Julianne Boyd of Barrington Stage Company

Bringing Year Round Theatre and Programming To Pittsfield

By: Julianne Boyd - Jan 28, 2012

Julianne Boyd is the artistic director of Barrington Stage Company now in its 15th season. Giuliano ohoto.

 

We are starting something this year. We have a New Works initiative. We’re starting new play commissions because playwrights have to live. Mark St.Germain is the recipient of the first play commission. Playwrights and musical theatre writing teams will be commissioned to write work that BSC will eventually produce.  Mark St. Germain’s commission for Dr. Ruth is underwritten by Sydelle and Lee Blatt and Beth Sapery and Rosita Sarnoff.

After this we hope to have one play in development and one musical in development each year. If you want to get the work of someone like Nathan Tysen and Chris Miller, they did the musical The Burnt Part Boys, we said “We would love to have you back.” They said “After we’re doing a play commission for Lincoln Center. And one for Playwrights Horizon. You can be third in line."

We are no longer getting the submission of some of those works because they are being commissioned. We feel we did so much for Nathan and Chris that exposed them to the New York theatres that had the money to offer them the commissions. Signature Theatre in New York took five playwrights and gave them five commissions for five years. Because they know that’s the way you build a community through playwrights.

I felt our contribution to theatre should now move into developing new theatre through new works. That’s what we are going to spend a lot of time doing. Not only new plays but also second productions because we’ll be building relationships with those playwrights as well.

We will be collaborating with the Berkshire Museum and doing our Youth Theatre there. We will be doing Beauty and the Beast. We are actually going to be enlarging the stage. We are actually putting a permanent apron on. It’s double the number of seats we had at Saint Joe’s. We’ll be running it three weeks there. Other theatre groups also want to rent that space because you know there is now a plethora of theatre here. It’s so exciting that Pittsfield is now a theatre town and that’s one more venue. It’s our 13^th Youth Theatre production.

We’re very excited about Fiddler on the Roof which opens the season on the Main Stage. Based on advance sales we could just run it through October. Gary John LaRosa is directing and choreographing. He was in the last Broadway revival of Fiddler. He was in the national company. We must use Jerome Robbins’s choreography. When you get the rights you must use that choreography. The Bottle Dance. He has worked with our music director Darren Cohen before so there is already a relationship. We start auditions next month. We are so happy that Berkshire Bank is sponsoring it and it’s a family show. It’s like Guys and Dolls but cleaner. There’s no Hot Box Girls.

This fall we are finally doing Lord of the Flies. (Postponed last season for a return run of the St. Germain hit drama Best of Enemies.) I have no idea if Chris Innvar will direct it because he’s still on Broadway with Porgy and Bess. It will probably run through the Tonys and perhaps a bit longer. We don’t know. If he’s available he’ll come and direct it.

If not one of the others in our group like Aaron Posner. He was the adapter/director of last season’s hit production of My Name is Asher Lev. He returns to direct the New England premiere of Lungs by Duncan Macmillan. John Rando is coming back. He directed last season’s musical hit Guys and Dolls and returns with the 1945 British comedy See How They Run by Philip King. We have a wonderful director pool. I wish we had more shows because we have more directors than shows.

So what we are trying to do is involve more playwrights. We can’t have Mark writing all of the plays on Stage 2. Although we may have a reading of a play which he put away for now because Dr. Ruth seemed like such a natural.

We are really concentrating on developing new work and a playwright community. We have an actor community with associate artists. Once that the season is announced we will then announce more associate artists. We have the actors, designers and directors but a shortage of playwrights. So that’s what we’re concentrating on.

As far as the Main Stage I didn’t want to do the same thing that we did last year. I didn’t want to do the two musicals (Guys and Dolls, The Game) with the social play (Best of Enemies) in between. I wanted to do something a little less expected. The Price (Arthur Miller) just fell in my lap. It deals with sibling rivalry and brothers. How you deal with the past. You can say all you want that the past doesn’t impact what we do today but it does. It’s an interesting theme that we have not investigated before. Having three brothers helps me to understand this. My mother died two years ago and I know this story. Jeff (McCarthy Mack and Mabel, Follies, Sweeney Todd) is just perfect for one of the characters and he is going to play the Doctor.  

A farce. I love farces. We have done them before. After Fiddler and Arthur Miller to come in with an out and out farce is just terrific. And to have John Rando do it is like my all time dream. Our entire staff read the plays. I told them when you read See How They Run be sure to read the stage directions. They are as important as the dialogue.

