INTERVIEW: Berkshire Theatre Festival has 90 candles on its birthday cake
Photo: The Petrified Forest is one of the productions in the Berkshire Theatre Group’s special 90th anniversary celebration. From left, Rebecca Brooksher and David Adkins. Photo courtesy of Emma K. Rothenberg-Ware / Provided with permission from BTG press site.
For actors and theatergoers alike, making a trek to the Berkshires in Massachusetts each summer is something of a rite of passage. So many people have made the journey and enjoyed the theater offerings at the Berkshire Theatre Festival, and the successful regional theater company shows no signs of slowing down. This year, they celebrate 90 years of theatrical excellence.
The Berkshire Theatre Festival was founded in 1928 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, home of the Fitzpatrick Main Stage and Unicorn Theatre. In 2010, the Berkshire Theatre Group combined the festival’s venues with the Colonial Theatre, which was built in 1908 in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts. There’s certainly a lot of history within these bucolic settings.
“I think we’ve been planning it for 90 years,” said Kate Maguire, artistic director and CEO of the Berkshire Theatre Group.”I do remember vividly when the theater turned 75 and thinking, oh my goodness, we have to make it to 80. And every five years it’s like, OK, we have to make it to the next thing. And so now I feel like all we’re talking about is getting to the 100th, so we have been thinking about reaching the next milestone. In saying that though, I would say that we’ve been planning the 90th for the past two years, both in terms of thinking about what the celebrations and the events around turning 90 can be and in thinking about what should the productions be as part of the 90th season. In other words, what are we celebrating in that historic playhouse? What are we celebrating at the Unicorn Theatre and at our newer space, the Colonial Theatre? We’ve been planning it seriously for two years, but we’ve been planning for the past 90 years just getting here.”
This past season had many highlights for the 90th, including The Petrified Forest by Robert Sherwood and directed by David Auburn. Up next will be Luigi Pirandello’s Naked (Sept. 27-Oct. 28).
No matter what the production is on the three stages of the theater group, Maguire loves interacting with the actors and creative team members, many of them having returned to the Berkshires season after season after season.
“Inevitably the faces behind those productions pop into view really quickly, and there is a core group of company members, not just artists, but the individuals that I work with daily to pull everything together,” she said. “So the folks that are working in the marketing office and the communications and the development office are really having to understand deeply what the work is that we’re trying to present, folks that are in the education program, too. … For example, in the first production that we did on our mainstage, Coming Back Like a Song!, was directed by Gregg Edelman, who is a phenomenal Broadway musical theater person, and he’s been directing with us for a few years. So it’s great to have him back. It was also great to have David Rasche, one of the actors in the production on the stage who was with us 40 years ago in a Christopher Durang play, Baby With the Bathwater, and there he was on the stage again in this wonderful piece. It all feels very right when these individuals come back and say, ‘I started my career here.’ Or when individuals now say, ‘This is my artistic home that I want to be back at every summer.'”
This past season also saw the return of Harriet Harris and Matt Sullivan, partners in real life who have been working in the Berkshires for a couple of years.
“We’re already trying to talk about what’s next summer,” Maguire said. “[In the Berkshires], they’re not racing to get on a train to get to rehearsal. They’re driving through the bucolic hills to get to their rehearsal space, which may be in a church or maybe in a high school auditorium, so everything is very different. And it’s often interesting to see artists when they first get here, and they’ve never been here because quite honestly there are still miles on some of the roads that you can’t even get a cell phone connection. We’re working on that, but imagine somebody coming from New York and L.A. and their cell phone all of a sudden isn’t working. And then after about a week, they sort of settle in and realize, oh, this is a completely different way of life, and actually what it does is it entirely contributes to the artistic soul. So, yeah, I do think they get hooked, and a lot of actors that have come here have bought homes here.”
To appreciate the Berkshire Theatre Group’s combined history, one only has to look at the many faces that have graced its stages over the years. Whether it’s James Taylor, Christopher Walken, Frank Langella, Al Pacino, Chris Noth, Anne Bancroft, Estelle Parsons or Buster Keaton, the actors and musicians who have played in this corner of Massachusetts have contributed to their own artistic soul and the community’s artistic vibrancy.
Who knows what might happen in the next 90 years.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Click here for more information on the Berkshire Theatre Group.
