Three Connecticut teenagers, about whom I know virtually nothing, have been charged with the arson that, four months earlier, burned down what had once been the beautiful Shakespeare Festival Theatre (subsequently just the Shakespeare Theatre) of Stratford, Conn. It had been nearly 30 years since the theater had been used for any sort of performance, Shakespearean or otherwise, and it was in a near-derelict condition. Its only recent employment had been by a nearby scenery studio, which had used its stage’s capacious fly space to hang and paint canvas backdrops—the “soft goods” that were once a prevailing element in theatrical set design but are now increasingly rare.
And it had all started so excitingly. The American Shakespeare Festival had been one of the many outgrowths of the new post–World War II mixture of affluence and worldliness that had come upon America with its new status as the leading nation of what, back then, they used to call the Free World. Its name summed up its artistic goals: It was to be Shakespeare, it was to be American—none of your artsy imports here—and it was to be festive.
Stratford, Conn.—a good-sized industrial town where the usual evening’s entertainment was pizza and beer, plus either the latest Hollywood flick or a favorite TV show—might not have seemed the optimal location for such an enterprise, but the name was right, the scenery just outside the town idyllic (Professor Charles Prouty, one of nearby Yale’s eminent Shakespearean scholars, referred to the venue as “Stratford-on-Housatonic”), and the location near enough to New York to make it an easy goal for busloads of tourists and students. The local teens, and a hell of a lot of other area residents, got summer jobs taking tickets, working the concession stands, apprenticing backstage, or maintaining the gorgeously landscaped grounds, so nobody was complaining.
And for some years, it all worked gorgeously. Men of taste had envisioned the project—the Theatre Guild’s Lawrence Langner and City Ballet’s Lincoln Kirstein were among its early proponents—and the philanthropist Joseph Verner Reed, who bankrolled it, had no qualms about, for instance, importing slabs of hand-polished teakwood to panel the auditorium walls. John Houseman, who ran the Festival in its early years, staffed it with a mixture of old friends from his Mercury Theatre days with the best young actors coming up through the ranks. I remember Nancy Marchand once reminiscing to me about sitting outdoors on a rehearsal break with Sada Thompson, enjoying the balmy Connecticut breezes, and Marc Blitzstein coming up to them, to tell Sada he was writing her a part in his next musical. “But I can’t sing,” she protested. “Yes you can,” Blitzstein said, “and you’re going to be in my show.” He had his way; despite her protests, you can hear Sada Thompson on the original cast album of Blitzstein’s Juno.
A sprinkling of Hollywood stars, most notably Connecticut resident Katharine Hepburn, helped vitalize the box office and conquer the American fear of Shakespeare. (Bernard Gersten, not yet Joseph Papp’s right-hand man, was Hepburn’s stage manager of choice. He once described to me, with great relish, how she had interceded when conservatives on Stratford’s board proposed firing him because he had appeared as an “unfriendly” witness before the House Un-American Activities Committee.)
At no point in its checkered history did American Shakespeare Festival productions please everybody. Critics were often cool to the results, and academics sniffy. But pleasing everybody, aside from being impossible, was never the goal. The goal was to bring Shakespeare and other great dramatists to as large an audience as possible, and many of Stratford’s 1,500 seats were often filled with people who responded enthusiastically. If they did so because they were watching Hepburn play Viola, or the TV star David Birney essaying Romeo, there was no harm in that. The play, thrown in with the star, amounted to a kind of bargain. In later years, the bargain included memorable items like Christopher Walken’s ferocious Hotspur and Elizabeth Ashley’s slinky, cold-as-steel Maggie the Cat—certainly nothing for playgoers to object to.
When Houseman left to pursue what was to be his next great passion, the Juilliard School’s Drama Division, an interregnum followed in which matters got artistically shaky, though not to an irremediable extent, and Michael Kahn’s advent as artistic director soon put what had by now become simply the Shakespeare Theater back on a sound artistic footing. Kahn balanced the Shakespeare with American plays. Both his Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and Crucible were commendable, and he afforded the great Morris Carnovsky, in old age, a final chance to play King Lear, a capstone on his career.
But Kahn, too, left to pursue other interests. One problem may have been that the size of the theater, as well as its country-festival atmosphere, limited the extent of the risks he or any artistic director could take. Other theaters that were springing up in Connecticut in the ’60s and early ’70s were developing stronger artistic profiles: Hartford Stage under Jacques Cartier and Paul Weidner; New Haven’s Long Wharf under Jon Jory and then Arvin Brown; Robert Brustein’s Yale Repertory Theatre. Situated inside cities with strong theatergoing communities to draw from, smaller in scale than towering, beautiful Stratford, they could move with a speed and daring that even Kahn’s best efforts could not have put into Stratford’s playbook.
Then, too, the Festival Theatre was not organic to Stratford as these other Connecticut theaters were to their communities. The mere coincidence of place names had not instantly made the townspeople become Shakespeare lovers. For all the money they could earn there, all the fun and knowledge they might have derived from the company’s numerous outreach activities, there was always a feeling among the townsfolk that the theater wasn’t “theirs,” that it had been dropped down next to them arbitrarily, only because their town had the same name as some old tourist trap in England. It seemed somehow unfair.
So, eventually, the Shakespeare Theatre fell on troubled times. Artistic directors and entrepreneurs with big schemes came and went; production schedules grew increasingly erratic. A plan to produce musicals there fizzled after a production of Li’l Abner—a choice of material that would have made Shakespeare either wince or grin broadly at its contrast with the works for which the theater had been built.
Thus Stratford closed. And though it didn’t go away, no one seemed to know what to do with it. The state and the town of Stratford juggled a variety of possible plans to rebuild and revitalize it, but none of them seemed to strike a spark; some stroke of entrepreneurship was missing. And meantime the theater, left untenanted, began to decay. The teakwood panels lost their luster, the rows of seats their upholstery. Rodents, birds, and inclement weather did their various forms of damage. By the time governmental rescue efforts finally got mobilized, the building itself was beyond saving.
Yet it still sat, a monument to good intentions that had gotten mislaid and goals that had perhaps been too nebulous to provide a longer-lasting vitality. It stood as a rebuke, too, to the American habit of conceiving of culture in grand schemes rather than starting with the simple impulse to ask what will please the groundlings while gratifying and challenging their intellectual superiors. I don’t claim that to be an easy task; it is, in fact, the very hardest in all theater, as well as the one most often shirked.
The rebuke stood there, criticizing us, until that January night when three local teens apparently went and burnt it down—teens who might, in an earlier time or a better balanced culture, have gotten gainful employment at the Festival Theatre, instead of a pyromaniac’s eerie kicks. Perhaps they might even have discovered some artistic gift, or some love for what the theater at its best can achieve, in themselves. You never know. But the wanton burning was in itself a sign, like so many of the signs that surround us. It tells us that we have passed the edge of thinking about art in any arbitrary way. That will no longer do. We are at the end of a phase. What will replace it remains anyone’s guess.
