Shakespeare & Company: "Les Liaisons Dangereuses" and "Women of Will"

Josh Aaron McCabe and Alexandra Lincoln in Les Liaisons Dangereuses. Photos by Kevin Sprague.
There's activity aplenty in South County as Shakespeare & Company lights its marquee for two events in February. Both are must-see performances.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses
The first is the much anticipated Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Christopher Hampton and adapted from the novel by Pierre Choderlos de Laclos which opens this week. It is directed by Tina Packer and presented at the intimate Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre from through March 21, 2010.

Love is the ultimate weapon! This wickedly entertaining story of love, sex and betrayal is as sumptuously guilt-inducing as a decadent chocolate you just can't resist. Depicting the devious schemes of French aristocrats on the cusp of the Revolution.

Elizabeth Aspenlieder
Packer directs Elizabeth Aspenlieder, who won the coveted Elliot Norton Award for her tour de force performance in Bad Dates last winter, and Josh Aaron McCabe, most recently seen last fall as Sherlock Holmes (and a host of other characters, both male and female) in the runaway hit The Hound of the Baskervilles. Les Liaisons Dangereuses (Dangerous Liaisons) was ahead of its time as a novel in 1782 and it still may be ahead of its time today.

Women of Will
Tina Packer and Nigel Gore.
On February 28, in the Bernstein Theatre, there will be a sneak peek of Women of Will. A true tour de force of performance, discussion, and just a bit of crowd participation, this pla, written by Founding Artistic Director Tina Packer, and directed by Eric Tucker is the much-anticipated, masterful summation of Tina Packer's 40-odd years of deep investigation into all things Shakespeare. Performing with Packer is Nigel Gore.

After years of work, refinement, and workshop performances, Tina is making the world premiere of Women of Will at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, England this March. For one night only, our audience will get a sneak peek of this remarkable survey here in Lenox—before Tina takes it across the pond.

How did Shakespeare's view of women and the feminine impulse change throughout his career? And what can his 400-year-old insights teach us today about our own lives, as we each figure out for ourselves what it means to be alive?

My colleague Chales Giuliano does a nice advance take on Women of Will and its place in the Shakespeare & Company repertoire. Berkshire Fine Arts

For ticket and specific performance information, visit www.shakespeare.org

Shakespeare & Company is located at 70 Kemble Street in Lenox, MA.
Box office: 413-637-3353
Main office: 413-637-1199

William and Margaret Gibson Remembered at Shakespeare & Company

Playwright William Gibson honored.
From Jeremy Goodwin comes news that friends and fans of the late playwright, novelist and poet William Gibson, and psychotherapist and author Margaret Gibson, gathered yesterday to remember them. There was an intimate celebration of the Gibsons’ lives at Shakespeare & Company’s Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, co-produced by S&Co. and the Berkshire Theatre Festival. A group of artists long associated with both S&Co. and BTF gathered to perform scenes from Mr. Gibson’s plays, as well as to read from Mrs. Gibson’s writings.

Tina Packer and Dennis Krausnick
Tina Packer, S&Co.’s Founding Artistic Director, recalled meeting the Gibsons shortly after founding S&Co., and described Mrs. Gibson’s impact as an early member of S&Co.’s Board of Trustees. Kate Maguire, BTF’s Artistic Director, shared stories about Mr. Gibson’s time as BTF’s Artistic Director, and his deep and long-running working relationship with the festival.

Berkshire Theatre Festival Artistic Director Kate Maguire
Maguire and Packer were joined by fellow actors Jonathan Epstein, Eric Hill, Dennis Krausnick (S&Co. Director of Training), and Annette Miller. Miller opened the program with a performance of a scene from Gibson’s Golda’s Balcony. This was followed by reminiscences about the Gibsons and readings from Mr. Gibson’s Jonah’s Dream, American Primitive, A Cry of Players, and The Miracle Worker. Eric Tucker directed the program and read aloud from Mrs. Gibson’s work. After the hour-long program, the invited crowd of about fifty adjourned for a reception, slideshow, and further discussion about their old friends.

Jonathan Epstein
According to Broadway World, Gibson's most famous play is The Miracle Worker (1959), the story of Helen Keller's childhood education, which won him the Tony Award for Best Play. His other works include Dinny and the Witches (1948, revised 1961), in which a jazz musician incurs the wrath of three Shakespearean witches by blowing a riff which stops time; the Tony Award-nominated Two for the Seesaw (1958), a recounting of which production appeared the following year in Gibson's nonfiction book The Seesaw Log; the book for the musical version of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy (1964), which earned him yet another Tony nomination; A Mass for the Dead (1968), an autobiographical family chronicle; A Cry of Players (1968), a speculative account of the life of young William Shakespeare; Goodly Creatures (1980), about Puritan dissident Anne Hutchinson; Monday After the Miracle (1982), a continuation of the Keller story; and Golda (1977), a work about the late Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir, which in its revised version Golda's Balcony (2003) set a record as the longest-running one-woman play in Broadway history on January 2, 2005.

