Atlantas Shakespeare troupes share Bard, little else

By The Associated Press

Posted 12:20PM on Saturday 13th December 2003 ( 21 years ago )

Jeffrey Watkins and Richard Garner came to Atlanta about 20 years ago and decided the city needed a Shakespeare troupe.Its probably a good thing they never got together.Watkins puts on rowdy, Elizabethan-style productions, faithful to the original text, on a small, unadorned stage at his New American Shakespeare Tavern in a gritty section of downtown Atlanta.Garner gives directors a chance to try such concepts as setting As You Like It in the Old West or Julius Caesar in Huey Longs Louisiana.Im not so concerned that its a traditional telling of that story, as long as its a faithful telling of the essence of the story, says Garner, a graduate of Berry College in Rome who received theatrical training in San Francisco.The Georgia Shakespeare Festival, which he co-founded in the mid-1980s, performs at Oglethorpe University, just northeast of Atlanta in DeKalb County.Oglethorpes 500-seat Conant Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1997, replaced a tent that had been erected each year since the Festival began in 1986 with a two-play, 25-performance summer season.The universitys resident company now does three plays each summer and one more in the fall. It also conducts a school tour program with an abbreviated version of a Shakespeare play. School groups from around Georgia attend matinee performances at both the Festival and the Tavern.Watkins arrived in Atlanta in 1983. A native of Dallas, hed worked as a street magician in New York and Chicago.The following year, he got a chance to produce a Shakespeare play at Manuels Tavern.We only had 120 people in there. But the audience and the actors were in the same space and the comedy just exploded off of the stage, he said.Watkins returned with another play the following year and sold all the tickets. But the ceiling was so low that you couldnt have a swordfight or hire a tall actor, he said.Watkins also put on a few shows at nearby Excelsior Mill, then grabbed the opportunity to rent an old warehouse across the street from Crawford Long Hospital. He scraped together enough money to create his Tavern, using whatever materials were at hand. In the spring of 1990, he opened with The Tempest.The plywood floors creaked, and the Tavern had only 180 seats, but the intimate atmosphere allowed Watkins to stage plays his way.Its so important that the audience sees the actors seeing the audience. That performance reality was very much what I had experienced as a street entertainer.Watkins calls his brand of Shakespeare original practice.Im not trying to do it just the way they did it, but the play has to live in the space between the actor and the audience. For the Elizabethans that was a very active space, and there wasnt a lot else on the stage except a costumed actor speaking text and whatever props were required.In the late 1990s, Watkins raised more than $2 million, which he used to buy the building and expand and renovate the space. The Tavern now has a balcony, seats 245 and has a poured concrete floor.Watkins said Shakespeares plays work better if rehearsals are kept to 40 to 55 hours. I have found it is more accessible, more vital, more passionate and more charged with drama when it isnt rehearsed to the degree that most modern theater companies rehearse their plays.Garner said 110 to 120 hours of rehearsal seems to be the time it takes to get a production up with a thoughtful discussion between director, designers and actors.An adaptation requires more than period clothing and appropriate accents. For the Festivals Julius Caesar in 2001, actor Bruce Evers steeped himself in Huey Long lore, and the killing of the poet Cinna was staged as a lynching.This fall, Garner directed a gender-switching production of The Tempest, with longtime company member Janice Akers as Prospera. He said the result was different from the usual version, but equally interesting.Some of the differences have to do with the relationship of a father vs. a mother to a daughter and between a man and woman to power and to revenge.Folks said theyd seen many Tempests before and this one opened their eyes to a fresh look at the play. Thats a success for us.Each company does work by other playwrights, and each performs rarely produced Shakespeare plays. Next year the Festival plans to do Coriolanus. The Tavern, which operates nearly year-round, took on Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1, Henry IV, Part 2, and Henry V, in consecutive weeks in November.I wanted to do something we would all remember for the rest of our lives, Watkins said.Jo Ellen Aspinwall, who teaches at Pierce County High School in Blackshear, said bringing her ninth-graders to the Tavern brought Romeo and Juliet to life after she had struggled to convey its meaning in the classroom.At intermission, I was met by a group of excited faces ready with comments about the personalities of the characters, the jokes that were suddenly very funny, and the pacing of the scenes. Not one student mentioned the difficulty of the language.Margie Cooper, a third-grade teacher in DeKalb County, brings students to both theaters.She thinks the Festivals modern storytelling is more appropriate for third-graders, but they also benefit from squiblets of Elizabethan language.Students are given information to help them understand what they will see. By the time they go they are so wired, Cooper said.Both theaters offer talkbacks. The students then go back to school, write letters, draw pictures and discuss the play. One thing they like is they know more about it than their parents do, Cooper said.Cooper took a class to the Festivals recent Tempest.They really do get it. One of them had a beautiful picture of Caliban standing there with the light coming down. Later, when they have to read the plays, they are already going to have a positive connection to this.___On the Net:New American Shakespeare Tavern: www.shakespearetavern.comThe Georgia Shakespeare Festival: www.gashakespeare.org

http://accesswdun.com/article/2003/12/181316