Midsummer Night's Spectacle

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

As twilight slips over the hilly college town of Ashland, Oregon, the sweet summer evening seems too balmy and starry for whiling away indoors, even to the holiday throngs who have journeyed to attend the theater here. Fortunately they need not choose between pleasures. Night after night, vividly costumed Shakespeare -- preceded by madrigals and heralded by a flag raising and trumpet fanfare from the topmost gables of a Tudor stagehouse -- unfolds beneath an open sky, turning edification into festival.

The scene takes place at the largest U.S. regional theater and one of the oldest (founded in 1935), a three-stage jamboree built on Bardolatry that draws 370,000 spectators a year, 90% from more than 125 miles away. With minor variations this scene also takes place in Boulder, Colorado; Cedar City, Utah; San Diego; Houston; Dallas; Orlando, Florida; an inner-city park in Louisville, Kentucky; the grounds of a legendary mansion alongside the Hudson River; New York City's Central Park; and dozens of other locales. According to Felicia Londre, secretary of the Shakespeare Theater Association of America, the U.S. has about 100 outdoor Shakespeare festivals. Some have grown, like Ashland's, into major institutions offering varied repertoires. Others operate just a few weeks a year. Nearly all rely on a lot of novice, non-Equity players. But almost all are thriving. Americans seemingly cannot get enough of the Bard in open air in summer -- though they are conspicuously less eager to see his work indoors at other times of the year.

For many theatergoers, the experience of Shakespeare outdoors takes on an almost sacred character. When Richard Devin of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival moved this summer's staging of The Winter's Tale to a new indoor space and installed outdoors an adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals, he quickly realized he had goofed. Not only did The Rivals prove an unusually tough sell, but subscribers wrote in fury. "They told me they would never come to Shakespeare indoors or accept another writer outdoors," Devin says. "They spoke of Shakespeare's universality and of what it meant to see these plays under the stars with their children. They felt we were stealing an irreplaceable opportunity from them."

Other theater executives have noted a similar, almost fetishistic audience passion for Shakespeare. Even his problem plays have much more box-office appeal than masterpieces by almost anyone else. Says Bill Patton, Ashland's executive director, who has overseen its rise since 1948: "Some of Shakespeare's popularity may be that it's certified as good for you, so audiences can congratulate themselves on their intellectuality, even though this was popular entertainment for its time and still is. Also the plays are taught in school, so people feel familiar with them."

Actors and directors tend to be ambivalent about staging the Bard outdoors. Only a dozen or so of his 37 plays consistently succeed outdoors both artistically and at the box office, and those mainly when staged in broad strokes. By common consent, the lighter comedies and the more swashbuckling histories fare best because they depend less on language that is easily lost in the night air and more on pageantry and action. Intimate texts and subtle, groundbreaking performances tend not to work in the wide and windy spaces. Soliloquies cannot compete with swordplay. Jerry Turner, who retired last year as Ashland's artistic director after nearly two decades, refused during his tenure to schedule Othello outdoors because he felt its closely chambered story and rich language ill fitted that setting. This year, after Ashland erected a stadium-like "acoustic shell" that wraps around the stage with tiers of balconies but leaves the sky open, Turner consented to try Othello outdoors. The flat and tedious result bears out his original judgment -- although the blame belongs mainly to the three principal performances, especially Mark Murphey's inert Iago.

By contrast, Ashland's outdoor conflation of Henry VI, Parts 2 and 3, evokes far greater narrative satisfaction out of inferior material. And much the best show on offer there is an exquisitely nuanced All's Well That Ends Well, staged indoors by Turner's successor, Henry Woronicz. To the probable dismay of Ashland adherents -- some of whom buy vacation or retirement homes chiefly to attend plays -- Woronicz vows to "pull away from the scale of production and pageantry, even outside." To subscribers who urge elaborately costumed and staged period productions as "traditional," Woronicz replies, "That is the tradition of the 19th century, not Shakespeare's."

Some artistic directors claim to find great value in working outdoors. Says Jack O'Brien of San Diego's Old Globe: "The shows are usually at their fairest and least phony outside. It's hard to stand next to a tree and speak archly. Even when we are doing Shakespeare indoors, I have often taken the cast outside during tech week and had a complete run-through just to get in touch with that honesty." O'Brien thinks Shakespeare's earlier plays almost all work outdoors, while his later ones mostly don't: "You can see in his poetry the adaptation from an open theater to a more enclosed one -- the way, for example, he speaks of light or time of day."

His counterpart at the New York Shakespeare Festival, JoAnne Akalaitis, extols the "magic" of Shakespeare in Central Park: "Shakespeare in the park is part of the essence of being a cultural person in New York City. It is relaxed, warm, open and democratic. The upsides are the wind and clouds, the informality, coupled with the power that comes with that much massed humanity." She adds dryly, "The downside is the body miking." The Central Park sound system is notoriously tinny, and actors cannot seem to master the technique of not hitting the mikes when they scuffle, so every few minutes the audience hears what sounds like thunder. Another downside is the sheer size of the stage and audience, which can tempt film stars, fearful of understatement, into almost operatic playing. That happened last week to Marisa Tomei, the street-corner ingenue of My Cousin Vinny, in a vaudeville-influenced staging of The Comedy of Errors. While Brazilian director Caca Rosset emphasizes the many shades of emotion within the text, Tomei, a gifted stage veteran, struck one note: screeching fury.

Whatever shortcomings artists may see, audiences seem to want Shakespeare outdoors more than ever. New troupes spring up each year as stage entrepreneurs discover what Ashland's founder, Angus Bowmer, learned in 1935. He staged boxing matches as a way to defray the costs of his outdoor Shakespeare shows. The boxing lost money. From the start, the Shakespeare turned a profit.