Much Ado About Shakespeare

BENJAMIN EVETT first mentioned his idea at a dinner party he hosted three years ago. It was an informal affair, potluck, nothing fancy. He had recently been let go from the acting company at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, and it seemed like the right time to convene with other artists. Many of Boston's finest stage actors sat around the table that night. Good friends, good grub, good will.

Evett was at a turning point, and everyone knew it. He grew up at the ART, literally and artistically. He got his first break there -- his 42nd Street moment -- when he was a student at Harvard University and went on in 1984 as the understudy for the role of Huck Finn in Big River. Apart from a brief stint in New York, he had been there ever since. Then suddenly, at 39, with a wife and two children, he found himself jobless in a field that isn't exactly known for its financial security. "It really was one of those cases where at the time you think, 'Oh, my God, what am I going to do?' " he recalls. "I loved that place. It was my artistic home." He's not one to wallow, though. "That's show biz."

And so Evett invited his friends to dinner. At some point in the evening, he quietly began the conversation that would change his life. Now, let it be said that this reliable, not particularly flashy actor is an unassuming fellow whose sartorial taste tends toward casual khaki. An impresario, he's not -- at least at first glance. But in his soft-spoken way, he captured attention that night. Let's start an acting company, he told the group around the table, that's dedicated to the work of William Shakespeare. Let's transform unlikely places into theater spaces. We won't appear naked in blue paint or stage wild conceptual shows. We'll simply do the plays, and the people will come.

To say that everyone who was there that night dropped everything and skipped off in search of a barn would be a stretch. There was enthusiasm, yes, but there was skepticism, too. Most of the actors had paid their dues with fledgling companies, performing in dank basements, stuffy walk-ups, and makeshift venues where a bucket served as a backstage bathroom. Anyone familiar with the Boston theater scene over the last few decades has seen companies come and go. Some died a quick and merciful death after one or two regrettable productions. Others, like the Brandeis Repertory Company, got off to a grand start in the late 1980s but then, poof, disappeared like so much smoke. Many of the actors remembered the bizarre saga of Actors' Enclave, a company that announced it was moving to Boston amid great fanfare in 1988. Its roster read like a Who's Who in American Theater - Colleen Dewhurst, Julie Harris, E.G. Marshall. The only problem was, they never bothered to show up.

And then there was the Boston Shakespeare Company. Founded in 1975, it endured a series of dramatic fits and starts before exhaling its last breath in the late 1980s. The city had been without a theater dedicated to producing a year-round season of Shakespeare ever since. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival is one of the largest nonprofit theaters in the country, and cities like Chicago and Washington had well-established Shakespeare theaters. But not Boston.

Given that history, Evett had some persuading to do. "I don't want to use the word 'jaded,' but many of the actors thought, 'Sure, this is a great idea, but let's see if this happens,'" recalls actor Ken Cheeseman.

This is the story of what happened.

THE GROUP, CALLING ITSELF the Actors' Shakespeare Project, staged a benefit and raised $150,000 in a matter of months, an unheard-of sum for an untried troupe. Its first production, in 2004, was an ambitious Richard III at the Old South Meeting House, with actor John Kuntz cast against type as Shakespeare's "poisonous bunch-backed toad." For the most part, the production was well received, especially when you consider its modest origins.

Then the theater received national attention with its magnificent production of King Lear last fall. Staged in an old Cadillac showroom that is now a classroom at Boston University, it starred theater legend and former ART stalwart Alvin Epstein. Notable for its ingenious staging -- there's no forgetting that staircase to nowhere -- and a few inventive twists, the production was a runaway critical and box-office hit. At 80, Epstein was every inch a king, from his grand, mischievous entrance to the final scene in which he collapsed half naked in a pile of mulch.

After the last performance, a breathless Evett told the audience, "We feel this is a little piece of American theater history." And it was. The sold-out production was extended for two weeks, and the company's box-office manager even received bribes from folks clamoring for a ticket. The production will be staged in New York, beginning June 15.

And it would not be a stretch to say that the rapid and surprising success of Actors' Shakespeare Project is at least partly responsible for Shakespeare, at least in these parts, becoming the playwright du jour.

The ART is currently staging Romeo and Juliet, Boston Theatre Works is producing Othello, and Trinity Repertory Company in Providence is offering a powerful Hamlet. The two box-office hits of the fall season were Lear and the Henriad (the trio of historical plays Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry V) at Trinity Rep. In May, the Huntington Theatre Company will launch its first Shakespeare production since 1999.

Meanwhile, Shakespeare & Company, the troupe founded by Tina Packer, is engaged in an ambitious effort to build a reproduction of Shakespeare's Rose Theater at its new 63-acre campus in Lenox. In November, the troupe staged its annual Fall Festival of Shakespeare, convening more than 500 high school students to perform 10 Shakespeare plays in a single weekend. If there was ever any doubt that Shakespeare is alive and well in the Commonwealth, it disappeared at this raucous, engaging event. The youngsters whooped and hollered at every bawdy pun and peccadillo, cheering with the enthusiasm that adolescents usually reserve for football rivalries and rock concerts.

