Director Bill Coons didn’t give much thought to institutional longevity when he founded Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield in 2006. “I assumed I would do a couple of shows and that would be it,” he said.
But, 10 years later, it’s a point of pride that Shaker Bridge Theatre has forged a distinct identity as a place to see contemporary plays by writers who are tackling issues of sexuality, race and class in entertaining, thoughtful ways.
“We’ve developed a reputation for doing a certain kind of thing, and we do have a lot of patrons who are attached to this place,” Coons said.
Shortly after moving to the Upper Valley 11 years ago from Dorset, Vt., where he’d worked with the Dorset Theatre Festival, Coons, who’d already taught theater to college students and directed scores of plays over his career, thought about starting his own company. The way he sold it to himself went like this: “I can retire and go live on a sailboat or I can find a way to start my own theater,” he said.
Coons paused slightly. “The theater is my sailboat,” he said.
There is more theater happening in the Upper Valley right now than in the past 20 years. From Northern Stage to the Briggs Opera House Community Arts Center to the Hopkins Center to the Parish Players, and beyond, audiences have a greater array of theater from which to choose. Drama! Comedy! Musicals! Thrillers!
But only Coons has designed a season around a fairly radical concept — presenting plays by women, and only women.
Coons recalled that he sat down with a pen and paper to compile a list of names, thinking he’d get to a third of a page. But as he wrote, more and more names came to him so that by the time he’d finished he had a page and a half of female playwright’s names. From there he narrowed it to about 60 writers, and after reading reviews and the plays themselves, he went with the five that were most compelling to him.
“If I am going to direct a play, it has to be one that I’m willing to be obsessed with. If I’m directing, it takes over my entire life,” he said.
Coons has been conscious to pick plays by women throughout the decade Shaker Bridge has been in business. But when he actually looked at the numbers, he was startled, he said. Twenty-five percent of the plays that have been staged at Shaker Bridge have been by women, which is, he said, twice the national average. But that’s still not as high as Coons would like.
So he’s upping the ante: for every three-year cycle there will be absolute parity between male and female playwrights. He is also going to cast more actors of color, and different ethnicities.
“It’s just a thing that’s real important to me,” he said.
But, in terms of the type of play or subject matter he selects, Coons is sticking with what he’s done all along. “All the plays are dealing to some extent with social or cultural issues that are current.”
The first play, which runs from Oct. 13 through 30, in the fall season is Bathsheba Doran’s The Mystery of Love and Sex, a comedy about two college students, Jonny and Charlotte, who have been close friends since they were children. Doran is a British-born, New York-based playwright. In a New York Times review, Christopher Isherwood called The Mystery of Love and Sex a “beautifully wise play.”
When Charlotte’s parents visit the two at the Southern university they both attend, they’re discomfited by the fact that the two show a new intimacy. Their unease may, or may not, have something to do with the fact that Jonny is African-American, while Charlotte is white. If this set-up sounds like, “been there, done that,” Doran takes things in an unexpected direction.
“It’s so funny and so poignant and there’s so much to deal with in terms of what’s current with race, identity and sexuality,” said Coons. Two actors familiar to Shaker Bridge audiences, Kay Morton and Dave Bonanno, play the parents and two young New York actors making their first Shaker Bridge appearance play the students.
In December, Coons shifts gears away from what’s been something of a tradition, Miracle on South Division Street by Tom Dudzik, to bring in a play new to Shaker Bridge audiences. Set in a small midwestern town at the holidays, Float, by Chicago playwright Patricia Kane, begins with the construction of a holiday parade float and rapidly spins out into something more complex dealing with sexual identity. It runs from Dec. 1 to 18.
Coons has cast four other local actors who have trodden the boards in the past at Shaker Bridge, Parish Players and Northern Stage — Laine Gillespie, Kim Meredith, Jeannie Hines and Lanny West — and is bringing back from New York Brandy Zarle, who has also been seen in a number of Shaker Bridge productions.
From Jan. 19 through Feb. 5, the company stages Love Alone, by Rhode Island playwright Deborah Salem Smith, which looks at the aftermath of an unexpected death in a hospital after what should have been a minor surgery. “I think it’s mostly about how do you deal with a relationship that’s not there anymore. It’s a gorgeous play,” Coons said.
Coons is handing over the directorial reins on Love Alone to Richard Waterhouse, one of two directors who will be working at Shaker Bridge this season. (Susan Haefner, who directs 4000 Miles, in mid-February, is the other.)
