SEASON DETAILS
(outdoor) “As You Like It,” June 9-Oct. 7; “Born Yesterday,” June 15-Sept. 22; “The Recruiting Officer,” June 22-Sept. 29; “Heartbreak House,” Aug. 3-Oct. 5; “Measure for Measure,” August 10-Oct. 6. “Blood Knot,” June 9-Sept. 28; “Exit the King,” June 26-Sept. 27; “Our Country’s Good,” Aug. 11-Oct. 7; “Engaging Shaw,” Oct. 25-Nov. 18.
Tickets range from $51 to $86. Visit americanplayers.org/.
sighed, even as she insisted that those plays can continue to speak to us, through their timeless themes involving the challenge and joy of being human.
At APT, such plays also increasingly speak to us through the way they’re staged, by smart directors making nontraditional casting choices.
Last summer’s terrific APT production of Jean Genet’s “The Maids” — directed by a Latinx woman and starring Latinx actors — is a case in point. While true to Genet’s text, this production also bridged the gap between Genet and today, class divisions in France and the plight of immigrants to the United States.
“Do we just not do older plays anymore?” DeVita asked — responding rhetorically to naysayers who want all new, all the time. “How do we measure how well we’re doing and how far we’ve come if we don’t do these stories? How do we see the unsettling and close relationship between the past and the present?”
How, in short, do we continue to learn who we are and might be if we won’t pay attention to where we’re from — and all that joins men and women past and present, confronting similar moral dilemmas? Grappling toward the same imperfect answers? Telling the same great stories about how we might outlast the dark and live to see a new dawn?
This year’s “The Recruiting Officer” is an illustrative example. It’s a wonderful and funny play. As DeVita noted, it’s also a gimlet-eyed view of the way young men in small towns with no apparent future feed the military’s insatiable need for bodies. And it’s the story of a woman who defies convention to be fully herself. How is such a story not relevant just because it’s old?
“Directors and actors have very little experience with these plays, now,” DeVita mused. “They require a lot of actors to be done well. Most directors won’t ever touch them, throughout their career. I wonder what will happen to them.”
One might as well ask what will happen to us; every time such a play becomes functionally extinct, we lose a bit of ourselves.
“People don’t understand that these plays can and do work until they see them,” DeVita said. APT will be making that case all summer, just two hours west of Milwaukee. True to a major theme in this year’s plays, all we need to do is watch and listen. As Paul says in “Born Yesterday,” one thing will then lead to another.