Birthday Bard

Shakespeare & Company celebrates two score years

by Carolyn Clay

LENOX -- It takes a willing suspension of disbelief to conjure up the bitter Berkshire cold of Ethan Frome on a brilliant June afternoon. Neither does Shakespeare & Company -- performing Dennis Krausnick's adaptation of the Edith Wharton novella in its roughhewn Stables Theatre on Wharton's onetime Lenox estate, the Mount -- offer much in the way of high-tech imagination bolstering. The playing space is hung with white sheets, and there's a gritty ground cover that looks closer to home for a beach chair than a careering toboggan. The magic here comes courtesy of language and acting. Indeed, language and acting are what this troupe devoted to Wharton and the Bard, which celebrates its 20th anniversary with an Age of Innocence-worthy gala July 5, is all about.

Shakespeare, of course, speaks for himself. Artistic director Tina Packer speaks for "& Company" when she exalts not only the power of acting but the power of the actor. "I'd been in a couple of good companies," says the British-born Packer, referring to stints with, among others, the Royal Shakespeare Company. "And the separation between artists and the management seemed to me horrendous. It also seemed to me that actors had given up their power. They were the ones who were out there when push came to shove, entertaining the troops. Yet they always were treated as if they were the low man on the totem pole, which you can do because there are so many of them. I think it infantilizes them and makes them children."

At Shakespeare & Company, all the actors have grown-up jobs helping run the company. The cast of Ethan Frome, which ushered in this 20th season, boasted director of education Kevin Coleman, business manager Josef Hansen, and public relations and sales director Elizabeth Aspenlieder. Adapter-director Krausnick is also the company's director of training. Jonathan Epstein, who will transfer his leviathan lothario of a Falstaff from the covered wagon of last season's frontier-set The Merry Wives of Windsor to this season's Henry IV Part I, is an associate artistic director.

"Historically, all of the great companies have been run by actor-managers," Packer asserts. "And all of the great actors have been actor-managers. Laurence Olivier, John Gielgud, and Ralph Richardson were the last actor-managers. And then, the last 30 or 40 years, actors gave up their power. And I feel it was a terrible, terrible happening. . . . So we started this artist-manager structure and it really works well."

Not that Shakespeare & Company's band of bosses has any small entity to wrap its collectively managerial arm around. The troupe that Packer co-founded at the Mount in 1978, more or less camping out with her troops in Wharton's rundown digs, has grown into a tripleheader of an artistic institution, with significant training and education programs in addition to a six-month performance season that this year includes four plays by Shakespeare (Henry on the outdoor mainstage, Bare Bard stagings of The Winter's Tale and A Midsummer Night's Dream in the Stables Theatre, and Twelfth Night in the Oxford Court) and four Wharton adaptations (Frome; a double bill of one-acts, The Pretext and The Verdict, that are performed in Wharton's parlor; and a Halloween special, The Lady's Maid's Bell), as well as Harold Pinter's Betrayal; Patrick Garland's theater piece culled from the writings of Elizabethan diarist and gossip John Aubrey, Brief Lives (to be performed by Epstein); two new plays, Joan Ackerman's Off the Map and a reprise of last summer's Clauder Competition runner-up, Bridget Carpenter's The Death of the Father of Psychoanalysis (& Anna); the annual offering of resident choreographer Susan Dibble, called Dibble Dance; a showcase by the teenage students of Shakespeare & Young Company; and a studio festival of staged readings that often proves a preview of coming attractions.

I catch up with Packer not at the Mount but on the campus of Simon's Rock College of Bard, where she and her compatriots are conducting one of the two annual four-week actor-training programs that are like x-rays of the backbone of the company's aesthetic. Much of it is encapsulated in company co-founder and master teacher Kristin Linklater's books Freeing the Natural Voice and Freeing Shakespeare's Voice. "Language is still in the center of the experience," explains Packer. "How do you undo the body so that you actually get to the detail of the text?"

