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My dad [Richard Bell] likes to talk about The Oresteia as a noble failure, as the reason we don’t cut plays, and also point out that my mother costumed him in beads and a mask. I don’t care. It was one of my favorite plays.
The Oresteia (1986)
It would be easy to think that it was only a favorite because of the spectacle, and it did have that. The masks the costumes. the 18 foot doors. All of that was cool. But actually one of my favorite books as a kid was D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths. I read it over and over so I was very well acquainted with the characters in The Oresteia.
The Oresteia (1986)
In fact, once the play closed, I got a copy of the script from my parents, and had my My Little Ponies act out the show.
We survived King Lear: both The Upstart Crow and me. And we went on to finish our sixth season with three one-acts by John Millington Synge: The Tinker’s Wedding, In the Shadow of the Glen, Riders to the Sea. It was not the best choice we could have made. They’re all wonderful plays and I think we gave each a really strong production, but they didn’t go well together. Tinker’s Wedding is a farce, a wildly funny play.
Characters in Tinker’s Wedding (1986)
Shadow is—well—a melodrama, and the earlier farce tended to set the audience up to laugh at the characters in the second play.
Characters in In the Shadow of the Glen (1986)
Riders to the Sea is a tragedy, a profound and beautiful little play but the two plays that preceded it, so different in tone, did not help its reception by the audience. We had thought that since the same playwright had written all three, that would unite them. But Synge’s range is great; we had three directors and three different casts. It was just not a unified coherent evening.
Characters (Joan Kuder Bell, other) in Riders to the Sea (1986)
We didn’t learn; we did it again. The second show of our seventh season was The Oresteia by Æschylus. The Oresteia is not a play; it is three plays, the only extant Greek trilogy we have. Agamemnon is about the Greek commander’s return to Argos after his victory in the Trojan War and his murder by his queen, Clytemnestra. The Libation Bearers is about the murder of Clytemnestra and her lover Ægisthus by her son Orestes. The Eumenides is about the punishment leveled on him by the Furies and their transformation into Eumenides: “All-seeing, Kindly Ones.” We did have a single director and a single cast, but we divided the trilogy, and three of us took one play each and edited it down to less than hour each so we could get all three done in an evening. So there were three voices. And we cut the choral odes drastically. That was a mistake. Two of the plays are named for their choruses. We should have known better. Each of the three plays was done well, I think, but they did not combine into a good, coherent, single production. You will recall, if you have read the first couple of blogs in this series, that The Upstart Crow started with a cutting of four Shakespearean histories into one play about Queen Margaret of Anjou; Vain Flourish of My Fortune. And that didn’t work either.
Characters in The Oresteia (1986)
(Twenty nine years later we got it right: The show we did last spring, The Flies by Jean-Paul Sartre is his version of the same story, of Libation Bearers and Eumenides, in a modern existentialist version. And we didn’t cut anything.)
Agamemnon (Scott Cuzac Tuffield), Crowd (Deanna Young, Matthew Gary, Nicole DeNardo, Casey Lloyd, Alexis Bell, Debra Conley), Zeus (Matthew W. King), Orestes (Christopher Shelton), Tutor (John Taylor) in The Flies (2015)
In between the Synge one-acts and The Oresteia we did Shaw’s The Man of Destiny. It was, as I remember it, an excellent production, and it certainly was a unified, coherent event; it’s a short play, only about an hour long, and that’s the problem. It didn’t really amount to a full evening’s entertainment. Our audience base is a lot larger than just the city and county of Boulder, and there were certainly people who spent more time getting to the theatre and then getting home than they spent at the play.
Characters (Joan Kuder Bell, other) in Man of Destiny (1986)
Here’s what we were missing: We thought we were selling you a ticket to see three plays by Synge or by Æschylus, or one play by Shaw. Actually, we were selling you a ticket to attend a single artistic event whose center was the three plays or one play. But, of course, you cannot have three centers.
