Catskill Mountain Shakespeare

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas

Sarah Reny  0:00  
I don't think they were like spewing poetry at one another; however, their ears really were attuned to a lot of, like, the words that will make fun of, like, thou and this, like Shakespearean talk. They did use those words.

Brett Barry  0:14  
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. Hark! On this day's "Kaatscast," we journey to the quaint village of Hunter in fair New York, whereupon Catskill Mountain Shakespeare doth present a stirring rendition of the noble tragedy, "Julius Caesar." Attend to thee this discourse with the esteemed founder and artistic director, Sarah Reny. And verily, seize thee a billet, for this performance doth breathe new life into a timeless saga. That and more forwith, after this brief interlude.

Campbell Brown  0:53  
"Kaatscast" is brought to you by Ulster Savings Bank. An award-winning bank where community matters. Meet the friendly staff at their Phoenicia and Woodstock locations. Call 866-440-0391 or visit them at ulstersavings.com. Member FDIC Equal Housing Lender; and by Briars & Brambles Books. The go to independent book and gift store in the Catskills, located in Windham, New York, right next to the pharmacy, just steps away from the Windham Path. Open daily. For more information, visit briarsandbramblesbooks.com or call 518-750-8599. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past and learn about the ingenuity of the historic milling industry. Watch the waterwheel bring a working sawmill to life. Bring a picnic to enjoy by the millpond. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2024 exploration days, visit hanfordmills.org.

Audio  1:48  
[MUSIC STARTS]

Brett Barry  1:57  
If you are expecting lutes, flutes, and fifes, you won't hear them in this production of "Julius Caesar," which ... sound designer, Levi Manners, composed to complement Catskill Mountain Shakespeare's contemporary sets, lights, and costumes. The text, however, is still all William Shakespeare. Sarah Reny is the founder and artistic director of Catskill Mountain Shakespeare, and we met on dress rehearsal day at their mainstage in Hunter, New York.

Sarah Reny  2:27  
Hi, my name is Sarah Reny, and I'm the founder and artistic director of Catskill Mountain Shakespeare, so we are a nonprofit professional theater company based in the Catskill Mountains. Our claim to fame and where we are right now is at our main stage production, which is outdoors under a tent, like summer stock style, so we are in Hunter right now, where we're performing. We perform behind "The Red Barn" on Main Street, right by the Doctorow Movie Theater. We actually open on July 13th, and then we run through July 28th. We perform Wednesdays through Saturdays. Wednesdays are "Pay What You Can" performances. We have a bunch of outreach: we have an LGBTQ mixer, a talkback, a bunch of stuff ... that's on our website, though, so that's at catskillmountainshakespeare.com. Currently, we're about to go underneath the tent, where the designers are tirelessly [kind of] trying to fine-tune all their elements for our final dress tonight—that includes [like] setting sound levels and trying to set light levels even though it's the day, which makes it very difficult because the show's at night, but we're about to come under this enormous 40x60 tent with a thrust stage, and soon to be 94 seats. But currently, like 12.

Brett Barry  3:42  
What brought you to Hunter?

Sarah Reny  3:43  
So I've been splitting my time between the city and the Catskills since 2019, so like a pre-pandemic-er, which I still like, is like a claim to fame these days, and I make like the full-time move ... this time last year. I had a baby, and also, [just] with Catskill Mountain Shakespeare growing, it was just really important that I be up full-time, and then what brought me up as my partner actually moved up, he's ... he's a chef, and he moved up in 2019, and that's kind of like when I dip my toe in, I'm an actor by trade, and so I was looking for places that I could work, and I was really surprised that there wasn't any kind of outdoor summer stock theater in the Catskills that was professional. Especially, it was like the boom of the Catskills was really before the pandemic, like I feel like people think of it, especially as like this thing that started in 2020, but it actually was like so much before that, and there was this real surge happening, and so, then, in January of 2020, I had this idea.

