Tag: Dan McCleary

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Tennessee Shakespeare Embarks on 2019-2020 Season

CREDIT: Michael Donahue

Michael Donahue

Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s Dan McCleary.

Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s 2019-20 season will have a variety of plays, readings, music, and Elizabethan food.

Scheduled are several regional premieres along with a new tiered ticket pricing and reserved seating.

The 12th season, titled Discover to Yourself (a line from Julius Caesar) has a production of Julius Caesar as its centerpiece, directed by TSC’s producing artistic director Dan McCleary. It will be performed at TSC’s new Owen and Margaret Wellford Tabor Stage at 7950 Trinity Road.

The lineup includes four full-stage productions, two new musical readings, TSC’s annual Southern Literary Salon, free and touring Shakespeare productions, an Elizabethan Feast, a family show for all ages and a VIP Broadway Composer evening. Several productions will be Mid-South stage premieres.

  • The season starts September 10th with the fairy tale of Pericles in the third annual Free Shout-Out Shakespeare Series. The 80-minute touring production of Shakespeare’s late romance will perform indoors and outdoors in the area. Performances will be in 10 different venues over of 11 days. Performances are free.
  • Julius Caesar (Sept. 25-Oct. 6)
  • Broadway Stories and Songs: An Intimate Evening with Big Fish Composer Andrew Lippa (Oct. 26).
  • Showplace Memphis: Musical Works in Progress (Nov. 2).
  • Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley, directed by Stephanie Shine (Dec. 4-22).
  • The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Dwayne Hartford, based on the novel by Kate DiCamillo (Jan. 28–Feb. 16, 2020).
  • Southern Literary Salon: The Unlikely Sisterhood of Zora Neale Hurston and Margaret Mitchell (Feb. 23).
  • Showplace Memphis: Musical Works in Progress, (March 28).
  • The Elizabethan Feast benefiting TSC’s Education and Outreach Program (April 25).

For more information on the programming and ticketing, go to the TSC website here.

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Original Game of Thrones: Tennessee Shakespeare’s Dan McCleary Talks Richard III

CREDIT: Photo: Joey Miller.

Photo: Joey Miller.

Dan McCleary as Richard and Caley Milliken of the Spirit World in TN Shakespeare Company’s production of RICHARD III playing at GPAC October 30 – November 1 at 7:00 pm. Children admitted FREE with paying, attending guardian. Box Office: 759-0604; tnshakespeare.org.

It’s almost Halloween, and as good a time as any to talk about dry old bones that have come back to haunt the living. Also, given the wild success of contemporary TV shows like Game of Thrones and this season’s installment of American Horror Story, set against the backdrop of a mid-20th-Century freakshow, the cultural stage couldn’t be more perfectly set for a reconsideration of Shakespeare’s gruesome historical tragedy, Richard III. And that’s exactly what the Tennessee Shakespeare Company will be providing in an extremely limited run (October 30-Nov 1) with TSC’s founding director Dan McCleary starring as the deformed and determined soldier who would be king.

It’s almost as if the spirit of the last Plantagenet called out across the centuries, begging to have his twisted bones exhumed from an anonymous grave. In September, 2012, a team of archeologists from the University of Leicester, working with the Richard III Society, broke ground in a parking lot poured over the site where Greyfriars Friary Church once stood. On the very first day of the dig the team discovered human remains. It was the body of a smallish man in his 30’s with a number of wounds, some clearly inflicted after death. The most compelling physical feature was a spine, severely twisted by scoliosis. Over time it became clear that the team’s first discovery, in the first hole they dug, was the body of Richard III, best known to the world by way of Shakespeare’s tale of a murderous hunchbacked villain who slaughtered anybody who stood between him and the throne. Shakespeare’s play presents an image of the King the historical society responsible for unearthing the remains has long dismissed as Tudor propaganda. Earlier this week I talked to McCleary about his approach to playing Richard, and the degree to which information drawn from the newly-discovered bones  combines with current pop cultural fascinations to inform how the historical horror story might be understood by contemporary players and audiences.

