TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082492/0824410.000

Text File | 1993-04-08 | 7.1 KB | 148 lines

                                                                                THEATER, Page 60

Midsummer Night's Spectacle


Shakespeare is a reliable summer hit, especially performed outdoors.
So why is he a hard sell under a roof in winter?

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III


    As twilight slips over the hilly college town of Ashland,
Oregon, the sweet summer evening seems too balmy and starry for
whiling away indoors, even to the holiday throngs who have
journeyed to attend the theater here. Fortunately they need not
choose between pleasures. Night after night, vividly costumed
Shakespeare -- preceded by madrigals and heralded by a flag
raising and trumpet fanfare from the topmost gables of a Tudor
stagehouse -- unfolds beneath an open sky, turning edification
into festival.

    The scene takes place at the largest U.S. regional theater
and one of the oldest (founded in 1935), a three-stage jamboree
built on Bardolatry that draws 370,000 spectators a year, 90%
from more than 125 miles away. With minor variations this scene
also takes place in Boulder, Colorado; Cedar City, Utah; San
Diego; Houston; Dallas; Orlando, Florida; an inner-city park in
Louisville, Kentucky; the grounds of a legendary mansion
alongside the Hudson River; New York City's Central Park; and
dozens of other locales. According to Felicia Londre, secretary
of the Shakespeare Theater Association of America, the U.S. has
about 100 outdoor Shakespeare festivals. Some have grown, like
Ashland's, into major institutions offering varied repertoires.
Others operate just a few weeks a year. Nearly all rely on a lot
of novice, non-Equity players. But almost all are thriving.
Americans seemingly cannot get enough of the Bard in open air in
summer -- though they are conspicuously less eager to see his
work indoors at other times of the year.

    For many theatergoers, the experience of Shakespeare
outdoors takes on an almost sacred character. When Richard Devin
of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival moved this summer's staging
of The Winter's Tale to a new indoor space and installed
outdoors an adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals, he quickly
realized he had goofed. Not only did The Rivals prove an
unusually tough sell, but subscribers wrote in fury. "They told
me they would never come to Shakespeare indoors or accept
another writer outdoors," Devin says. "They spoke of
Shakespeare's universality and of what it meant to see these
plays under the stars with their children. They felt we were
stealing an irreplaceable opportunity from them."

    Other theater executives have noted a similar, almost
fetishistic audience passion for Shakespeare. Even his problem
plays have much more box-office appeal than masterpieces by
almost anyone else. Says Bill Patton, Ashland's executive
director, who has overseen its rise since 1948: "Some of
Shakespeare's popularity may be that it's certified as good for
you, so audiences can congratulate themselves on their
intellectuality, even though this was popular entertainment for
its time and still is. Also the plays are taught in school, so
people feel familiar with them."

    Actors and directors tend to be ambivalent about staging
the Bard outdoors. Only a dozen or so of his 37 plays
consistently succeed outdoors both artistically and at the box
office, and those mainly when staged in broad strokes. By common
consent, the lighter comedies and the more swashbuckling
histories fare best because they depend less on language that
is easily lost in the night air and more on pageantry and
action. Intimate texts and subtle, groundbreaking performances
tend not to work in the wide and windy spaces. Soliloquies
cannot compete with swordplay. Jerry Turner, who retired last
year as Ashland's artistic director after nearly two decades,
refused during his tenure to schedule Othello outdoors because
he felt its closely chambered story and rich language ill fitted
that setting. This year, after Ashland erected a stadium-like
"acoustic shell" that wraps around the stage with tiers of
balconies but leaves the sky open, Turner consented to try
Othello outdoors. The flat and tedious result bears out his
original judgment -- although the blame belongs mainly to the
three principal performances, especially Mark Murphey's inert
Iago.

    By contrast, Ashland's outdoor conflation of Henry VI,
Parts 2 and 3, evokes far greater narrative satisfaction out of
inferior material. And much the best show on offer there is an
exquisitely nuanced All's Well That Ends Well, staged indoors
by Turner's successor, Henry Woronicz. To the probable dismay
of Ashland adherents -- some of whom buy vacation or retirement
homes chiefly to attend plays -- Woronicz vows to "pull away
from the scale of production and pageantry, even outside." To
subscribers who urge elaborately costumed and staged period
productions as "traditional," Woronicz replies, "That is the
tradition of the 19th century, not Shakespeare's."

    Some artistic directors claim to find great value in
working outdoors. Says Jack O'Brien of San Diego's Old Globe:
"The shows are usually at their fairest and least phony outside.
It's hard to stand next to a tree and speak archly. Even when
we are doing Shakespeare indoors, I have often taken the cast
outside during tech week and had a complete run-through just to
get in touch with that honesty." O'Brien thinks Shakespeare's
earlier plays almost all work outdoors, while his later ones
mostly don't: "You can see in his poetry the adaptation from an
open theater to a more enclosed one -- the way, for example, he
speaks of light or time of day."

    His counterpart at the New York Shakespeare Festival,
JoAnne Akalaitis, extols the "magic" of Shakespeare in Central
Park: "Shakespeare in the park is part of the essence of being
a cultural person in New York City. It is relaxed, warm, open
and democratic. The upsides are the wind and clouds, the
informality, coupled with the power that comes with that much
massed humanity." She adds dryly, "The downside is the body
miking." The Central Park sound system is notoriously tinny, and
actors cannot seem to master the technique of not hitting the
mikes when they scuffle, so every few minutes the audience hears
what sounds like thunder. Another downside is the sheer size of
the stage and audience, which can tempt film stars, fearful of
understatement, into almost operatic playing. That happened last
week to Marisa Tomei, the street-corner ingenue of My Cousin
Vinny, in a vaudeville-influenced staging of The Comedy of
Errors. While Brazilian director Caca Rosset emphasizes the many
shades of emotion within the text, Tomei, a gifted stage
veteran, struck one note: screeching fury.

    Whatever shortcomings artists may see, audiences seem to
want Shakespeare outdoors more than ever. New troupes spring up
each year as stage entrepreneurs discover what Ashland's
founder, Angus Bowmer, learned in 1935. He staged boxing matches
as a way to defray the costs of his outdoor Shakespeare shows.
The boxing lost money. From the start, the Shakespeare turned
a profit.