1600s History: Shakespeare Invades the American Summer Stage

You cannot drive across America in the summer without passing a Shakespeare theater festival.  The Bard seems to be everywhere, even Canada, and his plays, written in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, overflow through cities, suburbs and rural villages.  This summer, though, there are more Shakespeare plays than ever and people are paying more attention to them.

That’s because of the much publicized visit of England’s Royal Shakespeare Company, perhaps the best Shakespeare troupe in the world, to New York City this July.  The Royal Shakespeare actors, part of the Lincoln Center Festival, are turning the historic Park Avenue Armory into a theater that duplicates the Royal Shakespeare home at Stratford-On-Avon, in England.  During their six week residency (July 6–August 14) they will stage Julius Caesar, As You Like It, King Lear, Romeo and Juliet and The Winter’s Tale, plays full of history, romance, intrigue and murder.

“The Royal Shakespeare plays are a real plus for the festival because they give the Lincoln Center a very comprehensive program,” said Nigel Redden, the festival’s artistic director.  “They are a true ensemble theater, unlike American theaters.  They are now in their third year together and quite good.  They will be a highlight of the New York summer.”

The Park Avenue Armory is just a fast cab ride from the Delacorte Theater, the outdoor stage in Central Park near 81st Street where the New York Public Theater holds its Shakespeare Festival each summer.  On June 6 (until July 30) the Public Theater will stage All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure for Measure.  Last summer in the park the Public produced Merchant of Venice, starring Al Pacino, and it moved on to a long and prosperous run on Broadway, winning numerous Tony Award nominations.  Fans eager to see the plays wait on long lines on the day of the show to collect free tickets.  As they do so, they keep their fingers crossed that it does not rain.

Shakespeare in the Park has been a staple of New York theater life since 1962, when the city built the Delacorte Theater, with funds provided by George Delacorte.  That first summer Public Theater artistic director Joe Papp staged The Merchant of Venice with two unknown young actors named George C. Scott and James Earl Jones.  The Delacorte is a 1,800 seat theater that accommodates some 80,000 theater goers each summer.

To the west, the New Jersey Shakespeare Theater starts its Shakespeare season on June 22, when it stages Midsummer Night’s Dream at their outdoor theater at the College of St. Elizabeth’s, in Convent Station, NJ.  That runs while the rest of the season unfolds across the street, at the company’s permanent theater at Drew University in Madison. Timon of Athens opens there on July 6 for a month-long run.

From California to Canada, there are summertime Shakespeare festivals, all offering stories about doomed loved, bold swordfights, royal treachery, comedy, greed and jealousy.

Why does Will Shakespeare remain so popular after more than four hundred years?

“I think there is a resurgence in the idea, around the world, that Shakespeare’s plays are not just English.  He wrote dramas and comedies that had universal themes and appealed to all people.  Here in the U.S. we appreciate his work now just as the British did hundreds of years ago,” said Tony Simote, the artistic director of Shakespeare and Company, the well known Shakespeare summer festival in Lenox, Massachusetts, in the heart of the Berkshires, just a few miles from both the Williamstown Theater and the Tanglewood summer music festival.  “I think, too, that in Shakespeare you get enormous drama.  There is not just love and duplicity, but parties, marches, swordfights, battlefields, palaces.  There is a lot going on and audiences love that.”

Then Simote, who just returned from his theater’s first production meeting, laughed.  “And, finally, he is, frankly, the best playwright ever.  People always love his work.  They will love him as much four hundred years from now,” he said.

Bonnie Monte, the artistic director of the New Jersey Shakespeare Theater in Madison, NJ, agrees with Simote, but thinks movies have helped, too.  “Millions of people go to movies and lately there have been a number of films made about Shakespeare’s plays and about the playwright himself.  The best was Shakespeare in Love, a fabulous story.  Millions saw that movie in theaters and millions more on TV.  People see those movies and they get interested in actually going to the theater to see the plays on stage,” she said.

Lincoln Center’s Redden, a longtime lover of Shakespeare, thinks that everyone has a connection to the Bard.  “We use dozens of his expressions in our everyday speech.  We use so much Shakespeare when we talk that we don’t even realize the lines are from him.  He is our greatest playwright and audiences go back to him again and again.  Every generation, in some way, re-discovers Shakespeare.”

Shakespeare summer theaters also rarely rely just on Shakespeare to fill their seats.  Almost all balance his work with contemporary plays.

“Mixing them up not only helps you appeal to the tastes of all theatergoers, but gives the audience a chance to compare Shakespeare to modern writers, to see the differences,” said Simote of Shakespeare and Company, a festival that has three different stages.

“Each summer we try to present Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare plays that together make up a theme to the season.  At the end of the summer, we want our audiences to be able to say about each type of play, ‘we saw great theater.’  The combination does that,” said Monte, of the New Jersey Shakespeare Theater.

