Tony Simotes was just getting comfortable in the artistic director’s chair at Shakespeare & Company when he found himself flat on his back. An on-and-off company member since the troupe’s founding in 1978 (there’s a picture of him as a young Puck on this season’s souvenir program cover), Simotes was brought on last year to give founder Tina Packer more time for acting—and fundraising, as the cash-strapped company faced the prospect of bankruptcy. Then this past spring he was diagnosed with throat cancer and was out for the season.
Now disease-free, though still hoarse, Simotes is as energetic as ever. He’s directing David Sedaris’ sardonic Christmastime memoir The Santaland Diaries while overseeing the myriad other projects that have turned the onetime summer theater into a year-round enterprise.
As a longtime Shakespearean actor and director, “I’ve been around that product for a long time,” he says, wryly acknowledging the irony of the term “product” as applied to the world’s greatest playwright. “As AD and CEO, I’m no longer just the artist, I have to manage the cash register as well. The plays are one thing, and the concessions are something else, and the training programs are something else. It’s all about the branding of the company.”
Seated in the lobby of the Bernstein Theatre sipping a muddy-looking concoction from a glass jar (he’s still on a liquid-only diet), Simotes continues, “People don’t realize everything the company is engaged in.” There are education programs in schools throughout the region that introduce children to Shakespeare through performance rather than rote recitation, climaxing in a weekend fall festival of performances by the students on the company’s mainstage—the program’s “big ta-dah,” as Simotes puts it. There’s also a panoply of professional training courses—the company’s conservatory program is rehearsing a show even as we speak—a winter/spring touring production with graduates of the training programs, and several on-site productions to fill the dark days between the troupe’s lively summer seasons.
“It used to be the company would shut down after the summer, with just a skeleton crew,” Simotes explains. “But now the physical plant needs to be operational all year round. We can’t have the buildings standing empty.” Shakespeare & Company’s sprawling Lenox estate includes the big new Elayne P. Bernstein Center for the Performing Arts, which houses the company’s intimate second stage as well as rehearsal studios and costume and scene shops, plus the mainstage Founder’s Theatre, an administration building, and dormitories for seasonal employees and training students.
He sees the education and training programs as investments not only in the company but in the future of the art. “Working with young people, young artists, you see them getting excited about a future in the arts,” he says. “They may not end up going into theater, but they are the audience of the future. They become great patrons, and then their children will get involved and excited about theater.”
“It’s interesting how all these programs grew up,” Simotes muses, “out of necessity, but also out of the artistry of the people who do them. The artists were hungering for a way to continue the work.”
The Actor’s Perspective
Up the hill from the Bernstein, the work is continuing. A production of As You Like It, the culminating project in this fall’s Conservatory program, is in rehearsal. The Conservatory is a 13-week immersion in voice training, text work, movement, clowning and stage combat taught by a variety of experienced professionals. Sixteen young actors, most of them recent college or conservatory-program graduates, are rehearsing Shakespeare’s sunny comedy in the Founder’s Theatre under the direction of Tod Randolph.
As I enter the theater, four students are going over a scene from the play. Evil Duke Frederick has usurped his brother and banished him to the Forest of Arden, where he’s joined by the duke’s daughter, Celia, and her cousin Rosalind, who in turn is followed there by lovesick Orlando, who has earned the duke’s enmity. In this brief scene, the duke tells Orlando’s brother, Oliver, that he’d better bring him back, or else.
Alex Stewart, playing Oliver, is tied to a chair, guarded by two goons as the duke flays him with angry words. In this production, both the goons are women, and so is is the duke, renamed Francesca and played by Megan Rosen. Randolph is exploiting the unorthodox gender roles.
“You can play up your sexuality with him,” she tells Rosen. “You can be totally feminine, tease him, because he’s totally within your power. And remember—the violence in what you’re saying is more scary and effective the quieter and more understated it is.”
During a break, Randolph explains the cross-gender casting. It’s born of necessity—there are more than twice as many women as men in this year’s conservatory group—but it’s also inspired by the gender-bending that’s in the script. “In Shakespeare’s day, a boy would have played Rosalind, who”—in the play’s comic convolutions—”is a girl pretending to be a boy pretending to be a girl. It’s all over the gender map. So we inhabit a universe in this production where women are dukes, where two sisters, not two brothers, battle for power. And it’s just delightful that the actors are having so much fun with it.”
