Tag: Tennessee Shakespeare Company

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Intermission Impossible Theater

Nightmare Before Christmas: Tennessee Shakespeare Closes Macbeth

CREDIT: Tennessee Shakespeare Company

Tennessee Shakespeare Company

Michael Khanlarian (Banquo), Paul Kiernan (Macbeth), and the Witches. Through Nov. 4.

Hard as it may seem to believe, winter is coming. It won’t be long before area playhouses roll out stock scenery and turn their attention to holiday favorites. Theatre Memphis opens The 25th Putnam County Spelling Bee this weekend. And there are still a few more opportunities to catch Agatha Christie’s enduring mystery The Mousetrap at Germantown Community Theatre. But if there’s anybody out there who’s not quite ready to put Halloween away just yet,Tennessee Shakespeare Company performs Macbeth through November 4th.

Shakespeare’s witchy meditation on ambition and evil is directed by TSC’s founder Dan McCleary and performed by a company of nine actors. How dark do things get? Here’s what McCleary had to say via the TSC website:

“The witches are our masked Chorus, and a sacrifice is offered to cleanse a world of crimes against humanity. The sacrifice is a man who Shakespeare clearly defines as noble, generous, un-ambitious, indecisive, overly kind, incapable of lying with skill, morally incapable of imagining his own corruption or wrong-doing, courageous, patriotic, regretful, and a good husband and friend. Macbeth is the best of us. What is horrific is that we might be able to explain how he becomes the very worst of us.”

 

Very scary.

Thursday night’s performance is Free Will Kids night. That means up to 4 kids (17 or under) are admitted with one paid adult ticket. 

Tennessee Shakespeare follows Macbeth with a  large cast production of  As You Like It Nov. 29-Dec. 6

General Admission tickets are $39. Performances are Thursday-Saturday at 7 p.m., and Sunday at 3 p.m.

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Theater Theater Feature

Tennessee Shakespeare and GCT offer holiday alternatives.

The term “chamber theater” is usually reserved for stage adaptations of literary work that rely on much of the author’s original text. And even with that stricter definition in mind, I think it’s fair to apply that term to the kind of work Tennessee Shakespeare does when the company goes indoors at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens to perform epic plays in a room where plays were never meant to be performed. In a review of All’s Well That Ends Well, I said the cast’s performance style was less like ensemble acting than group storytelling. The same holds true for the company’s charmingly intimate Much Ado About Nothing, which feels like a show created for living room performances. If anything, Dan McCleary, who also directed Much Ado, has gone out of his way to amplify the show’s narrative quality.

Using the simple convention of talking to the audience, McCleary invites ticket-holders into the play and treats them like guests at a series of staged parties and public events. In Much Ado, which revolves around victory parties and weddings, it only makes sense.

Carey Urban and Tony Molina Jr. spar convincingly as Beatrice and Benedick. Their humane performances stand out in a tight, tiny ensemble of quality clowns and top shelf actors.

The Dixon’s Winegardner Auditorium isn’t the most changeable or accommodating theater space, so scenic design and lighting have been smartly de-emphasized in ways that frame the company’s biggest asset — its actors.

Much Ado is as fine example of how Shakespeare can surprise us with his modernity. Although the romantic comedy is best known for its witty banter, Urban very nearly stops the show with Beatrice’s clear-eyed assessment of gender inequality — “I cannot be a man with wishing, therefore I will die a woman, with grieving.”

Much Ado About Nothing through December 18th

First, I’d like to do something I almost never do and start this review with a standing ovation. Hooray for Germantown Community Theatre. Hooray for being brave and doing things differently during the holidays when nobody ever does anything especially brave or very different. While other playhouses pull out beloved Christmas classics and reel in customers who attend theatrical performances somewhere between once a year and once a lifetime, it makes good sense for a clever company to cash in on regulars looking to escape all the Bah humbugs and God bless us every ones.

