This month, Shakespeare Festival St. Louis is taking to the streets.
The Festival’s Executive Director Rick Dildine and his creative team have reimiagined The Tempest to emanate the flavor of the Gravois Park neighborhood, and are unleashing the adaptation from the theater to Cherokee Street as The New World for the inaugural production of "Shakespeare in the Streets."
“Let’s shut down the street and bring everyone together,” says Dildine of the event’s inspiration. “I was struck by all of the gates and fences that divided St. Louis.” Not only does the festival aim to break down city barriers, but also those between professional actors and their audiences. The creative team, consisting of director Tlaloc Rivas, playwright Nancy Bell, and designer Justin Barisonek, cast 5–16 Gravois Park residents to act alongside six traditional Shakespearian actors. “We want the voices of that neighborhood to be heard,” Dildine added. Residents will be performing roles specifically created for each of them.
Like Cherokee Street itself, The New World is open to the unexpected. “It’s pretty malleable; we don’t know what parts we’ll keep and which we’ll cut,” Rivas says of the play as a collaborative process between Shakespeare Festival St. Louis and the Gravois Park community. “Whether it’s a church choir or a high school drum line that gets involved, we want to leave room for possibilities.” A high school drum line and Shakespeare, you say? Is anyone else having Ten Things I Hate About You déjà vu?
Speaking of modern adaptations, The New World won’t be your English professor’s Shakespeare. The play keeps the spirit of Shakespeare’s play, yet also reinvents it with a mix of Bell’s original iambic prose and contemporary speech tailored to the community who inspired it. “It’s going to be very much the Tempest, but also very much Cherokee street… It will be something new and unexpected,” said Barisonek of what he envisions as the final product.
On her inspiration for the play, Bell said, “It’s about going into a community to find what’s there and then making a play to celebrate it,” The creative team has immersed themselves in the unique culture of Gravois Park since October, through story circles, community meetings, neighborhood events, and as Bell pointed out, listening to residents talk in local businesses such as Minerva Lopez’s soccer shop, Goool!! (Lopez, as it turns out, will be playing Ariel in this production.)
“What I love about Cherokee street is there are lots of different kinds of people doing different things, but they still manage to come together to preserve what is good in their community. We live in a time when there is still a lot of division, conflict, and drawing of lines, and it’s important to look for and celebrate a place where the lines are blurred,” said Bell.
With its fusion of cultures and artistic flare, Cherokee street seems like an ideal location to hold a street theater festival, but the question remains: why chose The Tempest as the template to celebrate this community? “We kept coming back to the idea of this little island quality of Cherokee street; it has a bit of a magical secret quality to it,” answered Bell. “The play is about forgiveness, redemption, and putting aside differences…a magical isle coming together.” The title itself, The New World, inspired by a line from The Tempest, serves as a metaphor for Gravois Park as a “model of diversity” for St. Louis, Dildine says.
Rivas elaborated on the analogy between Prospero’s island and the model of Gravois Park. “For me, I had this image of Prospero in his final act as he destroys his staff as a gesture of relinquishing his magic power in order to embrace forgiveness. In my interpretation, our Prospero will destroy a gate, symbolizing what divides St. Louis, to unite all of our neighborhoods.” Their mission to unite St. Louis through Shakespeare won’t stop with The New World. “I hope we get the opportunity to do this again in other neighborhoods to tell their stories, it’ll be a fascinating awaking and introduction to the city that we love,” said Barisonek.
The New World runs one hour long; it is free to attend, and will be performed every night April 27 through 29 (Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. and Sunday at 3 p.m.) .at the corner of Cherokee and California. For more information, call Shakeseare Festival St. Louis at 314-531-9800, or go to shakespearefestivalstlouis.org, where you can also find informaiton on Othello, this year's main production in Shakespeare Glen in Forest Park, which opens May 25 and runs through June 17.