Every good play has a shape, a rhythm. The Greeks named the parts: prologue, strophe, antistrophe, episode; and again strophe, antistrophe, episode, till the conclusion. Almost every good play can be analyzed as exposition, complication, climax, denouement. You can think of these as analogous to movements in a symphony. Small, intimate scenes will alternate with crowd scenes and soliloquies. Shouting and whispering take their turns. Shakespeare was the best of all at this. Look at how often, just as the tensions in a tragedy were reaching a climax, he would introduce a comic—even a farce—scene; not because the plot demanded it, but for the sake of the shape, the rhythm.
The three Synge one-acts are very good plays and I think we did them well. And each has the kind of rhythmic structure a good play needs. But they did not resonate with each other. We kept saying, “Forget what you just saw. It was good but it’s over. Start again.” We invited you to a banquet. We gave you a pot-luck.
We settled into the Guild Theatre in the second half of our sixth season. Now we were preparing ourselves for a series of artistic triumphs. We had a company of actors who had in fact triumphed over any number of difficulties of scheduling, of performance (and rehearsal) space, of storage of set pieces, props, and costumes, and on and on. All our troubles were over.
If you’ve been following these blogs, you will have noticed we tend to brag a little; we have been writing about our successes, about what we have done well. Why wouldn’t we? As we prepared for our first show in our new theatre we had everything going for us. There was another theatre company that had fallen dormant; they hoped to revive, but until they did they asked us if we would mind storing a number of platforms they owned but had no place to store. You betcha, we said, and turned them into audience risers in the Guild. (That company never revived.) Then it got even better.
The facilities manager of Mackey Auditorium called us. Mackey was going to be remodeled and would have all new seats. Would we like some of the old seats? Guess what we answered.
So, we opened King Lear in a brand new theatre financed in part by a $20,000 line-item grant from the city; The audience sat in upholstered seats on risers that permitted excellent sight-lines. And it got even better still. One of our actors had just bought a number of lighting instruments dirt cheap from another company; they were selling them because it was impossible to focus them. We bought them from him—cheap. It turned out they could not be focused because they all had the wrong bulbs in them. So we bought the right bulbs (They cost more than the instruments).
Lear (Richard Bell) in King Lear (1986)
What could possibly go wrong? Well, I was playing Lear. I did two performances, Friday and Saturday, of our opening weekend. And then I had a heart attack. That sort of limited my ability to continue in the role. So, what to do? We could have simply decided that our run was over. Yes, we would have lost the expected income from some half-dozen scheduled performances, but there were no future costs. The Guild would not have charged us for the scheduled nights we would skip. We could have survived to do our next show. Perhaps.
Lear (Richard Bell) and others in King Lear (1986)
But: “The show must go on.” That’s not just a slogan. For us it is pretty nearly a religious commandment. So, the director, Joan Kuder Bell, found someone to replace me. She called Jack Crouch, who had been the chair of the department of speech and drama at CU and the founder of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, and asked him if he would take on the part. His response was something like: “How do you say no to a request like that?” He carried a script, he wore a black suit, and he did the role. Whatever he lacked in preparation and rehearsal he made up in his really impressive stage presence and his understanding of the role and the play.
“How do you say no to a request like that?” In the 35 year history of The Upstart Crow we have had a half-dozen such occasions; times when an actor simply couldn’t do the role they were cast in. In every case we have asked someone else to take over the role, either just for tonight or for the rest of the run. No one has ever said no. We really are something like a cult.
I never saw Jack as Lear. I wasn’t out of bed till after the show closed but it must have worked: audiences were good, people liked the show. That was April. That summer the Shakespeare Festival did Lear with Dudley Knight, a famed Shakespearean actor, in the title role. And there was a party that summer that Knight, and Crouch, and I attended. Three actors who had played Lear within the last few months. Guess what we talked about. Has that ever happened before or since?
