Donna Northcott founded St. Louis Shakespeare 28 years ago, after returning from a summer spent studying the playwright in London.
“I got back to town, and was just crazy to do Shakespeare, but no one was doing it,” she recalls. “I contacted everyone who owed me favors, and lots of people who didn’t. We put up a production of Twelfth Night, and it just grew from there.”
Now, the company is kicking off its 28th season with Coriolanus, which chronicles the downfall of a former Roman battle hero. According to Northcott, this will be the first time the play has been staged by her company and, as far as she knows, the first time it has ever been performed in St. Louis.
“I hope people won’t be put off by the fact that it’s a title they might not be pronouncing correctly,” Northcott says. “It’s obviously not a well-known piece, but there are wonderful and powerful characters. It’s startling how relevant and contemporary it is.”
Northcott points to several current issues that echo conflicts in the 400-year-old script, from Occupy Wall Street to Tea Party protests to questions about Obama’s religion. The title character, for example, becomes the object of politicians’ suspicion as Coriolanus grows in popularity.
“They’re worried that he’ll become too powerful and they start saying things to turn the people against him,” Northcott explains, “Sort of along the lines of ‘He wasn’t born in this country, he’s a Muslim.’ It sounds kind of familiar, doesn’t it?”
Since then, the company has made it a mission to produce all of Shakespeare’s plays, from the universally popular classics like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth to more obscure works like Titus Andronicus and Pericles. In 1996, Northcott launched a spin-off company called Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre that stages original parodies like “The On-Hour Star Wars Trilogy: Live!” and “The One-Hour Lord of the Rings Trilogy: Live!”
“You can get it in an hour if you cut out all the walking,” Northcott says. A one-hour version of the Harry Potter series is also currently in the works for the fall.
Northcott, who teaches theatre full-time at Lindenwood University, directs all the plays for Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre as well as one for St. Louis Shakespeare per year. The company holds open auditions for each show, a fact of which Northcott is especially proud.
“We virtually never pre-cast anything,” she says. “We want to be very welcoming and open. You have to keep bringing in new people or you stagnate.”
With Coriolanus set to open Friday, Northcott is looking forward to exposing audiences to a rarely performed and underappreciated play
“If you are following current events at all, you’re going to see things you recognize onstage,” she says. “It’s not clear-cut, but it does shine a light. The more things change, the more things stay the same."
Tickets for St. Louis Shakespeare productions are $25 general admission, $20 students and seniors, $15 for teachers, and for Friday and Saturday shows. Performances are 7:30 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday & Saturday, and 2 p.m. Sunday. For more information, visit stlshakespeare.org.