There has been the occasional chatter about Coons relocating to another town, another theater, but Coons wants to stay put. Starting a theater company in a small New England town may not have been the best business plan, he said with a laugh, but he likes working in a space “that small and that intimate. I want to do work that is important to me.”
For information on the Shaker Bridge Theatre fall schedule go to shakerbridgetheatre.org.
If you want to hold a mirror up to our times, go back 400-plus years to Shakespeare.
That’s what Northern Stage is doing this fall with its production of Macbeth, said Artistic Director Carol Dunne. The play runs from Wednesday through Oct. 23 at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction.
“With the current political situation and the wars, it just feels like the right play for this time. Our take on it is very modern and very daring,” she said.
To direct, Dunne hired Stephen Brown-Fried, who is the head of directing at The New School’s College of Performing Arts School of Drama in New York, and has directed Shakespeare productions throughout the country. Dunne called him one of the best Shakespearian directors working in the U.S.
Brown-Fried asked Dunne whether she was open to a “really modern look at the play,” which was what Dunne hoped and expected he would say.
The idea behind this version of Macbeth is, she added, “Go big or go home.”
Dunne and Brown-Fried had nearly despaired of finding a lead when, in the best traditions of the theater, one of the last actors they saw turned out to be their Macbeth. He is played by Robert David Grant, a Yale School of Drama graduate who also happens to have grown up in Vershire. And Lady Macbeth is played by Tricia Miller, an experienced Shakespearean actor who has appeared at the Trinity Shakespeare Festival, Artists Repertory Theatre, Las Vegas Shakespeare Company and Southwest Shakespeare Company, among others.
This year Northern Stage brings back A Christmas Carol as its holiday show, after producing Mary Poppins last year. Dunne said she wants A Christmas Carol to anchor the holiday season every two to three years. Because this will be the first year that the company is doing A Christmas Carol in the Barrette Center, they are “expanding and broadening it for the new space.” A Christmas Carol runs from Nov. 16 through Dec. 24.
And if you’re headed to New York in October, Northern Stage’s production of Orwell in America comes to 59E59, an off-Broadway theater that presents original plays produced by nonprofit companies from across the U.S., and internationally. Orwell in America, which was written by Joe Sutton, who teaches playwriting at Dartmouth, stars Jamie Horton, a drama professor at Dartmouth, as Orwell. This is the first off-Broadway run for a Northern Stage production; it runs Oct. 7-30. Tickets are available at 59e59.org or by calling 212-279-4200.
One staged reading and one drama are coming into the Briggs Opera House Community Arts Center in White River Junction, which continues to serve an important function in the Upper Valley arts scene.
The Florists by Steven L. Calvert, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1968, will have a staged reading this weekend on Saturday at 7:30 p.m and again on Sunday at 1:30 p.m. (Tickets are $15.)
Using seven local actors, the play, directed by Christine Williamson, explores the most mysterious of human emotions, love, through the story of a young man who is attracted to a young woman working in a book shop. When she rejects his offer to go out to coffee, he heads next door to a flower shop — hence the title. The play follows Max through three episodes as he tries to win her over.
Calvert, who lives in Rhode Island, said in a phone interview from Seattle that he wanted to explore the “taxonomy of love. Love comes in so many forms.”
But the kind of sustained passion and deep feeling that can exist between two people is very unusual. “It has to happen between two people who have the capacity for true love, and not everybody does, and then they have to find each other, and then the timing has to be right for each of them at the same time,” Calvert said.
“What the audience gets to take away from this play, I hope, is …what’s their own experience been? Have they found it? Do they think they have the capacity?”
For information on the readings, go to the Briggs Opera House’s Facebook page.
From Nov. 3 through Nov. 20, director and actor Jarvis Antonio Green, is staging Choir Boy by MacArthur Award recipient Tarell Alvin McCraney. Green, who has been seen in several Northern Stage productions including last year’s Our Town, also helped found the theater department at ArtisTree in Pomfret, which is co-producing Choir Boy.
Choir Boy, which had a highly praised run off-Broadway, locates the coming-of-age story in the present day in a Southern prep school for young African-American men. The protagonist Pharus is gay, and, said Green, “fighting his way through this institution rooted in masculinity and tradition. The audience will go on a journey with this man finding his way.”
