What might we come to understand when we take the time to try and understand the things we can't understand?

From the Folcher Shakespeare Library, this is Shakespeare Unlimited.

I'm Michael Whitmore, the Folgers director.

The very idea of understanding a piece of theater or misunderstanding it or failing to understand

it has for much of the past 40 years been a predominant topic whenever the conversation

turns to theater director Peter Sellers.

Since the time he staged Anthony and Cleopatra in a dormitory swimming pool at Harvard,

Sellers, the recipient of a 1983 MacArthur Genius Grant, has been confounding audiences and critics.

His work has always been difficult. One reviewer called 1987's Nixon in China, good for a few giggles,

but only intermittently understandable. Writing about his 1994, Merchant of Venice, the New York Times,

said of the audience, those who held out to the end had the glazed look of hit-and-run victims.

But that impenetrability also has its ardent fans.

One of them is the scholar of Shakespeare in Performance Studies,

Ianna Thompson, who is now director of the Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies

at Arizona State University.

Thompson is the author of a new book about Peter Sellers, the latest in the Shakespeare in the

theater series from Bloomsbury. In it, she explores his influences, from the avant-garde

Marionette theater he watched growing up in Pittsburgh, to the Russian adjut-prop director,

Yuri Ljobamov to Japanese Kabuki

and tracks the predominant theme of his work Sellers laser-like focus on race in America.

Dr. Thompson came into the studio to talk about all this recently and joining her, we're happy to say,

was the subject of the book himself,

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