Directing

As You Like It at Hubbard Hall

Archival photo from Hubbard Hall’s 1916 production of As You Like It.

Archival photo from Hubbard Hall’s 1916 production of As You Like It.

The Theatre Company at Hubbard Hall (TCHH) announces Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It as its annual free summer Shakespeare touring production to area parks and historical sites in upstate New York and southern Vermont.  The live outdoor production, directed by TCHH’s new artistic director John Hadden, will tour the region from July 22 through July 31. The performances, which begin nightly at 7:00 p.m., are free and open to the public – tickets are not required for this event. 
 
The touring schedule and locations are as follows:  Thurs. 7/21—Subscribers’ Gala; 
Fri. 7/22--The Georgi Museum, Shushan, NY; Sat. 7/23—Park McCullough House, North Bennington, VT; Sun. 7/24-- Wood Memorial Park, Hoosick Falls, NY; Mon. 7/25—Greenwich Commons, Greenwich, NY; Tues., 7/26—Crandall Park (near Obelisk) Glens Falls, NY: Thurs. 7/28-- Hildene, Manchester, VT; 
Fri. 7/29—Cambridge Guest Home (behind IGA) Cambridge, NY; Sat. 7/30—Salem Art Works, Salem,
NY; and Sun. 7/31—Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs, NY. 
 
As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia and Touchstone the court jester, to find safety and eventually love in the Forest of Arden.  The play features one of Shakespeare's most famous and oft-quoted speeches, "All the world's a stage,” and is the origin of the phrase "too much of a good thing.”  The play remains a favorite among audiences and has been adapted for radio, film, and musical theater. States TCHH Artistic Director and Director of As You Like It, John Hadden, “As You Like It is full of impossibilities. An exiled Duke and his followers spend years trekking to the Forest of Arden, a place with enormous snakes, lions and palm trees…Four couples demonstrate the difficulties of love… Love and marriage are just as confounding for Shakespeare’s characters as for us. It’s up to them—and us—to decide whether to say yes or no to the unlikely events of the play and to the thorny possibilities of love.” 
 
Audience members are encouraged to bring blankets and folding chairs to enjoy a beguiling evening of outdoor Shakespeare that will be fun for the entire family.        
 
Hubbard Hall is an 1878 rural opera house located at 25 E. Main Street in historic Cambridge, New York. For information, visit Hubbard Hall’s web site at www.hubbardhall.org, or call Hubbard Hall for information, locations and directions at (518) 677-2495.

Notes: Hadrian VII

Let us now praise crackpot visionaries.

The original Hadrian VII is a 1904 fantasy autobiography of FW Rolfe, or Baron Corvo, a Symbolist writer, painter, homoerotic and underwater photographer—and lifelong seeker of the priesthood—who died in poverty and neglect. Peter Luke used the material to write his first play in 1960, which met with tremendous success in London. The rest of Peter Luke’s work is largely forgotten.

If Rolfe and Luke have ended up in a special part of Heaven, then RD Laing, the reluctant leader of the Anti-Psychiatry movement, is right there with them. In 1960, in The Divided Self (it was his first book, highly regarded; Laing’s professional standing declined with each one that followed), he wrote:

“… the cracked mind of the schizophrenic may let in light which does not enter the intact minds of many sane people…”

But even the most ordinary of us is little cracked, don’t you think? Two years ago, after a night of Elephant Man, I mentioned the play to Doug Ryan. It’s a real mind-bender, I said, like one of those Peter O’Toole movies from the 60’s. The hero thinks he’s Pope, but he’s in a straightjacket, issuing papal decrees from a padded cell. But he’s not just crazy—he has a high moral understanding. Doug said, “Hmm, let’s look into it.”

When I got the miraculous call to direct the play, I found my old copy and read it through, the yellow pages almost turning to dust in my hands. It was all exactly as I remembered it—except the part about the padded cell and the straightjacket. I couldn’t find it anywhere.

So as we started exploring the play, we decided that just because something isn’t there, that doesn’t mean it isn’t there—it’s just hidden somewhere in the cracks. Tonight, we ask you to look upon all our little fissures with kindness.

Notes: Richard III

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David Garrick as Richard III, William Hogarth, 1745

Director’s Notes

Richard is a sociopath.

Richard is a comic book villain.

Richard is a nihilist-comedian.

A terrific performer.

Audiences love him.

His act? Revenge.

Myth: Richard of Gloucester spends two years in his mother’s womb and emerges as a monster with hair and teeth.

Fact: a malformed baby meets a malevolent world. His mother despises him and tells him so every chance she gets. His brothers torment him for his disfigurement. As the years go by, in order to survive, Richard puts on a cheerful face and does the dirty work. He is finally accepted as one of the boys. But Richard can no more forget his persecution than he can forget the constant pain of his body. Revenge burns in his soul.