Audio  4:45  
[MUSIC STARTS]

Sarah Reny  4:48  
It felt like it fell into my lap, like how you look at a baby and it's like done; you're like you're so new, but you're also like whole, and it kind of felt like that, like I know exactly what this is, and I don't know how we're gonna grow it, but I know what this is, and I couldn't shake the idea, and I sat on it for weeks, which is very unlike me, and then I just kind of dove in and I incorporated by myself and hired a lawyer, and then, of course, the pandemic really happened, which was such an interesting time to start a theater company, but I think in a lot of ways helped me because I'm ... I think I would have barreled ahead really too quick, so it helped me put the brakes on, and then we got to kind of capitalize on this ... this insane rush of people being up here to kind of help put our name on the map and fill a really specific void.

Brett Barry  5:43  
What did that baby that fell in your lap look like, and how has it evolved to what it is now?

Sarah Reny  5:51  
That's such a great question, so the baby initially was, I think, kind of what I think of as what this will be in like 10 or 15 years, like a festival. Think of ... like Oregon Shakespeare, Hudson Valley Shakespeare, Shakespeare and Company, and Williamstown Theatre Festival ... all these like, really, and I'm Canadian ... it's like Stratford & Shaw. All these really iconic festivals—I think the thing that really drew me to this kind of lifestyle is this blending of art and, like, life, and I think what really ... I loved about the festival lifestyle is that people get to like build lives around it in a really different way, and I think that it also ... it does so much for the community; it's been really important to us to like serve the community, and I think that's one of the things like that was ... a part of this baby. Even though it's not community theater, I wanted it to feel like that—it was for the community and that it was there as ... as much as it's ours, so this festival is really what it will eventually be, and that's really what the baby looks like, and I think that's what the pandemic helped ... was like taking the step back, and then like, "Okay, let's start with one show."

Brett Barry  7:00  
There's one mainstage production each summer, but there's other programs that you do. Tell me a little bit about that.

Sarah Reny  7:07  
Our season begins in the spring; we have a school tour, a community and school tour. That's part of the Shakespeare in American Communities grants. We were awarded that last year for the first time, and we were just awarded again, and what that does is ... it allows us to bring a really like truncated smaller version of a play to high schools at no cost to the kids and middle schools, and then as well to community venues throughout. Something we have heard since our inception is, like, we want you to bring this to us throughout the region, so it was. This was something that felt much further down the line in terms of timeline, but we were lucky that we were kind of able to accomplish that sooner because it is what a lot of folks have asked for. Then we have our main stage, which really is like our flagship event, and a lot of our other events surround the main stage. The other big thing is ... we have a really robust outreach program that includes free workshops for kids, artist mixers, LGBTQ mixers ... we're part of Upstate Art Weekend [free and low-cost tickets to anyone that asks]. Pay what you can shows ... all these things that we try to do to really break down that barrier of Shakespeare being this like, elite in air quotes thing that is not for you. I'm like, "No, no, no, there are fart jokes. There are sex jokes. It's like gross and funny and dirty and scary." In the same way all of our pop media is; it just ... you just have to like acclimate your ear to it a little bit, so just trying to like ... get anybody that wants to come in and anyone that's curious about it ... helping to like eliminate as many of those barriers as we can, and then, of course, serve, so like the free workshops are a great example. It's an hour of free childcare for people locally when childcare is super super hard to come by, and then at the end of this main stage outreach season, we're launching our first young company intensive program, so we're calling that our YoCo, and that's a bunch of young people [grades 6–12]. They're going to be doing workshops [and then perform scenes from a play], which will be really cool, and that's at the end of August, and then, finally, we're having a gala this fall, and that's our first time doing that.

Brett Barry  9:23  
What kind of community buy-in has there been? What kind of partnerships and relationships have come out of this whole thing?

