The Heart of America Shakespeare Festival: 20 Years under the Stars
by Thomas Canfield
On a rainy June evening in 1993, the inaugural
production of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival, The Tempest,
opened in Southmoreland Park. For Marilyn Strauss, the festival’s founder, this
was “such stuff / As dreams are made on.” Yet realizing an outdoor,
professional, free summer Shakespeare production was a hard-won battle, and no
one could predict its future over the next two decades.
Strauss, who grew up in Kansas City, began her
professional theatre career in the 1970s when she organized the Leonard
Bernstein Festival with the Kansas City Philharmonic. This propelled her to a
career on the Great White Way, where Strauss co-produced five plays and
discovered Da, Hugh Leonard’s Irish comedy/drama, in 1978. When the
production was transferred to Broadway, it earned six Tony awards–including
Best Play–and garnered Strauss a Tony. She also received an Obie for the
off-Broadway play Getting Out and a Tony nomination for the musical Pump
Boys and Dinettes.
Homesick for the Midwest, Strauss returned to
Kansas City eleven years later to begin another chapter in her career. “I had a secret thought that I wanted to do theatre,” she
says. Determined for success, Strauss recalls thinking, “‘Nobody turns away
from Shakespeare. That’s a safe way to go.’ I wanted to be sure.” Aside
from reading a few plays, however, she admits: “I really didn’t know much about
Shakespeare” at the time.
As luck would have it, a local Shakespeare
scholar with an identical dream was eager to collaborate. In 1990, Strauss met
Felicia Hardison Londré, Curators’ Professor of Theatre at UMKC, who became the
festival’s Honorary Co-Founder. While researching her book on Shakespeare
Companies and Festivals: An International Guide, Londré had been travelling
to Shakespeare festivals throughout the United States and Europe.
Founding a
Shakespeare festival meant courting the city, potential funders, and the
community. At the time, it would be the only free outdoor Shakespeare festival
in a tri-state area. Convincing Kansas City to join the ranks of approximately
100-120 Shakespeare companies in the United States was “an uphill climb,”
Strauss says. Advised to start small, Strauss replied, “I’m not going to
start small. I’m going to go full force, and if it works, it’ll work.” She spent countless hours planning, gathering information,
making phone calls, attending donor meetings, and founding a Strictly
Shakespeare organization of supporters. Londré’s many contributions included
supplying model budgets, writing preliminary proposals for a free Shakespeare
festival, and creating a persuasive slide lecture on “The Shakespeare Festival
Phenomenon.”
In October of 1992, Strauss
produced a gala fundraiser at the Folly Theater starring Kevin Kline, who
performed scenes from Shakespeare’s works. The sold-out benefit, for which
Kline generously donated his talent, netted $100,000. “Now, we could choose a
play, hire a director, actors, designers, and technical experts,” Strauss says.
“We could build a set, make costumes, tailor the park, garner hundreds of
volunteers, and beg all kinds of services.” From its conception, the festival
took nearly three years to premiere.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Antony and Cleopatra,
performed in rotating repertory this summer, will mark 26 total productions of
18 different plays in the festival’s history, and it will be the first time the
festival performs Antony and
Cleopatra. To achieve a shared vision, executive
artistic director Sidonie Garrett and assistant director Todd Lanker
will juggle simultaneous rehearsals. Eventually, Garrett hopes that the entire
canon will be produced since a two-show season–which the festival hopes to
continue–allows for greater flexibility in choices than a single offering.
“Traditionally, Shakespearean plays
were viewed outdoors by boisterous crowds who routinely ate and drank during
the performance,” an early festival brochure notes. For many audience members,
the performances in the park are their only exposure to live theatre, and the
casual atmosphere is frequently punctuated by animated conversation, the
crumpling of potato chip bags, and the crack of opening soda cans. Last season,
almost 23,000 people attended Macbeth. Space is typically at a premium
during the last weekend of the run; Garrett recalls that the final performances
of Twelfth Night in 2001 saw close to 2,500 people crowded into the park
at once.
Rehearsals begin indoors, but once
in the park the company is at the mercy of insects, unpredictable weather,
sirens, and even fireworks and helicopters overhead. Rain can force a hasty
retreat to the hall, which means reduced time rehearsing on the actual set.
Movement coach Jennifer Martin remembers one year when a furious thunderstorm
forced everyone to take refuge under a tent. The director, Bruce Levitt, told
jokes while “actors emptied the
fast-accumulating rain from the canvas overhead and others blocked holes where
rain was coming through,” she says. “That also may have been the summer when we
sank in mud to the top of our tennis shoes in spite of the bales of hay the
Parks and Recreation Department strewed around the paths.”
Garrett’s first year with the festival, as a
young assistant director, was on The Taming of the Shrew in 1995.
Charged with maintaining the show after the director departed, she says, “It
was the hottest summer on record that any of us can recall. We would leave the
park and it would still be 100 degrees.” During one performance, an astonished
Garrett noticed the actors performing on an overhead scaffold above the
stage consuming Gatorade and popsicles–apparently stashed in a concealed
cooler. She then saw them silently offer–and toss–popsicles down to the performers
acting below. Initially shocked, she soon discovered that because of the
triple-digit temperatures, the stage manager had given them permission to eat
and drink on stage. Backstage, some actors sneak a round of Frisbee in their
off-time, though Garrett dreads they will twist an ankle on the uneven park
terrain or get whacked in the head.
Wild animals are another challenge.
Southmoreland Park was originally named Squirrel Park, and squirrels have a
propensity for raining down walnuts in the wooded green patch behind the stage.
During one particularly rowdy performance last summer, a squirrel leaped from a
tree into the audience. Then, halfway through the second act, stage manager
Jinni Pike and sound designer Rusty Wandall discovered a possum nestled among
the cables in the back of the sound board case. The show went on without a
hitch, but they had to prevent it from escaping until the performance concluded
and the park cleared.
With only three year-round employees, the
festival operates on a very tight budget and most of the money it raises goes
back into the next season. Garrett spends most of her time coordinating
administrative and financial activities: writing grants, raising funds,
soliciting sponsors, marketing, creating a budget, and doing an annual audit.
The festival holds one gala fundraiser every February, sometimes supplemented
by smaller events. This fall, selected festival artists will collaborate with
the Bach Aria Soloists to combine Shakespeare’s text with orchestral music. The
education department, headed by Kara Armstrong, offers summer camps, workshops,
and year-round school programs, and Strauss is particularly proud of their
success. A new festival ambassador, an outsized, costumed interpretation of
Shakespeare known as “Good Will,” travels to community events and connects with
children and families.
After 20 seasons, the
Heart of America Shakespeare Festival is still outdoors, professional, and
free, but it has grown and evolved from its infancy when the stage, erected at
the north end of the park, faced due south and mounted policemen patrolled on
horseback. Given the opportunity to begin again, Strauss says, “I wouldn’t do
anything differently.” Shakespeare is “the greatest storyteller that
ever lived,” and “the festival has brought me more fulfillment, more joy, and
more pleasure than Broadway.”
Thomas Canfield is the dramaturg for the Heart
of America Shakespeare Festival and an instructor of Theatre, English, and
Humanities.
Marilyn Strauss and I at the Festival.