This play is almost a romp of hatred and violence, but underneath the dark psychological comedy lies a simple plea for kindness.

Notes: The World Beyond the Hill: the Life and Times of W.E.B. Du Bois

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Director’s Notes:

This is the ninth show we have done in the three years of the high school. In the past we have done shows based on interviews with members of the community (People Talk), anthology material (Animalia), original work by students (The Tennis Court Oath Daytime Drama Spectacle Parade), as well as combinations of plays, and plays that involve formal language. This show has elements of each of these, either in forming the material or in discovering the action of the play.

A kid from Great Barrington graduates from the top of his class and goes on to become one of the great thinkers and activists of our time. He is the town’s first river advocate, writes twenty-three books and thousands of articles, in varying styles and genres, and makes significant contributions to the fields of sociology and philosophy. He lays the groundwork for the civil rights movement and is consulted by leaders of movements and nations. He is black and outspoken, and naturally falls afoul of the Joe McCarthys and J. Edgar Hoovers of the time. He is hounded and blacklisted, discredited to such an extent that even his own hometown remains largely mute about its preeminent native son.

I remember my first arrival in the Berkshires by bus, passing a small sign about DuBois near a grove of trees. I never found the sign again, and thought it must have been my imagination, until I was asked to join the school’s celebration of his work. Since then many of us have begun to see traces of DuBois everywhere, patiently revealed by a small number of people who have long cherished his memory. If we can share a small part of the bittersweet joy of this discovery, that will count as a good thing.

Directors Notes

Director’s Notes

This is our seventh production in this theater, in what still feels like our new high school. For the most part, we have put on plays-which-are-not-really-plays. In most plays you find on the shelf, only two or three characters are on stage at any given time, and they are usually the same people. Since this isn’t much fun for everybody else in the play, we have been looking for ways to get more people on the stage more of the time. One way to do this is to draw bits of material from a variety of sources, get everybody on stage to play with the different pieces, and create dramatic collages that are imagistic rather than character- or plot-driven.

This time we’ve taken excerpts from three full-length plays. The Fever, by Wally Shawn, is a monologue in which a man visiting a poor country, unable to sleep one night, realizes for the first time that the things he most loves in life are available to him only because of the labor and poverty of most other people. In the Blood, by the remarkable young playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, shows the life of a woman and her five illegitimate children who live under a bridge in a large city. Scenes from American Life, by A.R. Gurney, Jr., is a series of very short comedy vignettes about the decline of an aristocratic clan in Buffalo, NY.

Animalia: A New Ark Anthology

Stockbridge – Berkshire Country Day School’s new secondary school (BCD2S) will present a new play, ANIMALIA: A NEW ARK ANTHOLOGY, on December 7 at 1 P.M. and on December 8 at 8 PM.

The performances will be held at the Winthrop Campus on Boston University’s Tanglewood Institute property on  Route 183, two miles north of BCD’s main campus. The Winthrop Campus is the current home of BCD2S.

ANIMALIA: A NEW ARK ANTHOLOGY is a collage of scenes, monologues, and cartoons derived from sou0rces as divergent as Kafka, Saroyan, The Far Side, Thurber, Atwood, Schweitzer, Neruda, Beckett and the Bible. The various pieces are brought together by live sounds and music, lights and artistic design, conceived and executed by the students of BCD2S. The play, which involves almost half the student body and several faculty members, is orchestrated by John Hadden, head of the Theater Program.

The public is warmly invited to attend this inaugural production of the new high school. There is no charge for admission.

Notes: Comedy of Errors

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It has been an odd pleasure to mount the Comedy of Errors. In the same way one forgets that locking the house without a key to get back in will lead to problems at midnight, dragging oneself home for a cup of Sleepytime tea and a quick overnight nap after a long day of rehearsals and scattered obligations, one forgets that Shakespeare’s plays insinuate themselves into our lives like stray cats, or bedbugs. The play is delightful because it is full of the aggravations that drive us crazy (“but soft, my door is locked…”), and we love to see other people tear their hair out over small grievances. Not only out of our perverse nature, though that cannot be totally discounted, but also because we see that we go nuts over the things that don’t have any consequence. Over things of weight, like the hanging of a foreigner, or a merchant’s ruthlessness on his way to Persia (Iraq), we stay pretty calm. As we should, in order to be steady when things get rough. Meanwhile, it’s not a bad thing to laugh at our intricate follies.

Once again, many thanks are due to people whose acts of kindness and generosity make these hare-brained projects possible. Exemplary among these is Charley Clemmons, who lent his truck so we could pick up the set pieces from Shakespeare & Company on a Saturday two weeks ago when there were mountains of snow to be plowed before evening.