THEATER PREVIEW
Autumnal feel for summer theater season at Chautauqua
Last summer, for its 25th anniversary, Chautauqua Theater Company mounted a series of plays that company co-director Vivienne Benesch presciently dubbed “A Season of Dreams.”
From its hailed productions of Arthur Miller’s tragic “Death of a Salesman” and Craig Lucas’ madcap “Reckless” to the enchanted tones of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” the company’s silver anniversary, by measures both financial and artistic, was an unqualified success.
“We ended up exceeding our wildest expectations,” said CTC co-director Ethan McSweeny. But the dream, as anyone foolish enough to peek at the Dow Jones last fall could tell you, was not to last.
“We were just reflecting on how, 12 months ago, as we sat here at the beginning of last season, sub-prime mortgage was not a daily part of our vocabulary. I know that the indicators were there, and yet I think I will always look back on the 25th anniversary summer as the halcyon days of innocence and excess,” McSweeny said. “There was a pretty rude awakening in the fall.”
So, with the vaunted season of dreams behind them and a sense of the changing economic and political times firmly in mind, McSweeny and Benesch— co-artistic directors of CTC since 2004 — set about choosing the lineup for the company’s 26th season. It gets under way Saturday with a production of Tom Stoppard’s “Arcadia.”
The company’s choices for its 26th year on the grounds of the Chautauqua Institution make up “a rather autumnal season for a summer theater company,” McSweeny said. That’s owing to the inclusion of some fairly weighty subject matter, from the historical and intellectual time warp of Stoppard’s “Arcadia” (through July 12) and the lachrymose tragedy of Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie” (July 25 to Aug. 2) to Shakespeare’s psychologically fraught and jealousy- ridden fantasy “The Winter’s Tale” (Aug. 15 to 22).
For Benesch, the plays all seem to contain the notion of moving through time. In “Arcadia,” which tells the interlinked stories of a group of intellectuals, the action takes place across two centuries. “The Glass Menagerie” is a memory play in which the narrator takes a poignant look back on his life. And, in the third act, “The Winter’s Tale” skips 16 years ahead in order to allow the characters’ actions to take on the patina of their consequences.
Benesch will play the role of Hannah Jarvis in “Arcadia,” a role she said she had always pined for.
“From an actor’s point of view, it is just the most fertile material. It’s both intellectually vivid, but also emotionally vivid. A lot of people are scared off by Stoppard’s intellectualism, but what’s wonderful about ‘Arcadia’ is that there’s a really very basic love story and a comedy of manners in there as well.”
As for “Glass Menagerie,” considered by many to be Williams’ masterwork, even surpassing “A Streetcar Named Desire,” McSweeny sees clear modern overtones.
“When you look at the context for the story, which is set in the depression period of 1933-’34 and you look at some of the opening lines of the play that talk about getting used to a whole new way of thinking and recognizing a time that’s gone that would never come again,” McSweeny said, “you can’t help but be struck by the parallels.”
CTC will also present two readings as part of its New Play Workshop series: Kate Fodor’s so-called “big-pharma- office-dramedy” “Rx” from July 16 to 18 and up-and- comer Alex Lewin’s comedy “The Further Adventures of Suzanne and Monica” from Aug. 6 to 8.•
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