As to year-round activity we do May through October. I think the most we will ever grow is the beginning of May. We’re starting May 23. We wanted to start earlier but Aaron Posner, the director, wasn’t available.

May through October is great with us. We as a staff feel very strongly that we want our Christmas off. We work so hard for six months that we need that breathing time.

We love doing one thing in the winter. The past couple of years we did a Valentines Cabaret. We’ve done Fully Committed in that February slot. We do a one person show. We did the first workshop of Spelling Bee. When we can we love to surprise people with something they don’t expect. The 10 x 10 Festival seemed a natural. When we talked with Megan Whilden about when we should do it she said “Over President’s Weekend.” So we picked February 16 through 26.

When my husband and I were on vacation in Nantucket we went by an art gallery and they were doing nothing but 10x10” paintings. By a myriad of artists in the Nantucket community. Each one was $75 to $150. They had A through Z in each letterhead four paintings. So 26 x 4. I thought this is so amazing. I thought “I’ve always wanted to do ten minute plays.” We put out a call and got a lot of plays. Many of them were funny. We wanted to do something light. It’s just not about heavy duty at this time of year. We put together six actors. So we have our 10x10 rep company. Each actor is in four of the plays. The idea is fun. We got together with Megan Whilden and John Valenti of Beacon Cinema and Chip Benson of Mission Tapas. It’s basically 10x10 on North.

Beacon is doing ten smart phone films. Kevin Sprague is doing one. Mission is doing ten new songwriters. Shawn’s Barber Shop is doing ten graphic artists. It gives each shop or merchant the sense that they can be creative too. We do that and I think that’s it for us until May.

What we do want to do is auxiliary things like this week we are starting a movie festival. We’re doing a double feature of Americans in Paris and Singing in the Rain. With reasonably priced tickets. Just to keep the theatre open and for people to think that we are there for them and the community.

When we started here our Pittsfield audience was about 7% and now it is 25%. Just in Pittsfield, Pittsfield zip codes let alone Berkshire County. That surprised me. I think we have developed a really serious audience for theatre. Freud’s Last Session, The Whipping Man, The Best of Enemies.

 People want to see quality work. I’m talking about people in the community and not just tourists. So we are offering serious drama and continuing to do new plays.

In our fall program when we did To Kill a Mockingbird and Crucible they are actually in the curriculum of the High Schools. Lord of the Flies is required reading between the eight and ninth grades. It’s extra curricula but they do all read it. Last year when we did Best of Enemies a number of the teachers had seen it in the summer so they brought their students in the Fall.

We do workshops in the schools. We tell the kids what they are about to see. We average about 2,000 kids which is amazing. It’s four full performances. The actors do them at 10:30 in the morning. Can you imagine doing Crucible in the morning. We provide breakfast for them. It’s important for us to get those kids in to see theatre. When we ask them how many of you have seen theatre before it’s frightening.

During The Crucible the kids would call their parents during intermission. As soon as the kids went back into the theatre the phones in the box office would start ringing.

Sometimes it’s a matter of contacting the principals and asking them to let the kids go. Going to the theatre is as important as whatever test they are reviewing for. We try to get underwriting for the tickets. We have fun because our board believes in what we are doing and how we are trying to reach people in the community.

From October to April our main focus is on youth. We have Playwright Mentoring. Youth at Risk of which one group is court mandated as a condition of parole. We have three groups here and four groups in North Adams. We have seven groups and just got the money for another court mandated group in North Adams. They really need help up there. There are ten kids in each of those programs so right now we are serving 70 youths. We then take it to high schools where we serve larger communities and kids can ask questions. We also do a show here in April for the parents.

We teach conflict resolution skills. The kids come in and they are angry. They have a single parent, foster homes, whatever. We teach conflict resolution skills week after week after week. They learn so much. We have a couple of kids at Williams now. One girl is a senior at Smith. Another kid graduated from Brown. But we also have kids who just finish High School and go out and are worthwhile members of the community. They get jobs and feel good about themselves and we’re family.

They have been suicidal, are into cutting or drugs, alcohol, whatever. But when they have nine other kids with them that helps them to focus and they feel that they finally have a family. When I sit in on the sessions I am often fighting back tears. We often have long term relations with them as they do it for more than one year.