Behind the Curtain with David Schramm

Full Given Name:
David Michael Schramm

Hometown:
Louisville, KY

Playhouse Debut:
This production.

The thing you do before every first rehearsal:
Prepare the text.

Why you love Twelfth Night, or What You Will:
Because it has a certain balance that is rare. It is extreme in its passions and it has comedy, tragedy and romance, all swirling around at the same time.

Best thing about working at the Playhouse:
It's so beautiful, bucolic and charming. And it has Mark Lamos.

First time on stage:
My senior play in high school was a production of Pygmalion. I played Professor Henry Higgins.

Biggest onstage disaster:
Ripping my pants as the title character in Macbeth or having my zipper come down as the Inspector in The 13th Chair. Both of equally disastrous proportions.

Last great movie you saw:
Midnight in Paris

TV show you can't miss:
None. But it used to be “The Mickey Mouse Club” when I was 12- but since then, nothing.

Book on your nightstand:
Willa Cather: Her Life & Art by James Leslie Woodress, and a collection of short stories.

Guilty pleasure:
“Project Runway” or “Dancing with the Stars,” especially last season's DWTS runner-up, Kirstie Alley.

And…“how do you learn all those lines?”:
First let's see if I do. But secondarily, it just takes constant repetition and review.

  

Twelve Nights with Shakespeare

Our September newsletter featured an article highlighting all the ways Shakespeare has touched and continues to touch our lives. And it started me thinking about all of the different versions of Shakespeare’s works that exist - from more traditional adaptations to TV shows, films and books that took their inspiration from him. In the spirit of our current production of Twelfth Night, Or What You Will, I was inspired to spend a little time with the Bard myself and I invite you to join me in enjoying Twelve Nights with Shakespeare.

Day 1: We will start off with a classic film.
West Side Story (NR), an updated version of Romeo & Juliet, moves the action to New York City in the 1950’s. The Montagues and The Capulets become The Jets and The Sharks - two rival street gangs, and Romeo and Juliet become Tony and Maria, star crossed lovers who meet at a school dance. With a script by Arthur Laurents, music by Leonard Bernstein, lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and choreography by Jerome Robbins, West Side Story has been called a “cinematic masterpiece” by The New York Times in its 1961 review.

Day 2: Films to share with your family
Now, I’m not saying you should watch all three of these in the same night – but choose one and invite your kids to join you on the couch with some popcorn, and show them how current and fresh the works of William Shakespeare can be.

10 Things I Hate About You (PG-13). This modern re-make of The Taming of the Shrew takes place in a modern high school where beautiful Bianca (Larisa Oleynik) isn’t allowed to date until her “shrew” older sister Kat (Julia Stiles) does. So Biancia’s admirer, Cameron (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) hires bad boy Patrick (Heath Ledger) to woo Kat.
She’s The Man (PG-13). Amanda Bynes stars in this updated telling of Twelfth Night. When her brother heads out of town, Viola decides to disguise herself as him and take his place at his boarding school in order to continue playing soccer after her school cuts the girls team. Things begin to get complicated when she develops feeling for her roommate Duke, who likes Olivia. But Olivia likes Sebastian, or at least she likes Viola dressed as Sebastian. A high school love triangle written by Shakespeare!
Gnomeo & Juliet (G). If you’ve got younger kids at home, they’ll enjoy this animated version of Romeo & Juliet about two gnomes who have fallen in love. But they live in the feuding gardens of the Capulets and the Montagues. Will they overcome the obstacles keeping them apart?

Day 3: Modern literature based on a classic
No, I don’t mean for you to read this book all in one night – I know you’ve got a ton of other things to do! But author Christoper Moore is a great storyteller and his books are generally pretty quick reads. So, while it may take a few nights, it will be worth it! In his novel Fool, Christopher Moore tells the story of King Lear (slightly altered) from the point of view of the king’s jester, Pocket. "Moore is a very clever boy when it comes to words. There are good chuckles to be had in this tale. …Whether you need to read the original King Lear before you read Moore’s Fool is debatable. Seems a fool’s errand to us. Just enjoy." – USA Today

Day 4: Cooking with the Bard
I assume you’re still reading Fool, so tonight we’ll make a dessert you can enjoy while continuing the book. Warden Pear Pie with Saffron was inspired by a line in The Winter’s Tale in which the character Clown mentions that “I must have saffron to colour the warden pies”.

Day 5: Re-watch a classic TV sit com’s nod to an Elizabethan comedy
In the mid-1980s, Cybill Shepherd and Bruce Willis teamed up for ABC’s show “Moonlighting,” about an ex-model and a private eye running a detective agency. In one episode, which I admit to watching a number of times, a boy has to miss the week’s “Moonlighting” episode due to Shakespeare homework. As he studies, he begins to daydream and recasts The Taming of the Shrew with the cast members of his favorite show.