Everyone seems to be brushing up their Shakespeare these days, from the kids out in Lenox to the pros here in town. The newly invigorated Publick Theatre usually produces one Shakespeare play every summer in Brighton. The Commonwealth Shakespeare Company, which started on a shoestring budget in 1996, is now in its 11th year offering free summer performances on Boston Common. Once the singular dream of a young director named Steven Maler, the company is solidly established as a program of the Wang Center for the Performing Arts. "If we were an Internet company, we would be on the cover of Forbes magazine," Maler says. Last summer, 93,000 people saw Hamlet.

Jason Southerland, artistic director of Boston Theatre Works, has also seen his company grow since he started it with $30,000 in 1998. Today, the troupe operates on a budget of $250,000. "There wasn't a lot of Shakespeare eight years ago when we started," he says. "Now there is so much, and it's killing me."

All of these theaters must compete for a limited pool of resources and audiences, but, for the most part, good will abounds. They have formed a loose coalition called MassShakes, which aims to ensure that every student in Massachusetts sees one live performance of Shakespeare before graduating from high school.

Why all this activity now? "What I'm passionate about is getting the world sane through Shakespeare," Packer says, before letting out one of her hearty laughs. "We're doing a really good job, aren't we?" World sanity aside, she'll settle for changing the lives of a few hundred high school students. Kevin Coleman, the company's director of education, echoes that sentiment. "Why now?" he asks, with mock incredulity. "Why now? Because it's too late."

THE EASY EXPLANATION for this Shakespearean boom is the simple fact that actors love the work. "Once you get this passion, it is very difficult to stop," says Packer. "It puts such a demand on the artist, that anything less than that feels somehow like you've not had a proper meal."

Epstein, the celebrated elder statesman of the stage, didn't hesitate when Evett asked him to play Lear. Kuntz practically jumped off the ferry to Provincetown when he got the call from Evett telling him he was cast as the title character in Richard III. Kuntz, who is known for his offbeat one-person shows, was a risky choice. "I'm a clown," he says, "and people don't think of me right off the bat as someone who would murder and seduce and kill."

The truth is Evett coveted the role himself, and he made Kuntz audition three times before casting him. "When you have children, you suddenly discover something that is more important than you are," Evett says. "This company is kind of the same way for me. It's more important than I am. I really wanted to play [Richard III], but it wasn't the best thing for the company."

Actors' Shakespeare Project is a family in every sense of the word. Evett's mother, a retired theater critic, handles publicity, and his father, a retired professor of Elizabethan literature, acts as dramaturge. Growing up in Cleveland, Evett began his love affair with Shakespeare early, acting in community theaters and taking annual family outings to the Stratford Festival of Canada, in Ontario.

The company includes several married couples, and Epstein taught many of the actors when he was at the ART. Actors bounce back and forth among companies, and the connections between them are as interwoven as some of Shakespeare's most complicated plots.

Families, especially theater families, can be messy, though, and being a member of a fledgling company involves dirty work. Kuntz washed the togas when the troupe did Julius Caesar. The actors often help strike the set after each performance. Late one night, an actress got stuck in the elevator at the Jorge Hernandez Cultural Center in the South End, and it was a while before anyone, including her husband, realized she was missing.

For Actors' Shakespeare Project, it isn't an exclusive clan, at least not yet. People who are willing to put up with the long hours and little (or no) pay have been welcomed into this band of brothers. Tom Lawton was a data manager at Massachusetts General Hospital when he stumbled upon the troupe's first production. He volunteered as an usher and came back every night. He is now the company's full-time business manager. Of course, all families have their share of dysfunction, and Lawton has seen plenty of chaos in the box office. But being a member of a stage family has its benefits. "My ex-girlfriend is very jealous," says Lawton with a loud laugh.

"SHAKESPEARE WAS NOT of an age, but for all time," wrote a contemporary, playwright Ben Jonson. Indeed, the history of Shakespeare in Boston mirrors the evolution of theater in the city. In 1750, the Puritans banned theater because it supposedly increased "immorality, impiety, and a contempt of religion." In 1792, a production of Romeo and Juliet was shut down by the sheriff. As the late critic Elliot Norton told the story in his definitive book Broadway Down East, the episode nearly incited a riot.

The ban was lifted in 1797, and during the next two centuries, most of the great British and American stage actors performed Shakespeare here, with visiting performances from the likes of Katharine Cornell and Katharine Hepburn, John Barrymore and John Gielgud, Edwin Forrest and Edwin Booth. Until recently, Boston was known as a tryout town for Broadway productions, and many shows stopped here on their way to New York.

In 1975, an idealistic young Jesuit named Bill Cain founded the Boston Shakespeare Company, or BoShakes. While the critics were not always enamored of its work, the troupe had a devoted following. Cain, now a screenwriter and playwright in Los Angeles, remains a bit protective when he talks about the company. "We were exploring the mystery of life widely and deeply," he recalls.

