On tour with The Acting Company 2008

Editor’s Note: Actress Kelley Curran returns to The Acting Company following last year’s national tour of Jane Eyre, giving her a unique perspective and points of comparison. This Season’s Actors’ Tour Journal begins in Fairfield, CT and then back to New York’s Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts before taking us across America to Pasadena, CA presenting Moby Dick Rehearsed and The Tempest.  Kelley portrays Miranda in Shakespeare’s The Tempest and Pip in Moby Dick Rehearsed, adapted by Orson Welles from Herman Melville’s classic novel.  Kelley trained at Fordham University at Lincoln Center and studied at The Public Theater's Shakespeare Lab.

Check regularly and tour with Kelley and The Acting Company 2008.  

 –Gerry Cornez, Acting Company Director of Communications

Tour log: January 25, 2008

The Acting Company's 2008 season tour has officially begun!  After last season's Jane Eyre I'm headed out with Chris Oden, who was Rochester last season, plus several new (to me) actors and two exciting new productions!  We are also fortunate to have Michael Stewart Allen and David Foubert who toured with The Acting Company in 2005 and 2006 respectively.

Fairfield, CT

After weeks of being immersed in rehearsal for The Tempest, we kicked off the tour with a 10am student performance of Moby Dick Rehearsed at the Quick Center for the Performing Arts at Fairfield University in Connecticut.  What a way to start – in front of an engaged and uncensored audience of junior and high school students whose energy and response could not help but fuel ours.  We discovered in the talkback that many of them were aspiring actors, and were particularly curious about exactly how they could become involved with The Acting Company.

In the afternoon, the cast paid a quick visit to the Barnum museum of Bridgeport, CT (a museum we make reference to at the top of Moby) to learn more about the curious life of P.T. Barnum, and a bit about the history of Bridgeport, where we were staying.

The evening was the highlight of the day  -  our official opening of Moby Dick - Rehearsed, performed for a house of Connecticut locals, and many of our Acting Company supporters: Margot Harley, our Producing Artistic Director, several staff members, Board Chairman Earl Weiner, Board President Joan Warburg, Casey Biggs, our director, Jared Aswegan, our costume designer, and a surprise guest, Mary K. Bercaw-Edwards, a Melville scholar who spent an afternoon with us in November, exploring the Mystic Seaport in Connecticut.  The night ended in a toast to a great start of The Acting Company's 35th season!  

Tomorrow it's back to The Tempest in Brooklyn, and Wednesday we head for Pasadena, California to begin the west coast leg of our tour and meet up with our beautiful new tour bus and our returning driver, Wes!

Brooklyn, NY:

After an exciting opening of Moby in Connecticut, we returned to New York for our first public performance of The Tempest at the Brooklyn Center for the Performing Arts at Brooklyn College.  It was a particularly sentimental venue for Peter Macklin (Trinculo/Queequeg), who took acting classes there and graduated from junior high school in that very theater!  My parents also came down from Albany (Hi mom and dad!) to make up two of the 800 member audience.  It was a much larger stage and house than we had been performing in at Baruch and was great preparation for some of the houses we will play on the road. 

We now have two days to pack and then off to California! 

Peter Macklin and Victoire Charles discover The Acting Company truck upon arrival at CalTech's Beckman in Pasadena, CA

Pasadena, CA

After bidding a fond farewell to New York, we arrived in sunny (and slightly warmer) Pasadena, California!!  Luckily, we had a day off to recover from jet-lag as well as taking in the sights of Pasadena.  Timothy (Ferdinand/Ishmael) and I spent the afternoon at the beautiful Norton Simon Museum, musing over a collection of art that spanned 6 centuries, including works by Renoir, Degas, Picasso and Warhol! 

The first performance day was a full one!  We began with a 10am 1-hour educational performance of The Tempest for students ranging from ages 8 -18.  The youngest ones especially enjoyed the clown scenes!   The show was followed by a re-spacing rehearsal.  The Beckman Auditorium at CalTech is a lovely house with a great crew but the stage is smaller than any on which we had performed and the rehearsal paid off enormously for our evening show.  The way the cast and crew adapted efficiently and smoothly to the spacing changes got me very excited for the tour ahead.  I was reminded of the challenges we faced adapting Jane Eyre to the various venues last year; in my opinion, that is one of the most rigorous and rewarding aspects of touring.

After the evening performance, we had an audience talkback followed by an alumni reception where we met fellow Acting Company members who had toured with the company as far back as 1974!  Several audience members returned the following night to see The Tempest, which made for a delightful show. 

