Courtesy of Phillip Hamer Photography
Park-goers walk under an arch painted by artist Brock Seals during "A Late Summer Night's Stroll."
The plague was to Shakespeare as COVID-19 is to us, and in the midst of this modern pandemic, St. Louis Shakespeare Festival has had to change how it celebrates the Bard's work with "A Late Summer Night's Stroll."
The event is a socially distanced walk for groups of up to 10 people that spans a little over a mile of Forest Park, with 14 stops along the way. Each stop features a performance by groups of local artists and is marked by colorful arches designed by PaintedBlack STL. The end result is an interpretive experience of A Midsummer Night's Dream.
This is not quite what the group expected its 20th season to look like. Originally, the plan was to perform Much Ado About Nothing in typical Shakespeare in the Park fashion. However, once the coronavirus pandemic hit, the wheels began turning for Producing Artistic Director Tom Ridgely.
Ridgely had been thinking about doing a walking Shakespeare experience even before it became a necessity for events to find ways to spread out. When the original event was canceled due to its affinity for drawing large crowds and the fact that big groups of actors could no longer rehearse together, he realized this could be an opportunity to try out his idea.
"We just realized that this could be possible and actually safe, and could maybe in some small way offer some of the feeling of reconnecting with the city and the community in a way," he says. "And then it came together really quickly."
But Much Ado About Nothing didn't seem right for the occasion, so the festival team pushed it back to 2022 and opted for A Midsummer Night's Dream instead. They figured the mood of the park was more similar to the play's forest setting, and its plot was well-known enough to understand even in abstract snippets.
From there, the team began reaching out to local arts organizations. Each of the 14 stops showcases a different artist or group of artists—from actors to dancers to musicians—interpreting scenes of Shakespeare's play in their own way. There's jazz saxophone, opera, even a character actor with her Great Dane.
Courtesy of Phillip Hamer Photography
Character actor Laura Coppinger performs with her Great Dane.
Above it all are the colorful arches painted by artists from PaintedBlack STL, which denote each performance spot and guide the audience along the path.
"What the 14 individual artists came up with for these arches is just breathtaking. Beautiful, extremely varied, but really just powerful interpretations of these 14 different moments in the play," Ridgely says.
PaintedBlack STL began this summer with a group of artists painting windows downtown that were boarded up due to protests. Now that the boards have begun to come down, the group has shifted its focus to different ways of helping Black artists find opportunities to showcase their work.
Co-founders Tyson Baker and Jayvn Solomon were fans of Shakespeare in the Park, so they jumped at this opportunity. The Shakespeare team already had the idea for the pieces to be arches, but beyond that, the design was up to the artists.
"Going back to the artists painting windows, it was a very similar process in that we basically say, 'Hey, this is the space you have, do what you will,'" Solomon says. The art did have to stay on theme, though, so each artist was given a "one-word theme" of the scene their arch was going to be in front of. "What exists now in the park is a manifestation of how each artist interpreted each scene," he says.
Courtesy of Phillip Hamer Photography
St. Louis Shakespeare Festival actors perform under an arch designed and painted by Dee Drenning.
Some of the artists were painting windows with the group when it was first founded; others were pulled from a list of people who had expressed interest in working with the group. Once PaintedBlack STL's Artistic Coordinator, Charlie Tatum, had found the right artists, she went through each one's work to get a sense of their style in order to pair them with the scene they were best suited for.
Ridgely knew the arches were going to play a significant physical role, but he was shocked to realize just how important they were artistically as well. "The artistry that these artists brought to it and what it feels like to see them in the park—to see the colors pop against the leaves and to see the glimpses of them from a distance—is really extraordinary and something we couldn't have anticipated," he says.
When the arches are combined with the rest of the exhibits, Ridgely calls it a magical experience. "It was unlike anything I've ever felt," he says.
Unfortunately for those still looking to see it, reservations are booked through September 6, the last day of the show. However, there is a waitlist available in case of cancellations and no-shows. Even for those who can't get a spot during the actual performance times, the arches remain in Forest Park during the day and have QR codes on them that, when scanned, lead to the event's website, with audio recordings from each scene.
The popularity of the event was exciting for Ridgely—as was a recent mention of it in a New York Times article. "The reason we did it was because we thought it was something people might need right now," he says. "It was great to feel that hunch confirmed."
For everyone who managed to get reservations, he suggests wearing comfortable shoes for the walk and says not to forget your mask.
He's not sure if this is something the group will do again, but it's not off the table. Although the audience doesn't get to see the whole play this way, it allows for a new way of seeing the same shows that have been performed for hundreds of years.
"You get a sense of the variety of ways in which Shakespeare can be engaged that you wouldn't get from a more traditional production," he says. "To see an opera singer do a song, to see a jazz quartet play a new composition, to see dancers dance beautifully, you start to realize how rich Shakespeare's poetry and stories are."
