An American Revolution
The 75-year-old Berkshire Theatre Festival looks to its star-spangled past to inspire a still-fermenting future
By Sarah Hart
Herman Melville. W.E.B. DuBois. Edith Wharton. Norman Rockwell. Not to mention a handful of buildings that predate the Boston Tea Party. The signposts alone in the Berkshire Mountains of Massachusetts read like an American heritage coffee table book—replete with a Kodak-ready backdrop of gently rolling hills, winding roads and dense trees that part for vistas that could inspire any number of revolutions. This is America before there were cell phones. It's America attuned to nature—and certainly accustomed to culture, with Big Art names like Tanglewood and Jacob's Pillow rivaling the historic American place-names.
It's a fitting setting for one of the country's oldest playhouses, an 1888 Stanford Whitedesigned casino-cum-theatre in Stockbridge that knows a thing or two about American history itself. It's also an ideal spot for the season Berkshire Theatre Festival just wrapped in its tree-shaded, two-theatre complex at the foot of the road immortalized in Norman Rockwell's "Main Street at Christmas." The season opened with American Primitive, William Gibson's epistolary paean to John and Abigail Adams, and closed with Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman's Assassins, a black-comedy musical chronicle of some of the nation's less-than-satisfied customers.
I'm visiting this haven of Americana on the opening weekend at Berkshire Theatre Festival (Memorial Day weekend for the rest of the country)—cold and rainy, but to paraphrase James Taylor, "the Berkshires seem dreamlike" on account of the mist. Executive director Kate Maguire is outlining some of the theatre's history, along with her vision for artistic success, with a childlike enthusiasm. In spite of a stylish suit and business-like bob, Maguire appears all wide smile and glinting eyes. Her sheer joy in the theatre is contagious; even when she's talking about the more difficult aspects of leading a venerable institution with 75 years of performances under its belt, you can see she's having fun.
Revolution is key this season. Not only does the lineup of plays seem to build on the idea of the American Dream (and its inevitable deferment), but this is the season that Maguire thinks most reflects the outcome of her own quiet revolution in redefining BTF. A panel discussion following American Primitive's opening performance offers a telling insight: According to Williams College history professor Robert Dalzell, "revolutionary," in John Adams's time, was not understood the way we think of it now (radical change, anarchy and overthrow are all synonyms in Roget's). In those days, he says, the word meant "revolving in orbit and returning to a place you'd started."
Maguire seems to be taking that sentiment to heart. This weekend is a renaissance and a homecoming for 88-year-old William Gibson, whose American Primitive originally premiered at BTF in 1969 toward the end of Gibson's tenure as theatre president [see sidebar]. And Maguire's face lights up at the mention of Eva Le Gallienne, who starred in Cradle Song, the inaugural production of the Berkshire Playhouse, directed by her company member Alexander Kirkland, the theatre's first artistic director, in 1928. The casino became Berkshire Playhouse that year and was rechristened as a nonprofit festival four decades later.
"Oh, lovely Eva! She was a good one, Eva Le Gallienne," Maguire says dreamily, then adds, "A powerhouse. No one had ever told me that she inspired the creation of Berkshire Theatre Festival until I read her biography by Helen Sheehy. But that's when everything I was trying to do came together in my mind. There's an instinct for company here, founded by someone who wanted theatre to be for a community." (No chance of forgetting about Le Gallienne's connection now—her face and history are splashed across BTF's glossy anniversary program and a modified version of the 1929 Le Gallienne-as-Peter Pan image is the poster art for that show this season.)
"These executive directors," Maguire says, her grin overtaking her face. "We'd like everybody to think that we started the whole thing."
Actress/manager Maguire arrived on the scene almost 10 years ago as managing director and, after three seasons, was given sole charge of BTF when artistic director Arthur Storch retired. A single-headed position, it turned out, did not equal a single, unifying vision. "The thing about stepping into a position at a theatre that has a 60-plus-year history, when there has been a series of artistic directors before you, not long-term," says Maguire, "is that it's a bit schizophrenic. Everyone has different ideas about what Berkshire Theatre Festival is."
For Maguire, it seemed as if the theatre had reinvented itself at least once a decade, and there was at least one board member (on a board of 50-plus) with fond memories for each incarnation, from summer stock musicals to a commitment to all American playwrights. But with the hint from some board members that she ought to revitalize the theatre, Maguire leapt into the void, as she puts it, and crammed her mainstage season with productions she thought were extremely exciting (rather than leaving the edgier work in the barn-housed, 122-seat Unicorn second stage, where audiences were used to it).