Intermission Impossible: This is one of Shakespeare’s longest plays and one of his most demanding roles. I can’t even imagine how you can run the company, keep up with young twin boys, and rehearse this part. How are you holding up?


Dan McCleary: The boys just came to tech rehearsal last night. They’re really interested in this cartoon called Mike the Knight. I wear some pretty full armor on my torso for the duration of the play and so thay became immediately interested. They wanted to know why I wasn’t wearing a visor or a helmet. It wasn’t about Shakespeare for them.

This isn’t my first time to play Richard. I played him once before when I wasn’t this old and tired and grisled. It’s been 17 years and I was very different then, in a very different take on the play. So yes I did know what it would likely mean to do the part again and that’s why brought in a long time associate David Demke to direct, so I could feel like I had confidence in that area. I wanted to surround myself with some folks who were quick studies and knew the play.

It’s a short run, at least.

It’s a strange schedule you know? It’s more like an opera or a concert. One of the originations of Halloween is a reconsideration of saints or souls, so when GPAC had a few days available over Halloween I seized on that, and also the fact that Richard’s actual remains are still are above ground right now. I thought it was a perfect confluence of creative impulses they came together. In terms of schedule we’d love to run for two or three weeks obviously but it’s fitting quite nicely on the stage.

I’m glad you brought up the bones. There’s been a lot of contention regarding the historical Richard III. Does having seen the remains change how we see the play? And how it’s performed?

I think it does. I really should only speak for myself. But it has for us and it’s one of the questions at the heart of what we’re doing. As Shakespeare was writing England into being he knew very well who his monarch was. He was writing for the Tudors, and as we know, history is written by the winners. Also, Shakespeare is writing at at a time when there is a true and genuine belief, not just a religious belief but a humanist belief, that what’s on a person’s outside was the stamp of God. And because it was a stamp of God they were the same on the inside. We know Richard was not buried as a monarch. He wasn’t buried as a king or with any blessing or ceremony. Shakespeare wrote about a withered hand, and he didn’t have one. What may have made him a smaller person of 5’1” or 5’2” was, quite likely, the onset of scoliosis at the age of 10, which twisted his back quite painfully, and visibly into the shape of the letter C. That wouldn’t have prevented him from being a fierce warrior, but it would’ve forced him to find a way to breathe differently. To reorganize his internal organs. To walk differently. To fight differently. To approach life differently, maybe like the elephant man. We’ve considered those things, and we spent a lot of time looking at people who do indeed live through this. It forced us to come to terms with some of Shakespeare’s writing with an overlay of Richard’s bones.

It does humanize the monster.

Instead of creating a vice or a morality play, or some monster or creature, we’re considering who the man had to be considering the humanist and religious thoughts about what people look like on the outside, and how he was born, which is talked about very explicitly in Shakespeare’s play. We have to consider any horse accident he may have had after the age of 10 and everything he had to do to live, not just physically, but psychologically as well. He was a child born into war. He called himself deformed, and yet he was the most fearsome warrior there was. So we’re trying to figure out what might make him so.

The face of evil?

So the remains suggest a more sympathetic view?

The remains force us to look at is what Shakespeare created for Richard in acts 4 and 5, which is a subconscious, his waking dream when the ghosts visit. There’s a lot of fun working toward Richard becoming King. But there’s about six beats of silence in one of the first lines after he becomes King. He only gets six beats of happiness as king and then he’s already thinking about having to kill a child or children. So with the remains being above ground the impact on our production, so far, has been more heartbreaking than harrowing and more painful than Machiavellian.

Audiences seem more familiar with Richard III than they are with the other History plays.