Sarah Reny  9:31  
Yeah, we've ... we've been really lucky that the community has really welcomed us with open arms. Our main partnership is with the Catskill Mountain Foundation, so that was really a turning point for us at Catskill Mountain Shakespeare in terms of the level of professional theater we were able to do. Up here, finding housing can be so difficult, and our main stage shows are anywhere from 10 to 14 actors, plus an entire design team plus stage management plus directors plus assistance. It's a lot of bodies to house, and the Catskill Mountain Foundation was really wonderfully and generously able to lend a lot of that infrastructure, which then allowed us to hire, you know, older actors, more established actors, because we're not putting them in like funny little Airbnb houses. A lot of our actors come from the city or our regional actors that kind of bop around, and then our tech team is usually from the city, but we also work with a lot of local professional actors. We've always made it a point to have local auditions, and then we also auditioned in the city.

Brett Barry  10:35  
And aside from ticket sales, is most of the funding coming from grants?

Sarah Reny  10:40  
Yeah, grants and corporate funding, so a lot of ... a lot of local businesses up here ... they do like $2,500 to $5,000 grants; that's kind of how we cobbled together these things, and that's what a lot of the pre-work is ... is raising the $200,000 that this costs.

Brett Barry  10:55  
So it costs $200,000 for the mainstage production. Can you break that into some big chunks for me?

Sarah Reny  11:03  
I'd say the majority of that is artist pay, which we're really, really, really proud of, so we have 10 actors, 3 of which are Actors' Equity Association actors or stage managers. Actors' Equity Association—that we have an ASM, we have a director, we have 5 designers, we have a technical director, we have carpentry help, all of those things—to try and pay people a living wage is just really expensive and really important, so that since day one has really been where things have gone, as we kind of move into this next breath of where the money will go, we're hoping to, you know, invest more in technical elements, as well as Frank and I having some sort of more traditional salary—we'll call it, so that this has more of [like] a longevity to it, as opposed to us donating our time—the clock—the big thing I want people to know is if they want to come, we want them here. If money's an issue, we have so many things in place to try and get you here anyways. and if you don't know anything about it, that's fine. Because if you leave and you don't understand it, it means we didn't do our job. It doesn't mean you're not a "Shakespeare" person. Everyone is a "Shakespeare" person. I promise, no matter what kind of jokes you'd like, we have them here. Maybe not in this show, but in general, we do, so I think that's the thing I want people to know [is just]: we want you here—we want you to come and join us, and we'll do everything that we can to make that happen.

Brett Barry  12:27  
Is this a full-time project for you [year round], even though most of it is happening in the summer?

Sarah Reny  12:33  
This is definitely full-time for me, so I'm the artistic director, and then we have Frank Wildermann, who is the managing director, and he and I do pretty much everything in the lead-up to this, so we ... once this closes down, actually even now this morning, before I came in, I was writing a grant for next season already, and that's in like the busiest week of the year, but the deadlines happen to coincide, so once this closes, we're [like] already looking straight ahead to the tour straight ahead to next summer. It's definitely ... full year for ... for the two of us, yeah, and full-time. Ooh, and there's some sounds.

Brett Barry  13:14  
This is from the production?

Sarah Reny  13:15  
Oh yeah, this is, uh, this is definitely from the production; all of the sound, all of the music, and sound cues for this were made for the show; it's very cool.

Brett Barry  13:26  
So just add a little extra percent; it's very hip and modern. Tell me about this particular production and how you've given it your signature, your fingerprint.

Sarah Reny  13:37  
So this production, and with all of our productions, definitely, is very contemporary, and it's take, so I studied in London. I went to the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, which is very traditional training [very text-based], and you'll hear about the technique of acting, and theater and all these things. It's very rooted in that classical technique, which ... that I've kept. I think that ... that's really useful. I think it helps really take care of story, which is so important, and that's kind of where my classical taste ends. All of our productions—this one is absolutely no exception—are really contemporary. We have really diverse bodies—really queer bodies—on stage, but you don't always see it in these kinds of plays, and then everything from the music to the set design to the costumes is all—contemporary doesn't even feel like the right word because it's not always like ... rooted in space this year isn't. It feels kind of timeless, but it's not Julius Caesar and Togas. It's more like Julius Caesar in this war-torn Dune, like ethereal middle ground.

