Rebuild of Shakespeare theater in Stratford ill-timed
“If you build it, they will come” is a lovely sentiment for a baseball fantasy, but it’s terrible strategy for planning a new large-scale arts organization. That dictum comes to mind every time someone puts forth a new plan for the site of the former American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, the most recent of which was unveiled last week.
The Stratford theater had a fabled history for roughly 20 years, launching in 1955 with a roster of stars in its earliest years that included Connecticut’s own Katharine Hepburn. But save for a last gasp in 1989, it had really petered out by 1982.
The theater has been dark longer than it had operated. While its destruction by fire erased a structure of stage legend, no artists or audiences lost opportunities in the smoke and ash.
Each time a plan to revive the building, or now simply the site, has been announced, it has failed to come to fruition; when it was controlled by the state.
The efforts usually seemed more bound up in real estate dreams than artistic inspiration, or by nostalgia for what briefly happened on the banks of the Housatonic decades ago.
What all such plans often neglect is that for all of its artistic ambition and achievement, the American Shakespeare Theatre always stood on shaky financial ground. It was started and sustained by the largesse of philanthropist Joseph Verner
Reed and destabilized by his death in 1972, only lasting for 10 more years, as no group or individual stepped forward to fill the enormous budgetary gap.
It’s also important to remember that when the theater debuted in 1955, the only major theatrical producing entity in the area was the summer-only Westport Country Playhouse.
But the national regional theater movement began in the 1960s and quickly took hold with worldclass theaters springing up — the newly restored Goodspeed Opera House in 1963, Hartford Stage in 1964, Long Wharf in 1966 and Yale Rep in 1967. Even Westport, though it clung to its summer stock ways for several decades, shifted to a regional theater
model some 20 years ago.
This leaves the question for anyone seeking to restart theater in Stratford: What gap will it fill? The major regionals, a variety of smaller professional companies and academic theater programs around the state regularly produce classics, so the works of Shakespeare are not scarce. Connecticut has long sent new works from its stages to New York, around the country and even internationally. The Bushnell in Hartford and the Shubert in New Haven provide homes for commercial tours from Broadway. Other presenting houses, including the beautifully restored Palace in Waterbury and the tenacious Garde Arts Center in New London, offer varied programs of theater, music and community events.
None of this should suggest that there’s not always room for new visions, new models and new artists. However, at a moment when the theatrical ecosystem, along with every aspect of the country, is struggling to at last make up for the racial, ethnic, disability and economic barriers that have kept so many out of the theater, it’s important to understand how this new entity plans to embrace this essential and overdue shift in the culture.
The announcement of the new Stratford venture could not have been more ill-timed, coming in the midst of a pandemic that has stopped all manner of live performance and thrown the future of many arts organizations into doubt. When six Connecticut theater organizations, all with distinguished track records of 50 years or more, have just asked the state for a combined $12 million to ensure their futures due to the shutdown of their venues, the $77 million budget to fund a phoenix-like American Shakespeare Festival seems not simply over-ambitious but downright contrarian.
It would be a boon for the Stratford economy and the arts community to have a new theater company emerge, but it should walk before it runs, prioritizing the creative work over the architectural. Starting with a temporary structure so as not to be burdened by the cost of an edifice complex seems advisable — and as it happens, the now-bankrupt
Cirque du Soleil may be able to offer a good price on year-round tents. Also worth keeping in mind: It took Sam Wanamaker a quarter-century before his dream of a reconstructed Globe in London became a reality, and he did not live to see it.
I grew up in the town of Orange, which is adjacent to a portion of Stratford save for the river that runs between them, and I retain a vivid memory of seeing Christopher Walken as Hamlet at the AST in 1981. My life and career have been shaped by Connecticut theater, and I want to see it thrive and grow. I wish the new venture only the best.
But my experiences have also taught me that it is the art that must come first, and if that succeeds, then the real estate can follow need. It was in “The Merchant of Venice” that we learned not to grasp at the gold and silver but that the greatest treasure was achieved by claiming the simplest and most utilitarian of vessels — and director Peter Brook taught that all one needs to make theater is an empty space.
New Haven native Howard Sherman has been executive director of the O’Neill Theater Center, general manager of Goodspeed Musicals, and public relations director of Hartford Stage, as well as executive director of the American Theatre Wing. His book “Another Day’s Begun: Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in the 21st Century” will be published in January 2021 by Methuen Drama.