The next day, we were greeted with a familiar face – Casey Biggs, the director of Moby Dick Rehearsed, who had organized a party for us in Malibu at the home of his friend and former Juilliard classmate, Leigh McClosky (remember Dallas?).  On our way there we got our first glimpse of the Pacific Ocean.  We were welcomed by Leigh and his wife, Carla, with open arms; their house is breathtaking – filled with light, warmth, and Leigh’s incredible artwork.  Their backyard is an ambling garden atop a hill overlooking the Pacific.  We spent the afternoon catching up with Casey, Leigh, and several acting company alums who had attended Moby Dick the night before.  What a great afternoon and what a thrilling start to the tour: new venues, familiar faces, the Pacific Ocean and the hills of California, which our bus is currently barreling through as we make our way to Medford, Oregon.

Northern California to Medford, OR

Our first long bus drive was a six-hour drive up the west coast for an overnight in Sacramento.  Luckily it was Super Bowl Sunday and, thanks to the amazing amenities on our bus, we were able to gather in the lounge and watch the whole incredible upset (yay Giants!) on television.  Thousands of miles away from New York, traveling along a California highway at 60mph, it felt like a taste of home.  The next day, however, the TV was off as we drove through the breathtaking Siskiyou Mountains and everyone’s eyes were glued to the windows.  We've also managed to use the long travel days to get some understudy and one-hour Tempest work done under the instruction of our wonderful Staff Repertory Director, Jessi Hill.

We arrived in Medford, Oregon in the afternoon, leaving us time for rest, exercise, and dinner before our performance of Moby at the Ginger Rogers Theater, which was a fantastic space for the show – a beautiful stage, incredible acoustics, and a great local crew.  We were welcomed with a gift basket of gourmet sweets from the regional company of Harry and David.  The performance was the first one in which we were able to have all the elements of the sound, lighting and set design fully intact since we began the tour.  There were a few familiar faces in the audience as several of us had friends drive down for the show from Ashland, where they’re currently working at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.  Penny Metropulos, former Associate Artistic Director of OSF and current member of the Acting Company’s Producer’s Advisory Board, also came with Richard Howard, an Acting Company alum.  Now we’re off to Washington State and the Broadway Center for Performing Arts in David Foubert’s hometown of Tacoma.

Tacoma, WA

Five whole days in one place!!  After another beautiful drive through the Pacific Northwest, we arrived in Tacoma for a five day, six-performance run at Tacoma’s Broadway Center for the Performing Arts.  The opportunity for so many performances in one theater is a rare one on tour, and a great one to have so early on!  We began with two performances of Moby, along with our one-hour educational Tempests each morning for the first two mornings, and then transitioned into three fully-staged performances of The Tempest. 

This was also a wonderful opportunity to have the same audiences see our shows in repertory.  The unique experience of falling into different characters, circumstances, and distinctly different text, in front of the same community, and then to have the chance to dialogue afterwards, to me, enriches the experience of live theater.  We also had several company members’ families in our audience in Tacoma, as the city is David Foubert’s hometown.  Michael Allen’s in-laws also made a visit, and Timothy Sekk’s family traveled all the way from Montana to catch the shows!

Beyond the performances, the stay has been a comfortable one too.  Our bus driver, Wes, drove us into Seattle on our first free morning, where we soaked up the sights of the misty city.  The original Starbuck’s coffee shop was a primary point of interest for Michael Allen, as the shop’s name was inspired by the character that Michael portrays in Moby.  Starbuck at Starbuck’s made for a perfect photo op.

We also wandered around the amazing Pike’s Place Market.  It’s difficult to describe what a joy fresh and home-cooked food becomes on tour.  Our hotel had a kitchen in each room so we took advantage of the opportunity.  Kale, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, pears, grapefruits, eggs, bread, fish, coffee – oh the smells and colors!  It was a week full of cooking before and in-between shows.  Well, to be completely honest, it was a week full of cooking primarily for Chris Oden, master chef; I did the coffee brewing and olive-pitting along the way, but I like to think I did it valiantly. 

Longview, WA

A brief, but fantastic stop!  We headed out from Tacoma for Longview, early on Sunday morning as we had a 3 o’clock matinee scheduled.  We arrived in time to wander around the charming town and orient ourselves with the beautiful Columbia Theater for the Performing Arts, a vaudeville house dating back to 1925!  We were told that the theater was actually set to be torn down in the spring of 1980 but the day the wrecking crew was scheduled to tear it down, Mount St. Helen’s exploded.  The contractor was called to the volcanic explosion, leaving the old theater standing where it remains today as a dynamic cultural hub of the community.  Plus we had a great performance of The Tempest there for a nearly full house that included over 200 Longview students.  They were a responsive and delightful audience. 

