THEATER: Casting a Wide Net

Fishing for a common theme among the four big regional theaters is a fun annual exercise, but once one finally sinks a hook into something it usually turns out to be pretty slippery. Even when focusing on a single theater’s summer season, a theme can be hard to net. Julianne Boyd at Barrington Stage Company (BSC), based in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, may flirt with community, while Kate Maguire at Berkshire Theatre Festival (BTF) down the road in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, will try relationships on for size, but both will do so as if they are just now considering it, thinking aloud. As with all great art, themes may emerge, but as often as not they are accidental, the artist as surprised by them as anyone.

This year’s exception that proves the rule, however, may be Nicholas Martin, who when planning his final season at Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, very deliberately chose twentieth-century classics as his artistic template, with an all-American list that is as intriguing for its absences (David Mamet, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams come to mind) as it is for its inclusions: John Guare, Stephen Sondheim, Thornton Wilder, and Lanford Wilson.

“I’m looking forward to it more than any other season,” says Martin, talking excitedly about the upcoming summer, his third and final season as artistic director—Jenny Gersten was  named in early May as Martin’s successor. “But I wish we could do three American seasons. We’re missing many great writers,” he admits, “including Miller, [Lillian] Hellman, and Williams. But on a personal level, my favorite play, aside from [anything by] Shakespeare, is Our Town, and so right for New England. And it especially speaks to me at this time of my life, speaks to me more than any other play. Once I scheduled it, somewhat selfishly, I also realized that it’s a gift to Williamstown, too.”

But we get ahead of ourselves. Before Our Town (July 28-August 8), which is actually the third play of the season on the Main Stage (and which stars the rather youthful, for the part, Campbell Scott as the stage manager and is directed by Martin himself), the all-male A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (June 30-July 11) will continue to celebrate Sondheim’s eightieth birthday—a year-long celebration that includes numerous tributes to the Williams College alum throughout the country and no doubt beyond, and in part the reason for Boyd to ambitiously mount Sweeney Todd as her kickoff musical at BSC, not to mention Into The Woods as her youth theater project.

WTF’s second offering will be John Guare’s modern classic, the quite comedic Six Degrees of Separation (July 14-25), followed by Our Town by Thornton Wilder, and ending with Lanford Wilson’s Fifth of July (August 11-22), a co-production with Bay Street Theatre in Sag Harbor, New York. One of Wilson’s best, the play (which chronicles the aftermath of Vietnam as a group of thirty-somethings gather in rural Missouri to mourn the loss of a friend) will be directed by Tony Award-nominee Terry Kinney.

As usual, WTF’s Nikos Stage will boldly go where few theaters are willing to go these days, presenting four new works: a one-woman comedy written by and starring Judy Gold, It’s Jewdy’s Show: My Life as a Sitcom (June 23-July 4); Samuel J. and K. by Mat Smart (July 7-18), which received a WTF Fridays@3 reading last summer; Amy Herzog’s After the Revolution (July 21-August 1); and ending with the world premiere of The Last Goodbye (August 5-20) inspired by Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet and written by Michael Kimmel, with music and lyrics by the late rock singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley.

 
The other intriguing subplot of the upcoming season will be observing “new” artistic director Tony Simotes complete his first full season at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, after taking the artistic reins from founder Tina Packer early last year.

“When I came in [the beginning of] June [2009],” Simotes says, “the season had already kicked off. I had done a couple of weeks, and it was pretty intense. It was like joining the game as a mid-inning reliever [rather than a starting pitcher].” This year, Simotes gets the ball from the first pitch, with no runs, hits, or errors yet on the scoreboard.

Firstly, Simotes has cut back on the number of productions, by at least “four or five plays,” he says, “so we have a doable season for us.” But while there are fewer productions than last year, it’s still more than Shakespeare & Company has typically done in the past, and there has been no cutting back on the number of overall performances. Plays will simply get longer runs with the hope that audiences keep coming (or even returning) to them.

The Founders’ Theatre will bookend the educational Women of Will: Following the Feminine in Shakespeare’s Plays written by Tina Packer and directed by Eric Tucker, and featuring Packer and Nigel Gore (May 28-July 24), with its second act, a kind of companion piece, Women of Will: The Complete Journey (Parts 1-5) (August 25-27). But the highlight of the season will be Richard III (July 2-September 5) directed by Simotes himself and starring John Douglas Thompson, who has more than made a name for himself as one of the preeminent classical actors of his generation. He made his Broadway debut as Flavius, opposite Denzel Washington, in Julius Caesar in 2005, and tackled the lead role in Shakespeare & Company’s 2008 production of Othello, also directed by Simotes.
“It’s a part [Thompson] really wanted to do,” Simotes says. “I played Richard when I first met Tina [Packer] back at NYU. It was one of the first plays that brought me to Shakespeare.”