The monster that Shakespeare was writing for the Tudor family made it a very popular play for 400 years. It’s easy to make into a fun story about a monster but I’m not quite sure that’s what Shakespeare intended, especially as we get to his fourth and fifth acts where we are able see the actual man. And then there’s the remains. Eleven wounds to the body. Nine to the head. Two of them lethal. And then there are the wounds inflicted on the body after he was dead, the shaming wounds. And the body unceremoniously dumped into a mass grave.

You know, right or wrong, good or bad, they’ve decided legally to give him a ceremonial burial in the spring. So that informs us as well.

Original Game of Thrones: Tennessee Shakespeare’s Dan McCleary Talks Richard III

I know your production isn’t directly informed by Game of Thrones or American Horror Story. But it seems to me, given the huge popularity of these kinds of TV shows, that the time is absolutely ripe for bringing Richard back. He’s so clearly an inspiration for the GOT character Tyrion Lannister. Even shows like Walking Dead force us to confront a dark side born of circumstance. So, do you think that these trends in pop culture also shape how we experience Richard?

I don’t watch those shows so I can’t say. We always want to create something through Shakespeare the talks directly to our Memphis audience about time and about geography. We want immediacy, urgency, and relevance. This might not be something that’s as Memphis-flavored as our [Taming of the] Shrew. But the bones being aboveground is what excites. We’re going to have a reconsideration of Shakespeare’s Richard with this overlay of natural history. And we’re going to find ways to visualize that. In regard to pop culture, there’s a fascination and always has been a fascination with perceptions of human evil. How can someone do such a thing to someone else? Or to themselves? Something we do I find, as humans, is attempt to not to just be a spectator, but to understand it. We don’t just pay five dollars to go and see the bearded lady, but to find out what it means for us. You know, I’ve killed a fly before. I’ve done something mean. That’s basically the  foundation and Shakespeare is really the first playwright to be fascinated by this and to investigate.

He also knew human nature and our sick attraction to oddity. In The Tempest, which he writes much later, he says that people who “will not lay out a droit to relieve a lame beggar” will pay good money to see “a dead indian.”

Well, he was a marketing guy too. He was a business owner and he knew what would bring audience to the theater. And I don’t blame him at all for that. But really, Richard was probably presented as a morality play, and, to me, that seems like a foreign kind of theater and a form that’s already settled its case. This way there are more unknowns involved. I much prefer that.

Richard III is at GPAC Oct. 30-Nov. 1. 

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Cover Feature News

Tempest Tossed

CREDIT: courtesy of the Tennessee Shakespeare Company

Sweet are the uses of adversity/ Which like the toad, ugly and venomous/ Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;/ And this our life exempt from public haunt/ Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks/ Sermons in stones, and good in every thing. — William Shakespeare, As You Like It

“Sweet are the uses of adversity.”: It’s one of Shakespeare’s most famous and frequently repeated quotations. In its original context, the line is spoken by a deposed and exiled duke in the ever-popular and often relevant urban/suburban comedy As You Like It. And, although it is intended to be over-the-top and more than a touch ironical, as an enduring aphorism, it is more often used as a token of sincere comfort in troubled times.

Although the Tennessee Shakespeare Company (TSC), currently making its home in a rustic train depot on Poplar Pike in Germantown, has remained relatively healthy and viable, even in an unrelentingly tough economic climate for not-for-profit arts groups, the ambitious six-year-old company has of late experienced more than its share of adversity. So much so, in fact, that TSC’s  founding director Dan McCleary, a Germantown native, has begun to wonder whether or not his dream of operating a classical theater company in his hometown can continue as is or if, like the aforementioned duke, there may be some kind of exile in his future as well.

The tragedy played itself out in June, as Shelby County’s municipalities considered the costs and ramifications of creating their own unique school systems. Germantown’s mayor and board of aldermen, looking to trim money from the city’s budget, chose by a unanimous 5-0 vote not to restore the $70,000 in funding that served as a foundation for TSC’s extensive educational programming. The money, only a fraction of the company’s annual operating costs, had in seasons past enabled the TSC to produce special student matinees and allowed up to 20 teaching artists to take Shakespeare into classrooms. That funding had been raised by appropriating a percentage of rental fees from the city-owned Germantown Performing Arts Center.

“This vote will have devastating consequences on our ability to provide education programming for students in our community,” McCleary wrote in a statement released following the city’s decision. “The impact will be felt immediately,” he concluded.

“I can’t understand why they would invest so much in something for our young people and then just stop,” McCleary says. “Especially when the investment seemed to be working so well.”

“Seventy thousand dollars is a lot of money, and it was money that we put to really good use,” he says, comparing the lost funding to the company’s broader $600,000 operating budget. “On the other hand, the grant money that has been cut was almost entirely for education. And, more specifically, it was almost entirely for education for Germantown families. So, while it is a terrible loss, it’s really more of a loss for students and for education in Germantown than it is a financial loss for us as a company. Because, if I can’t raise that money from other sources, then we just won’t offer those programs anymore.”

According to an economic impact study conducted by Christian Brothers University, the Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s presence in Germantown brings $1.2 million into the community annually. “If all you’re looking for is a dollar sign, there’s that,” McCleary says. But the actual value to Germantown and Shelby County, he insists, is more subtle and sometimes difficult to quantify.

“In our first productions, I was told by some people — and yes, by some city officials — that I didn’t want to be mixing [students from different] schools at our performances,” McCleary says, as though he might be establishing a contemporary Memphis-specific setting for Romeo and Juliet, where a feud between “two noble houses” yields a grim teenage harvest. “Of course, I took that as an invitation to mix the schools,” he says, recalling his company’s first student matinee of As You Like It, which was attended by 345 students from six Memphis, Germantown, and Bartlett schools.

The teachers had instructed their students how to behave, and throughout the first half of the play, they sat quietly with their hands in their laps appreciating the work.

“It wasn’t very Elizabethan,” says McCleary, who prefers a more communal relationship between the actors and their audiences. “Children have been told by so many adults in their lives that Shakespeare isn’t something that they’ll understand, but they should go anyway because ‘it’ll be good for you.'”

Since As You Like It, TSC’s productions have often been immersive and environmental. During that first matinee, when the play’s lead characters left the court for the Forest of Arden, the audience was instructed to follow the actors out of St. George’s Episcopal Church and into a wooded area nearby. The kids, of course, ran. And when they regrouped in the great outdoors, they were no longer separated by geography or architecture. They mixed organically and were no longer passive observers grouped by individual schools with various pecking orders. They were active participants in the drama.

“It was something to see,” says McCleary, who describes perceived differences in the urban and suburban students as “ludicrous.”

TSC’s educational arm played a much greater role in audience development than anybody involved with the fledgling company anticipated.

“Children would see our shows, then they’d go home and say they wanted to come again. And then they’d bring their parents to our evening performances,” McCleary says. “We developed our audience, because teenagers would bring their parents. And now, of individuals who are also supporters, 55 percent of them are parents who came to us, because their children brought them.”

The unforeseen impact on audience development encouraged TSC to go into the schools more and to seek more state and federal funding to create opportunities for underserved communities.

“That’s not the same as underprivileged,” McCleary clarifies. “But there haven’t been a lot of professional classical opportunities for students. And now [in a season] we can readily count on 80 or 90 schools and over 15,000 students. And that’s just here in Shelby County. That doesn’t include Arkansas, Mississippi, or the rest of the state.”

The multiple educational components TSC programmed around its shows caught the attention of the National Endowment for the Arts. As soon as Germantown announced that it was cutting the company’s civic funding, the TSC became one of 40 American companies awarded a $25,000 matching grant from the NEA, through ArtsMidwest and the Shakespeare in American Communities Initiative.

The $25,000 was quickly matched, but that money is specifically earmarked to take something called the Romeo and Juliet Project into underprivileged communities.

The Romeo and Juliet Project, initially launched thanks to the generosity of the city of Germantown and since expanded via ArtsMemphis to include three Memphis City Schools, is a program designed to introduce students to Shakespeare in a theatrical, rather than literary, context.

“We know Romeo and Juliet is a part of every incoming freshman’s curriculum,” McCleary says. “It’s in the English department, not the art department. Nevertheless, you’ve got all these children reading, so we thought that if these actor-teachers could be the first to introduce Shakespeare to these ninth graders, it could really turn them on to Shakespeare. And, because this is Romeo and Juliet, in certain schools we could address pressing current social issues having to do specifically with violence and the death of peers. This was a way to get young people on their feet and talking.”

McCleary is transparent and can be outspoken.

“What we do is expensive,” he says, running down a list of expenses, from recruiting talent to creating costumes to renting facilities and equipment to engaging professional unions.

“A lot of people think this is a theater town, but it’s not,” he says, only slightly overstating his case. “People don’t move here to make a living in the theater; they move away. So we either need to be training constantly or we need to be going out of town and bringing in new talent,” McCleary says. “And I insist on paying everyone.”

When a company member asks McCleary if it really costs $100,000 to produce The Taming of the Shrew, he answers unhesitatingly in the affirmative and lists expenses.

At a time when many donor-dependent organizations are struggling, the TSC has managed to grow its earned-to-donated revenue ratio to more than 40 percent earned.

“And that’s not because donations are down,” McCleary says. “We’ve grown every year.”

In spite of this relative stability and proven nimbleness, there’s still not a lot of room in the budget for shuffling funds when disaster strikes.

“We spend a lot of time producing theater in places where theater was never intended to be produced,” McCleary says, describing a costly proposition that has resulted in extraordinary artistic opportunities and interesting partnerships with the Dixon Gallery & Gardens, the IRIS orchestra, and Shelby Farms park. The opportunities to perform in multiple locations in Germantown, but also at locations throughout Shelby County, have also created identity issues for a new company. McCleary thinks it’s time for the TSC to start seriously thinking about a permanent home. But where?

“Because we did this in Germantown, people in Memphis question whether it’s a Memphis thing,” he says, explaining his ongoing conundrum. “And when we perform in Memphis, people here question whether or not it’s a Germantown thing.”

At one time, McCleary’s proposal to create an art park and amphitheater behind the Morgan Woods Theater on Poplar Pike seemed to be moving full steam ahead. The city spent $55,000 to research the project. The TSC spent an additional $20,000. Designers were chosen, and it seemed as though McCleary’s long-range plans to create a permanent home would be realized. Only, they weren’t.

“We were told, among other things, that our design wasn’t green enough,” McCleary says with a sigh.  “And this brings us back to one of the original questions: Can the Tennessee Shakespeare Company remain in Germantown?”

McCleary says the answer is a qualified yes.

Since the vote to eliminate its education grant, Germantown has made provisions to provide the TSC with roughly $13,000 worth of in-kind facility rental at GPAC, and that helps.

“For the past five years, the city of Germantown has helped us raise our baby,” McCleary says. “I hate to see them leave us, if that, in fact, is what’s happening.”

Since the funding cut, McCleary has received what he describes as an “inordinate” number of invitations to look at facilities outside of Germantown.

“The locations have ranged from Bartlett to Collierville to downtown to Midtown to East Memphis. Some of the locations have been theaters. Some of them are empty spaces. Some of them are empty spaces that are about to get really active.”

McCleary says he’s in conversations with numerous parties, including developer Bob Loeb, who is currently rebranding Midtown’s Overton Square as a theater and restaurant district.

“We’ve expanded our board by six people, and many of them are there because of they have facility and planning expertise,” McCleary says. “So we will continue having these conversations over the course of the balance of this calendar year.”

Only time will tell how sweet are the uses of such adversity.

The Tennessee Shakespeare Company Launches its Sixth Season

The Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s sixth season includes one comedy, one tragedy, a back-by-demand Christmas show, and an original script, inspired in part by recent events.

Unto the Breach! The Un-Common Courage of William Shakespeare is an original compiled script that was added as a substitute for TSC’s usual full-cast fall production. The two-performance show in the 824-seat Germantown Performing Arts Center/Duncan-Williams Performance Hall is a benefit to help restore education funding to the community’s classrooms. Ticket revenue will go to TSC’s education program. The original script will feature TSC founding director Dan McCleary and resident artist/education director Stephanie Shine onstage together for “a 90-minute exploration of Shakespeare’s courage.” Scenes will be performed from Richard III, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Twelfth Night, Coriolanus, The Merchant of Venice, The Winter’s Tale, Macbeth, As You Like It, and more.

The show plays September 7th and September 10th. A special all-school matinee with discounted tickets will be made possible by TSC’s sponsors on September 10th at 10:30 a.m. at GPAC.

Other season offerings include It’s a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play in December in the Winegardner Auditorium at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens; Romeo and Juliet in January at the Germantown Performing Arts Center/Duncan-Williams Performance Hall; and The Taming of the Shrew in April in the Dixon’s Winegardner Auditorium.

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News The Fly-By

Great Shakes

Dan McCleary gets evangelical about Shakespeare.

And why shouldn’t he? The Bard has been good to this 1985 graduate of Germantown High School who has carved out a niche for himself as an actor and director specializing in the classics.

Over the past 20 years, McCleary has taken on roles ranging from Hamlet and Macbeth (in Hamlet and Macbeth) to playing Sly Stallone’s holographic father in the intolerable superhero flick Judge Dread. Now, it would appear that the next phase of McCleary’s career has begun.

His ambitious five-year plan to create the Tennessee Shakespeare Company, a resident professional theater company in Germantown, is moving forward. Initial fund-raising has been strong, plans for temporary signage and outdoor lighting have been approved by the city of Germantown, and auditions for Shakespeare’s pastoral comedy As You Like It are scheduled for Monday, May 12th, and Tuesday, May 13th, at Rhodes College’s McCoy Theatre.

“We are now an official 501(c)(3),” McCleary boasts by phone. He’s currently in Atlanta directing a production of the classic Servant of Two Masters, adapted by playwright Jeffrey Hatcher, whose Compleat Female Stage Beauty is currently enjoying a successful run at Midtown’s Circuit Playhouse.

“We’ve put a board together. We’re about to launch a website … And we’ve got enough operating capital to get started,” McCleary says.

The director’s Atlanta gig is a free-to-the-public, city-subsidized event performed on the dock of Lake Clara Meer in Piedmont Park and, although McCleary doesn’t make any direct comparisons, it’s clear that this is the sort of event he envisions for Germantown.

“The city really supports this thing,” he says of the Atlanta production. “It’s free. It’s on the lake. It’s beautiful. And it brings in about 1,000 people a night.”

McCleary says his ultimate goal is to create an arts park behind Germantown’s Morgan Woods Theatre, with stages for dance, music, and theater. The city of Germantown votes on whether or not to proceed with plans for the arts park on May 12th.

“Germantown Parks and Recreation has been incredibly supportive,” says McCleary, who expects the vote will be positive.

Although the city has yet to approve the complete Morgan Woods plan and McCleary’s not met all of his fund-raising goals, he says the production of As You Like It has been a go since Germantown approved his signage and lighting proposals.

“We’re using as few instruments as possible — just enough to light the show and to light up the verticality of the trees,” McCleary says. “We’ve got enough light for security and to make sure everyone is safe walking in the dark. But even with all of that, we’ll be using a generator that’s only about half the size of a conventional generator.”

The signs will be hung on the grounds of St. George’s Episcopal Church where the first act of As You Like It will be performed. The second act of the play will occur outdoors on an adjacent parcel of land owned by arts patron Barbara Apperson.