Day 6: A modern take on a Shakespeare classic
The Royal Shakespeare Company recently filmed their stage version of Hamlet, starring David Tennent and Patrick Stewart. The Guardian wrote “Gregory Doran's production is one of the most richly textured, best-acted versions of the play we have seen in years.” While the costumes and time period have been modernized, the timeless words of William Shakespeare remain the same.

Day 7: Time for a music break
Lovers of classical music, I invite you to download, purchase or dust off (if you happen to already own it) Felix Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Mendelssohn began composing for A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826 when he wrote a concert overture (at the age of 17!). It wasn’t until 1842, shortly before his death, that he composed the remaining music and added the Overture in. Fun fact: Listen for “The Wedding March,” now a staple at many weddings and possibly the most famous song ever written by Mendelssohn.

Day 8: Back to the Elizabethan kitchen
Lecturer and food write Francine Segan has compiled a book of Renaissance Recipes, including today’s Shakespeare-inspired activity – Salmon with Violets. In Francine’s words “Allow me to introduce you to these wonderful Elizabethan cooks, their recipes, and the foods and dining customs of 16th and 17th Century Europe as we journey back to Shakespeare's England and back to our own culinary roots.”

Day 9: An actor’s take on why Shakespeare is important.
Still not convinced about the timelessness of Shakespeare? Why not let Al Pacino tell you in his own words in Looking for Richard. The documentary features scenes from Richard III, rehearsal footage and interviews with Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Estelle Parsons and others in which they discuss the play itself as well as what was happening in the world at the time the play is set.

Day 10: A Shakespeare-inspired Playlist
I set out to create a list of songs inspired by Shakespeare and his work, only to realize the work had already been done for me! The kind folks at the Folger Institute have created a list of 20 songs drawing their inspiration from Shakespeare. Sync up the iPod and enjoy!

Day 11: Academy Award-Winning Shakespeare
Shakespeare in Love (R) The films I’ve listed thus far have been re-telling of Shakespeare’s works. Today’s film goes a step further and re-imagines the life of Shakespeare himself! Winner of seven Academy Awards, Shakespeare in Love, written by playwright Tom Stoppard, is full of heroes, villains, backstage intrigue, and, like Twelfth Night, even a loveable heroine disguised in male garb. Westport Arts Center will be showing Shakespeare in Love on Friday, October 28th at 7:00pm for $10. Click here for more information.

Day 12: Shakespeare on Stage
I really feel like I would be remiss in not adding a live performance of a Shakespeare production to our list. And it just so happens we have one on stage now through November 5th – Twelfth Night, or What You Will! Join us for an exciting evening of illusion, deception, disguise, madness and the crazy things one will do for love.

Beth Huisking
Associate Director of Marketing

  

Spotlight on the 2012 Season

Now into his third full season as Artistic Director, Mark Lamos and his artistic team are, in the words of the Waterbury Republican-American, “subtly transforming…Westport...into a serious player and major regional theater.” While the past 80 years have been wonderful, they are a prologue to the exciting possibilities we can create with our audiences. In this spirit, our 2012 season has been billed as “Theater Worth Talking About,” because we believe the performance does not end when the curtain falls. With the hopes of engaging and engendering meaningful, enriching conversations and experiences among our audiences, the Playhouse will produce four plays and one musical, starting with the dark and beguiling musical Into the Woods by Stephen Sondheim and directed by our very own Mark Lamos; followed by the poignant and moving The Year of Magical Thinking directed by Nicholas Martin, based on Joan Didion’s best-selling memoir; Molière's satirical and irreverent comedy classic Tartuffe directed by Playhouse Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy, is third; followed by the world-premiere of Harbor by Tony-nominated playwright Chad Beguelin and directed by Mark Lamos, an alternately biting, touch, and hilarious comedy about the malleable nature of the meaning of “family”; and our 2012 season will close with a production of Lorraine Hansberry’s towering drama exploring a family’s quest for their piece of the American Dream, A Raisin in the Sun, directed by Phylicia Rashad.

With Mark busy putting the finishing touches on Twelfth Night, or What You Will, running through November 5th, our Patron Services Supervisor Chad Kinsman recently sat down with Associate Artistic Director David Kennedy and Artistic Advisor Annie Keefe for their insights into our 2012 season.


The Playhouse has a unique relationship with Stephen Sondheim, who was an intern here in 1950, and the honoree of our 2006 gala, so we’re very excited to be opening the season with a co-production of his Into the Woods, billed as “One fairy tale that’s not the same old song and dance.” Could you talk a little bit about what sets Into the Woods apart from other musicals?