Filling out the main stage menu will be The Winter’s Tale (July 15-September 5) and the world premiere of Berkshire playwright Joan Ackermann’s The Taster (July 29-September 4), which the company commissioned. As with Ice Glen, Ackermann’s last world premiere here, Packer will direct. And speaking of new plays, another world premiere will get on its feet at the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre: Mengelberg and Mahler by the Berkshires’ Daniel Klein (June 11-September 10), a one-man, time-traveling show about legendary conductor (and accused Nazi collaborator) Willem Mengelberg that examines the choices he made over the course of his life. Completing the second-stage offerings are: Julius Caesar (May 21-June 13) with the company’s Educational Program artists; The Comedy of Errors (June 26-September 4), presented by the Training Program’s Performance  Intern Program participants; Sea Marks by Gardner McKay (July 9-September 4), about a Welsh native living in Liverpool, England, who finds herself unexpectedly in love with an Irish fisherman; and, back by popular demand, Bad Dates (August 4-September 12), the one-woman play by Theresa Rebeck that has Elizabeth Aspenlieder reprising the single-gal role that garnered her the Elliot Norton Award for Outstanding Solo Performance last year. 

 
“In the past,” says BSC’s artistic director Julianne Boyd, “we’ve done a musical, often times funny, then a straight play, and then a comedy at the end.” Or, she adds, a musical might fit in the third slot, but since the formation of the Musical Theatre Lab, that second musical on the main stage didn’t make much sense. While there is very much a season template now in place, Boyd argues that the formula does vary slightly from year to year. Last year, for instance, BSC began with the more serious musical, Carousel, followed by a lighter mystery, Sleuth, and ending with the American tragedy, A Streetcar Named Desire. This worked so well that BSC will duplicate that variation this season as it begins with the dark musical Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (June 17-July 17), arguably Stephen Sondheim’s masterpiece, directed by Boyd herself, followed by the comedic Art (July 22-August 7), a three-hander about the absurdities of modern art and friendships in Paris, and closing with Absurd Person Singular by Alan Ayckbourn (August 12-29). Ayckbourn, though often overshadowed by the likes of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, is one of the great comic British playwrights of our time.

Part of the fun of any theatergoing season is discovering some lesser-known gems on the second stages throughout the region, and this year BSC’s Stage 2 looks particularly promising. Along with two original musicals (the Musical Theatre Lab presents a pair of world premieres: Pool Boy, July 13-August 8, and the in-progress The Memory Show, August 18-29) poking their heads out at the more intimate venue just a couple of blocks north of the Union Street Main Stage is The Whipping Man (May 26-June 13), written by Matthew Lopez and directed by Christopher Innvar, which receives its New England premiere.

Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain will take a victory lap (June 22-July 3); the play about an imaginary meeting of the minds between C.S. Lewis and Sigmund Freud was so well received last summer that it’ll be moving on to a New York run. But prior to it hitting the Big Apple, BSC is giving hometown fans one last chance to visit Freud’s library in Pittsfield, with the same two actors, Martin Rayner and Mark H. Dold, who originated the roles.

Kate Maguire, who, as artistic director, has been picking the plays at Berkshire Theatre Festival for the past thirteen seasons, insists that it’s a very collaborative process among a rather close-knit family of artists, actors, and directors who enjoy returning to Stockbridge each summer. More often than not, an upcoming season is born from suggestions by an Anders Cato or an Eric Hill (or, this year, a David Auburn, author of Proof, who wanted to direct Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, which runs August 17-September 4), rather than Maguire plucking them out of thin air.

Case(s) in point: Cato was interested in directing a musical, so this summer’s Main Stage offerings begin with his first ever for BTF, entitled The Last Five Years (June 22-July 10). Next up is the French comedy The Guardsman by Ferenc Molnár (July 13-31), about a husband who disguises himself as a potential suitor to test his wife’s fidelity, directed by Tony Award-winning director John Rando. (In this instance, the suggestion came from the actress Jayne Atkinson before others, too, suggested The Guardsman to Maguire.) Eric Hill will then direct Macbeth (August 3-14), a rather straightforward and streamlined (though bloody) evening of Shakespeare that wraps in approximately two hours. (“When I first met Eric,” says Maguire, “that’s all he ever did: Shakespeare and the Greeks. Last year, I said to Eric, ‘You’re doing Shakespeare.’”) 

Perhaps the most notable of the Unicorn productions will be Endgame by Samuel Beckett (July 6-24), directed by Hill and starring Randy Harrison and David Chandler, coming in the wake of BTF’s fabulous 2008 production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. But the Unicorn will lighten things up considerably when it hosts the musical Babes In Arms (July 27-August 28), before a tense K2 (June 17-July 3), about two men on a treacherous ledge at 27,000 feet, takes the stage. The world premiere of No Wake (September 1- October 24) concludes the lengthy season, stretching the summer out this year until almost the first snow.

Maguire concedes that she does sort of have a formula down. “On the other hand,” she adds, “we introduced a big, old-fashioned musical at the Unicorn last year [Candide], the first [time] we did [that]. That really worked. So things can shift. I’ve always wanted to do a full season of comedies: eight comedies. Maybe we’ll do that one year.” Her large, round eyes, grow even larger. “Yeah, that would be fun,” she says with a grin. “Well, one would hope,” she adds, suddenly sounding a little less sure, perhaps making that preliminary cast from shore and waiting to see if she feels that old familiar tug. [JUNE 2010]

Chris Newbound has reviewed plays for Variety and is the chief theater critic for Berkshire Living.

THE GOODS

Barrington Stage Company
30 Union St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.236.8888

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

Shakespeare & Company
70 Kemble St.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.3353

Williamstown Theatre Festival
1000 Main St.
Williamstown, Mass.
413.597.3400