"We did Orson Welles's Moby Dick—Rehearsed. I thought that was perfect. Melville wrote the great novel just up the road. It wasn't perfect for the audience. I was literally asked why I didn't change the ending. I thought The Crucifer of Blood was going to be fairly middle of the road. People thought it was too dark. We did Lives of the Saints by David Ives, and that threw the audience into a complete tizzy."
By the end of her second season, Maguire realized she needed to rethink her plan. "That was the hardest time for me," she says—because she didn't feel she'd pushed the audience too far. "I wasn't doing Ionesco. I wasn't doing Exit the King. I didn't have actors sitting and staring at the audience for entire productions without speaking or anything." (That stultifying vision isn't so far removed from the locale. William Gibson relates a story about Ionesco's 1969 stint in the Berkshires, while Arthur Storch directed his Hunger and Thirst in rep with the original American Primitive. "Storch would say to Ionesco, 'You can't say this here because you said it already in the first act.' And Ionesco would say, 'So?' And Storch would say, 'Well, you know, if you repeat the same thing, you lose the audience's interest.' And Ionesco would say, 'So? You Americans. I think the theatre is a place where you should go and sleep a little bit.'")
Still, while a good half of the audience that had patronized the theatre for 20 years or more was furious, a new audience was developing, drawn by the different work Maguire was offering—an audience she didn't want to alienate by packing the season with what she terms "lighter fare." She decided that if the actors could maintain the intensity, energy and physicality, something like Camelot—which opened her third season as executive director—could be just as exciting as more ostentatiously experimental work. Director Eric Hill (Maguire's husband) was handed both Camelot and the next season's My Fair Lady, with the suggestion that he approach the projects with what Maguire calls "not your average musical theatre eye." Hill, who trained for 10 years with Tadashi Suzuki, brought an unexpected physicality and strength to the productions. And, says Maguire, "slowly the audience's tastes became more accustomed to seeing these productions that were slightly off—Camelots that were a little different."
It's taken four years, but Maguire thinks she's bridged the gap and possibly educated both factions of her audience. She finds her demographics—once primarily second-home owners from New York City—are changing, and the local community is more represented in the mix. (A recent audience survey indicated that the share of area residents is up to 42 percent, equal to the percentage of second-home owners.) Within those demographics, people are moving more fluidly from genre to genre. "As soon as they start to feel comfortable, the musical audience will go to see something like Strindberg's Miss Julie. Gradually. And the more adventurous audiences that were wanting to see a show like Robert O'Hara's Insurrection feel like, 'Yeah, I'm going to see Peter Pan, too, because it's going to be interesting and speak to me.'"
Director Timothy Douglas staged both O'Hara's postmodern, satiric treatment of slavery and this season's Assassins, two shows with the potential to spark an audience revolt. "I have to credit BTF for being such an influence on its audience's cultural tastes," Douglas says. "I still have trouble getting people to look at Insurrection in major urban centers, in markets where black people could see it. It really says a lot about Kate's programming, and the theatre itself, and the audience they've cultivated."
Certainly the established cultural bastions of the Berkshires aid in community recognition of the arts. Even residents who aren't in the BTF audience are familiar with the company from its participation in schools. "There's an openness about the community," says Maguire. "I think it has to do with the cultural institutions here. The audience can become very elite, so it's critical to get those folks in. But you have to move slowly or people feel you're insulting them. I don't want to drive anyone from the theatre."
It's a trial William Gibson remembers all too well. The playwright (best known for The Miracle Worker and Two for the Seesaw) was part of the group—along with film actor Viveca Lindfors, playwright George Tabori, director Arthur Penn and others—that transformed the for-profit Berkshire Playhouse into the more serious-minded, not-for-profit Berkshire Theatre Festival. He served for several years as president and, in 1970, as producing director; Maguire calls him "the thread through the '60s." Instead of the new-show-every-week summer stock model, the theatre began producing more experimental work and premieres by new American playwrights like Gibson, Don Peterson and Jack Gelber, with actors Tabori brought from New York. ("Nobody else knew them, but they had names like Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman and Gene Hackman," Gibson says gravely.)
"I owe a lot to Bill Gibson and that period," says Maguire, "because people still remember those years, and they still talk about the work that was being done. It's left this small, fertile ground for experimentation."
