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“Two planks and a passion” is how Christopher Selbie describes the kind of theater he believes in–theater that emphasizes the art of acting, the imagination of the actor, and the imagination of the viewer. Four years ago Selbie formed the Compass Theatre Company with a few friends and a measly $300. Today he and Compass have taken over the Denver Civic Theatre and are redefining the place–along with handling its five-figure debt.
In an attempt to keep the building active and pay its mortgage, Selbie has brought in the Industrial Arts Theatre Company to occupy the small Dorie Theatre with its characteristically lively small productions. Industrial Arts has also begun an experimental series of new plays called “Construction Zone” that runs Tuesdays and Wednesdays at the Civic. Dance concerts and festivals fall between the plays, and Compass Academy theater education classes are scheduled at six-week intervals. And a significant collaboration with the University of Colorado-Denver will bring college classes to the Civic and give Compass Academy teachers adjunct faculty status at the university.
Selbie doesn’t want to bring in directors from New York or L.A. There’s enough talent in this town, he says. But Denver’s small theater companies do have to define themselves, Selbie adds, and he clearly defines Compass as a classical-theater company.
“What is a play?” he asks. “Some people on a stage lying effectively in public. It’s very primal storytelling, like sitting around the campfire and recounting the hunt. If you choose special effects [a la Miss Saigon], it becomes effect after effect, and you teach people to want that. It is a dangerous path.”
Compass productions, by contrast, are marked by spare, graceful production values. A tall platform with stairs can become a castle keep, a balcony for a Juliet or the woods at midnight. The mind’s eye of the viewer is as much a part of the play as the actors themselves. And, of course, “the play’s the thing,” not the scenery.
Meanwhile, the shows must go on. A lot of them. Compass is now in repertory with three thematically related plays: Macbeth, Richard III and Henry VI. Repertory is a risky thing for a small, underfunded theater company to undertake. For one thing, with the exception of the Colorado Shakespeare Festival in Boulder, local audiences haven’t been trained to attend repertory. They are far more used to long runs of a single play or, at the Denver Center Theatre Company, simultaneous productions to choose from.
“You need to open as many of the plays as soon as possible,” says Selbie of some of the complications surrounding repertory. “The same body of actors has to absorb a number of different styles in a short space of time. You have to find a way of making a lighting design with a limited amount of equipment that will suit the different plays without having to rerig and refocus every time.”
Most American actors aren’t classically trained, and a repertory run, says Selbie, keeps them on their toes. Mia Todd, who plays Lady MacDuff in Macbeth and Lady Anne in Richard III, finds the split-focus problem a major challenge. But she says it has always been her goal to work in classical rep with a company of actors who grow together.
Rep requires tremendous stamina from the players and the audience, especially when double performances are in order–Compass’s Nicholas Nickleby a few years ago was a two-parter that took a whole day (or two separate evenings) to see. Next fall, Compass will return to the form with I, Claudius, a two-part play written by Selbie from the Robert Graves novel.
But tough as it might be physically, rep is great training for a company. Selbie has already learned that in order to make rep work, you have to give lots of performances, so he’s extending the Shakespeare run by three weeks. There is an audience for classical theater in Denver, he says. And by the look of the performances I attended, which had been put on without the benefit of advertising or reviews, he’s right.
One of the great things about rep is its potential for developing a theme. Macbeth, one of Shakespeare’s later, greater plays, has been done twice before this season in Denver and might seem like an odd choice here. But it makes perfect sense in relation to the two other plays. Macbeth and Richard III both describe the rise and fall of a tyrant and the curse of the damned by the damned. Henry VI describes the civil war and the events leading up to Richard III. All three plays concern the horrors of war and the plots and machinations of the few to control the many. And all three are dreadful distortions of history, meant to slander those nobles who fought on the wrong side in the War of the Roses.
Directed by A. Lee Massaro, who also stars as Lady Macbeth, the Compass production of Macbeth is a coolly weird reworking of the masterpiece. It’s not the most profound reading of the Scottish tragedy, but there is something darkly alive about it. Macbeth, played by Erik Tieze, is a weakling this time–a moral coward, though a brave soldier, who bends too easily to his wife’s calculating will.
Massaro has Macbeth turn on Lady Macbeth as he descends the ladder of depravity. So when he comes to that last, great soliloquy in which he looks into the abyss of nothingness he has made of his life–“Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow”–it is not the existential despair of a thoughtful villain but an embrace of emptiness by a light-minded fool.
The death of Lady MacDuff, played with vulnerable intelligence by Todd, as she is forced to watch the murder of her children before she herself is killed, is as horrific as possible, while Timothy Tate’s heartbreaking response as MacDuff is moving and real. Dave Gesler, so brilliant in Ad Hoc’s recent Three Sisters, is the best Banquo this town has ever seen, bringing a gravity and intelligence to everything he does. Joey Wishnia’s comic porter manages to truly relieve the tragic atmosphere, and Carla Kaiser makes a splendid, flesh-chomping cannibal Witch–she’s as wicked as they come.
But while Massaro has made some intensely interesting choices, they do little to cultivate the audience’s understanding of the nature of evil. Selbie’s direction of Richard III, on the other hand, is all too relevant to twentieth-century politics. Not that this is a PC production–Selbie plays Richard as a spider, using the terribly deformed man’s crutches as if they were the legs of an arachnid capturing its lunch. At times he is more praying mantis, but he is always creepy in his insect mode as he scurries over the bodies of those he has executed on his way to the throne.
What’s so different about this characterization, though, is the aggressive sexuality Selbie invests in Richard. The most difficult scene in the play is the seduction of Lady Anne, whose husband and father-in-law Richard has killed. It is practically impossible to understand how Lady Anne can be won by the monster–the most convincing productions usually show Anne being mesmerized by the chivalry of the ambitious Richard. But Selbie abuses his victim, and Lady Anne (played with innocence and anguish by Todd) reacts like a kidnap victim who has developed a sick dependency on her tormentor. It is repellent sex that wins her over, not chivalry, and it is disturbing–but not unbelievable.
Consciously invoking modern American politics, Selbie points out that Richard is running for office but has no policy. All that motivates him is ambition and revenge toward the world that does not accept him. Unlike Macbeth, Richard never has any empathy for anyone. But both tyrants end without love or friends.
Selbie is right when he says that it is important to explore themes like the corrosive effect of the Big Lie on a large canvas. In this case, that canvas is a whole repertory season. Whatever the flaws of these individual productions, Selbie has carefully chosen plays that speak to each other and actually change our understanding of Shakespeare’s works. And that is really something new on the theater scene.
Macbeth, Richard III and (starting May 9) Henry VI, through May 25 at the Denver Civic Theatre, 721 Santa Fe Drive, 595-3800.