THEATER: Less Risky Business at Regional Companies

It’s the economy, stupid. No question about it, artistic directors in the Berkshires had the same thing on their minds this past winter when beginning to piece together this summer’s season—as did just about everyone else in America. Knowing that the show(s) must still go on, but not knowing—more so than usual—who would be willing to pony up to see them, theaters came up with a few different strategies for reducing costs while preserving their product.

Julianne Boyd, artistic director at Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, reduced the number of second-stage productions and decided to begin her main stage season three weeks later than usual, while Nicholas Martin at Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, simply reduced the number of Nikos (second-stage) productions from five to three. Tina Packer at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, has decided to remount two recent productions, reducing rehearsal time and set and costume preparation, while Kate Maguire at Berkshire Theatre Festival (BTF) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, found cost cuts across the board—boards?—reducing wherever, and whenever, possible.

“What’s different about it,” says Boyd, referring to BSC’s fifteenth-anniversary season, “is that we’re going into it realizing that we may not have the same audience or contributions as in past years. How do you grow your season, when you perhaps don’t have the financial wherewithal? We cut our budget by 12 percent.… We’re being prudent, but not so cheap that you’re going to endanger the productions. We’ll cut a vein but not an artery.”
 

Maguire, BTF’s artistic director and CEO, sang a similar song from her Stockbridge offices in April, talking about budget cuts of 20 percent. “We cut it by bringing every line item down. There were [also] significant cuts,” Maguire says, “in housing, transportation, and staff that we have working year-round. In the summertime they usually wear three hats, now they wear six.”
 

This year, the criteria for selecting plays wasn’t simply about how big (or how little) and how many, but about choosing familiar plays upon which artistic directors can reliably depend to lure people into the theater. While the summer theaters always aim to please, this year they aim to please even more. Some riskier, lesser-known choices will still find their way to the theater’s second stages, fast becoming one of the few places where new work is mounted, but when it comes to main-stage choices, audiences will more or less know what they’re getting.
 

This is particularly evident in the selections of Shakespeare & Company this year: Founders’ Theatre productions of Hamlet and Othello might even lead viewers to a bit of “been-there-done-that” seasonal confusion. Hamlet (June 26-August 28), for instance, was last performed at the Founders’ Theatre in 2006, and will once again feature artistic director Packer as Queen Gertrude; her son, Jason Asprey, as Hamlet; and Packer’s husband, Dennis Krausnick, once more as Polonius. And last year’s Othello, with John Douglas Thompson reprising the title role and Michael Hammond as Iago, will no doubt give theatergoers an even stronger sense of déjà vu when the curtain comes up on the same production this year (July 3-September 6).
 

But Packer says that this is what Shakespeare & Company does, for better or for worse: presents Shakespeare plays year after year—and if theatergoers don’t want to see these particular ones again, she says, well, they don’t have to. They can see less-recently-produced Shakespeare offerings such as Twelfth Night (July 25-September 5) or Romeo and Juliet (May 21-June 7), which, like Measure for Measure (July 10-September 5), will be performed at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, a new, much more intimate space. With that said, she likens revisiting Shakespeare productions to going to hear Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.
 

“You don’t get it all [the first time],” says Packer. “There’s a depth of understanding by seeing something a second and third time. If I find a piece of theater that is profound and it moves me, I always try and see it two or three times. I enjoy it more a second time. So I hope people will come back, and if not, they’ll send their houseguests. At least they know they won’t be taking a chance on these productions, because they’re bloody good productions.”

While there is no sure thing in this biz, Nicholas Martin, WTF’s artistic director, may also be trying to hedge his bets for his sophomore season, and, incidentally, WTF’s fifty-fifth. While not quite on the tip of most people’s tongues, the four main stage plays Martin has selected are also very much of the tried-and-true variety, and, generally speaking, meant less to challenge audiences than to entertain them, starting with one of A.R. Gurney’s lesser-known works, Children (July 1-12), a co-production with the Westport Country Playhouse. The previously produced work is a loose adaptation of John Cheever’s short story, Goodbye My Brother, in which an estranged brother returns to his family’s coastal Massachusetts second home—Tony Award-nominee John Tillinger will direct. Martin, however, argues that he’s not going out of his way to choose safer plays, or audience favorites.
 

 “I don’t think we’re doing that. I don’t think that works, to be perfectly honest,” Martin says about trying to anticipate an audience’s preferences. He goes on to recount being talked into a Tom Stoppard production of The Real Thing, when he was at the Huntington Theatre Company in Boston, which he very much regretted, simply because Stoppard was considered an audience favorite there. “It wasn’t a great production and then people don’t come. It’s a very risky thing.”
 

