10 Years of Door Shakespeare by Katie Dahl

January, 2008

“All the world's a stage,” Shakespeare famously pronounced through the melancholy Jacques in As You Like It--the first play, incidentally, that Door Shakespeare performed as an independent company. The Bard may have been right (and, as Shakespeare actors, directors, and enthusiasts we do not believe it wise to declare him wrong!), but we happen to think that one particular corner of the world makes an especially good stage. That corner is the Björklunden Garden, which this summer will be the site of Door Shakespeare's tenth season.

Door Shakespeare originally began as a pilot project sponsored by American Folklore Theatre, which, in 1994, produced a one-night staged reading of A Midsummer Night's Dream.  That performance turned out to be more than a one-night stand, and the response to that initial reading prompted ATF to bring back Door Shakespeare for two more seasons.

Following the 1996 season, however, AFT determined that it needed to devote its energies and resources to its own theatrical offerings and so decided to discontinue Door Shakespeare.  Happily for theater lovers, Door Shakespeare was rescued, as it were, when Suzanne Graff (who had performed with AFT) and Jerry Gomis arranged with AFT to assume the rights to the company, which they re-established in 1999.   Each of them had trained with the National Shakespeare Conservatory in New York, and believed that Shakespeare could be a natural fit for the Door County community.   That belief has been justified.  They arranged with Lawrence University to use the Garden at Björklunden as the venue for these productions, and the setting has proved a most attractive and effective one for actors and audiences alike.

That inaugural season in 1999 featured 18 performances of As You Like It, which attracted an audience of 1700 patrons.  By 2002, when the company again did A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the number of performances doubled to 36 and 3600 people attended.  The following year Door Shakespeare offered a repertory season of two Shakespeare plays, and beginning in 2005 performed a play by another playwright to be paired with one of the Bard’s: in the past three years, the season has included Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, and Jean Baptiste Moliere’s Tartuffe.  The audience response to having two plays in repertory—one Shakespeare, one not—has been very positive and the 2008 season will continue that pattern with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (back for its third incarnation) and Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac.   

In the course of its first decade, Door Shakespeare has been fortunate to secure the artistic talents of a number of actors from Door County and beyond.  These individuals have enriched and enlivened Door Shakespeare and helped it develop a faithful following among theatergoers, a tradition we are pleased to carry on this summer. Once again, we will have the privilege of playing beneath the stars night after night, sharing Shakespeare’s poetry and Rostand’s words with the audience in the natural setting of the Garden. How grand it is to make a stage, year after year, out of this corner of the world we love so much.