Directors plan every element of an outdoor production in painstaking detail, from casting to lighting to props. But when Nature enters the scene, even the best-laid plans go awry.
Lightning or smoke from forest fires can cancel a performance. Rain can ruin elaborate costumes; some productions keep stripped-down, weather-hardy versions handy or else send actors out in their street clothes. And wildlife who strut and fret an unanticipated hour on the stage can steal focus from even seasoned actors. During the 2014 season’s Richard III, a resident owl hooted repeatedly just after Richard’s cry, “Out on ye, owls! nothing but songs of death?” Audience laughter was hard to ignore.
Directors like Lisa Peterson, who has directed Henry IV, Part Two (2011) and Othello (2008) in the outdoor theatre as well as this season’s Hamlet, not only roll with nature’s unruliness but relish it. For Peterson, outdoor intrusions keep performances fresh.
“We never know what’s in store for us,” she said in an interview. “There’s a kind of ‘come what may’ attitude to being outside that gives a nice roughness and playfulness to [a production]. It’s ‘look, this will be slightly different every night; maybe I’ll be wearing my costume, maybe I won’t be. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’ So I would say more than inside, where you control everything, it’s fun to know that you’re casting yourself to the elements and you’re going to be improvising. That’s a good way to be. It keeps the electricity going.”
Engaging the “excellent canopy”
Yet another kind of charge comes from acting outside, noted Peterson. In Hamlet’s second act, Danforth Comins tilts his head up to the sky and speaks of “this most excellent canopy the air . . . this brave o’er hanging firmament, this majestical roof, fretted with golden fire.” Both she and Comins treasure that moment. “You’re not pretending,” she said, “you’re actually looking at the thing. And you feel connected to the person who, hundreds of years ago, wrote about the same sky, the same stars.”
She feels connected to her audience as well: “I love the energy of being outside. I feel like the audience is hardy and ready for anything; they’ve got their blankets, they’ve got their [rain ponchos, tarps or trash bags]; they’re just ready for a kind of vigorous experience. And the production has to be vigorous in a theatre this size; you have to make choices that are strong enough that they’ll be [visible]. And that’s great because Shakespeare was writing for performances that were happening outside; he wrote to grab an audience’s attention in a big way.” The scale and shape of her production will prove especially interesting in the context of Artistic Director Bill Rauch’s intimate 2010 Hamlet in the Bowmer, she said—evidence of the ways every shift of approach offers new insight into this famously rich, complex play.
Adjusting for light
The natural shifts of light in the Allen Elizabethan Theatre also helped shape Peterson’s production. In Shakespeare’s time, outdoor performances took place in the afternoon. Her Hamlet would unfold as daylight gradually slipped into darkness. This provided both problems and opportunities.
“I wanted to focus on the fact that Hamlet is a ghost story,” she said. “I wanted it to be scary. But for much of the run, the light will be quite present for the first hour or more. How do you tell a ghost story that way? I don’t want to say too much, but it was a wonderful challenge deciding how we represent the ghost and what the ghost does, how to surprise and thrill our audience without the use of darkness.”
Peterson knew that the mood of the play—and the audience—would shift with the deepening gloom. “That’s one of the things I also enjoy about working outside here,” she said, “that you can feel yourself going into the night. I like knowing that as the darkness descends, things get deeper and a little scarier, and that’s true of the play as well. Watch for what we do right after intermission, something we can only do in the dark.”
Hamlet’s second part plays with ways of invoking, breaking and shaping the dark. “One of the things I love doing [in the Allen] is using [the theatre’s] torches; that’s one of my favorite things at OSF, because they’re very intense, these sources of real flame.” She uses them at the top of the show and during the famous play-within-a-play scene, where they lend a kind of “candlelit coziness” to what she sees as “a valentine to theatre, an expression of the power of theatre.” But their full impact comes as they start to stand out after sunset. They illuminate and cast shadows, said Peterson; “they let people recede into the darkness or lurk in the darkness, that kind of thing.”
The setting sun affects temperature as well as light, something Peterson thinks provides yet another advantage. “It gets cold out there,” she noted. “You come back from intermission and your body has to go taut, because you’re warding something off. It’s cold and the midnight hour is coming and you’re aware in every way of being under the gun. That really helps to drive up the sense of suspense.”
Be on the lookout for birds
Birds, too, are a part of the production, though Peterson didn’t anticipate using them at first. The production’s set designer, Laura Jellinek, kept bringing in little mechanical birds and images of birds, to Peterson's bewilderment. But then she did some research. “If you take all the bird imagery from Hamlet and line it up, there’s a lot of it: lots of caged birds, birds of prey, a cock crowing at the beginning, the whole idea of birds and time. It’s almost like a buried thread. It might be fun for people to hunt for and pay attention to the places where birds exist in our production, because we’ve put in many representations of them.”
And if real winged things decide to present themselves? Peterson said she will welcome them. “If we can get bats early on, in the light, when we’re trying to be scary,” she said, “that would be just great.”