David Kennedy: I think Into the Woods is a great musical because it’s so unexpected. Sondheim and James Lapine were working with fairy tales, these archetypal stories that we all know and love, and then adding a twist that complicates them, brings to the surface the darker themes that were perhaps latent in the original material. To some extent, fairy tales are a mechanism for sublimating fear, using art to safely explore our deepest collective anxieties. The protagonists of fairy tales endure the most harrowing ordeals, but by the conclusion they are rewarded, and things usually end “happily ever after.” Into the Woods turns that formula on its head, and happily ever after is replaced with somewhat more complex resolutions to the tales.

Annie Keefe: Yeah, I like the sideways look they take at the traditional characters. The Wolf doesn’t con Little Red Riding Hood, he seduces her. The Witch isn’t simply evil, she’s a clever negotiator. And the enormous egos of the Charming Princes are just the cost of being so handsome, I guess. Sondheim finds the essences of these characters we’ve all known since childhood and then gives them his own unique twist.

DK: I think that complexity can be found in the music too. Sondheim is a true original, and in that sense his work never sounds like it’s by anybody but him

Into the Woods is being co-produced with Baltimore CENTERSTAGE. Can you tell us what a “co-production” involves?

DK: A co-production is a joint venture with another theater where we pool our resources, often to take on a project of such a scope that it would be hard for either company to manage it on their own.

AK: We share the cost of the casting director, the rehearsal salaries, the rehearsal space, the major hand props, and, most importantly for the Playhouse, the cost of building the costumes, since CENTERSTAGE has a costume shop and staff, and the Playhouse doesn’t. We will most likely share some elements of the set as well, even though our spaces are different. These are just a few of the economic advantages when theaters take on large productions together. 

DK: It’s really a win-win situation for the theaters, the artists involved, and the audiences. The theaters get to do a larger project; the artists get longer employment because it plays at two theaters back to back, as well as the satisfaction of a longer run where their work can grow and become deeper and richer; and the audiences, at least on the second leg—which is the case with the Playhouse and Into the Woods—get to see a show that has had more time to simmer, to develop into something truly wonderful.

Most people will be familiar with The Year of Magical Thinking as the National Book Award-winning memoir by Joan Didion. While a story of loss and grief, the show also explores our capacity to find hope and renewal in the face of life’s trials. What kind of experience can our audience expect from this powerful and moving show?

DK: Well, unlike reading a book, where you’re apt to pick it up and put it down over several readings over many days, on stage The Year of Magical Thinking unfolds over the course of a single evening, so it’s a compressed amount of time. I think that gives it an impact and an immediacy that the book cannot have. I also think that seeing an extraordinary performer say these words in front of you makes it so much more human.

AK: I can’t say it any better than that. Definitely with an actress as accomplished as Maureen Anderman in the mix, you get a very powerful live experience. Maureen has had a great career. She spent years in the regional theaters with several notable forays to Broadway. Albee’s Seascape comes to mind, and a critically acclaimed Macbeth. I saw her when she went on for Vanessa Redgrave in Driving Miss Daisy. The performance was so moving and precise, and her A Delicate Balance last year in the Berkshires was breathtaking. This year she is on her most ambitious project of all. She is touring the world with Kevin Spacey in Richard III with the Bridge Project. She’ll finish the run at BAM and come straight to us. And she is an alum several times over of the Playhouse.

DK: Add to that the fact that a book is a private experience and a play is something that you, as a viewer, share with other members of an audience. I think the adaptation of Year makes much of the power of that sense of communion. And there are all the poetic elements of the theater, light and sound and space and embodied emotion. I know that will greatly enhance this story.

Tartuffe has long been a classic satirical comedy and enjoys a production history of almost 350 years. What keeps Tartuffe fresh, funny, and relevant, especially to a modern audience?

DK: Molière was a first-rate student of human behavior, so his observations have never gone out of style. Fashions may change and history ebbs and flows, but, beneath those surface fluctuations, we’re not much different as people today than people were 350 years ago. We still have the same weaknesses and foibles, and Molière's comedy is all about laying those bare. I think the particular issue of religious hypocrisy and charlatanism, which is so much a part of this play, is resonant in this country because there has always been a professional class of people who’ve made it their business to tell the rest of us how to live according to their moral precepts, and unfortunately they have a sizeable and not at all benign influence on American politics. The fact that so many of these people are con artists, more interested in earthly power than matters of spirit, is obvious to most people, and yet they continue to flourish. How is that? That’s sort of the situation that Molière presents us with in Tartuffe. From the beginning the argument in the family of Orgon, the main character, is whether this “holy man” Tartuffe, whom Orgon follows with absolute zeal, is a saint or a fraud. Of course, the play is about so much else too—the nature of obsession, midlife crises, the allure of money—but religious hypocrisy is the element that first comes to mind with Tartuffe. But the play is much more than just a satire. It’s so human. Molière was not just a comic writer; he was a great artist, an iconoclast. He said things that, while they made people laugh, also made them uncomfortable. It’s the writers who break rules who have staying power.

