All Opinion pieces and Letters to the Editor reflect ONLY the thoughts of the writer, and not those of the Stratford Crier or its Editorial Board.
By Ted Van Griethuysen
I wish that there would one day be honesty about the American Shakespeare festival and its presence in Stratford. So far there has been very little. I got to know Stratford in 1960 and again in 1961 when I was engaged as an actor here. It didn’t take long to see that apart from a rather limited group of friends the town of Stratford itself could have cared less about the festival and its existence. Considering that Lawrence Langner and the Theatre Guild simply descended upon Stratford when they couldn’t get an opening to Westport and set up this American festival for the purpose of attracting audiences from across the country and even from around the world—to taste the magic of American Shakespeare I suppose—the absence of support by the whole town is not surprising.
It was undertaken. as far as I know, without any attempt to discover if the town–the people of the whole town –wanted this thing which would require their assistance very much in the way the Canadian Stratford came fully behind their Shakespeare theatre. It —not so by the way-is -still running heartily now. The town wanted it. So, they got it. That’s not what happened here.
Jumping forward in time: in 2014, the Mighty Quinn Foundation stepped in and worked assiduously at the business of setting up a Shakespeare Academy here in Stratford. Some history: over the years the Globe in San Diego and the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland (I worked in both) provided a summer location for young actors, all of us still in school, to spend the summer in performing the plays of Shakespeare. It was a kind of training ground that simply doesn’t exist anymore and the loss is considerable. The endeavors of the Quinn foundation could have picked up where San Diego and Ashland left off. I should mention now that both of those theaters are simply run now by professional actors, and both are in some financial difficulty.
I worked occasionally with this new and very welcome addition to the Shakespeare field and the education it requires. I got to know a number of the young actors. I have seen a lot of Shakespeare in my 90 years and while much of it here was hit-or-miss, increasingly–and it’s the way education does things–the work was getting better and better. I saw– in the White House– I saw a production of Julius Caesar done by a very limited cast of perhaps seven or eight maybe nine young actors. I went not expecting anything particularly outstanding and was virtually thrown out of my chair by the imagination and skill with which those young actors presented what for me was the best production of Julius Caesar I’ve ever seen.
Now, to be sure, COVID-19 did what it did, and American theater as a whole is still striving to recover. It’s going to take a while yet, but there is a place for a Shakespeare Academy here. The opening remains.
It was Andy Byrne’s fine and careful piece about the White House and its history in the latest Crier which moved me to write about all this again. The Shakespeare theatre which occupied such a prominent place in Stratford, destroyed by fire such a short time ago, came and went without ever really making much of a dent in Stratford itself; nor, I am sad to say, In the history of theater in this country. Oddly there was more possibility in the Rooney family’s Shakespeare Academy than the theatre which took up so much space and for so many years. It was begun by people who live here, and it knew what it was here for. I would very much like to see it in action again, occupying the dear old White House, with its companion, the Will Geer Garden. There’s a place for it.