Roughly 120 professional actors take this training every year, and some 30 of them form Shakespeare & Company's second company, the Summer Performance Institute. Among the more famous alums are Sigourney Weaver, Rebecca De Mornay, Karen Allen, Andre Gregory, and Andie MacDowell. Also, Keanu Reeves, who was a very funny Trinculo in a 1989 S&C Tempest, and Alicia Silverstone, who, after being locked in a room with Tina Packer for four weeks, could hardly have remained clueless about acting.

A feminist as well as a Shakespearean, Packer is known for the female slant she brings to the Bard, whether exploring his evolving feminine aspect in her Women of Will trilogy or transforming the villain of Much Ado About Nothing from a male malcontent into an angry woman with a whip. This summer, however, she co-directs Henry IV Part I, which hardly seethes with Steinem-esque opportunities. "I do feel as though I'm letting the side down a bit," sighs the director.

Henry is, however, a bold move -- the first of Shakespeare's history plays to occupy the 600-seat outdoor mainstage at the Mount. The performance space, where lawn meets wood behind the manse, has proved particularly receptive to the Bard's pastoral comedies. And last year's rambunctious Merry Wives broke box-office records. "Doing a history play," Packer admits, "always makes the audience pause for a minute: `Oh, which Henry is this?' But we're marketing it as a comedy and as a spectacle, and so far the box-office projections are coming in slightly above last year. So I'm not as nervous as I was. And Jonny [Epstein] was very successful as Falstaff. So I think it was too good an opportunity to miss. Also, it seemed in our 20th season, what were we going to do? We were either going to do A Midsummer Night's Dream yet again or we were going to break new ground."

Too many Henry IVs fall apart in the battle-heavy late innings. With fight director Tony Simotes a protégé of company co-founder and renowned fight choreographer B.H. Barry, this does not promise to be one of them. "We have 45 people fighting on stage," confirms Packer. "There are two major battles and 10 other skirmishes. So I think you can look forward to major battles. There are reasons I like thinking about Henry IV, though they're not feminist ones. I like thinking about [Scottish rebel] the Douglas's army coming screaming down from the hill. I'm thinking of making them all naked and painting them blue, like the original gallowglasses. The gallowglasses were the fighting clans within the Celtic clans. And I think they were drugged when they went into battle. So they were screaming dervishes. I'm not sure whether I can do this, but you can write it down."

When not shamelessly using skin and drugs to sell tickets, Packer has been involved, over the past several years, in a contentious altercation between Shakespeare & Company and the Edith Wharton Restoration, which began as an adjunct of the theater company but has since become its landlord. Last December a court-appointed master issued a lengthy report that should help resolve day-to-day financial and operational issues between the parties. Indeed, the EWR, which oversees the property as a museum and conducts tours of the house, has recently begun much-needed repair work on the Mount. Packer, however, doubts that the EWR intends to renew the theater company's lease when the current one runs out in 2003.

But as that famous Shakespearean Vivien Leigh remarked in another context: we'll think about that tomorrow. Shakespeare & Company officially celebrates its 20th anniversary on July 5 with a lavish do featuring dinner, dancing, and performances by the British actress Janet Suzman, who will air excerpts from her one-woman show, An Agreeable Blunder; Lenox resident Maureen Stapleton, who with her chums Zoe Caldwell and Kristin Linklater will read from the works of Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams; and Olympia Dukakis, who will present part of her Dennis Krausnick-directed The Mystery of Things: A Woman's Exploration of Lear. Also performing will be Anne Jackson, Eli Wallach, singer Vikki True, and a band, the Raging Hormones. Clearly Packer's revels, unlike Prospero's, are far from ended.

Henry IV, Part I opens July 25. The 20th-Anniversary Gala is July 5, with performances at 6 p.m. and cocktails, dinner, and dancing from 7 until 11:30 p.m. Tix are $200. Call (413) 637-1199 extension 133.