Having the evening off, we enjoyed some delicious Mexican food and went bowling – not only is the cast talented on stage, they’re great on the lanes.

Robb, Timothy and Michael had the first of a series of educational workshops the next morning with some of the students who had attended the performance the day before.  It was an Acting Clues class, and the students had prepared some of their own monologues.  It was a great way to start the workshops – rewarding for both our company members and the Longview students.

Queen Creek, AZ

We drove into Arizona in the evening, in time to watch the sun set over the desert landscape out the bus window and hop off at the Queen Creek Performing Arts Center for our 7:30 performance of Moby.   The performing arts center is a lovely, large professional venue that is actually part of the high school!  It’s unique in that the theater serves the community with professional touring productions and also functions as a venue for local talent and creativity.   We had a great performance that night to a very receptive Presidents’ Day audience. 

We left Arizona, and its dry and mild air, the next morning, and headed off through the desert towards New Mexico.

Alto, NM

After three hours of driving through the desert, past the White Sands Missle Range, our bus barreled up into the mountains of New Mexico to arrive in the charming town of Ruidoso where we performed The Tempest at The Spencer Theater for the Performing Arts in Alto.  Ruidoso is filled with eccentric local shops and restaurants that we were able to amble through in the afternoon before heading over to Alto for our performance.  The venue was gorgeous.  Surrounded by nothing but ascending, snow covered mountain peaks, The Spencer stood out like a diamond in the wilderness. The inside lived up to its facade: a 500 seat theater that retained an incredible intimacy, a fantastic local crew, and private dressing rooms for the ladies (yes, there are some perks to being the only two women in an acting troupe full of men)!  There, before a full house of locals, and students who had come from as far away as Roswell to catch the performance, our Tempest came joyfully alive.  

Albuquerque, NM

Two performances of The Tempest in a row!  Another small pleasure of touring in repertory is the opportunity to perform the same play one night after the next, even if it’s in a very different space.  What a grand hall it is – over 1500 seats and with acoustics so fantastic our voices filled the hall almost effortlessly.  We performed to another full house, which is something I’ve been thrilled to discover on this tour, that night after night, town after town, people have been arriving in multitudes to see Shakespeare and the Acting Company and that has been inspiring. 

The show went wonderfully that night, and motivated us for our early morning performance of our 1-hour educational Tempest to another full house, this time composed of 6 through 18-year olds.   Many of the students were familiar with the play.  Two classes had been studying The Tempest with Acting Company teaching artist, and former company member from 2006 and 2007, Matt Steiner.  All week they had been playing with the language and participating in scene work, so when the time came for our performance, they were a very eager audience.

Performing for such large and thoughtful houses in Albuquerque was thrilling! 

Unpredictable things occur all the time in the theater; it is one of the most thrilling aspects of LIVE performance.  I know that unpredictable things can happen especially on tour, when you’re moving from venue to venue, night after night, when no two places are alike.  But I’ve never had an experience quite like the one we had in Santa Fe. 

I had pictured Santa Fe as a sunny, arid, desert town.  Little did I know, the city sits high atop the mountains of New Mexico and, in the winter, the air is crisp and cold and remnants of previous snowfalls cover the ground.   We had the afternoon to wander around the beautiful downtown area, to soak up the architecture, shops and galleries, and seek out authentic New Mexican fare before the performance.  As we arrived at the theater for our 7:30 pm Moby, it began to snow. 

The Lensic Performing Arts Center in downtown Santa Fe is a beautiful, vaudeville house with an interior as breathtaking as its façade.  All of our technical elements were in place, the house had been sold to capacity, and the company was warming up on stage in great anticipation of performing in such a beautiful venue.  Suddenly, at 7 pm, there was a power outage in downtown Santa Fe, and the lights went off in the theater. 

Cast and crew alike waited backstage for over an hour, in hopes that the power would be restored and the show could go on.  Our loyal audience of 500 all squeezed into the lobby and endured the wait along with us.  I have never experienced anything like it, nor had our company, or any of the local crew.   We were moved by the audiences’ fortitude and eagerness.  Like a band of guerrilla actors we wanted to grab our costumes and flashlights and charge onto the stage to perform our show! But in this age of liabilities, the idea was simply an impossible.  To the deep, deep disappointment of the cast, crew, the staff of the Lensic, and the audience, at 8 o’clock, the show was called.  We got out of costume, saddened and dismayed, and headed back onto our bus. 

