“The more problems you’ve got, the more fun you have. The audience loves seeing the problems and how we solve them.”
Director Kevin Coleman is in a circle with four young men, discussing a scene in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale in which they basically stand around and speak not a word. He’s trying to make even the proverbial “spear-carriers” a vibrant part of the stage action. The “problems” he’s addressing now are about “staying really still and still being very alive,” and then, when required, how to move effectively to support the other actors.
This summer, I’m spending a full day at each of the Berkshires’ four established summer theaters, and spending as much or more time backstage as in the audience. Today, a Saturday in early July, I’m seeing productions on Shakespeare and Company’s three stages, but I’m also watching the gears of the company’s creative machinery as they turn.
Right now I’m in a big, airy rehearsal room in the new Bernstein Center, which houses a 198-seat theater as well as costume and scene shops, three studios for rehearsals and classes, and other workspaces. Coleman, a founding member of the 33-year-old Lenox-based company, is still as buoyant about the work as he was when the troupe was in its infancy. In rehearsal, he’s constantly bouncing out of his chair to talk to an actor, try out a movement, encouraging, questioning, joking.
The actors he’s working with—who also carry literal spears in this season’s production of Richard III—are playing servants and nobles in the court of Leontes, the king whose unwarranted jealousy of his wife sets in motion the play’s tragicomic events. As he runs through the scene with them again, Elizabeth Aspenlieder joins them onstage, even though she hasn’t been called for this particular rehearsal. In addition to playing the wronged queen Hermione in this play, and reprising her prize-winning performance in the one-woman comedy Bad Dates, she’s also squiring me around in her role as marketing and publicity director.
“Yes, I’m juggling several hats,” she says as we leave the rehearsal and head upstairs. “Right now I’m working on a couple of special promotions, writing a press release for The Taster”—a world-premiere work by area playwright Joan Ackermann—”working on ads for this coming week, taking you to the costume shop—which reminds me, I’ve got to get there myself for a fitting—and in a few minutes I’ve got the press opening of Comedy of Errors.“
She is one of many here who have multiple on- and offstage roles—a policy born of financial necessity and a philosophy of collective endeavor. She came 15 years ago for the company’s intensive actor training, and simply stayed on—a common occurrence in this theater.
“For me it was a no-brainer,” she smiles (her default expression). “There isn’t another place I’ve worked where the ownership of the artistic work is matched by the ownership of being part of the company. I work with new people all the time and with old friends all the time. The deep connection we have with each other makes this a safe haven where actors have the freedom to fail—but fail beautifully—and to succeed beautifully.”
The long run
The costume shop is a huge room lit by a high wall of windows, crammed with cutting tables and sewing machines and humming with activity. The wardrobe crew is overseen by a 29-year company member, Govane Lohbauer (whose husband, Robert Lohbauer, is currently appearing in the one-man show Mengelberg and Mahler). The walls are papered with designers’ drawings for the 10 summertime shows and three more coming in the fall. Right now the rush is on for The Winter’s Tale, which opens on the 15th, but there are also baskets full of costumes for Richard III, now in previews, earmarked for adjustments and alterations.
It’s noon, and time for Lunchbox Shakespeare. Today is the official opening of The Comedy of Errors, performed by the young professionals in the company’s actor training program. Dennis Krausnick has staged the mistaken-identity romp as a knockabout vaudeville in a circus ring, in which one challenge for the actors—largely achieved—is to keep the express-train pace from rolling over the meaning of the text.
Before the performance, Krausnick tells the opening-day audience, “You don’t really learn about playing Shakespeare until you’ve played Shakespeare in a long run. This run is 40 performances, a great experience for this young cast, and it’s a very different show to see it late in the run than it is early on.” He invites us to come back again, if we enjoy it today, to see how it has developed. Maybe I will.