AK: I also think it’s an excellent play to be producing in an election year!

The Playhouse has a wonderful history of world-premieres, and next summer’s production of  Harbor will bring our audience the excitement of seeing brand new work. Could you talk about what it means to produce a world premiere, and what about Harbor makes it the play to re-introduce new work to the Playhouse?

AK: It gives us the opportunity to explore an issue straight from the headlines. It will have people talking in the parking lot.

DK: And it’s essential to produce new work. There’s nothing better than being witness to the birth of a new play, for an audience to be the first to experience it, for actors to be the first to create a specific character. It’s one of the most exciting events in the theater. And Harbor is specifically such a great play with which to return new work to our stage, because it’s about the way we live now, an exploration of the always evolving nature of the American family. Most of the great plays of the American canon are family plays of one sort or another—A Raisin in the Sun, Long Day’s Journey Into Night, You Can’t Take It With You—and so Chad Beguelin is really playing with our native form, while giving it his own twist.

Speaking of A Raisin in the Sun, this play, considered a hallmark of the American theater, is a provocative exploration of the financial and social struggles of an American family in the 1950s Southside Chicago. How will an audience relate to the Younger’s quest to escape their circumstances and claim their piece of the American Dream?

DK: Well, I guess in so many ways the American Dream has been under assault for years now, with stagnating middle-class wages, the crushing costs of healthcare, rising poverty, the gross income inequality in this country. All of this has been true for a long time, but has really come into stark focus with the economic troubles of the last few years. So the story of a family struggling just to keep its head above water is the story of so many people today. Obviously, the Youngers’ story is the story of a particular African-American family in 1950s urban America, but Hansberry is so probing of these characters’ humanity that we come to know them intimately regardless of whether we share a similar background.

AK: I think, too, that it gives the opportunity for the Playhouse to share this iconic work with a whole new generation of young people and to show our loyal audience how much or little change has happened in the world since they last experiences this play.

DK: We may have never experienced anything like the Youngers’ particular struggle, but the transporting power of the stage puts us in their position for a few hours, allows us to see the world through their eyes, which can be a profound experience. So the question is not whether an audience relates because they’ve lived the exact same experiences, but that they will relate because of theater’s uncanny ability to allow us to imagine ourselves into the lives of other people. And hopefully that imaginative act, the aesthetic empathic, causes us to think about the world in a different way.

Chad Kinsman
Patron Services Supervisor

  

WCP & WAC Team Up for Twelfth Night

Last month the Playhouse began our second enrichment initiative, this year titled “Shakespeare in our Time,” centered around our production of Twelfth Night, or What You Will. The initiative was designed as an opportunity to engage with a variety of partner organizations to provide even greater insight to the production on stage for our audience and community. We are thrilled to be teaming up once again with Westport Arts Center, an instrumental partner in last year’s inaugural initiative (“Windows Onto History: Perspectives on The Diary of Anne Frank”).

Together we have planned a number of events which we are co-producing throughout the run of Twelfth Night. Their exhibition, Love: In the Eye of the Beholder, presents their artist members’ individual interpretations of the notion of love, which challenges every emotion, transforms reality, marries imagination with projection, and inspires us to depict its complexity through color, light, texture, and form. Love: In the Eye of the Beholder will be on display through November 6.

On October 28, the Westport Arts Center will host a film screening of John Madden’s romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love. With a screenplay by noted playwright Tom Stoppard, this delightful concoction – full of heroes, villains, backstage intrigue, and, like Twelfth Night, even a loveable heroine disguised in male garb – won seven Academy Awards. David Kennedy, Playhouse Associate Artistic Director, will introduce the screening and provide context to the themes explored in the film. It is sure to be an evening of good film and good conversation.

On October 6, the Arts Center hosted “Love Night: a social mixer at Westport Arts Center.” Led by WAC Director of Visual Arts, Helen Klisser During and Playhouse Associate Artistic Director, David Kennedy, the event explored the common languages of the visual arts and theater. Professional actors were on hand to read scenes from Twelfth Night, placing the exhibition within the context of Shakespeare’s words and helping to make powerful connections between the art in the theater and the art in the gallery.

The Westport Arts Center has made invaluable contribution to the development of Shakespeare In Our Time, generously sharing of their expertise in the visual arts. It is so gratifying for the Playhouse to partner with a fellow Westport non-profit with whom we can develop collaborative programming in accordance with our own artistic missions and specialties. To witness this collaboration in action, visit “Love: In the Eye of the Beholder” through November 6 and join us for the screening of Shakespeare In Love on October 28.

Angela Marroy Boerger
Education & Community Programs Coordinator