Following Gurney is the couldn’t-be-more-different True West (July 15-26) by another still-living playwright, Sam Shepard. WTF is casting real-life brothers Nate and Rob Corddry to play the contentious siblings in Shepard’s modern classic, which will also take advantage of the cost-efficient, one-set, four-character play. And then, once again wildly changing course, WTF offers something far more lighthearted on the main stage: The Torch-Bearers (July 29-August 9), a 1920s play-within-a-play, described as a Noises Off-style farce featuring Tony Award-winning actor Marian Seldes and directed by WTF veteran (at least as an actor) Dylan Baker; WTF will conclude its main stage season with the much more subdued, sentimental, Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms (August 12-23), a play about an eccentric group of Cambridge (that’s British) academics, starring Mary Beth Hurt and Jefferson Mays, among others. “I worked really hard to get that play,” Martin says, in part because Gray, who passed away last year, was a friend of his.
 

Boyd and BSC will set sail as they always do, albeit pulling away from shore a little later than usual, with one of their classic musicals. This year Boyd will sink her teeth into Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “musical masterpiece” Carousel (June 17-July 11), which, incidentally, TIME magazine chose as the best musical of the twentieth century. For the BSC production, Boyd has chosen the two-piano version, of which she says she’s a fan in any economy because the score is “unbelievably lyrical, the voices are another instrument. We also did South Pacific that way,” she adds, “and nobody even remembers” that there was no pit orchestra. Anthony Shaffer’s Tony Award-winning Sleuth (July 16-August 1), another battle-tested play, will follow, before A Streetcar Named Desire (August 6-29), arguably one of Tennessee Williams’s most revered works (also to be directed by Boyd and starring longtime BSC favorite Christopher Innvar as Stanley, three-time Tony Award-nominee Marin Mazzie as Blanche, and Sara Surrey as Stella), concludes BSC’s main stage season with a bang.

While Maguire, too, has aimed for calm, familiar waters, her season is, in her words, a bit more eclectic than usual. Yes, there will still be the typical BTF fare such as Irish dramatist Brian Friel’s Faith Healer in the Unicorn Theatre (May 21-July 4), a new adaptation of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts (August 11-29), and the politically charged The Einstein Project by Paul D’Andrea and Jon Klein (June 30-July18), but then there are a few more surprising offerings, such as the early season cabaret, Broadway by the Year (June 18-27), Neil Simon’s The Prisoner of Second Avenue (July 21-August 8), and the comic operetta Candide (July 7-August 15). While all three of these might make a theatergoer feel as if he’s time-traveled to the New York of yesteryear, Maguire would argue, What’s wrong with that?
 

“People,” says Maguire, “have been asking for musicals for a while.” And, yes, she says, it does strike her as ironic that “in a year that we’re cutting back, we’re actually doing two musicals [Candide and Broadway by the Year].” Maguire adds that she’s wanted to do The Prisoner of Second Avenue for ten, maybe fifteen years. And “Neil Simon is one of our most important playwrights … when the economy collapsed, it gave me a great opportunity to do this play about another time in New York when times were hard.”
 

The something-for-everyone approach seems to be working. When Maguire last checked, BTF ticket sales were actually ahead of last year by almost ten percent. Perhaps this is partly due to a strong ski season and there being more people around this winter, or, she theorizes, it may have something to do with people not wanting to go very far this summer.
 

“People who have second homes here are really going to start using them,” says Maguire, and Boyd agrees. Yes, says Boyd, there are more unknowns this year, but “I’m excited because I think people are going to stay close to home, and the Berkshires will be alive with people.” And hopefully alive with people who want to benefit from these hard times by taking advantage of opportunities to see some of the most commercially successful theater ever created—not quite a money-back guarantee, but as close to a sure thing as one can get. [JUNE 2009]
 

Managing editor Chris Newbound is Berkshire Living’s theater critic.
 

THE GOODS

Barrington Stage Company
30 Union St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.236.8888
www.barringtonstageco.org

Berkshire Theatre Festival
83 East Main St.
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.5576
www.berkshiretheatre.org

Shakespeare & Company
70 Kemble St.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.3353
www.shakespeare.org

Williamstown Theatre Festival
1000 Main St.
Williamstown, Mass.
413.597.3400
www.wtfestival.org

PHOTOS: From top, Jason Asprey as Hamlet at Shakespeare & Company; Julianne Boyd of Barrington Stage Company; the BSC production of South Pacific; Kate Maguire of Berkshire Theatre Festival; the BTF production of The Book Club Play; Tina Packer of Shakespeare & Company; the Shakespeare & Company production of Othello; Nicholas Martin of the Williamstown Theatre Festival; the WTF production of The Corn is Green; actress Marian Seldes at WTF; and the BTF production of Love! Valour! Compassion!