THEATER: Required Readings

A staged reading of a new play—actors glancing at hand-held scripts and a couple of folding chairs serving as the set—might not be the most glamorous evening at the theater. But occasionally, this season’s staged reading becomes next season’s hit. Case in point: Barrington Stage Company’s Tony Award-winning The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, which began life as a workshop performance at BSC’s Stage 2 in Sheffield, Massachusetts, in February 2004.

Berkshire Playwrights Lab has brought new attention to the form by doing nothing but staged readings the last three summers, using the historic Mahaiwe Performing Arts Center in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, as its venue; Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Massachusetts, test-drives new plays during its annual Studio Festival of Plays, a two-day marathon in early September; and Williamstown Theatre Festival (WTF) in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and Berkshire Theatre Festival (BTF) in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, provide informal staged readings to the public every Friday throughout their seasons: WTF with its Fridays@3 and BTF with its Friday Series, with occasional talks with directors or designers sprinkled into the mix.

Barrington Stage Company (BSC), now in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, also frequently offers new musicals through its Musical Theatre Lab, as a way of hopefully launching the next, say, Spelling Bee. Set in a high school, with music and lyrics by William Finn, the musical made its home-grown debut in front of an audience in the cafeteria of a school in Sheffield in the winter of 2003-2004; received its world premiere at Barrington Stage Company the next summer; opened off-Broadway in January 2005; and finally landed on Broadway, where it gave its regards 1,136 times and received six Tony nominations, garnering two awards. Not too shabby.

Spelling Bee is not the only success story. Other more modest tales of plays advancing to fully staged productions from area theaters abound, including Barrington Stage Company’s more recent surprise hit, Freud’s Last Session, a two-hander by Mark St. Germain that first debuted as a Labor Day weekend reading in 2008 and then went on to a highly successful 2009 staging. After several “back-by-popular-demand” runs, including this summer’s revival at Stage 2 (June 22-July 3), with Mark H. Dold as C.S. Lewis and Martin Rayner as Sigmund Freud reprising their roles, the play will move to New York, having earned its shot at the big time. And from there, who knows? Another St. Germain play, The Best of Enemies, will be given a staged reading later this summer, September 4 and 5, no doubt hoping to find lightning in a bottle one more time.

Just a little further north, WTF’s Fridays@3 series recently launched The Good Negro, a play by Tracey Scott Wilson, which went from staged reading in Williamstown to the Public Theater in New York to productions around the country. Last year’s reading of Samuel J. and K. by Mat Smart has led to a world premiere at WTF’s Nikos Stage this summer (July 8-18), directed by WTF’s artistic associate Justin Waldman, who also happens to run the very successful play-reading series. Other examples of Fridays@3 plays growing up to become full productions include last year’s Nikos-hosted Knickerbocker by Jonathan Marc Sherman and What is the Cause of Thunder? by Noah Haidle, both of which began as staged readings up in Williamstown.

 “It’s a sneak peak of what you might see for real,” says Waldman from WTF’s New York offices. “A way to get talented writers to come up here if it’s more of a developmental project that’s going toward a production … you’re not just doing this to gaze at your navel. You’re looking at it seriously for production.”

Plays and playwrights face almost the same steep climb to get a play performed as a staged reading as they do getting one produced. To select plays for six or so readings each season, Waldman and his colleagues must first cull hundreds of submissions through the year, narrowing them down to about ten possibilities. Considerations such as casting (i.e. which actors will be around and willing to participate) whittle the list down even further. One of the slots is committed to a reading of a screenplay, courtesy of Williamstown Film Festival’s artistic director Steve Lawson, a longtime associate of the theater festival; another slot goes to the winner of the L. Arnold Weissberger award for playwriting, whereby the recipient receives $10,000, has his or her play published by Samuel French, and gets a staged reading at WTF’s Fridays@3. That leaves roughly four more plays to fill the remaining slots; the readings are given at the Paresky Center, the new student center at Williams College, a venue that Waldman says helps give the readings an appropriately informal feel: less like a performance and more like improvisation.

Part of the challenge of doing any reading, or at least doing them well, says Julianne Boyd, artistic director at Barrington Stage, is finding the money—money that theaters don’t often have to spare. “I love to do staged readings,” says Boyd, during a busy morning when both an audition for The Crucible and an early Sweeney Todd rehearsal await her, “when time and money permit.” At BSC, actors are typically paid for doing staged readings; in fact, if rehearsals extend beyond a certain time limit, theaters are required to compensate the actors. 