The play is also notable, Green said for the way McCraney weaves spirituals, sung a capella by the cast, throughout the narrative.
This is the first in a series of productions over this year’s theater season that Green will direct. “I am choosing to do pieces that create conversation, and be in dialogue about, what is actually happening in our world — and a lot of that happens through theater,” he said.
For information and tickets go to: artistreevt.org, or call ArtisTree at 802-457-3500.
To close out its 50th anniversary celebration this year, Parish Players will stage one of theater’s most popular thrillers, Sleuth by Anthony Shaffer, from Oct. 21 through Nov. 6.
A devilishly constructed puzzle, Sleuth plays off the conventions of the English mystery, setting the drama in a country manor house. Andrew Wyke, a famous writer of, what else, crime fiction, invites his wife’s lover Milo Tindle to the house to discuss the situation. The tables are turned, turned again, and then again, as there is a struggle for dominance between the two men.
For the past five years the company has resurrected a show that it had great success with in the past, which is partially why they decided to bring Sleuth back.
And director Barbara Payson was “looking for something spooky to do around Halloween,” she said. “I’ve always enjoyed the play.”
In another nod to Parish Players history, Dean Whitlock, who played Tindle in the previous production, will now play Wyke, just as Michael Caine played Tindle in the first film version of Sleuth in 1972, and then played Wyke in the 2007 version.
For tickets and information go to parishplayers.org or call 802-785-4344
Some of the big events at the Hop are happening in early January, starting with an appearance by the Mark Morris Dance Group and the Silk Road Ensemble on Friday, Jan. 6 and Saturday, Jan. 7 in Layla and Majnun, a co-commission by the Hopkins Center.
Layla and Majnun refers to the medieval legend of two young Persian lovers kept apart by their families, rather like the Capulets and Montagues in Romeo and Juliet. Here, Morris works with the Silk Road Ensemble, which includes the Azerbaijani father-and-daughter singing duo of Alim and Fargana Qasimov.
Margaret Lawrence, director of programming at the Hopkins Center, cites not only Morris’ “beautiful, clever work” but also his musicality. The Qasimovs, who have “voices that send shivers down your spine,” said Lawrence, only add to the performance’s luster.
On Friday, Jan. 13 and Saturday, Jan. 14, the Hop hosts Bela Pinter, a Hungarian actor, writer and director, who brings his Budapest theater company to the stage. Our Secrets looks back to life in Hungary in the early 1980s, when it was assumed that the government spied on the people, and that citizens would spy on each other. Pinter plays this as the darkest satire, imagining that the government infiltrates a rather unlikely target: the Hungarian folk music scene. Lawrence praised it as being funny and entertaining, while The Herald of Scotland called it “cleverly written and brilliantly acted.” In Hungarian with supertitles.
For information and tickets go to hop.dartmouth.edu or call 603-646-2422.
Opera North continues its tradition of performing Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors at Lebanon Opera House during the holiday season, with shows on Dec. 16 and 17 at 5:30 p.m.
In keeping with the company’s goal of making the Upper Valley an arts destination, Opera North is also taking Amahl and the Night Visitors on the road, with a performance at noon on Dec. 13 at the Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord.
“We are very proud that we’re extending our reach,” said Evans Haile, Opera North’s general director.
For information go to operanorth.org.
Lebanon’s City Center Ballet performs Clara’s Dream, its annual holiday version of the Nutcracker, at the Opera House from Thursday, Dec. 1 through Sunday, Dec. 4, with two local dancers playing Clara: Ada Bauer, of Norwich, and Jaida Michetti, from Canaan.
The company is also bringing in first-rate guest artists from New Mexico, New York City and Philadelphia to dance Clara’s Dream, said Linda Copp, the artistic director of City Center Ballet. Dancers Victor Hernandez, Alfredo Solivan and Matt Emig, are dancing the parts of, respectively, the Prince, the Snow King and the Sugar Plum Fairy’s cavalier.
Because the company has also expanded its studio space it will hold an open house at the school from 6:30 to 7:30 on Oct. 8 to showcase the work of its students, particularly in the realm of character study.
“We’re inviting people in to get a better sense of what’s occurring among our dancers,” Copp said.
For information go to CityCenterBallet.org or call 603-448-9710.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com
Correction
The actor David Bonanno will appear in The Mystery of Love and Sex at Shaker Bridge Theatre in Enfield. His surname was misspelled in an earlier version of this story.