Women toppling patriarchy is theme in APT’s season
The Harvey Weinstein scandal and #MeToo movement weren’t even on the horizon when American Players Theatre’s Brenda DeVita and her artistic team began planning the 2018 season a few years ago.
But almost all of the nine plays in APT’s upcoming season — which kicks off in Spring Green on June 9 and runs through mid-November — involve women toppling a male-dominated power structure that’s morally corrupt and politically exclusionary.
“Of course my seasons are going to include strong female characters,” DeVita said, during a wide-ranging conversation in her office, heaped with plays from seasons past and those to come. “I’m a woman, and that’s going to inform my perspective and my choices as an artistic director.
“But I had no idea just how topical these plays were going to be when I chose them. None of us did.”
Women seize the day
In APT’s season-opening “As You Like It,” Rosalind leaves the oppressive and violent dukedom ruled by her uncle. She ventures into the woods to remake herself and the world, as the greatest heroine Shakespeare ever created.
In Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure,” another young woman — who’ll be played, as Rosalind will be, by Melisa Pereyra — stands up to a hypocritical tyrant (Marcus Truschinski), insisting that truth and principles matter.
In “Born Yesterday,” which DeVita will direct, APT standout Colleen Madden plays the unforgettable Billie Dawn, who undergoes a Pygmalion-like transformation from a kept and browbeaten woman to a moral force, declaring her independence from the blustery blowhard (David Daniel) who’s long controlled her life while assuming he owns
her body.
In Shaw’s “Heartbreak House,” which will be presented in a slimmeddown adaptation by Aaron Posner (also directing), a young woman (APT newcomer Phoebe González) challenges long-held assumptions regarding what England is and how people should inhabit the world.
Learning a new story
In these and other APT plays this summer, the women turning the world upside down see what so many of the men miss: One can’t successfully go it alone. We change ourselves by letting others in, learning through a give-andtake exchange.
“We’re losing the sense today that we can learn by listening and collaborating,” DeVita said. “The learning that goes on in these plays is what I’m most excited about. Characters realize that going somewhere, physically and emotionally, means having your ideas of who you are tested, and embracing the wonder of it.”
In a delightful series of exchanges in “As You Like It,” Rosalind and Orlando (Chris Klopatek) learn the language of love.
In “Born Yesterday,” Billie and a tutor (Reese Madigan) who’s been hired to smooth out her rougher edges fall for each other, as both learn that “education’s pretty hard to control.” “One thing leads to another,” Paul marvels, himself learning as much as he teaches. “It’s a matter of awakening curiosity — imagination — independence.”
Refuse to learn and you begin to die, spiritually and physically. That’s the moral of “As You Like It” and “Born Yesterday.” Of Shaw’s “Heartbreak House” and its thematic twin in this APT season: Eugène Ionesco’s “Exit the King,” in which a dying monarch (James Ridge) watches his kingdom collapse while his body fails.
It’s certainly true of “Measure for Measure,” a play that DeVita has had her eye on for years, rightly recognizing as she does that it speaks powerfully to our moment, in which we’re often so busy shouting that we’ve forgotten how to listen. Convinced of our own truths, we never get to yes together.
“People need to live beside each other,” DeVita said. “In ‘Measure’ and in our own moment, people intentionally — out of fear and necessity and complete frustration — are insisting that their individual point of view is more important than the greater whole.
“I’m not saying there isn’t right and wrong. What Angelo does to Isabella in this play — insisting she trade her virginity for her brother’s life — is evil. But there’s also so much gray. And nobody in this play is perfect.
“Shakespeare was brilliant and prescient in recognizing this; he didn’t create uncomplicated characters who were right. He understood how imperfect we are, and why we must therefore listen to each other, with compassion and a humility reflecting our own failures as human beings. The answers won’t come because we’re talking and yelling louder than other people do.”
Putting our stories on stage
Theater artists intuitively grasp the sort of interactive learning DeVita has in mind; it’s no accident that much of the collaborative spirit engendered by this year’s APT plays involves characters who are consciously willing to try on different roles to better understand who they are.
Tracy Michelle Arnold will set the stage starting on APT’s opening weekend by playing Jaques — the melancholy philosopher in “As You Like It” who is usually embodied by a man. When describing our lives as a performance in Jaques’ famous “All the world’s a stage” speech, the crossdressed Arnold will be practicing what Jaques preaches.
In the same play, Rosalind disguises herself as a man and liberates herself into a fuller understanding of all she can be.
In Athol Fugard’s “Blood Knot,” which will be directed by Ron OJ Parson and feature Gavin Lawrence and Jim DeVita, two blood brothers are divided because one is lighter than the other. That difference allows the lighterskinned brother to pass as white, thereby underscoring that “race” is an arbitrary construct, however real that cruel myth is in the lives of the oppressed.
In George Farquhar’s rarely staged “The Recruiting Officer” — a 300-yearold comedy being directed by APT mainstay William Brown — another cross-dressing heroine (Kelsey Brennan) dons her trousers while declaring “a petticoat a mighty simple thing,” adding that she’s “tired of my sex.”
The cast opening Farquhar’s play in June will also appear in Timberlake Wertenbaker’s “Our Country’s Good” come August. They’ll be directed by Ameenah Kaplan, who co-directed First Stage’s recent production of “The Wiz.”
The pairing of these two plays makes sense, and not just because Wertenbaker’s play is grounded in a historical truth: After the First Convict Fleet arrived in Australia in 1788, captors and convicts alike staged a production of “The Recruiting Officer” that forever changed them both.
“In addition to being a great story about a historical moment, ‘Our Country’s Good’ celebrates the transformative nature of theater,” DeVita said.
“Like so many of our plays this season, it celebrates the idea of freedom or emancipation from the thing that you are — that you’ve been made to be or chosen to be, for whatever reason.” It’s about shedding this skin, becoming something else, and realizing you could be someone else. There’s nothing more powerful or transformative.”
Transforming the future
What transformations does DeVita see for an APT she has already done so much to reshape?
Much like the Oregon Shakespeare Festival and Stratford Festival in Ontario, DeVita imagines a future in which APT will stage musicals — further expanding its repertoire and, paradoxically, allowing APT to more readily honor its roots in Shakespeare.
Musicals are popular and make money; they’ll free APT to take a hit on Shakespeare history plays that are frequently produced at other prominent Shakespeare festivals but rarely staged in Spring Green.
“I love ‘Richard II,’” DeVita said, of a gorgeously poetic play that APT hasn’t staged since 2001 (five of Shakespeare’s history plays have never been staged at APT, despite the company’s nearly 40year history). “But the last time we did it, we had the fewest people in the audience that I can remember, despite it being a really good production.
“People want to see the comedies. They want to see ‘Born Yesterday.’ They’ll come to see musicals. When we’re like Oregon and Stratford, we’ll do a bunch of musicals and then we’ll be able to throw down a Shakespeare history and have only 400 people in the audience.”
DeVita is also hopeful that a recent and substantial six-figure gift — earmarked for adapting classical works for APT’s 200-seat indoor theater — will enable APT to make the old new, breathing life into forgotten classics even as APT continues incorporating ever more work from this and the last century reflecting the diversity of the world in which we live.
Learn the past, or repeat it
“I’m being told every day that these older plays we do are elitist,” DeVita