Welcome to Livermore Shakespeare Festival 2012!  We’re thrilled to be celebrating our tenth anniversary of Shakespeare in the Vineyard, thanks to your enthusiasm, interest, and support. As part of our celebration we are inaugurating an LSF Blog.  You’ll hear from a variety of voices: our artists, tech crew, stage manager, apprentices, staff, volunteers, and me, the dramaturge.  We’ll share with you some inside information about what goes on backstage, about the people and the incredible variety of artistry, skills and knowledge it takes to put a show together, and some background about this summer’s plays – all kinds of stuff.

Join us for a weekly glimpse into what’s happening, and let us know what you think by responding to the blog posts. We’d love to hear your questions, comments and observations.  You can leave a reply at the end of the blog.
—  Peggy Riley, Dramaturge

June 15, 2012

Traveling Players

By Peggy Riley
Dramaturge

 
The tradition of traveling players is almost as old as theater itself, encompassing performers from the pageant wagons of Medieval Europe to the roving bands and Commedia troupes of Renaissance Italy, from groups of entertainers including acrobats, puppeteers, jugglers, musicians and storytellers in all times to the road shows and touring companies of our own time. Our directors, Lisa Tromovitch and Virginia Reed, adapted the concept of traveling players to Livermore Shakespeare Festival 2012: a troupe arrives at Concannon Vineyard to perform in Hamlet’s play-within-a-play, The Murder of Gonzalo; while they’re here, the players present The Merry Wives in the vineyards outside the town surrounding the castle (in our case, the grand Ellen Roe Concannon house).

How chances it they travel? Hamlet (II.2)

Traveling players were very much a part of Elizabethan theatre and familiar to Elizabethan audiences. London-based acting companies regularly toured the country, sometimes going as far as Scotland, often in times of plague when theaters were closed in London. Many companies also toured annually, performing in a wide variety of venues, including large country homes and castles, as we see in Hamlet when “the tragedians [actors] of the city” come to Elsinore.  Some players went even further, all the way to Europe. Three of Shakespeare’s players, Will Kemp the clown, George Bryan and Thomas Pope, are recorded as performing for Danish royalty at Elsinor in 1586!

Traveling troupes in England generally kept to major roads, partly to ensure the easiest possible transport for their wagons containing costumes, props and set pieces, and partly to gain access to the most lucrative possible venues, those in large population centers. Performing in country houses could be especially appealing; often the company members enjoyed free food, safe accommodations, and generous payment. “Use them after your own honor and dignity,” Hamlet tells Polonius, speaking of the players. “The less they deserve, the more merit is in your bounty. Take them in.”

O brave new world. That has such people in’t. The Tempest (V.1)

The earliest English colonists brought Shakespeare to the new world and were staging his plays by 1750. Shakespeare was considered the icon of Anglo-Saxon culture, a culture the raw, new country was eager to acquire. By the first half of the 19^th century, Shakespearean actors were coming from England: touring companies promised wealth and excitement, great job prospects for actors. Traveling players even became the target of Mark Twain’s satire in Huckleberry Finn when a pair of rogues tried to pass themselves off as Shakespearean actors touring the south.

Then westward-ho! Twelfth Night (III.1)

And tour the actors did. They played not only the big cities in the East, but the mining camps and new towns of the west, which proved particularly profitable. Cowboys, outlaws, trappers and, yes, miners, knew and loved Shakespeare. When there were no accessible performances, they’d often read or recite Shakespeare around a campfire. So when traveling players brought Shakespeare to the west, they were enthusiastically welcomed.

Actors could earn up to $3,000 a week in San Francisco in the 1850s, and even more among cheering miners who paid for their tickets with gold dust and tossed gold nuggets on the stage. They played in saloons, gambling halls and brothels as well as in some of the ornate new “opera houses.” Actors even performed on the stump of a giant redwood tree in Calaveras County.  And famed actor Edwin Booth played his first Shakespearean lead in California.

Let us every one go home/And laugh this sport o’er. Merry Wives (V.5)

So imagine a troupe of these traveling players passing through Livermore on their way to play Shakespeare at the mines; the route we know as 580 was a major route from San Francisco to the gold fields. Imagine those players camping by what is now Concannon Vineyard. And now imagine yourself in the present, visiting Concannon Vineyard on a summer night, after the traveling players have pulled in their wagon.

Shakespeare is very much a part of western summers; westerners pioneered Shakespeare festivals.  From Ashland, Oregon to Utah and Colorado, from the Pacific northwest to the southwest canyons, from Orinda and Santa Cruz to Livermore, westerners are picnicking, laughing, sorrowing and reveling in Shakespeare’s timeless stories. “Gosh!” observed one cowhand.  “That fellow Shakespeare could sure spill the real stuff.  He’s the only poet I ever seen what was fed on raw meat.”

Enjoy a musical look at traveling players (“We Open in Venice” from film version of Cole Porter’s Kiss Me Kate) at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LoR1ElaOpDk

Not only do players travel, but also venues! Next time we’ll take a look at Shakespeare’s home at Concannon and the Globe in London.