An Artistic Mission Sustained by 'the Packers Fans of Theater'

Elisabeth Vincentelli, The New York Times

For a regular theatergoer, a recent July evening in rural Wisconsin was peak surreal.

It could have been the sight of an amphitheater packed to its 1,075-seat capacity for a weeknight performance of the fairly obscure French comedy “Ring Round the Moon.”

Or maybe it was that the actors didn’t have mics, which is a rarity nowadays. From my seat, I could see audience members leaning in, transfixed by those unamplified voices.

“They’re here to listen,” Brenda DeVita, the artistic director of American Players Theater, said of the faithful who flock to Spring Green, about an hour west of Madison.

A.P.T., in its 45th season, describes itself as a language-based company, which explains why it has doubled down on idiosyncratic choices in the current theatrical landscape. One is not doing musicals. Another is eschewing mics.

That last is partly a practical choice since A.P.T. productions — nine this season, with the last closing on Nov. 10 — are done in repertory. This means the actors are always busy rehearsing or performing, leaving little spare time to add microphones to tech rehearsals. But banking on the glory of the human voice is primarily an artistic decision: Nothing comes between the actors, their words and the public.

“My first question was ‘Is it miked?’” the New York-based troupe member Triney Sandoval said, recalling an early conversation with Carrey Cannon, an associate artistic director. “Everyone has switched to mics and I really don’t like it — it’s hard to tell where the voice is coming from.”

I certainly always knew who was speaking and from where during “Much Ado About Nothing,” another show at the Hill amphitheater. Even when someone was pretend-lurking in the brush off the side of the stage, every word remained distinct.

“Often people will say, ‘Oh, it’s magic,’” said Vanessa Stalling, who is directing Nick Payne’s “Constellations” at A.P.T.’s indoor venue, the 201-seat Touchstone Theater. “But it’s not magic: There’s rigor and work and intentionality behind it.”

One of A.P.T.’s major distinctions is that it has a dedicated voice and text program, and assigns one of its nine coaches to each production. Their purview includes dialects, dramaturgy and the techniques necessary to modulate indoors and project outdoors. Breathing is key, for example, as well as posture. “You don’t want your head to be wagging around,” Sara Becker, the program’s director, explained. “You want to point your mouth toward a hard surface, almost like playing pool, where you’re banking a shot.” (At the Hill, this usually means targeting the eaves at the back of the auditorium so the sound can bounce back rather than disperse into the air.)

Naturally this extends to helping the performers deeply engage with text and cadence. Gavin Lawrence, a member of the core acting company who directed August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” this summer, mentioned that an actor in that play had been amazed to receive coaching. “People tend to think that August Wilson’s language is simple because it’s just Black vernacular,” Lawrence said. “But it’s just like a meter in Shakespeare: If you change a word or a syllable, you change the rhythm, you change the musicality. The voice and text people help us use the language to kind of catapult the truth, the emotion all the way to the back row. It’s hard work and that’s why I think a lot of us keep coming back, because we can always get better at it.”

Founded by Charles Bright, Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso, A.P.T. kicked off in 1980 with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Titus Andronicus.” Such was the focus on European classics that it took 12 years to get an American play, “Our Town,” on the boards. David Frank, a former artistic director, brought in pieces by such wits as Sheridan and Shaw in the 1990s, before DeVita further expanded the boundaries in the mid-2000s.

DeVita started as an actress and landed in Spring Green when her husband, Jim, was cast in the 1995 season’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Henry V” and “She Stoops to Conquer.” After becoming the company manager that year, she was named associate artistic director in 2004 and artistic director 10 years later. Under her leadership, the voice and text department was developed, as were A.P.T.’s core company and the acting apprentice program. She has also moved the programming goal post, starting with plays by 20th-century American giants like Miller, O’Neill, Williams, Hansberry and Wilson — already considered classics everywhere else, but newbies at a place where the 19th century still felt a little daring.

DeVita then used the Touchstone, which opened in 2009, to program plays by Stoppard, Fugard and Albee, followed by contemporary works including Jen Silverman’s “The Moors,” Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” and, this season, the world premiere of Michael Hollinger’s “The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool.”

Now that the diversification of programming is part of a national conversation about theater, A.P.T. is expanding initiatives it had already started, slowly but surely. “It was part of Brenda’s vision to challenge the people who live here to say, ‘There are other ways of thinking, there are other cultures who have fables and stories to be told,’” said Dale R. Smith, an A.P.T. board member.

The organization seems to be navigating those waters more smoothly than many of its peers, partly because the artists are involved in the process. Lawrence, for example, said the company’s leadership was “not just talking the talk, but actually walking the walk when it comes to diversity and inclusion, and looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve been doing this wrong. We need to get this better.’”

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