Photo by Carissa Dixon
You have driven a couple hours, found parking, picnicked with hundreds of other theatergoers, climbed the hill and taken your seat in the woods at a natural outdoor amphitheater on a hill. You hear the bright songs of birds, see the soft sway of tree branches and feel the warm sun on your cheeks as the production begins. You drift into the storylands of Shakespeare, Arthur Miller, Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard, and at the end of the show when stage lights fade, you tip your head back to see a navy sky full of bright stars winking above.
This magical place in the middle of the woods lies two hours from Milwaukee in Spring Green and is home to American Players Theatre (APT), a repertory theater company of 37 years that pays tribute to Shakespeare and other classic playwrights at its glorious 1,140 cushioned-seat Up-the-Hill Hill Theatre and introduces new works in its 200-seat indoor Touchstone Theatre. APT puts on 198 performances of nine different plays and attracts more than 110,000 people each season.
APT Artistic Director Brenda DeVita says there are few acting companies in the country with a company of actors dedicated to one theater and an aesthetic. “Our company is a group of actors committed to doing classical plays, which means really intense, poetic big idea plays, dense verbal dialogue, things that you just don’t hear on television every night,” she says. “They are really curious and dedicated to language and how poetry and dense language and great stories are told so that they feel like they happen to us now.”
DeVita balances each season so that audiences have a variety of experiences, as many people stay a weekend in Spring Green to see multiple shows. This year’s productions at Up-the-Hill, which typically features those well-known classical works by great authors, are Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and King Lear, Miller’s Death of a Salesman, Wilde’s An Ideal Husband and Stoppard’s Arcadia. The Touchstone, which DeVita says “explores more intimate, lesser-known works that we think would be on the list of great plays in the future,” are Carlyle Brown’s The African Company Presents Richard III, Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice, Samuel Beckett’s Endgame and Stephen Massicotte’s Mary’s Wedding.
Death of a Salesman, featuring Milwaukee’s Brian Mani as Willy Loman, is described by APT Managing Director Carrie Van Hallgren as astonishing. “Even if you’ve seen the play before, seeing it here under the stars is a different experience entirely. And King Lear is perhaps my favorite play by Shakespeare. We haven’t performed it here since 1999 and I am eager to see the play in the hands of director William Brown with Jonathan Smoots in the title role.”
“I think The Comedy of Errors, if you’ve never seen Shakespeare, is a gateway drug because it’s such a well-crafted, funny, outrageous romp,” DeVita adds. “Arcadia, which I think may be one of the best plays ever written, is a brilliant, intellectual, emotional and theatrical feast. I’m also excited because we’re doing a play about a historical event about The African Company that the world doesn’t know about—even people who love Shakespeare and love theater are absolutely unaware of this story.”
In addition to a full season, APT is mounting its Next Great Stage Campaign to support the engineer-mandated rebuild of its Up-the-Hill stage and backstage, to construct a new rehearsal hall and to renovate other facilities. The campaign is for $7.7 million dollars and DeVita says APT is about 80% of the way there.
“We’re really proud of the fact that we have kind of a scrappy Midwest hard-work ethic outdoor theater. In the 37 years we’ve been here, we have slowly and methodically and very on purpose built our infrastructure. Nothing has ever been frivolous,” DeVita says. “We are working on flexibility, safety and longevity for the rebuild of our Up-the-Hill stage. We don’t want to change what we love about it. It is a theater that’s grown out of the woods in the hillside and we want to maintain that aesthetic, but we want to make it safer, more user-friendly and have more flexibility for sets to be designed in ways that don’t require such restrictions.”
DeVita adds that every outdoor venue has its own personality. “I’ve visited them across the country and I think that what’s unique about APT is that it is an adventure to come here,” she explains. “You actually have to walk about 10 minutes through the woods up the hill, and in that time from your car to the theater, something happens that I’ve never tried to—nor do I want to try—to explain. I just know that I feel it, experience it, and the audiences do too. People deserve to take the time and to let themselves come hang out and experience it.”
For tickets or more information, visit americanplayers.org or call 608-588-2361.