There were other troupes in town around that time, some good, others not so, but Boston lagged behind cities like Chicago and Seattle as a place for home-grown theater. Things began to change, albeit slowly, in the early 1980s when two professional regional theaters opened in Boston. Robert Brustein, recently fired from Yale University, established the ART at Harvard University in 1980. Known for its avant-garde take on the classics, the ART opened with A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by none other than Alvin Epstein. The critic Harold Bloom dismissed it as one of the two worst he had ever seen -- "a hilarity," he sniffed -- but the late Globe critic Kevin Kelly described it as "magical, mischievous, and very, very mysterious."

The Huntington Theatre opened two years later at Boston University, offering the occasional and more mainstream Shakespeare production. Over time, these two companies, with their dramatically different aesthetics, formed the bookends of what is growing into a mature and thriving local theater scene.

But the ground certainly wasn't fertile when they arrived. BoShakes was never able to settle in one home for very long. The actors were young and earnest, and many outgrew the company. Will LeBow, now at the ART, earned $90 a week when he joined BoShakes in 1977, playing everyone from Hamlet to Lear (at the ripe age of 29). He got raves for his Hamlet, but Kelly likened his Lear to "a croaky Robitussin commercial." The next night, the actor recalls, "There were like 20 bottles of Robitussin on my dressing table."

Those were scrappy times. "Our motto might have been, 'Readiness is all,'" Cain says. He left in 1982 and was briefly replaced by an interim director before the wunderkind Peter Sellars came in for a magnificent yet mismanaged season in 1983. Under Sellars, the plays captivated critics but alienated members of the old, more mainstream audience. And the administration was nothing short of chaotic. "We did some fabulous stuff, really exciting stuff," says Cheeseman, then the company's education director. "But in terms of office work, oh, my God, it was a nightmare. Peter was like, 'Oh, God, let's get a big closet and throw all the paper in it and shut the door.'" Sellars departed after a year, leaving BoShakes with a huge deficit.

Enter Tina Packer. The grand dame of Shakespeare was brought in to revive the troupe, but she met one obstacle after another. She and her staff shuttled back and forth from Lenox to Boston, and the effort was exhausting. They did manage to produce some exciting work, including a new play series and two festivals of contemporary Irish theater.

But what was a Shakespeare company without Shakespeare? And what was a theater company without a theater? A few years after Packer signed on, the troupe lost the lease on its theater in the South End. The city worked out a development deal to give BoShakes a theater in a new condominium complex, but that fell through when the condo market crashed in the late '80s. And that was the end of BoShakes. "I couldn't sustain the strains and the stresses," Packer says.

The company's demise left a void that is only now being filled. "I never realized how sad people were," says Cheeseman, who worked at BoShakes in all its configurations. "There are people who are, like, desperate for Shakespeare. They really, really want their Shakespeare."

THE MAN IS everywhere these days. In the past year, there has been at least one Shakespeare production in the area at any given time. Add to that a steady flow of films and scholarly and popular books, including Stephen Greenblatt's surprise 2004 bestseller, Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. "Shakespeare is a growth sector in the industry now," says Maler, and, strange as that sounds, he isn't kidding.

There is something to be said about Shakespeare as a brand name, but the current rage for the Bard is driven by artistic, not market forces. "People change the climate rather than the climate changes the people," Brustein contends.

But the climate has changed. Boston theater has matured since the days when BoShakes stumbled and faltered. More and more, actors who train in the area choose to stay in town. There are also more theaters, with two new spaces at the Boston Center for the Arts, a second theater at the ART, and a new venue at the Arsenal Center for the Arts in Watertown. Gone are the days when theatergoers and critics would make the trek to some dusty basement, uncertain whether their senses were about to be assaulted by amateurs. Now there is a full range of professional theaters that offer everything from the postmodern to the mainstream.

But can there be too much of a good thing? Packer says no. "The great thing about Shakespeare is that you're always going to be doing new productions of him," she says. "Nobody does in the playwright."

Certainly there are as many interpretations as there are doctoral dissertations. In December, the Actors' Shakespeare Project mounted an intimate production of Twelfth Night. It was lovely, quite charming really, but strictly by the book. It had absolutely nothing in common with the ART's 1989 production, a postmodern spectacle that featured a helicopter, a police car, a television, and a gay bar. Nor did it resemble Commonwealth Shakespeare's production in 2001, a jazzy, comic romp in which the jesters upstaged the lovers.

With that range, Boston is catching up to other cities where Shakespeare is a regular part of the diet. Actors' Shakespeare Project considers itself fortunate to have a room of its own - a dank, windowless office in the basement of the Cambridge YMCA. But the lessons of the past aren't lost on Evett, who knows that a big idea is not always enough, especially in a mediadriven culture obsessed with iPods, webcams, and wide-screen TVs.

"We have to approach it without a sense of entitlement, with a sense that we have to earn our success," Evett says. He's growing into the role of artistic director, which often requires asking for money. "That's how it works," he says. "That is also show biz."

Undoubtedly, there are more dinner parties in his future.

Patti Hartigan wrote about theater for the Globe from 1987 to 2001. E-mail her at pattihartigan@gmail.com.