Randolph is a 14-year veteran with the company, a much-lauded actress for whom this is the first Shakespearean directing venture. “I’m enjoying directing as an actor, from an actor’s perspective,” she says. “A lot of directors have no understanding, much less appreciation, of the actor’s perspective.”
Part of the actor’s perspective here is the experience of working on a professional stage, “learning how to present yourself in a theater this size.” Randolph recalls that one of her cast remarked that it felt “very ‘presentational.’ I said to him, ‘Yes, that’s our job, we present.’ The task of the actor is to become comfortable with that and make it natural to your being.”
The presentational aspect is underlined by the bare-bones staging. This is essentially a workshop production that focuses on the actors’ work rather than production values. The costumes—modern dress in this case—are pulled from existing stock and there is no set. The actors’ job is to fill the empty stage, backed by bare scaffolding, with their energy and imagination.
Reflecting on her seasons in Lenox, Randolph says, “I think the reason people love working here is because of the actor-centered philosophy. It’s a joyful place to work, and the joy of the language is the foundation of the work. As Tina puts it, it’s about being in love with every word this writer ever produced.”
This consuming passion informs the training process, Randolph says. “Okay, I love this language, how do I express it? How do I prepare my body, my voice, learn to stand on stage in the light, being completely exposed? And then how do I rehearse a scene, how do I communicate with the director, what questions do I need to ask, how do I communicate with the other actors, work with violence to make sure it’s safe—all those skills onstage.”
A Sense of Rejoicing
As the actors reconvene to continue their rehearsal, I head back to the Bernstein to catch the final runthrough of The Santaland Diaries before tonight’s preview performance. Peter Davidson is performing the adaptation of David Sedaris’ now-legendary monologue about his Christmas-season job as one of Santa’s elves at Macy’s New York department store. As the actor prepares to go on, Tony Simotes comments that he didn’t want to make the play just a mockery of the hilariously horrible backstage scenes Sedaris describes.
“The company has come through a very difficult time financially, and I’ve been a part of that rebirth, as well as for myself coming out of the cancer. I wanted the play to have a little more warmth to it and not just edge. With so much to be thankful for, as we look to the darker, colder months of winter, I wanted to feel a sense of rejoicing for what the company has been through.”
He’s set the one-man show in a high-rise Manhattan apartment, and imagined the character as a now-successful photographer regaling his party guests—the audience—with the story of his misadventures in younger days, taking kids’ pictures with Santa and other demeaning duties in a green-and-red elf costume. Patrick Brennan’s set has plush furniture, patio windows overlooking the city lights, and a baby grand piano at which Davidson, who is also a cabaret singer, intersperses his narrative with snatches of seasonal songs.
To those interpolations, the actor and director have added improvised banter with the audience as well. So when I—the only non-crew member in the house for this run-through—slip out partway through the performance to hurry back to the Founders Theatre, Davidson calls after me in mock horror, “Is it something I said?”
The As You Like It cast is rehearsing a group scene in the Forest of Arden, where the “good duke” and his—sorry, her—followers are just sitting down to a sylvan picnic when they are set upon by Orlando, starving and desperate. Randolph has staged this moment with what she calls “the grab.” Instead of merely drawing his sword and demanding food, he seizes Jaques (of “all the world’s a stage” fame) and holds, yes, her hostage till the duke disarmingly says, “Sit down and feed, and welcome to our table.”
They work “the grab” several times, adjusting posture, balance and weapon safety, then run through the whole scene. When it’s done, Randolph mounts the stage. “Good reactions, everybody, good storytelling,” she says to the group of “foresters” who have been mutely watching the action from the background. “I have a few notes, not too many.” She points up some acting moments and corrects some of the blocking, then calls for questions.
“Are we going to have real food?” one actor asks. “Well, we have no money, no budget,” Randolph replies. “But if you guys would like to pool your resources and buy some bread and things, that’s fine. But no nuts—that’s the worst thing for your voice. Okay, let’s take it again.”
The scene is run again, and this time it’s much tighter and brighter. At the end, Randolph raises her fists in the air and lets out a whoop. “Hooray, we have a play! You’re really creating a world here. We have no fucking set, but I can tell who you are and where we are, through the power of the imagination.”
As You Like It: Dec. 17-18; The Santaland Diaries: through Dec. 30, Shakespeare & Company, 70 Kemble St., Lenox, (413) 637-3353, shakespeare.org.