Brett Barry  14:42  
Do you stay true to the language in the text?

Sarah Reny  14:45  
We definitely stay true to the language in the text. We will sometimes take the songs. Chaser has written a lot of songs in his plays and sometimes will completely take those out and like added, so that's true in this show was true in our last show, but aside from that, all of the text is the same, but we do make cuts, so you're not coming into like a 4-hour Julius Caesar, which would be brutal.

Male Voice  15:07  
His coward lips did from that color fly ...

Brett Barry  15:09  
And then confided in Sarah that it takes me a few scenes to get into the rhythm of Shakespearean dialogues, and that's if I'm really focused. So what is it about Shakespeare that keeps a modern-day audience and performers coming back to his work?

Male Voice  15:24  
... start of the majestic world ...

Sarah Reny  15:26  
I think nothing that's so special about Shakespeare is the fact that it's difficult, like there are people that spend their whole lives working on these plays, and they go from being these engineers up to Queen Margaret's and Lady Anne's, and they devote their entire careers to these plays, and I think the difficulty is why, and it definitely does take time to acclimate your ear to the language, and it's something that if you're not fluent in it [takes that much longer]. My personal theory on this is ... I think the reason kids really love Shakespeare is because they're kind of used to not always getting what's going on, so they're really able to let the poetry kind of wash over them and get the broad strokes, and then they'll pick out the bits that read to them, and then they'll kind of drop the rest, and I think as grownups, we're really used to, like knowing what's going on, so that ... I think that's the shift. Sometimes that's hard to like ... get into because you're right. It is difficult, and it's impossible to watch one of Shakespeare's plays, and even if it's the best actors in the world, you'll never hear every lick of poetry, every perfectly composed metaphor. It's impossible, but that's not even the point. The point is that you can go back again and again and again, and at different points of your life or different days, different things pop out at you, depending on who's saying the line, where you're at, what you're listening for, what the story is, and I think that's actually it. It's the fact that it isn't easy all the time.

Brett Barry  16:56  
So let me ask you this: the way that Shakespeare wrote, was that how people spoke, and if so, what class of people spoke that way?

Sarah Reny  17:06  
I love that question. I mean, I don't think people in Elizabethan England are like going around speaking about how like the ... you are the sun rises in the east, like I don't think they were like spewing poetry at one another; however, their ears really were attuned to, a lot of, like, the words that will make fun of, like, thou and this, like Shakespearean talk that people will kind of poke fun at and play up. They did use those words; the British accent was actually, I think what I've heard is that it's closest to how a Georgia accent sounds like an American Georgian accent. I think that's what is now considered what the closest was, but I think they were just a bit more used to the cadence of it all, but we all speak in iambic pentameter. Not like, "but um, but um, but I'm perfectly that I'm duh dum, duh dum." That's the "I AM," but we do. That is the English language, and then if you're going to Molière, the cadence that that's written in is much more adapted to French, of course, because it's French but like, in English, we do go up and down. It's how we tell we listen; if you hear babies talk, they kind of do it as they pretend.

Brett Barry  18:17  
And so [the] every person in 17th-century England would have attended a Shakespeare play and just totally gotten it.

Sarah Reny  18:26  
Totally, and they also would have been, like, by our standards, incredibly rude, like, if ... if you've ever been to the globe in ... in England, it's round, and in the middle is where everyone would stand, so all the peasants, all the poor people, all the everyman would stand, and then there were seats coming out for the nobility and all these things. It was for everyone. There are crass jokes in these plays in every single one of them, but also, if they were doing a bad job, like, they would get yelled at, they'd be like told that they suck really loudly, and then have to keep going on this play that they just learned, which is also insane, like this was like pumped out so quick. The culture of it was just so different. There wasn't this reverence for it, which I think can be great, and I spent all my time doing this. I think it's the most beautiful, wonderful, touching art that there is, and I think that we have far too much reverence for so much of it. It alienates people from it.

