy one percent exert their influence through loans and lavish gifts. Most live well beyond their means, thanks to a precarious pile-up of credit they resolutely ignore. When that credit fails, lives fall apart.

Tellingly, Timon is the only one of Shakespeare’s plays whose title character has no romantic interest or family. While a word used repeatedly in the play, “bond,” can invoke human closeness and connection through relationships valued and invested in, the cash nexus is the only bond that ties. It’s not surprising that the sole women in the play are hired dancers and prostitutes who, like the rest of the play’s characters, “will do anything for money.”

Certainly Timon seems unable to recognize genuine intimacy or emotional connection. His extravagant philanthropy gives him power; it also magnifies his distance from those he gifts. “Imprisoned” is the first word Timon speaks, and though it’s supposed to describe the man whose freedom he offers to redeem, it applies to him as well. When his power to give is taken away and his “friends” turn their backs, he rejects the free and loving aid of his servant. Instead he retreats into a hate-filled isolation, replicating the sterility of the community he’d once considered so rich. Unlike Richard or Hamlet, Timon does not discover a greater humanity through loss. What this play lacks in hope it makes up for in its searing appraisal of a culture where worth is determined by coins instead of by character and where politics is deeply rooted in greed. Little wonder that Timon feels so current in our second Gilded Age.

Misrule

Twelfth Night introduces a community whose aristocrats have abdicated their authority. This has opened up spaces for both repressive and creative misrule as social boundaries are challenged and even redrawn. In Illyria, we quickly discover, “nothing that is so is so.” Almost everyone yearns for something (or someone) they cannot admit to or don’t yet realize they want. Only by encountering new forms of desire—as Olivia does with Viola, a young woman disguised as a man—will the lucky ones overcome the limits they’re locked into. Others, particularly social climbers like Malvolio, will be mocked and punished for their hopes.

Twelfth Night makes us notice both the joy of desires fulfilled and the pain of those denied. The happy couples at the close are notably offset by characters who are absent or left out: not only Malvolio, with his famously bitter exit, but also Maria, the hurt Sir Andrew and Sir Toby, and Antonio, who (like Antonio in The Merchant of Venice) can only stand by and witness a love he is barred from.

Deciding what constitutes a happy ending is the point of an election year. Who will be let in and who excluded from the common dreams that bind us? What cultural boundaries need reinforcement; which should we loosen or redefine?

In Twelfth Night, Feste’s final song ushers its audience from a fantasy scene of resolution back to their everyday lives. When the curtain rings down, when the balloons and confetti are gone, who’s in and who’s out is not the end of the story.