I think I can speak on behalf of the company when I say to the people at The Lensic and the community of Santa Fe, we wish so deeply that we could have performed, and we thank you so, so much for inviting us to your beautiful space, and your beautiful city.  I only hope that the company will be able to return in future seasons and enjoy the opportunity that unfortunately and unforeseeably we could not.    

The next morning, we left beautiful and snowy Santa Fe, wishing we could have stayed to perform. 

Raton, NM

Our next performance of The Tempest was in the beautiful Shuler Theater of Raton, New Mexico.  Built in 1915, it’s a genuine vaudeville house complete with rumors of spirits that haunt the old space, though I can’t say I encountered any myself.  I imagine The Shuler is the oldest theater we will have the opportunity to perform in over the course of the entire tour.  The community of Raton came out to fill the house and made for a wonderful audience.  The space was slightly too small to allow for our full set, but with a brief restaging rehearsal the show went off without a hitch. 

We drove out of New Mexico the next morning, and headed on our way towards Colorado. 

Fort Collins, CO

Fort Collins, CO was one of the warmest and most hospitable communities I’ve encountered in my one and a half years of touring experience!  We had three days and two performances at The Lincoln Center performing arts venue.  It was our first performance of Moby since the cancelled show in Santa Fe, and we had a great time plunging into the play in such a large and beautiful venue.  We also had two 1-hour Tempests in the same theater the next morning for over 1,500 9^th graders from the Fort Collins area.  And what a morning that was with 1,100 14-year olds in one theater!

After our educational shows we had the night and the following day off and Fort Collins was a beautiful location in which to spend it.  The weather was clear, sunny and mild and the city was a walk-able one filled with all sorts of unique local shops, galleries, and restaurants.  Some of us stretched our legs on a hike up Horsetooth Mountain while others explored the town.  In the afternoon, we toured the New Belgium Brewery where we met several locals who led us to the best places for dining and entertainment in Fort Collins.  We went to the Choice City Deli and Butcher Shop for lunch, which rivals any New York City Deli I’ve ever been to.

Thank you to Russ, Mike, Chad, Miller, Doug, and the great people of Fort Collins for all their hospitality.  We hate to leave, but it is time to head on upwards to Wyoming and our 8^th state on the tour!

Cheyenne, WY

Just an hour after leaving Fort Collins, we arrived at the historic Hitching Post Inn of Cheyenne, Wyoming and that night performed The Tempest to a nearly sold out house at the Cheyenne Civic Center of Laramie County Community College.   The venue is beautiful and enormous, all wood from floor to ceiling with incredible acoustics. The audience included LCC Drama department students, who, earlier that day, had participated in a Building a Character’s Body for Shakespeare workshop led by our Staff Repertory Director, Jessi Hill.  We met with the students after the show who were really eager to learn how each of us readies our voice and body for performance.  They were also curious about the challenges we face when adapting our warm-ups from venue to venue given the varying size of the spaces we’re called upon to fill.   They were a fantastic group of students and we really enjoyed our time with them.

Looking back I can hardly believe it’s been a month already.  Life on the road is flying by as we take in the sights of the bigger cities, meet the people of the smaller towns and, performance after performance, face new challenges and make new discoveries about ourselves, our shows and our audiences.

Now, it’s onward and eastward to the second month of the tour as we head into the Midwest, the great cornhusker state of Nebraska, and one time-zone closer to our home state of New York!! 

Seward, NE:

It was here in Seward that we experienced our first understudy performance as a company.  We had had two days off in Denver, CO and unfortunately Chris injured his back and didn’t recover before our performance in Nebraska.  One of the unique things about this company is that we all understudy each other so that we function are ready to step into various roles if called upon to do so.  With only two days notice and a brief on-stage rehearsal, Jay played an extra role in Moby Dick at the Seward High School Auditorium and he did so wonderfully.  It is a strange, almost foreign feeling to be missing a member of our company but given the circumstances, the show went off without a hitch.  It was a wonderful audience – a nearly full house of adults and students from Concordia University where we had done an Acting Clues and Shakespeare Workshop earlier that day.  

