"I'll have these Players play something like..."

So, we're off and running with plans for the summer 2012 season.  We're calling it our season of love, lies, deceit, and secret identities - As You Like It, Othello, The Rivals (by Richard Brinsley Sheridan), and a 55-minute family-friendly version of Comedy of Errors.  It promises to be exciting.  

I'm often asked how we choose a season.  The process of selecting this one began over a year ago.  First stop - a look at our production history to see which plays were "moving into rotation."  Shakespeare left us only 37 published plays, so we come back to our favorites again and again.  The Festival has done some of the most popular - Midsummer, Hamlet, Taming of the Shrew, Romeo and Juliet - more than 10 times in its 34 year history.

Of course, no matter how much we love a play or how interested we might be to see how the next artistic team will attack it, we want to give them all a regular rest.  Generally, we wait six years or more to bring any play back.  That automatically took 15 plays out of the running for 2012.  (I'll include a list of our full production history later.)

The comedies are very popular with our audiences, so we do one almost every year.  In some ways, selection of the comedy is easy since there are a finite number of Shakespearean comedies.  As You Like It, Comedy of Errors, Love's Labors Lost, Merry Wives of Windsor, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, Twelfth Night, and Two Gentlemen of Verona - that's about it.  The Merchant of Venice is sometimes classified as a comedy, too, but it's hard to see it as funny today.

Warming up in the bullpen this year were As You Like It, Two Gentlemen of Verona, and Twelfth Night.  Twelfth Night was questionable because we'd done it in 2005 - so it's just barely out of its six year hiatus.  And we did Two Gents last year at ISU, so some of our audience had seen it recently.  AYLI seemed a good pick.  It's a comedy but has interesting things to say about politics and power - great for an election year.  And it has a number of great roles for young women - Rosalind, Celia, Audrey, and Phoebe - an important consideration for 2012 because the Festival is part of the School of Theatre at Illinois State University, and this year there will be four actresses from the graduate acting program auditioning for the Festival.  While there's no guarantee that they'll get one of these roles, I want to give them something to shoot for.  (Those of you who saw the shows last summer saw these women on stage doing amazing work in roles large and small.)

Once AYLI was on the list, I started looking at the histories and tragedies - something to balance out the comedy.  I'd heard quite a few requests for a history play from patrons last summer.  We haven't done Henry IV, Part 1 in a long time (since 1994), so that went under serious consideration.  But it has a very large cast and that would mean hiring 3 to 4 more actors than we did last year.  Additional costs would include housing them and putting all those extra bodies in costumes.  That didn't seem like a smart economic decision right now.  I was also very interested in Troilus and Cressida.  In 34 years, we've never found occasion to do this one.  It's a difficult play and pretty dark, but also powerful, with great resonance for our contemporary American culture.  Unfortunately, this one has a large cast, too - and would probably not be a big seller.

And that matters.  While it would be nice to let our artistic desires completely dictate our choices, theatre has the same concerns as every other business.  We have to make sure we aren't spending more money than we can bring in through ticket sales, contributions, and grants.  A balance has to be struck...which is why it often takes so long to come up with a good season - one that serves the Festival artistically as well as financially.

Eventually, we settled on Othello.  It's a great play - one of my favorites - a big emotional play with strong cultural and political undercurrents.  And it has one of Shakespeare's greatest villains!   It's always a challenge to find a good Othello - but I feel confident we'll find the right actor for this.

So, that's our two Shakespeares on the big stage.  I'll leave discussion of our non-Shakespeare selection for the next posting.  And in the posting after that, I'll chat about our Theatre for Young Audiences show.  Until next time...