One thing that might really help Shakespeare festivals is the drop in gas prices, that had hovered over $4.00 a gallon in early May.  Many Shakespeare festivals are located outside of cities and have no mass transportation.  Theatergoers must get there in cars.  The initial, and promised deeper, drop in gas prices should encourage them to go.

Shakespeare festivals experiment, too. This summer, three different festivals will have a woman playing Julius Caesar. Others will stage some of his 37 plays in a modern setting, with men in suits and corporate boardrooms as sets.

Many summer festivals have added presentations and plays about Shakespeare’s work, so audiences can look at him through the eyes of others.  Shakespeare and Company’s Tina Packer has put together a five-part show, Women of Will, that explores the roles of women in Shakespeare’s plays.

“Tina’s show promotes the theme that it is the women, as well as the men, that drive the play.  We see him as way ahead of his time in writing women’s roles, too,” said Simote.

The New Jersey Shakespeare Theater uses a gorgeous outdoor stage, designed to look like an ancient Greek amphitheater, to bring in new and different audiences with popular plays and a friendly atmosphere.  The festival trims its outdoor offerings to just ninety minutes, no intermission, picks plays that appeal to families and kids and encourages people to bring chairs and picnic while they watch the show (this year’s play is Midsummer Night’s Dream).  “This is our tenth summer at the outdoor stage.  It has worked wonders for generating new audiences for us and, everybody agrees, it is just a lot of fun,” said Monte.

Up the Hudson River from New York, the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival, in Garrison, will present Hamlet and The Comedy of Errors.  (http://hvshakespeare.org).  Near Buffalo, NY, the Chautauqua Theater Company will stage Love’s Labours Lost (theater.ciweb.org).  In Connecticut, Shakespeare on the Sound in Norwalk, will present Much Ado About Nothing at two stages near Long Island Sound, starting June 16 (http://shakespeareonthesound.org).

In the West, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in Ashland, one of the nation’s finest, is producing eleven plays, including Measure for Measure, Henry IV, Part 2, Love’s Labours Lost  and Julius Caesar, with a woman playing Caesar.  The Festival boasts three stages and a season that runs through November 11 (http://osfashland.org).

The Old Globe Theater, in San Diego, California, is staging The Tempest and Much Ado About Nothing on its outdoor stage, near Balboa Park.  It will offer other productions on its indoor stages (http://oldglobe.org).  In Santa Cruz, California, the Shakespeare Santa Cruz Festival will makes history of sorts by staging The Comedy of Errors and the play that inspired it, Plautus’s Brothers Menaechmus.  The outdoor theater will also begin a three-year cycle of the Bard’s Henry plays with Henry IV, Part I (http://shakespearesantacruz.org).

The Georgia Shakespeare Festival in Atlanta, will stage The Tempest and Anthony and Cleopatra starting June 8 (http://gashakesapeare.org).

Massachusetts hosts one of the nation’s longest and most prestigious Shakespeare Festivals at Lenox, in the mountainous western part of the state. Shakespeare and Company will stage Women of Will, an exploration of the women in Shakespeare plays (opened May 27) for five weeks.  Running in repertory with the production will be As You Like It and Romeo and Juliet, among other plays.  The festival has several stages, a lengthy season and its next door to the fabled Tanglewood Music Festival (http://shakespeare.org).

The Houston (Texas) Shakespeare Festival will present Othello and The Taming of the Shrew on its outdoor stage. Tickets are free (http://houstonfestivalscompany.com).

The Utah Shakespeare Festival, in Cedar City, will stage A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Romeo and Juliet and Richard III, along with The Music Man and The Glass Menagerie, Plays are on an outdoor stage.  This is the festival’s fiftieth anniversary and it will play host to numerous events and parties, including a beach party one night (http://bard.org).

The American Shakespeare Festival, in Staunton, Virginia, will offer The Tempest and Hamlet, along with others plays (http://ascstaunton.com).

The American Players Theater in Spring Green, Wisconsin, will stage The Taming of the Shrew and The Tempest, along with Tennessee Williams’s The Glass Menagerie and John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (http://americanplayers.org).

Up north in Canada, the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, the largest in North America, opened May 19 with another historic moment, a woman playing Richard III (Seana McKenna).  The festival features Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Titus Andronicus and other plays, including Jesus Christ Superstar and The Grapes of Wrath (http://www.stratfordfestival.ca/).
 
Are you exhausted reading about all this Shakespeare?  You think there can’t possibly be any other way to produce a play about the Bard?  Well, you’re wrong.  On May 29, the Clurman Theater, on Theater Row, W. 42d Street, opened Shakespeare’s Slave, the story of a mythical slave who met Shakespeare when he was wallowing in a writers’ block (I can’t understand how a man who wrote thirty-seven plays ever had writer’s block).

You don’t know whether or not you’ll enjoy any of these Shakespeare plays in the summer.  Don’t worry, all’s well that ends well…