There’s a problem, though. From its violent beginning through a long, somber curtain call (set to the loping tune of Alfred Hitchcock’s TV theme), Germantown’s Rope never feels like a gift of any kind.

Rope‘s a funny fish to begin with. Modern audiences may be familiar with the show by way of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 film starring Jimmy Stewart as a morally ambiguous college professor coming to terms with a pair of decadent students who’ve misunderstood Nietzsche and done something awful. It’s based on Patrick Hamilton’s chatty, 1929 play, which tells the same story. Set in the period of original production, and loosely based on the Leopold and Loeb murder case, Rope was Hamilton’s portrait of a dangerous and narcissistic class, happy to make games out of sex and murder. It also functions a kind of platonic dialogue on nihilism. Think of it as a gay American Psycho set in post-WWI Britain with an au courant ideology standing in for watermarked business cards.

GCT’s production is well-intentioned but short on color. The lust for a life less ordinary that drives this hot chiller is largely desexualzed and less compelling than it might be.

James Dale Green holds his own in the pivotal role Rupert Cadell, an irascible, hard-drinking poet shaped by the original war to end all wars. But for a man full of drinks and dangerous ideas, he’s never allowed to be more than a scamp. Nor is anybody else, regardless of whom they may not have killed, or why.

As Hitchcock once noted, the best films are made from mediocre source material. Rope‘s no real exception.

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Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s All’s Well That Ends Well

It’s exciting to see local companies getting outside their comfort zones and staging productions of Shakespeare’s less frequently produced plays. October found New Moon Theatre Company wrestling with the famously bloody Titus Andronicus. This holiday season the Tennessee Shakespeare Company (TSC) moves into uncharted waters with a rare production of All’s Well That Ends Well, which runs through December 20th at the Dixon Gallery & Gardens.

TSC’s latest undertaking explores the mysticism at the heart of this dark comedy and asks what it means when women undertake the classic, usually masculine, hero’s journey. All’s Well That Ends Well — sometimes described as a “problem play” due to formal irregularities — is inspired by Boccaccio’s sprawling 14th-century story collection, The Decameron. It tells the story of Helena, the low-born charge of Spanish aristocrats with healing gifts inherited from her father. She sets out to marry a young nobleman named Bertram whose appetite for adventure includes a taste for fighting wars and rampant virgin defilement. The clever and gifted suitor, Helena, follows him first to Paris and later Italy in a play chock-full of life-or-death bargains, bed tricks, and faked deaths.

TSC at the Dixon

Like the wittier and more frequently produced Much Ado About Nothing, All’s Well That Ends Well lays bare the similarities between love and war. The journey is fraught with trouble and tragedy, but the play ultimately lives up to the promise embedded in its title.

Under the direction of founding executive Dan McCleary, TSC’s latest production is a neoclassical fantasy inspired by the artwork of Maxfield Parrish, an American illustrator whose work is most closely associated with A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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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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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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Tennessee Shakespeare Company Loses Grant From Germantown

CREDIT: Joey Miller

Tennessee Shakespeare Company performs The Tempest

  • Joey Miller
  • Tennessee Shakespeare Company performs The Tempest

The Germantown Board of Mayor and Aldermen voted to fully eliminate Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s annual grant at their meeting on Monday night.

In early May, the theatre company was told of the possible $70,000 grant elimination and quickly took to the public for support. Letters were sent out and phone calls were made to the Germantown board to emphasize the importance of the theatre company.

Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s grant was the only education/arts program funding to be fully eliminated after five successful years. Dan McCleary, founder and artistic director of the Tennessee Shakespeare Company, believes the consequences of this decision will be devastating to the communities they have actively served over the years. However, despite the final decision, McCleary said he’d still like to thank the public for their overwhelming support and looks forward to bringing Tennessee Shakespeare Company onto more stages in Memphis.

You can find the the Flyer‘s previous coverage of this story here.