PRINTActing Out
Maplewood Barn celebrates 35 years
Joshua A. Bickel
Actress Sue Ellersieck (center) plays Kent in Shakespeare’s King Lear. Director Russ Scott left the script untouched but modernized the play by setting it in the year 2040, when England has suffered a civil war that leaves everyone homeless.
May 8, 2008 | 12:00 a.m. CST
It’s safe to say the Maplewood Barn Theatre Company isn’t a typical theater group. Among other things, actors have to worry about the rumblings of traffic and helicopters, sounds from neighboring cows and goats and the possibility that a mosquito might fly into their mouths at the end of a soliloquy.
Columbia’s only outdoor theater, the Maplewood Barn Theatre at Nifong Park has provided outdoor summer entertainment since 1973 — weather permitting.
What: King Lear
When: May 9-11, 16-18, 23-25, 8 p.m.
Where: Maplewood Barn Community Theatre
Cost: $6-8
Call: 449-7517
“It’s a completely different atmosphere for both the actors and the audience,” says Charlie Wilkerson, who’s in his third season with what those involved endearingly call The Barn.
“If you are doing indoor theater, you don’t have cars or ambulances going by — or an animal zoo, though the cows mooing worked great for Oklahoma!,” he says.
“The Barn is just really informal, even old-fashioned in a way,” says Kathleen Wesselmann, president of the board of directors for Maplewood Barn.
Each summer, the group of local actors performs four productions. “We’ve got writers, physicians, pharmacists, students; you name it,” says 20-year Maplewood veteran Byron Scott of the people involved in the productions. For its 35th anniversary season, The Barn will first raise its curtains (if it had curtains) with the Shakespearian tragedy King Lear.
Originally written for an outdoor performance, King Lear is perfect for Maplewood Barn. But just like this unconventional theater space, the play will be nothing like a stuffy Elizabethan performance.
“I didn’t want to set it up in the traditional, pre-1300s-style because then we’d have to have more traditional costuming,” says director Russ Scott (no relation to Byron). “We are out in the heat, and we can’t have actors wearing too many heavy fabrics,” he says. As a solution to sweat-soaked actors and to make the play more relatable to the audience, Scott decided to change the year to 2040.
“What is happening between now and that time period is that England has gone through a civil war, and a majority of the population is homeless except for the royalty,” he says. The set looks like a war-torn city, and the characters dress either in raggedy layers or in business casual-type wear, depending on their status. Luckily for Maplewood Barn, this isn’t a violation of Shakespeare’s law because the scripts don’t come with stage or set directions.
“The main difference between a contemporary show and Shakespeare is you have more freedom with Shakespeare,” Russ Scott says. Despite the director’s futuristic interpretation of set and costume, the script and dialogue remain unchanged, which means everyone speaks in iambic pentameter and (spoiler alert!) almost everyone dies.
Not all this summer’s productions kill off everyone on the playbill, and for the first time the company will perform indoors. This season the company will produce a fifth play in conjunction with the Missouri School of Journalism’s centennial celebration that is aptly named The Front Page and is co-directed by Wilkerson and Byron Scott, a Missouri School of Journalism professor who will retire in August. The satire will be performed indoors at the new Missouri Theatre. “It’s an opportunity for us to give our actors a different space to work with and to also allow the community to see us in a different venue,” Wilkerson says.
“I’m sure it will feel really different to perform indoors,” Wesselmann says. “We’ve never performed at the Missouri Theatre, and that should be a great part.”
Whether it’s an outer-space musical or the Greek tragedy Lysistrata playing at The Barn, leave the suit and tie at home. Instead, bring a lawn chair or blankets (there are no seats at the theater), bug spray, a picnic basket and even a bottle of wine. Maplewood Theatre also provides a petting zoo for children. Animals aside, Russ Scott promises loud, energetic performances and expects a loud, energetic audience. “It will have to be,” he says. “Sometimes the traffic gets really loud on Highway 63.”
The Barn Summer Productions
Proof by David Auburn
June 13-15, 20-22, 27-29
• This Pulitzer Prize winning play is about a woman who has spent most of her life caring for her brilliant father. When he dies, her sister and a former student of hers re-enter her life. Hopefully things will start looking up.
Plan 9! The Musical from Outer Space
July 11-13, 18-20, 25-27
• Columbia actors have taken a B movie and made it into a rock ’n’ roll musical comedy. This production is by Chris Bowling, Meg Phillips and J. West and is based on the film by Edward D. Woo.
Lysistrata by Aristophanes
Aug. 15-17, 22-24, 29-31
• Just about as tragic as King Lear, only Greek, Lysistrata asks all Grecian women to end the war by refusing to have sex with their husbands. Drama is inevitable.
The Front Page
Sept. 11-13
• By Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur, the 1920s classic is about a press room in Chicago’s City Hall on the day a murderer escapes from jail. Reporters compete against each other to sell newspapers. Who says journalism is unethical?
