All Shakespeare All the Time!!
Artistic Director’s blog, supplemental…stardate April 3, 2007…Now that Tartuffe has closed, I turn my personal attention to the works of one Mr. William Shakespeare. For the next 6 months, my life is all Shakespeare all the time…which is very interesting because that is not how I envisioned my career going when I first discovered I wanted to be a director. Beginning this summer, we launch our Shakespeare at Equus Run series with a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost, a play described by the eminent critic Harold Bloom as “…a festival of language, an exuberant fireworks display in which Shakespeare seems to seek the limits of his verbal resources, and discovers that there are none.” This linguistic lovefest will take place from June 21-30 at Equus Run Vineyard, in the heart of horse country on a stage nestled against the beautiful Elkhorn Creek. Why Love’s Labour’s Lost? It is an ideal choice for a couple of reasons: it is the perfect pastoral comedy for our perfect pastoral setting. Again, I quote Mr. Bloom: “Shakespeare’s most artificial comedy, his great feast of language, antithetically subsides in natural simplicities and in country phrases.” Four guys decide to swear of women for a year and concentrate on their studies. Four beautiful women show up…high jinks ensue!! What more do you need…Another reason is when do you ever get to see this great play in Central Kentucky? It seems as if our area has been inundated with some version or another of A Midsummer Nights Dream As You Like It Much Ado About Nothing Ad Nauseum…Shakespeare wrote at least 35 plays, I think Central Kentucky audiences deserve to see more than 5 of them. UK’s Department of Theatre had great success with Bo List’s production of Titus Andronicus, which gives me hope people want to see more of Shakespeare’s plays…
My next two directing projects are Romeo and Juliet at the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company and Hamlet starring Adam Luckey here at AGL. Romeo and Juliet is THE GREATEST LOVE STORY EVER TOLD! And everyone knows it, or thinks they know it. It will be great fun to guest direct with CSC, a fast rising company and the only classical theatre company between Chicago and Philadelphia. They actually have a resident company of actors who work fulltime as actors! Yes Lexington it is possible to have a resident professional theatre company…so I am delighted to get to work with their fine company of actors. CSC’s artistic director, Brian Isaac Phillips, is currently in Lexington staging our season closing production of Jane Martin’s Anton in Show Business. Anton is a very funny look at contemporary American regional theatre, of which AGL is a part. The story, in a nutshell is: A group of actors comes together at a small professional theatre company in San Antonio, TX to put on an ill-fated version of Anton Chekhov’s The Three Sisters. Everything that can go wrong does go wrong as the company struggles to get the production mounted. Will they pull it off? Find out April 18 – May 13 at Anton closes what is shaping up to be AGL’s most successful season since we moved into the Downtown Arts Center in 2002. Starring a first rate cast of Allie Darden-Tipton, Lara Brier, Hayley Williams, Sylvia Howard, Julieanne Pogue, Micha O’Connor and Kim Dixon…all the roles are played by women.
Enough of the Anton sidebar and back to Romeo and Juliet. The challenge is going to be how do you tell a story everyone knows? And if they don’t know it, five lines in to the production, the stupid chorus gives away the ending: “From forth the fatal loins of these two foes/A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life;/Whose misadventured piteous overthrows/Doth with their death bury their parents’ strife.” I am of the belief that the words Shakespeare left us are so overwhelmingly great that we need only tell the story honestly, truthfully and have actors engaging with each other in such a way that, while it unfolds with a natural inevitability, still feels to the audience like they have never seen the play before. Every time I see it, every time I read it, I still hold out hope Friar Laurence’s letter will get to Mantua and Romeo in time and all will be well. It hasn’t worked out yet!
Finally Hamlet. Ugh, where to start…the play terrifies me, I have seen productions that had good parts and bad parts, good Hamlets and bad Hamlets but I have never seen a GREAT production of Hamlet. It is a hard hard play to do, although others will argue that King Lear or MacBeth are even harder still…I don’t care, I’m not thinking about directing those plays! At this point, here is what I know about our Hamlet: Adam Luckey is going to be great as the Prince. He has taken almost the perfect route to this point in time where he can play this part. To look at Adam’s development over the last ten years is to see the way actors used to be trained, starting as apprentices and working their way into the company. I first saw him in AGL’s 2003 production of Reckless and just witnessing the growth I have seen since that production is testament to his talent, his intellect, his heart and his courage. Other strengths we have: Chuck Pogue will be a terrifically slimely Claudius, Jack Parrish will bring 30 years of experience to the role of Polonius, Hayley Williams will be a heartbreaking Ophelia, I am casting Lara Brier has Gertrude and Bob Singleton as Laertes…It will be a production chock full of some of our finest talents. We will also be welcoming back lighting designer Steve Koehler, AGL’s former Managing Director and my longtime partner in crime…plus, we will have a multimedia element to the play, designed by Kirby Malone and Gail Scott White of Cyburbia Productions. Kirby and Gail come to us from the Multimedia Peformance Studio at George Mason University in Fairfax, VA. Visit their website at www.cyburbiaproductions.com.
All of this talent will hopefully help us to illuminate the central action of Hamlet, which is the overthrow of a country and the total destruction of two families, and the underlying truth of Hamlet, which is “What comes next?” There are many many aspects to the play, I often say to direct this play, you have to decide what story you want to tell (because I promise you we won’t do all 4 hours of it). Through the character of Hamlet, you can experience all the stages of grief, there is something rotten in the state of Denmark, there is a robust ghost story but to me Hamlet is about the most political play ever written. As we are going to the polls to elect a new governor and one year away from turning out perhaps the most incompetent and corrupt presidential administration in the history of the country, we need to ask ourselves, “What comes next?” and more importantly, “Are we prepared to deal with the consequences if its bad?” We will find out this fall as Hamlet plays in the Downtown Arts Center, Shakespeare up close and personal, from October 17 – November 11, 2007.
Peace and Love
Richard (Rick) St. Peter
Artistic Director
April 3, 2007
PS Current reading list includes: Harold Bloom's Shakepeare: The Invention of the Human, Jan Kott's Shakespeare Our Contemporary, Adrian Brine and Michael York's A Shakespearean Actor Prepares, Paul Allain's The Art of Stillness: The Theater Practice of Tadashi Suzuki, and Shakespeare: A Life.
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