The ABCs of APT

A 2010 season preview by 77 Square's Lindsay Christians. In many ways, the life of a classical repertory company is like a hamster wheel. The same Shakespeare plays roll around about every eight years. The same company members shuffle leading roles. And the season itself rotates; the set for 'As You Like It' makes way for 'All's Well That Ends Well,' then cycles back again. But at American Players Theatre in Spring Green, audiences are showing no signs of fatigue - and neither are the players. The circular style of a repertory season still appeals to thousands of patrons each year, many of whom travel hundreds of miles to go 'up the hill' and see a play in the woods. 'We've been doing it for 18 years, and the overwhelming evidence is that audiences delight in it,' said APT artistic director David Frank. 'I would like to think that because we're aware of the dangers (of audience fatigue) is one of the reasons that they don't occur.' Despite the recession and slight dips in ticket sales, APT keeps growing. Last year, the company added a new indoor theater and three additional plays. This winter it will add a musical for the holidays, 'The Gift of the Magi,' written by James DeVita and set to open in November. 'A company that has been exercised in the Shakespearean gymnasium will be well equipped, I think, to tackle a new one,' Frank said. 'The plays we tackle require enormous skills. You only get those skills with a company working together over a long period of time.' The repertory style keeps actors healthy, Frank said, because they're constantly developing their skills in language and physicality. For this company, it seems, the old cliche holds true: if you can do Shakespeare well, you can probably do anything well. This season's varied repertoire, from Shakespeare and Shaw to Beckett and Fugard, seems designed to test that theory. The 2010 season officially opened this weekend with 'As You Like It,' one of just two Shakespearean plays APT is producing this year (typical is three). APT will open five plays this month, including 'All's Well That Ends Well' and 'Another Part of the Forest' in the 1,100-seat amphitheater. The smaller, indoor Touchstone Theatre will host Samuel Beckett's abstract 'Waiting for Godot' and 'The Syringa Tree' by Pamela Gien, a play about growing up in South Africa under the apartheid system. The same core company of 10 actors performs in both theaters. That's a deliberate choice, part of what keeps the core APT company connected. 'It would be very easy to produce an indoor season and an outdoor season,' said associate artistic director Brenda DeVita. But though that might be less expensive, 'the idea of having separate companies is so against the grain of how we operate." 'We have a very distinct cultural approach to how we operate at APT,' she added. 'We really believe that a rep company needs to have - many people cross over and work together and know each other. That makes for the net underneath everybody, to have each other's backs.' Tim Ocel, a first-time director for APT who helms 'As You Like It,' has already felt that community. 'It's all about the work here, which I love,' he said. Ocel is a fan of the repertory system for the same reasons Frank is. 'I think it's a terrific thing,' Ocel said. 'If (actors) are well-cast, they get to show an audience different facets, different muscles throughout a season. It keeps them fully dimensional. - They get to use the entire human experience to explore a whole palette of humanity.' To that end, Bill Brown directs the relatively more contemporary 'Another Part of the Forest,' opening in late June (Brown directed 'A Comedy of Errors' last season). 'Forest' was written by Lillian Hellman, and it's set in the south in the 1880s - a seemingly gentile time for what Brown called a 'funny, horrifying and moving' family drama. 'It's such an opportunity for extraordinary acting,' Brown said. 'Everyone is determined to work their way into the role.' Playing different characters in the same season gives actors a chance to apply Shakespearean skills of poetry and diction in another setting, Brown said. Depending on the size of the part, it can also let an actor rest a little. 'If you're playing a character that is devastated nightly, thrown to the ground and beaten, metaphorically, it's so nice the next night to be the happy little maid in Act II,' Brown said. 'It allows you to live in the play more fully if you're not pounding away at it eight times a week. 'But if you're the happy little maid in Act II, that can get pretty boring, too. - If the next night you get murdered onstage, well, that's fun. It's such a healthy thing for the actor.' 'Forest,' a 20th century American play written by a woman, represents a slow evolution for APT. In addition to the classics, APT has begun to produce more modern playwrights, like Tennessee Williams and Eugene O'Neill. Audiences can expect to see more of this in the Touchstone, which allows APT to produce more economical plays with smaller casts. 'There weren't a lot of seven-person plays in the 19th century,' DeVita said. Last year, APT's overall audience was down three percent, likely because of the recession. The company nonetheless hit its operating goals, Frank said, by being 'very cautious in our budgeting.' 'We survived without losing any money,' Frank said. 'Outside classical theaters around the country were averaging 11 percent down. So we were glad.' In 2009, the company sold nearly as many tickets (96,074) as in 2008 (100,175), though that statistic sounds better than it is because there were more plays in 2009. APT's new indoor theater sold 10,827 tickets in its first year. Plus comps, that's about 94 percent capacity. Frank estimates about half of those sales came from patrons who decided to cut back on shows up the hill and watch something inside instead. 'The kind of diversity in programming that we're trying to find now is good for the audience,' Brown said. 'It's good for everybody. If you come up for a long weekend, you can go on quite a ride.' For more news about APT visit the News and Reviews page