Robert Cohen - Theatre, Brief Version-McGraw-Hill Education (2016)

292 Chapter 10 Global Theatre Today
hometowns, and professional theatre artists can live in any
major city in the country—not only in New York.
SHAKESPEARE FESTIVALS
During Broadway’s mid-twentieth-century heyday various
theatres opened up as summer stock companies.
This network of theatres, mainly located in resort areas
throughout the Northeast, provided summer entertainment
for tourists and assorted local communities. Summer
stock companies produced recent and not-so-recent
Broadway shows, mainly comedies, with a mix of
professional theatre artists from New York and young
theatrical hopefuls from around the country. They provided
America’s vacation theatre and professional training
ground.
Summer stock is not as vibrant today, but in its place
has risen another phenomenon that, like summer stock,
is unique to the United States. This is the vast array of
Shakespeare festivals, begun during the Great Depression
and now flourishing in almost every state. The
Oregon Shakespeare Festival, in rural Ashland, is the
much-heralded grandparent of this movement. Founded
by local drama teacher Angus Bowmer, whose threenight
amateur production of The Merchant of Venice in
1935 was preceded by an afternoon boxing match “to
draw the crowds,” the Oregon festival now produces no
fewer than eleven plays each year, attracting 350,000
spectators during a ten-month season in a town of less
than 20,000 people. There are now more than 200 North
American Shakespeare festivals, many of them largely
or partially professional, with two of them (Oregon’s
and Utah’s) winning regional Tony Awards. Characteristic
of each is a core of two to four Shakespearean
productions, normally performed outdoors, together
with more contemporary plays often performed on
adjacent indoor stages—an arrangement not unlike that
of Shakespeare’s King’s Men, which by the end of the
playwright’s career performed plays of many authors
at both the outdoor Globe and the indoor Blackfriars.
In addition to providing exciting classical and modern
theatre to audiences around North America, these
Shakespeare festivals provide a bridge for aspiring performers
and designers to segue from college training to
professional employment.
SUMMER AND DINNER THEATRES
There remain some notable professional summer theatres
without the word Shakespeare in their names. The
Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts is the
most notable, as it employs many of New York’s betterknown
actors, designers, and directors eager to leave
the stifling city in July and August to spend a month or
two in this beautiful Berkshire village, where they play
Chekhov, Brecht, Ibsen, Williams, and newer plays in
elegantly mounted productions. The Berkshire Theatre
Festival in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is also a highly
accomplished professional summer theatre, located in a
culturally rich area just two hours north of New York,
where, in the afternoons, visitors can also drop in at Tanglewood
to see the Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsing
in shirtsleeves.
Dinner theatres were introduced to suburban America
in the 1970s, offering a “night-on-the-town” package of
dinner and a play in the same facility. Their novelty has
worn relatively thin, however, and only a few of them
remain, generally offering light comedies, mystery melodramas,
and pared-down productions of golden-age
Broadway musicals.
AMATEUR THEATRE:
ACADEMIC AND COMMUNITY
There is an active amateur theatre in the United States,
some of it operating in conjunction with educational
programs. More than a thousand U.S. colleges and
universities have theatre or drama departments that
offer degrees in these fields, and another thousand
collegiate institutions put on plays, or give classes
in drama, without having a full curriculum of studies.
Several thousand high schools, summer camps,
and private schools also teach drama and mount plays.
Much of this dramatic activity is directed toward
general education. The educational staging of plays
has been pursued at least since the Renaissance as a
way to explore dramatic literature, human behavior,
and cultural history—as well as to teach skills such
as public speaking, self-presentation, and foreign languages.
Practical instruction in drama has the virtue
of making the world’s greatest literature physical and
emotional; it gets drama not only into the mind but
into the muscles. Learning about history becomes
embodied, rather than just thought about. Some of the
world’s great theatre has emerged from just such academic
activity. Four or five “University Wits” dominated
Elizabethan playwriting before Shakespeare
arrived on the scene, and Shakespeare’s company
competed with publicly presented school plays that
had become popular in London during his career. Several
plays that changed theatre history—such as Alfred
Jarry’s Ubu Roi and Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz