THEATER: Chester Theatre Company No Longer "Miniature"

Michelle Tattenbaum is listening attentively to a scene between Benjamin Pelteson and Heddy Lahmann, an actress who displays an uncanny resemblance to a young Helen Hunt. To Tattenbaum’s right sits Kate DeCoste, the production’s stage manager. The play is Dov and Ali, with Pelteson playing Dov and Lahmann his girlfriend under the direction of Tattenbaum.

“Good. Nice,” she says after they finish, nodding, thinking. Tattenbaum appears to be holding back, letting her actors try a scene a couple of different ways, miserly, for now, with her suggestions. Table-reading (when actors and the director sit around a table reading the script aloud for the first time) has officially begun—a theater professional’s spring training, as it were, when hope for the new season springs eternal.

Finally, Tattenbaum seems ready to form her thoughts into a complete sentence. “Don’t feel as if you have to match each other’s energy.” Her touch is light; the pauses in between the fits and starts of conversation can occasionally be long, almost awkward, as she allows the actors to digest what they’ve just done.

Meanwhile, Byam Stevens, the bearded, fifty-something artistic director of the Chester Theatre Company (CTC), previously the Miniature Theatre of Chester, lurks around the perimeter. His presence in the rehearsal room is not uncommon. “I’m very active that way,” he says. “Some artistic directors aren’t. It’s not that I’m always looking over the director’s shoulder or micromanaging; it’s just that I want to know what’s happening in that room, so that when people come to me and say they have issues, I know what’s going on.”

Fortunately, there are no real issues at the moment, other than talented theater professionals getting to know one another, becoming familiar with their scripts, their roles, their rural surroundings, wanting to get comfortable enough to take the kinds of risks necessary for exciting theater to occur. For Stevens, and those who work with him, perhaps the one “no-no” around here is playing it safe. About this, Stevens can be rather adamant. This goes for his management style as well.
 

Just this past year, Stevens, with the board’s encouragment, hired a new development director. As other theaters are cutting back by trimming costs across the board or reducing the number of productions or full-time staff positions, Stevens, somewhat perversely, has decided to go in the opposite direction.

“We felt if we’re going to survive this, we’re going to have to take risks,” Stevens says, “because we didn’t want to be in a position where you start to die the death of a thousand cuts, just trimming, trimming, trimming, and after a while you get to the point where you can’t do it anymore. You can’t create interest that way and you can’t [raise money.] So, in fact, we are hiring. We’re doing bigger plays this year with more equity actors this season than we did last year. Not because I’m looking to, but because the plays that I was interested in doing had larger casts. You’ve gotta go with the art that excites you….” he says, trailing off, implying, Otherwise, what’s the point?

Fortunately, the art that excites Stevens has excited others as well. “Byam Stevens always seemed to me to be a very substantive person whose work prodded the audience in ways that audiences should be prodded and want to be prodded,” says Ed Siegel, former theater critic for the Boston Globe. “That is, anyone can do Golda’s Balcony, which tells the audience basically what it wants to hear. But to do a play like Sixteen Words for Water, a play that really tried to come to terms with Ezra Pound’s anti-Semitism, which they did, really takes some guts.”

“Byam selects plays for their merit and succeeds admirably in bringing shows that you won’t likely see anywhere else in the valley,” agrees longtime board member Bob King. “It compares favorably to anything you might see in Williamstown…. It’s not a safe season. Our first offering is about a Jewish teacher against a Muslim student. That’s going to challenge people.”

“I do think CTC audiences want something more challenging than typical fare,” echoes Jay Stratton, a returning actor. “CTC doesn’t do musicals. For those, a summer audience can go to BTF [Berkshire Theatre Festival] or Barrington Stage Company.”

In order to get more challenging fare, however, theatergoers have to drive a little farther. If you’ve never taken the road out to Chester before, somewhere between the signs for Jacob’s Pillow in Becket, Massachusetts, and the town of Chester (nearly ten miles further along Route 20), you’re going to think you’re lost. How could it be THIS far?  But it is this far. Do, however, keep a careful eye out, as it’s far too easy to drive right past the blink-and-you-might-miss-it town of Chester as you round the next (or maybe it’s the next or the next) corner, which, for anyone who has been to Chester knows, can make Adams, Massachusetts, look like a big, bustling town; Great Barrington, a thriving metropolis.

“We sit in the middle of three audience centers,” says Stevens, now sitting in his office at the headquarters of CTC, an old house a stone’s throw from the theater itself. All is quiet at the moment apart from the occasional interruptions coming from Stevens’s teenage son, wanting to know what exactly his father wants him to hose down and when.

“Obviously we do have people in town [approximately 1,300 year-round residents] who come to see our work,” says Stevens, “but we draw people from Berkshire County; we draw a good proportion of our audience from the five-college area; and then the other portion comes from the lower Pioneer Valley…. So everyone drives thirty, thirty-five minutes to Chester. But that’s not unusual around here. People drive an hour to go to Williamstown.”

Still, one must motivate people to make such a drive (more like forty-five minutes from, say, Pittsfield, Massachusetts). But over the last twenty years, the Chester Theatre Company has been doing just that, garnering critical acclaim and strong word-of-mouth by putting out consistently strong and often new work well worth the drive. Along with its unique location, its quaint performance space—the old-style proscenium stage in Chester’s town hall built in the late 1930s—and its partiality to contemporary plays that address important issues facing society, CTC is one of the few theaters in the area that doesn’t just talk about producing new work, but actually has acquired a reputation for doing so.