Brett Barry  19:25  
What's the relevance of this particular play to 2024?

Sarah Reny  19:32  
The relevance of this play to 2024 [the relevance of Julius Caesar to 2024 in America], you know, is so political. We've tried not to be on the nose about it, and we're not. It's not set in America. There's no red hats or Biden flags or American flags. I thought that, and we hope that no matter where people fall on the political spectrum, they feel the same, like that they ... that they feel seen in it and that they feel that fear of ...

Audio  20:10  
[MUSIC]

Sarah Reny  20:12  
It's so tricky. It's ... if you do not keep politicians in check ... how dangerous that can be, and also if you do not keep the means with which you keep people in check, how it derails like the entirety of our civilization, which is ... I think most people will feel very contemporary.

Brett Barry  20:36  
So the dangers of complacency, just as relevant 425 years ago, when this was written?

Sarah Reny  20:43  
The dangers of complacency, the dangers of a mob mentality, the dangers of ... for the common good kind of ideas where the ends justify the means, and he's just really complicated questions that I don't know. I don't really know the answers to frankly—I think that ... that's where a lot of us are this year, where we're all like very off guard by what ... what do we do? What's the ... what's the right thing to do, and I think this really speaks to that. We're like, "What is the right thing to do? What should they have done? What would have happened? We don't know." It just unravels with the choices that they do make.

Audio  21:25  
[MUSIC]

Brett Barry  21:25  
What do you think that William Shakespeare would really enjoy about this particular company and this location being someone who, I guess, never came to the Catskills?

Everyone  21:41  
[LAUGHTER]

Sarah Reny  21:41  
No, I don't think Shakespeare did make it to the Catskills. Unfortunately, I think ... I think Shakespeare would love it. Stratford-upon-Avon is not dissimilar to this kind of vibe. It's more populated, but I hope he was ... really like it. I think he would be very surprised by many of the elements of just modern life that are both present on stage and in general, but I hope, my hope is that he would hear the care that the actors take with the words that he wrote and how intentional the words are like ... to go back to kind of how deep these plays are as an actor. It's ... there's a million ways you can dissect these things, but everything from, like, line-endings to couplets to stress to be. It's not stressed to be. They all mean something. It's crazy, so I think to come here and then listen to the care that people have taken with his words. I hope ... would mean a lot because they have.

Brett Barry  22:42  
And how about some of the other production elements? What would he make of those?

Sarah Reny  22:45  
Oh, man, I think fluorescent tubing light would probably be a shocker. As with, like, glossy black paint on the floor? Yeah, I think the lighting would definitely be shocking, and although, like a very droney kind of subwoofer. These sounds would probably really be a shock to the system in general, but hopefully you think that's cool. I mean, it would feel ... it's kind of futuristic for us, so I can't even imagine you'd be like ... these are aliens, yeah.

Audio  23:18  
[MUSIC STARTS]

Brett Barry  23:17  
"Julius Caesar" is running through July 28th. Get your tickets at catskillmountainshakespeare.com. "Kaatscast: The Catskills Podcast" is a fair production of Silver Hollow Audio. Thrice honored as the [Chronogrammies] Best Regional Podcast. Pray, rate, and review on the podcast app of thy choosing. Subscribe to our missives at kaatscast.com and follow us on Instagram @kaatscast. I am Brett Barry. Gratitude for lending thine ears, and until our next encounter, fare-thee-well!

Campbell Brown  23:52  
"Kaatscast" is supported by a generous grant from the Nicholas J. Juried Family Foundation and by listeners like you! If you'd like to make a donation, you can do so at kaatscast.com. Thank you!