CT Town's Shakespeare Fest Faces Existential Crisis

"At the Stratford Arts Festival next weekend, the soliloquies of “Hamlet” will be spoken much as they have been for the last 400 years. But the performance will take place outside what is commonly known here as the Shakespeare Theater. At the audience’s back, the theater will sit, as it has for the bulk of the last quarter-century, boarded and ghostly, its collapsing exterior balcony and weathered teak only hinting at the physical deterioration inside. And the festival’s serene setting, along the Housatonic River, will belie the discord that has roiled for decades over one main question: not “to be or not to be,” but “what to be.”

For 30 years beginning in 1955, this community of 50,000 and its theater were central to the production of Shakespeare in America. But today, the legacy of what the theater once was is running headlong into the reality of what it should become. Like many Shakespearean tragedies, it is playing out against a backdrop of competing political and cultural agendas and disruptive natural forces.

“When it rains, it’s a waterfall in here,” said J. Sibley Law, chairman of the Stratford Arts Commission. Standing in the theater in early July, where daylight was visible through the roof, Mr. Law said the deterioration had grown worse since the last time he visited, several weeks earlier. “When I first started coming in here five years ago, this was like new,” he said, pointing to a warped and rotted dressing table on the stage.

The air was acrid, and the smell of rot, mold and mildew was intense. Below stage level, dressing rooms and what was once a lounge for important visitors were wet, filthy and oozing. There was rust on steel girders that hold up the stage. Items in prop rooms were crusted with corrosion, frozen in time. A backdrop remained half-raised. Catwalks were rotting. Photographs from old performances, including one of Katharine Hepburn and Morris Carnovsky in a 1957 production of “The Merchant of Venice,” were strewn carelessly about the lobby.

“You know, I never saw a performance in here, and I come in and it just makes me sad to see some place like this in this kind of shape,” said Mr. Law, who has overseen the salvage of about 1,000 artworks and props whose value could be as high as $3 million. “This is not an easy fix, and people don’t get it.”

There has been little consensus on the right way to reconstitute the theater since it closed in the mid-1980s, broke and out of benefactors. While some simply want to get the doors open with any kind of entertainment that will turn a profit, there are those who cling to its origins: a summer home for Broadway’s elite to perform Shakespeare and the classics.

In its heyday, the theater showcased a huge roster of stars like John Houseman, Christopher Plummer and James Earl Jones. And it helped establish early credentials for the likes of Jane Alexander, Christopher Walken, Julie Taymor and Kelsey Grammer."