“I can’t really speak to what the early mission was,” says Stevens, “but I do know it’s one of the things that’s always been very impressive about this company. The hardest thing to do is to produce new plays, because they’ve got no track records. So you can’t quote reviews, and so unless you’re doing a new Mamet play—people will come because it’s Mamet—if you’re doing a new, young writer, it’s a hard sell.”

What was not a hard sell, however, was Stevens’s own route to the Chester Theatre, though it may have been almost as windy and circuitous as Route 20. Despite always being interested in theater growing up on Long Island’s North Shore, he was an English and philosophy major at Yale; he didn’t stay long, however, drawn back to the bright lights and big city of New York over the dimmer ones of New Haven. Stevens says he left early because he’d spent a year between high school and college living in New York, where he’d had his own apartment, made money, and had a beautiful girlfriend who was a professional dancer at the company where he worked, the American Ballet Theatre.

“It was very hard to go back to college and share a room with three other guys and do papers. I had had a taste of the circus and didn’t want to come home,” he explains. Back in New York, he taught acting, was an actor himself until he tired of waiting for his juvenile looks to mature, worked as a literary manager, as a director, and had a series of various other jobs in “the biz.”

In fact, he credits whatever strengths he has as an artistic director to his journeyman career in theater. Along with being a literary manager—reading hundreds of plays—and working as director and actor, he has also been a director of development for a small company as well as a managing director. “I did a lot of different things,” he says, “which ultimately over the years brings you to the point where you say, ‘I understand enough about how this operation works, having done all the pieces, that I can be an artistic director who has some credibility.’ I mean, there are a lot of artistic directors who are terrific directors, but being an artistic director is also being a producer, and knowing how to work with a board, develop long-range plans and develop marketing ideas, do whatever.”
 

Stevens has been the artistic director at Chester for twelve years. Many, including Stratton, credit its recent success to Stevens’s tenacity. “He is an incredibly determined guy,” says the thirty-eight-year-old actor. “Sometimes this shows up as valuable drive and energy; sometimes as inflexible or pugnacious.”

Stevens first became involved with CTC after meeting the founder, Vincent Dowling; he was invited to direct at Chester, which eventually led to his being asked to be the artistic director. One of the few but significant changes Stevens made was to advocate for the renaming of the theater, though he wanted it to happen sooner than it did. Initially, the board resisted the move, feeling that years had gone into establishing its brand as the Miniature Theatre of Chester. But Stevens finally got his way, and this will be the third season under the new name.  

“I don’t think [the old name] told people who we are,” says Stevens. “Hi. We’re little….We were constantly getting inundated by producers who wanted to come here to do their puppet shows and their children’s shows and their doll museums, none of which we did…. It said everything except, ‘We are a professional theater company doing contemporary theater of substance.’”

Along with Dov and Ali, the “theater of substance” this season includes plays such as Love Song, about the transformation that one experiences from a first big love, which Stevens will direct himself; a world premiere, of a farce no less, Railroad Bill by T. J. Edwards (July 29-August 9); and A Body of Water (August 12-23), a play about a middle-aged couple who wake up in a summer house unable to remember who they are. Stevens says the choices link to an overall four-play summer theme of personal identity, which, one could argue, dovetails nicely back to the theater’s own sense of self: a theater that does contemporary (often new), intimate, but never small work. Never miniature. Apologies to puppeteers and doll collectors, but miniature is just no longer a word in this theater’s vocabulary.

After another go at it, Lahmann says to Pelteson, “You’re with me, but you’re not. So why do you like me?” referring, one assumes, to their stage personas, not their real-life ones.

“Is it that?” asks Pelteson, a dark, wiry, and intense actor with big brown eyes. “But then I have to justify it. Oh God, I fucked something up and have to repair it.”

“Are you speaking as Ben or Dov now?” asks Tattenbaum, confused.

Pelteson doesn’t seem sure himself. He smiles. “I guess I’m speaking as the hybrid of both of us,” he says, which breaks the tension as they all laugh. “At this point,” he adds, “there isn’t much difference.”

They have just three weeks from yesterday to get this, the first play of the CTC season, up and on its feet. But at the moment, this doesn’t seem like as short a period of time as it actually is. There are still seemingly endless hours of rehearsal time left in which to explore choices, take risks, fail before succeeding, create bolder distinctions between one’s real self and the character one is playing. In three weeks’ time, and with any luck, there will certainly be a difference … a big difference. [AUGUST 2009]
 

Managing editor Chris Newbound is Berkshire Living’s theater critic. Read his reviews at www.BerkshireLiving.com.

THE GOODS

Chester Theatre Company
15 Middlefield Rd.
Chester, Mass.
413.354.7771

Photos by Josh Lee, top, Byam Stevens; Michelle Tattenbaum; actors Benjamin Pelteson and Heddy Lahmann rehearse Dov and Ali; Byam Stevens; and Chester Town Hall.

Photos courtesy Chester Theatre Company, Elaine Bromka in Tea for Three, 2004; Jay Stratton in Two Rooms in 2006.