Chickasha, OK:

We’ve had three days here in Chickasha and three performances of our one hour Tempest for groups of students in both Chickasha and Oklahoma City.  We also performed a fully staged, full length Tempest at the Davis-Waldorf Performing Arts Center.   The audiences here have been very responsive.  We’ve been performing at several universities and college campuses recently, and it has been especially exciting for me to see younger audiences become so wrapped up in a story whose protagonist is an older man reflecting back on his life and his decisions.  It is exciting to see students find something in this man’s journey that resonates for them – a great testament to the ability of Shakespeare to transcend time and age.  

Although the scenery on our long drives has gotten somewhat more, well, flat, I have truly been enjoying our performances in these small but vibrant college towns.  

We move northward to Wisconsin now, and make our way to our 13^th state of the tour!

Platteville, WI:

Our journey north to Platteville brought colder temperatures and the snow covered plains of the Midwest as we drove through Missouri and into Iowa, where we slept while performing in Wisconsin with Illinois somewhere between the two!.  On our 20-minute drive to our performance of The Tempest, we actually passed through three states! 

The Platteville Performing Arts Center on the campus of the University of Wisconsin is a lovely, intimate theater of about 500. Timothy and I participated in a pre-show discussion with audience members, which was a change from the more typical full-cast post-show discussions held at other venues.  We got to meet the professors heading the Theater Department and answered audience questions about The Acting Company, our production, our own personal experience of life on the road and how our plays are being received across the country.  It was lovely to get to know a little of the audience we would be performing to before the show and to hear about their interests in the play.  The show went very well that night, the venue was a great space for it and the crowd was delightful. 

Now we’re off, crossing into a new time zone, and following the snowstorm into Ohio.

Sandusky, OH:

We arrived in Sandusky the day after a 20 inch snow storm but – snow or no snow – we were greeted by an audience of almost 1500 people at the State Theater of Sandusky, a beautiful old theater at the edge of Lake Erie.  This performance of The Tempest was sponsored by a local Sandusky bank that gave away all the tickets to the public for free!  The mission of The Acting Company is to bring theater to places across America that have little or no access to live performance. The Bank and The Acting Company joined together to make sure that happened.

The audience was our most diverse thus far and one of our more vocal!  When, in the play, Prospero finally gives Miranda’s hand to Prince Ferdinand, a woman in the audience shouted out a joyful, “Yaaay!” that rang through the whole theater.  It reminded me of our performance in Chickasha, OK, when Ferdinand was struggling with the logs he’s forced to pile up at the top of Act II and an audience member yelled out, “Come on! You can do it, Ferdinand!”  It’s a pleasure to play for such joyful and responsive crowds!

Wausau, WI:

We were back in Wisconsin for a night, performing The Tempest at The Grand Theater in Wausau and grand is certainly an appropriate name. It is a large, ornate performing arts venue with 1100 seats.  The backstage is just as spacious. I nearly got lost wandering around looking for the green room and dressing rooms.  Adjusting to the backstage space is a huge part of the touring experience. We have to hop off the bus and make ourselves as familiar as we can with the layout of the theater in a very short amount of time so we know how best to navigate it during the performance.  The backstage areas vary in size and layout.  Luckily, our fantastic crew arrives ahead of us to load in the set, costumes, props and all the technical equipment.  By the time we get to the theater, they’ve encountered all the ins and outs of the venue – on and off stage – and help us adjust to the space. 

Crystal Lake, IL:

We crossed back into Illinois to perform Moby at the Raue Center for the Arts in Crystal Lake.  The walls on the inside of the theater were constructed to look like the landscape of a small Southwestern town, and the ceiling was a deep blue sprinkled with twinkling lights, which made us feel we were in downtown Santa Fe in the evening.   I was curious as to how our seafaring play would be seen in this environment but the stars on the ceiling actually added a little magic to the night scenes in Moby.  There was a great local crew at the venue, and all-in-all, it ended up being a pretty fantastic theater for our Moby.   

Now it’s back to Ohio for a Tempest in Columbus!

Columbus, OH:

Perhaps I’m being repetitive when I describe so many of the theaters as “beautiful,” but each space has its own charm and eccentricities.  The Southern Theater in Columbus, however, is simply stunning.  Built in 1896, it has an arching golden proscenium and an orchestra, mezzanine, first and second balconies made up of 1500 royal blue velvet seats.  Backstage, the hard wood floors and exposed brick echo its history; a spectacular setting in which to perform The Tempest.

