SHAKESPEARE IN DETROIT
Theatre company embraces history
Henry V strode across the battlefield — beneath a peaked ceiling with exposed beams and a 115-bulb chandelier. The wood floor creaked.
It was a new way to see William Shakespeare’s 400-year-old play — in the former ballroom of the historic Frederick K. Stearns House in Detroit last week.
It was staged by Shakespeare in Detroit, a non-profit professional theatre company “unlike any you’ll find,” says director D. B. Schroeder.
They’ve performed The Tempest on Belle Isle, Antony and Cleopatra at the former Lincoln Motor Company, now a recycling centre, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Heidelberg Project. They’ll perform The Taming of the Shrew on the grounds of the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House this year.
They also perform one play a year for free. This year it will be Hamlet, at New Center Park in July. It will be directed by Dean Gabourie, former associate artistic director of the renown Stratford Festival.
There’s something else about Shakespeare in Detroit. It’s not all white guys. Half the cast are women, and almost half are black. All are from Detroit.
“It’s Shakespeare for all,” said executive and artistic director Sam White.
The free performance is the “bedrock” of the company’s season, White said.
“Sometimes we have homeless people come, and the sponsors come, who have deep pockets,” she said.
For a couple of hours, the income gap disappears. The audiences range from age eight to 80 and cross all racial, ethnic and social divides.
It’s one of the things that intrigued Gabourie, a former juvenile offender who credits theatre for saving his life.
“I think what Sam is doing is extremely important and extremely brave,” he said. “They bring something very special to Detroit. I find it quite moving. “
The lead role in Hamlet will be played by actor Dante Jones from Seven Mile, one of the toughest neighbourhoods in the city.
“He’s the kid we want to see this play, to think, ‘I can do that,’” said Gabourie. “The idea that a kid in the audience who doesn’t have money, may not have the greatest education, is getting exposed to the greatest writer in the English language is important. That’s really what this thing is all about.”
As for the venues, White says she’s bringing theatre to where people live, work and play — and to bus routes so they can get there.
Dawn Bilobran lived near Grand Circus Park when Othello was staged there in 2013. She walked out and stumbled across “this amazing free performance across the street.” She returned for Henry V.
The company is also showing off Detroit’s rich heritage.
“This is such an interesting and beautiful venue,” said J. M. Ethridge of East Point, who came to Henry V with her husband, Todd. “We’ve lived here almost 20 years, and we’ve never heard of this place. When we found out about this, we said ‘Let’s do it.’ ”
The Stearns House, a two-anda-half-storey Tudor built in 1903 for pharmaceutical company founder Frederick K. Stearns, is a fitting place to stage Shakespeare, said White.
“I always thought this home looks like Shakespeare’s birthplace,” she said.
It’s also part of Detroit’s heritage. Architect William Stratton, who filled the house with intricately carved wood, a unique stained glass castle in a window and a wall in the dining hall made of the city’s distinctive pewabic tile, was known for designing many unique homes in the city. Stratton’s wife was Mary Chase Perry, who founded Pewabic Pottery, now a national historic landmark.
Stearns himself, said White, was “the epitome of the Detroit work ethic.”
To honour the house, season opener Henry V was also a celebration of traditional chamber theatre from the 1800s, when guests retired to the drawing room after dinner for a performance. Everyone had a front-row seat. The actors, wearing costumes from the First World War to fit the house, were so close they sometimes brushed against the audience. Henry nodded and smiled at people and shook hands with a boy.
Cramming an epic story into an intimate space fit with the prologue, when the character Chorus asks, “...can this cockpit hold The vasty fields of France? or may we cram Within this wooden O the very casques That did affright the air at Agincourt?”
The cast is from Detroit because White wants them to stay here instead of leaving for New York or Los Angeles.
“Being able to actually perform plays I love in the city is a privilege,” said Joe Sfair, who plays Henry V. He grew up in East Point and has a BA in theatre from Wayne State University.
White is also big on diversity because, as she wrote in a blog, “there aren’t a ton of arts leaders in this neck of the woods that look like me — not even in a city that is...more than 80 per cent black like me.” The company, along with 4th Wall Theatre Company, is also planning to perform Romeo and Juliet featuring actors with disabilities
White didn’t always like Shakespeare. She liked rap music when she was a kid.
“But my mother wasn’t having it,” she said.
Her mother caught her listening to rap on a boom box and handed her Shakespeare’s complete works.
“If you like lyrics, you can read this,” she told her daughter.
Every Saturday, White had to read it. It was “complete and utter punishment,” she remembered.
Now, Bilobran calls White “an amazing force for the arts in the city.”
White started Shakespeare in Detroit in 2013, planning the first free performance of Othello at Grand Circus Park that summer.
Then Detroit filed for bankruptcy.
“I was scared,” she remembered. “I’d spent all this money. I thought me, my mom and the squirrels are going to be there. People are worried about other things.”
Five hundred people showed up. It was the first open-air Shakespearean production with a local cast in Detroit.
Detroit needed The Bard, White figured.
“People thought Detroit was scary and violent. They talked about the blight. They said don’t go there. But we’re not Othello,” she said, referring to the character who is manipulated and deceived. “We didn’t fall for it.”
The company has staged 11 plays seen by 8,000 people, including theatre-goers from Windsor, Chatham and even Toronto. As Detroit rises again, White still believes Shakespeare speaks to her city.
“To be or not to be,” she said, quoting Hamlet.
The question for the Motor City, becoming known for its tech sector and restaurants, is what does it want to be as it rebuilds, she said.
White and others believe Shakespeare in Detroit, whose three performances of Henry V sold out, is part of the city’s renaissance.
The most important thing the company does, said Aamir Farooqi, chairman and CEO of Banyan Investments, a Detroit real estate company that sponsors Shakespeare in Detroit, is show people that “Detroit’s resurgence is not one-dimensional.”
It’s about more than new entrepreneurs and clearing away blight, said Farooqi, whose favourite subject in school was English literature.
“For society to get back on its feet it has to be more wellrounded.”
Bilobran grew up in the suburbs and had just moved to Detroit when she found that free performance in Grand Circus Park in 2013.
“What a great place to live,” she remembered thinking.