Boyd says she has three incarnations of staged readings: one, a cold reading for herself, the playwright, and maybe a few others, with actors who are available and volunteer their time; two, a more formal rehearsed reading, where she will cast and pay actors for their time, transportation, and lodging; and three, a workshop version of the piece, which BSC will often do for musicals in their embryonic stage, at a greater cost than doing a straight play. The musical Pool Boy was workshopped last summer; this season it gets a full production (July 13-August 8) as part of the Musical Theatre Lab. “With a cast of seven or eight actors, Pool Boy cost us three thousand dollars,” says Boyd. “We ran it for one or two nights, with a suggested donation price, and we maybe made back fifteen hundred.”

For years now, Shakespeare & Company has been devoting one of the last days of its summer season to the Studio Festival of Plays, an entire day of staged readings; this year, given the demand and desire to develop new work, the company has expanded its sixteenth annual impromptu festival to two days.

On September 6 and 7, theatergoers can hang out from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. and experience a virtual festival of new plays for a suggested donation price of $16 per show or one larger donation for a daylong pass. As many as five plays a day are performed in the new 198-seat Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre, a setting intimate enough to retain that gather-around-the-campfire feel. Here, too, audiences might well be getting a sneak peak of a play they’ll see down the road, as was the case with The Goatwoman of Corvis County by Christine Whitley, which was first heard at one of these readings and, due to the positive response from audience members, ended up being the first play ever to be mounted at the Bernstein when the theater opened in 2008.

“A common misconception about Shakespeare & Company is that we only do Shakespeare,” says associate communications director Jeremy Goodwin, “when, in fact, part of our mission has always been to develop new, more contemporary work.” And Tony Simotes, Shakespeare & Company’s new artistic director, has an eye not only on continuing this developmental work, but on expanding it. Berkshire playwright Joan Ackermann’s Ice Glen and this year’s The Taster (July 29-September 4) have found a hospitable home at Shakespeare & Company.

Kate Maguire, artistic director at BTF, is looking for good new plays, too, not just for the entertainment of an appreciative audience coming to her Friday Series, but also as a way to discover new plays that BTF might want to develop and produce; this was the case with Pageant Play, a new offering by Matthew Wilkas and Mark Setlock that first received a staged reading in 2007 and then found its way to the Unicorn Theatre stage in 2008. For Maguire, as for the others, it is mostly a labor of love—another duty added to her never-ending to-do list. “I have ten plays on my table right now that I’ve yet to read,” she says. And ten to fifteen new plays often arrive in the mail every week, she adds. “But what I’ve come to accept,” she says, “is that it’s up to me to ultimately pick the plays for the theater. [I’m the one] who understands our audience, so readings are also my responsibility.”

Given that BTF stages around ten plays each summer, most of these submissions will never get a full production, at least not at BTF, but, she says, they’re all contenders. “Any one of these plays we could decide to move forward on. On the other hand, if you put that kind of pressure on a play, you wind up in a different world … there’s an informality to it, but there’s also an idea that this piece could move.”

Admission to staged readings is typically either free or for a suggested donation, quite a bargain when you consider that most successful plays get their first outing in front of an audience as a staged reading or a workshop performance. And while playwrights (and audiences, too) are naturally the beneficiaries of this process, most actors enjoy participating as well, flexing their acting muscles one more time before leaving the green summer pastures of the Berkshires.

  “People are really pumped to do these great new plays,” says Waldman. “It’s a pretty low-key day, a couple hours of rehearsal and then a performance.” Waldman theorizes that one of the reasons readings often lead to such surprising and superlative performances is because of “pure abject terror. You got to get out there and dance as fast as you can, and so you pull out all your tricks. You get the most talented people in a room and you just go.” [JULY 2010]

Chris Newbound’s plays-in-progress have received staged readings at Main Street Stage, Berkshire Playwrights Lab, and Berkshire Theatre Festival.

Barrington Stage Company
30 Union St.
Pittsfield, Mass.
413.236.8888

Berkshire Playwrights Lab
Great Barrington, Mass.
413.528.2544

Berkshire Theatre Festival
Friday Series, held at 2
6 East St./Route 7
Stockbridge, Mass.
413.298.5576

Shakespeare & Company
70 Kemble St.
Lenox, Mass.
413.637.3353

Williamstown Theatre Festival
Fridays@3, held at 3
1000 Main St./Route 2
Williamstown, Mass.
413.597.3400