"We were disasters, financially," Gibson counters candidly, citing an audience that plummeted from 65 percent capacity to 30. "Nevertheless, we established something here. The theatre had some kind of personality that it didn't have before."
Maguire is just thrilled to have Gibson walking around the theatre again (although he's quick to point out that the cluster of buildings, including the Unicorn where American Primitive is playing, didn't exist in his time). "His mind and strength are so intense," says Maguire. "I want to be around that, and I want it for the organization. It feels like good karma to open the season with his play, like all the elements have conspired to bring this about." Then she laughs at her own earnestness. "If we were doing this interview at the end of the summer, it might be very different. 'What was I talking about? Little Mary Sunshine!'"
By the end of the summer Maguire could be forgiven for shedding some of her youthful ebullience. She's on the main stage in person, playing the quintessential grown-up mother, Mrs. Darling, in Peter Pan—and, what's more, her husband is directing, and her daughter, dancer Isadora Wolfe, is playing the boy who would not grow up.
Meanwhile, across the lawn from the main stage, at the Unicorn, things have revolved pretty far away from the ideals of the country's founding fathers. A chorus of trigger-fingered discontents have come to the conclusion that "All you have to do / Is / Squeeze your little finger" to "change the world"—and are causing a dramatic rift in the BTF audience. Assassins has prompted several walk-outs, almost all about midway into the show, during the song quoted above. Douglas and Maguire, however, suspect that the unsettled reaction has more to do with a generation gap than with the material itself.
"On opening night a fight nearly broke out in the audience," says Douglas, who spent the rest of the evening transfixed not by the drama on stage, but the one unfolding between patrons. The dark comedy elicited an uproarious, laugh-filled response from a large under-25 crowd, to the annoyance—and anger—of several of the older spectators, who were maintaining a reverential silence. Words were exchanged between one particularly verbal enthusiast and an older patron behind him, which resulted in the exodus of the older patron's entire row. Nor was this an isolated incident: One critic went so far as to review the audience, as opposed to the performance.
"This is the first time I've noticed a gap in the generations," says Maguire. "The young people were equally annoyed that these old people were annoyed with them." But in the next breath, Maguire is eagerly analyzing violence in Peter Pan, as compared to that in national politics—clearly, even as she's describing the season's hardships, she's still taken with the game of running a theatre. Perhaps the gap between theatre executive director and mother—or even president—isn't so wide.
"My job is to create a world here in the summer," Maguire says, referring to her goal of attracting an acting, design and technical company that returns year after year. "A little government or a country unto itself. What are the rules of the country? We're pointed toward the work, and there's a code of ethics about that, and that's how it's managed."
Eric Hill, who is associate artistic director of Connecticut Repertory Theatre and director of performance studies at the University of Connecticut, agrees, and cites the easy dialogue and shared history among the theatre practitioners at BTF as one of the biggest selling points for directing there. The familial aspect of Peter Pan only serves to highlight the closeness of the company. "I can plug into a whole resource of people that I've known a long time and that I've actually trained as actors," says Hill.
If there's one subject that Maguire is more passionate about than Eva Le Gallienne, it's education. Maguire defines not-for-profit around the tenet of education, both in terms of her audience and community and the training of the next generation of actors. With approximately 15 acting apprentices and 25 interns arriving annually and a newly ratified connection with UConn, BTF is ensuring its future—as well as, she hopes, instilling the value of a company in all the students who pass through. This season the rock opera The Who's Tommy was directed by 24-year-old Jared Coseglia. "I felt old," says Maguire. "I felt like the roof of the Unicorn was going to come off some days—but I felt like I could go home, go to sleep and hand it over. I've no worries about retiring."
"It was a good season," Maguire says finally, "the most successful we've ever had in terms of numbers—and I think it was a pretty good display of really diverse theatre. The fact that Assassins is going on while Peter Pan is on the main stage—that's thrilling to me."
Even with that success, Maguire is still fine-tuning the theatre's future. The development of new work might be another new direction made possible by the recent renovation of the class and rehearsal space down the road from the theatre. The advent of air conditioning and heating in these spaces (mostly old house and barn structures) opens up the possibility of winter workshops or readings. Maguire's next goal, however, is implementing a development department.
"The theatre is in very good shape, I think, when I look at the talent," she says, but before she can allow the theatre to rest on that laurel, she and Hill have launched into an animated discussion on the critical value of education. "Nothing will survive if we don't work on our educational system," Maguire proclaims, "...but we won't go there."
The next revolution, perhaps.
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