The show went wonderfully.  The audience was very responsive audience and I had an old friend travel from Dayton to catch the performance.   The city itself is lovely and perfectly walk-able, with an abundance of restaurants and shops.  My favorite place was the Northern Market, an indoor market of specialty foods, coffees, wines and fresh produce, reminding me of Pike’s Place in Seattle. 

We’re on our way now to Muncie, Indiana, which will be the first repeat tour stop for me from last year!  I’m curious to discover how familiar it might feel. 

Muncie, IN:

Over a year ago I was in this very town, pirouetting across the same stage of Emens Auditorium at Ball State University as Adele in Jane Eyre.  This time around, I was climbing ladders and leaping off wooden boxes as Pip in Moby.  It’s actually a thrilling juxtaposition of the foreign and familiar to be back in the same place with an entirely new company of people, and an entirely different performance ahead of me.   

I remembered the theater immediately, because Emens Auditorium is enormous - a cavernous 3,000 seat house with massive wing and fly space backstage.   Looking out on all that open space from the stage, it was not difficult to imagine the great vastness of the ocean, and just how diminutive a little whale ship must seem among the immense deep of the sea.

We drive briefly out of the Midwest tomorrow for another Moby, this time in Parkersburg, West Virginia.

Parkersburg, WV:

This was a really fantastic tour stop.  We performed in a small auditorium at West Virginia University that the local crew and ours had transformed into a theater just for our show.  In order to fit our set into the space, the venue actually built a temporary addition to their stage! And they set up a few hundred folding chairs for what was an intimate and warm audience, which included the president of the University and many of his guests.  It was one of the more exciting venues to perform Moby in because the openness of the backstage area that was revealed to the audience actually heightened the theatrically of the “Rehearsed” part of Orson Welles’ adaptation.  

The show went really well and we had a very thoughtful post-show talkback.  One audience member had seen our production of The Tempest in Columbus, Ohio, and drove all the way to Parkersburg in order to see us perform Moby!  She said she was thrilled to see us transform into a whole other set of roles – I was so thrilled she found it worth the drive!

Bloomington, IN:

Once more unto the Midwest, dear friends, once more.   We crossed back into Indiana for what would be our third and final time on tour for a performance at the Indiana University Auditorium in Bloomington.  The theater was a drastic change from our last venue in Parkersburg as it was an enormous old house with 3,200 seats! The wonderful acoustics, though, helped the venue feel more intimate than it appeared.   We performed The Tempest and had another great talkback after the show, giving us an opportunity to know the IU community. 

We’re onto Cincinnati, Ohio.

Cincinnati, OH:

I was thrilled to be back in the Aronoff Center to perform Moby Dick Rehearsed.  We performed Jane Eyre here last year and had one of the best shows of our entire run.  In fact, our performance last season won Cincinnati’s 2007 Acclaim Award for Best Touring Production (Cincinnati’s own version of the Tony Award).  The Jarson-Kaplan Theater is the perfect venue for a straight play:  a 500 seat theater, with two balconies, structured in such a way that there isn’t a bad seat in the house. And the theater scene in Cincinnati is a thriving one.  We had a full house and, from what I could tell, there were many Cincinnati actors and theater artists in the audience.  It was wonderful having such a supportive crowd.

After the show, I ran into an audience member outside the theater who was disappointed that we were leaving Cincinnati so soon.  He said he could’ve seen the show 20 more times.  I would have loved to stay, too!  But the tour continues south now, out of the Midwest, and we have a mini-break from performing – 2 days off in Raleigh, North Carolina to rest and rejuvenate!

Raleigh, NC:

After a lovely respite, and lots of delicious North Carolina Barbeque in Michael Stewart Allen’s home state, it was time again to perform Moby at the Stewart Theater of NCSU.  The theater was another great venue.  The house is about 500 seats and is structured somewhat similarly to Baruch Performing Arts Center where we began and where we will do our Off-Broadway run when we return to New York in May.   It was nice to be back in a house where the audience was eye-level and upward to the stage, rather than a more traditional proscenium where they are below at orchestra level. 

Michael Allen felt a bit conflicted about performing at NC State, the rival to his alma mater of Chapel Hill!  All went very well, thanks to a great local crew and warm audience.  Our first show back after a little break has revved us up for the next leg of the tour which begins on Thursday night in beautiful West Palm Beach, Florida!!  And, don’t worry Mom and Dad; I’ve packed my sun block!