But now I’m off to another rehearsal. Shakespeare & Company isn’t all about Shakespeare. This season the “company” it keeps includes four contemporary plays. One of these is Sea Marks, a poignant two-hander featuring two company veterans, Kristin Wold and Walton Wilson, that tells an unlikely love story. Set in the 1960s in the isolated Aran Islands of western Ireland and in urban Liverpool, it’s the tale of two lonely middle-aged people living only a few hundred miles apart but, as director Daniela Varon says, “They might as well be on different planets.”
In the scene shop across the hall from the rehearsal, Production Manager Tom Rindge is working on part of the Sea Marks set. Designed by another company co-founder, Kiki Smith—who during the academic year is on the Smith College theater faculty—the set represents the characters’ respective homes, both inside and out. To further contrast the two distinct worlds, the buildings’ exteriors are shown in scale models above the stage: a turf-roofed stone cottage and an elegant Victorian row house.
Sea Marks is one of four plays running in repertory in the Bernstein Theatre. In this still-dicey economy, when all theaters are trying to “do more with less,” as founder Tina Packer put it recently, Shakespeare & Company are mounting fewer summer productions than usual (“only” 10!) and four of them use only one or two actors.
Packer herself is in one of these. Women of Will is a personal tour of Shakespeare’s female characters, developed over many years and presented as a kind of illustrated lecture. Chatting affably with the audience, she demonstrates her points with scenes from the plays, Nigel Gore playing the men to Will’s women.
The Rose Footprint is a circular peaked tent open to the air, occupying the “footprint” of the space where the company hopes to build a full-scale replica of the Rose, the London playhouse where Shakespeare’s first plays were staged. This summer’s family-friendly late-afternoon offering is The Amorous Quarrel, a 90-minute adaptation of an early Moliere farce that draws its style from Commedia dell’Arte and its plot from the kinds of stock devices Shakespeare was partial to: jealous lovers, girls dressed as boys, mistaken identities, et al.
Crossing the t’s
In the Founders Theatre, the company’s mainstage venue, Richard III is preparing for its second preview performance, overseen by stage manager Hope Rose Kelly. From her booth at the back of the auditorium, she clicks open a microphone to address the actors backstage: “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your half-hour call. I will be opening the house in a few moments. Half hour.”
The lighting designer, Les Dickert, has been running through the light plot cue by cue and making adjustments. Kelly asks him if he’s ready or needs more time. “No, I have one more thing to do, but I’ll do it blind,” he replies. Kelly turns on the intercom again. “Okay, house managers, the house is yours.”
After a quick checking-in tour of the backstage area, she marks Dickert’s changes in the script she uses to call light and sound cues during the performance, then sits back. “Now,” she says, “it’s just sitting and waiting for curtain time.” She’s a native of Woods Hole who thought she’d go into oceanography, “until I got drafted to stage manage the high school musical. I just fell in love with it and never looked back.” This is her seventh season in Lenox and her third as production stage manager, “which means I’m not only running two shows, but also heading a department of nine other stage managers.”
Richard III, starring John Douglas Thompson, last season’s sensational Othello, is directed by Jonathan Croy, another longtime company member, who stepped in when Artistic Director Tony Simotes was sidelined by illness. Standing in the wings, Croy confesses that giving the curtain speech before a show is the only time he’s nervous onstage—perhaps because he’s playing himself, and because of the long list of “housekeeping” items to remember: emergency exits. No photography. Turn off your cell phones.
But striding downstage, he’s jovial and at ease with the audience, explaining that since the play is in previews, “We’re still crossing the t’s and dotting the i’s. Anything can happen. And that means that you—yes, you—are part of the process. At the intermission I’ll be wandering through the lobby, and if you have any thoughts I’d love to hear them. We all contribute to all we create.”
In the stage manager’s booth, Hope Kelly opens the intercom switch. “Ready, sound cue 1, light cue 1. …Go.” And the show begins.”
Shakespeare & Company: 10 productions in repertory through Sept. 5, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, (413) 637-3353, www.shakespeare.org.