Eric Tucker and Eric Hill
In 1954 he published a novel, The Cobweb, set at a psychiatric hospital resembling the Menninger Clinic. In 1955, the novel was adapted as a movie by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Gibson married Margaret Brenman-Gibson, a psychotherapist and biographer of Odets, in 1940. She died in 2004.

Shakespeare Conference Held in the Berkshires

The Bernstein Theatre was packed with attendees.

Tina Packer from Shakespeare & Company welcomed more than a hundred members of the Shakespeare Theatre Association of America (STAA) to Lenox for a conference on the theme of "Revolutionary Shakespeare". More than five dozen performing companies were represented, from London's Globe Theatre and the Stratford Shakespeare Festival to grass roots efforts such as the Los Angeles Women's Shakespeare Company and the Boston based Actor's Shakespeare Project. Speaking to father and son team of Ben and David Evett, it was clear that this was far more than a reunion of Bard enthusiasts, but a productive meeting of creative minds intent on keeping Shakespeare vital and alive.
Making Shakespeare inclusive was the theme of one session with panelists Alphonse Keasley, Claudia Alick, Alison Carey, Tara Olney, Philip Sneed, Sherrie Young and Patrick Spottiswoode.

Packer commented that the gathering was more like a party than a family reunion: "There were lots of new and exciting people to meet and draw ideas from." Philip C. Sneed, President of the STAA expressed the concern shared by all: "Many of our theatres have been ravaged by the effects of the global economic meltdown, and some of those here have come close to shutting their doors." Shakespeare, too, suffered huge reverses and obstacles in his time, including his theatre burning down, but like the attendees, he picked up the pieces and struggled on.

"Given this," he continued, "we must address the new economic realities. We need to be revolutionaries in how we confront painful choices in the months and years ahead...that Shakespeare will continue to guide and inspire us to the levels of imagination and creativity we need to survive in tough times."

Marcella Trowbridge (ARTFARM: Shakespeare in the Grove) speaks with Patrick Spottiswoode (Shakespeare's Globe, London)

The sessions covered a wide range of topics. The discussion of building new audiences honed in on a little known phenomenon. Most of the Shakespeare companies have educational programs in the schools. I have always thought of them as force-feeding children a diet of difficult language and developing an appreciation for the Bard. Instead, these innovative companies have found creative ways to make Shakespeare relevant to the youngsters lives, and in the process develop them not only as audiences, but also a reservoir of community actors.
Elizabeth Aspenlieder (Shakespeare & Company) chatted with Ben and David Evett (Actor's Shakespeare Project)

The discussion was led by Dawn McAndrews from the Shakespeare Festival of St. Louis, and included Shakespeare & Company's Director of Education Kevin Coleman, Alison Carey from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, and Tom Evans from the Actor's Shakespeare Project. Most companies reported that when done right, they have to turn children away who want to be part of these programs. In addition, when they finish their learning encounters, they bring their parents and neighbors into the theatre, many of whom return to see full fledged productions. They have discovered that Shakespeare is not so foreign after all.
Listening intently during the Writing Forum are (l to r) Tina Packer (Shakespeare & Company), Philip Sneed (Colorado Shakespeare Festival and President of STAA) and Alison Carey, (Oregon Shakespeare Festival)

Not content with performing only Shakespeare, virtually every company offers works by other writers. A discussion about how Shakespeare was really a historian of his time took this notion to a new and higher level. It was revealed that several companies are actively working on U.S. History Cycle of original plays. Tina Packer explained how Shakespeare's "History Plays" informed the citizens of Elizabethan times while entertaining them, and how new plays can become the "voice of the people" once again.
The subject of building new audiences for Shakespeare was a very popular break-out session.

Packer used the example of her company reading the Declaration of Independence out loud, and how it has since became an annual event, one of the most popular July 4th weekend events in the Berkshires. "We the people is meant to be read aloud, and speaks directly to each of us about how and why we came to be as a nation," she noted, and "so we have undertaken to commission playwrights to go and speak again to the people, and write what they hear."
Box lunches in the Scene Shop gave everyone a chance to meet and mingle.

Participating in this effort are two other companies, with more to come. The Oregon Shakespeare Company's Alison Carey, who led the discussion revealed that up to 37 new plays would be undertaken over the next nine years. Phillip Sneed from the Colorado Shakespeare Festival noted that some $400,000 has been located for this purpose through grants and services from corporations, foundations and the NEA. He noted that these histories would not be purely academic studies but rather provocative works that entertained. 'Sometimes you have to ignore the facts to tell the story," he added with a smile.
Moderator Dawn McAndrews (Shakespeare Festival St. Louis) led a lively discussion on educating children about Shakespeare.)

'I see this as theatre in service to the citizens," Packer noted. "The question we are asking is just what does it mean to be an American these days? It is a question that the people themselves must answer, and we want to give them that voice."
Ron Nichol (Stratford Shakespeare Festival) catches up with Fred Adams, (Utah Shakespeare Festival)