West Palm Beach, Florida:

We arrived in glorious West Palm Beach to perform at the Kravis Center, an enormous five-theater performing arts venue downtown. Over our four-day stay, we performed both Moby and The Tempest to wonderfully receptive audiences.  One of the ushers said that our Moby was the best show she’s seen at the Kravis in all her years here!  

We loved spending a few days in the same theater and to have audiences see both shows. I talked to some after the show who had remembered Chris and me from last year’s production of Jane Eyre.  I found it so exciting that they were still eager to talk about a show that they had seen nearly a year ago and to hear what had resonated with them from each different story.

We had great free time during the day to relish the warm weather and the sandy beaches.  We also got a little break from hotel-life as we split up and rented vacation homes for our stay – grocery store trips, cooking, homemade dinners – all those wonderful, simple home comforts we’ve been missing!  Best of all, after our Sunday matinee of The Tempest, Victoire even hosted a delicious fish fry for us all!

We also received a letter while we were in West Palm Beach from a woman who had seen Moby in Muncie, Indiana.  She is an avid fan of the novel and wrote us one of the most moving letters I’ve ever read. It reminded me how urgent, vital and powerful the arts are in every community and how The Acting Company keeps that alive.  Thank you, Jan for your letter!  You stirred our spirits and moved us to tears, too!

On our last day, we performed two educational Tempests to local students and fielded some great questions about approaching Shakespeare’s text and what it takes to pursue a career in the arts.  It was an inspiring way to bid a fond farewell to West Palm.

Fairfax, VA:

I was excited to be back at the George Mason University Center for the Arts, another venue where we performed last year.  The theater is a great supporter of the Acting Company and consistently books its productuions.  In fact, while we were there, they were already advertising for next season’s Henry V and The Spy!  The Center is a large 1900 seat house with really great acoustics, which make it feel more intimate than it appears.  

We performed both Tempest and Moby at this venue, not only to George Mason students who attended one of our workshops, but also to loyal acting company fans who return to each show, each season.   Seth, Jessi, Timothy and I were able to participate in pre-show discussions with the audience who was interested in the challenges of putting on two entirely different shows, both technically and as actors switching roles night after night.   The giant house was nearly full each night, and it was thrilling to perform for such avid fans of the Company. 

We were fortunate to have some time off in Fairfax, so we hopped on the metro into Washington DC where we visited the Capitol, Smithsonian, Botanic Gardens, Jefferson Memorial,  some great restaurants, and of course, the Folger Shakespeare Library.  Many of us were able to see different plays on our night off at The Folger, the Woolly Mammoth, the Roundhouse and Arena Stage theaters.  Though I had been to D.C. before, I’d never had the opportunity to see theater there and was truly impressed, not just by the quality of work but by the sheer amount of it. Theater is thriving in DC and it seems like a wonderful town in which to work, especially on the classics. 

Duxbury, MA:

After a 12-hour ride on the bus, our longest of the whole tour, we arrived in Plymouth, Massachusetts!  We were back in the Northeast for two performances of Moby in Duxbury.  I was so excited to arrive back in my home region of the country; while for other’s it was an entirely new experience. Robb, fresh from California, has never explored the Northeast at all.  Plymouth is a lovely town to wander around in requiring, of course, a trip to the famous rock and the Mayflower II.

Our performances of Moby at the Duxbury Performing Arts Center, were part of a Herman Melville Festival going on in the area.  In fact, two women who attended our show were part of a local book club that is planning to read Moby Dick next month.  They had seen last year’s production of Jane Eyre, and were thrilled that the Acting Company brought back an adaptation of Moby.

Queens, NY:

Home again, home again!  We briefly returned to New York!!  I could hardly believe it when our big tour bus crossed the Harlem River into Manhattan.  We had four performances of The Tempest scheduled over two days at Queens Theater in the Park in Flushing.  Though we were in competition with the New York Mets next door at Shea Stadium, we still had fairly full houses of very thoughtful audiences. The best part was that our director, Davis McCallum, was able to attend and see The Tempest for the first time since we left New York at the end of January!  After two months on the road, to be able to bring a show back to our director is a thrilling and rare opportunity.  Davis not only shed light on the progress of our production but also inspired new and further exploration of this seemingly infinite play for our last few weeks on tour. 

While in Queens, we also had the chance to perform our 1 hour version of the Tempest for an exceptional student audience!  I think after our New York visit we will be able to return to the last few weeks of tour with a renewed vigor for the work we have been doing all across this enormous country.  

We climb back on the bus, our home away from home, and head to New Hampshire.

Keene, NH:

We arrived in Keene for an evening performance of Moby at The Colonial Theatre.  The town is charming with several local shops and restaurants, including Miranda’s Veranda (which I was particularly thrilled to find).  The theater is an older house with a proud history of musicians and artists who have performed there.  We also had a performance of Moby the next morning for a fantastic group of high school students.  Later that day some of our company members led a workshop in movement for a class of the students who had seen our performance and who were concentrating in drama.  After seeing our show, the students were eager to learn about our movement training as a group and individuals.  It was a great workshop! 

Onward now to cover the fourth and final corner of the country on the tour!  

Orono, ME:

We had the pleasure of performing at the Maine Maritime Academy in Castine, Maine!  Originally, the company was booked at the Maine Performing Arts Center in Orono, however, the theater is undergoing major renovations and has relocated its performance series to various other venues throughout the area.  Ours was at the Delano Auditorium, which was not larger enough for our entire set.  We held a restaging rehearsal before the performance to adapt our production to its newly trimmed design.  I believe that having to be alert to quick changes and new blocking in the moment adds a heightened level of reality to the “rehearsed” aspect of this adaptation.

The highlight of this specific performance was performing for an audience made up of essentially the people we were portraying - sailors, captains and mates alike!  They were an audience with a deep history and knowledge of many of the seafaring terms in the play and novel of Moby Dick.  The idea of that was, of course, quite intimidating at first however, once the show began, they proved to be the most generous, engaged audience we have had so far.  One man, leaving the theater was overheard saying, “I had a captain just like Ahab once!”  It was incredible to hear.  The day after our performance we even received a letter from Captain Sam Teel, a professor of navigation at Maine Maritime, expressing how impressed he was by the reality of the acting in portraying seafarers, especially in front of such a knowledgeable audience.  He extended to us a “Bravo Zulu” – a saying from the sailing profession known to mean “good job” or “good work.”  It was just as exciting for us, as I hope it was for our audience!

Portland, ME:

Another beautiful stop in Maine!  We arrived in Portland in time to seek out fresh seafood before our evening performance of Moby, which is exactly what we did at J’s Oyster House – delicious!  Downtown Portland is a charming and lively area; its cobblestone streets are filled with unique shops, bookstores, and pubs.  It was great having some time to explore.   

Our show that night was at the beautiful Merrill Auditorium.  Our performance was part of a Melville Festival going on in Portland.   Jessi, Seth, Timothy and Michael participated in a pre-show discussion with several audience members and avid fans of the novel.  Many questions were posed about our stage adaptation, particularly how Welles chose to explore the themes of revenge and racism using conventions of the theater. 

Needless to say, with the majority of audience members so deeply familiar with the novel and being so attuned and responsive to the portrayal of the various chapters of the story, the show felt great.  The next day, as we were exploring local lighthouses and seeking out breakfast, we ran into several people who had seen the show, and wanted to express their appreciation of the performance and depiction of some of their favorite characters.  I hate to leave Maine! Performing here, for communities with such a deep connection to the history of the story we’re telling, has been inspiring.   

Burlington, VT:

Burlington, Vermont and the Flynn Theater: one of my absolute favorite stops on tour last year!  I was thrilled to be back in town performing in this beautiful, old house!   As it is Vermont’s largest city and home to UVM, the town has a thriving, active arts community.   That was made particularly clear when the 1,400 seat Flynn was filled for our performance of The Tempest!   It was our largest audience to date for either show. The presenter at the Flynn glowed when he said he thought even Shakespeare himself would be thrilled that on a Friday night in Burlington, VT, over a thousand people would be attending one of his plays nearly 400 years after it had been written.

It was a special performance for me too, as three of those audience members were my family members – my mom, dad, and little brother (who was seeing the show for the first time).   In the audience were also several local artists and residents who had participated in an Acting Clues workshop with Timothy, Michael, and Robb earlier in the day.   They all made for an incredible audience and an exciting performance of The Tempest after almost a week of only Moby.   Our crew also had a great experience here as the local crew of the Flynn was an incredibly efficient, capable, and fun.

It was here, too, that we had our first full day off, without traveling, since Fairfax, Virginia.  We were able to spend the day hiking, walking the waterfront of Lake Champlain, and sampling the coffee and fare of the delicious restaurants in town.  Now we drive on through the Berkshires to the beautiful mountain town of Great Barrington, Massachusetts for another Tempest. 

 

Thanks for taking this tour with us!

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To read last year's Tour Journal by Amy Landon, January - May, 2007

Click HERE