Goodheart Takes Helm Of Elm Shakespeare

As every New Haven Bard-o-phile knows, every August for the past generation, Elm Shakespeare Company (ESC) has given us high-level, exuberant, and pay-anything-you-wish-but-please-contribute-something-really-almost-free Shakespeare in Edgerton Park.

Now ESC founders Jim and Margie Andreassi have passed the company’s leadership baton on to a a single person, Rebecca Goodheart. This is Goodheart’s first season as its producing director, meaning that she wears the hats of both the artistic and business leader of the company. In August, she’ll present A Midsummer Night’s Dream, directed by Tina Packer, the distinguished founder of Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. and her own and Jim Andreassi’s mentor

And this Sunday, Packer herself is presenting at the John Lyman Center at Southern Connecticut State University her performance of Women of Will, a dramatic tour of females in Shakespeare’s canon, as a fundraiser and welcome for the beginning of the Goodheart chapter of ESC’s ongoing story.

The Independent sat down with Goodheart to talk about her plans for ESC; the new partnership with Southern, which finally is giving ESC an artistic home; her own career as an actor and voice teacher; how heavy lies the head that wears both the art and business crowns as producing director; and what she thinks of the theater scene in New Haven. Goodheart said it’s going to be different — watch out for those statues and nymphs leaping about the bushes of the park — and yet also the same as the Midsummer that Andreassi staged 19 years ago when ESC was just a baby.

That’s because, as Goodheart said, they all have the same actor-centered ​“Shakespeare DNA” derived from the teachings of Tina Packer.

Here are highlights from that interview:

Independent: Who is Rebecca Goodheart and how has she come to ESC?

Goodheart: Jim Andreassi and I had both spent much time at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, the 10th-largest Shakespeare festival in the country. It’s the home of a very particular actor-audience aesthetic, bringing Elizabethan ideals into performance. You are an Elizabethan actor! It means you’re trained with dance and the connection to the divine; with fights and the connection to violence; with clowns and buffooning; joy and silliness and connection to the earth; and connection to language on a word by word basis. Tina founded Shakespeare & Company and created an aesthetic that changed people’s lives. I love the way Jim puts it: He and I are from the same Shakespeare DNA … Tina’s DNA.

Independent: But you’ve told me that after your training in Lenox and before ESC you founded a Shakespeare festival in Maryland, most recently worked with the San Francisco Shakespeare festival, and are associated with one, at least as a consultant, as far away as Prague. Do you see yourself as much a producer as an actor and teacher of actors?

Goodheart: I started out as an actor. I acted in New York for ten years, in the 1990s. I went to NYU and studied with Stella Adler. I was always connected with language. I come from Washington D.C. I grew up with the Folger Library. [I always felt] psychological realism was limiting. What I love about theater is the expansion of what it means to be human. I’d always found that in Shakespeare. I was at Shakespeare & Company for five years, with Tina, my mentor. They kicked me out of the nest. Go create, [they said]. That lead me to the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va., an original practices theater, where I learned what we can learn about performing today from [performing in] Shakespeare’s day.

I’m also trained in Kristin Linklater’s voice training — the idea that your thought-feeling-impulse is connected with your breath and language connects to that in your body. Teaching is wonderful, but at the end of the day I am a producing artist. I have to be in the mix of it. I love being the person who has the vision that holds the community. No other job I’ve ever done takes as much of me as being a producing director.

Independent: Can you say a little about possible tensions between the two?

Goodheart: I’m both the mom and dad, both Margie and Jim. One side of my brain is holding on to the financials, the strategic planning, and the other side is creating amazing art and working with artists and developing curriculum for the teaching artists all within the context of serving a community. At its core the danger is there’s a tension between a good artistic director and a good managing director. The artistic director says, ​“let’s go to the moon.” The managing director says, ​“it’s not in the budget.” We have an amazing board and great oversight [that helps with this tension]. The solution is you surround yourself with visionary artists who say, ​“let’s go the moon” … and you frame the conversation about possibility, vision, magic, and then you say, ​“all right and how do we do this with the budget we have?”

Independent: So what might we see that’s new?

Goodheart: My first obligation, my first job, is to honor and fulfill the incredible legacy of Jim and Margie and what the original board of directors created. Our gift to the community will always be the summer outdoor Shakespeare. That said, we are growing and deepening our educational programs. This year we are on target to serve double the number of students we served before. We are adding a program for the seven-to-13 year-olds that we never served before, and summer camps in three different locations [in New Haven]. We are expanding our teen programs, our teen troupe with a 12-week course that puts on a performance each semester. And we’re deepening the scholars’ program where each student will have a direct, one-on-one mentoring relationship with an actor or crew. The [student] actor will be responsible for a ​“rehearsal understudy” for learning all the mentor’s lines and blocking in Midsummer Night’s Dream … and half the [student] actors will be on stage each night — this year they’ll be fairies — and the other half will learn about the front of the house and put on their own pre-show entertainment during the one-and-a-half hours [of picnicking] beforehand.

Independent: And what is the relationship with Southern about?

Goodheart: We’ve been homeless and now Southern gives us, as Theseus says [in Midsummer], a ​“local habitation.” I got to be the person who ran that football over the goal line, although it had been in process for three years. Using their carpentry shop, sharing resources in terms of rehearsal space is old. I’d like to see us building more costumes of our own. We do borrow and rent and we have great relationships with Southern, Yale Drama, Yale Rep, Long Wharf, and the Shubert. This partnership allows us to do more creating of what goes on stage. What’s new is we will have an office here year-round, and we’ll be working with Southern students. I’ll be teaching or directing. They are helping us sponsor Tina Packer coming to New Haven. We wouldn’t have been able to do something of this level of international attention, Women of Will, without the relationship to Lyman.

Independent: So why did you choose Midsummer Night’s Dream for your first show, and will you be directing it?

Goodheart: Tina will direct. For the first two years [while I hold the company together] I’ll bring in great directors. [As to Midsummer] there’s a reason it’s done more than the other Shakespeare plays. It allows us to make the most of the spectacular outdoor venue, the beautiful park. The rehearsal process is quite short, three weeks, and structure of the play allows us to rehearse all three subplots simultaneously, so it buys rehearsal time. I can’t reveal our casting yet, but there are about 15 reasons why any one play is chosen. It’s a great play the actors and the audience have come to love at Elm. Tina and I were speaking also that we are in a time of great contentiousness in our world, whether heart-sickening violence, our raucous political environment. Shakespeare in the park is a gift we give to New Haven. The play begins in strife, in war, and ends in a place of harmony and peace. The play ends with ​“hand in hand, with fairy grace, we will sing and bless this place.” From there Puck turns to the audience and says: ​“Do you think this is a dream? Give me your hand, and it can be yours.” We’re going to be playing a lot with the park as a magical world.

Independent: Tell me your impressions of New Haven and the theater scene here, as a newcomer.

Goodheart: I keep falling more and more in love with New Haven. It’s a community that certainly values great art. It’s [also] a community that is really engaged in issues of the 21st century. I was so moved at the Community Foundation’s annual meeting to find out the way New Haven embraces refugees. I was so proud in that moment.

I’m a sucker for all the stone work downtown. I wasn’t prepared for the physical beauty of downtown. I can see West Rock from where I live, and every night those rocks are a different color. Here’s the question we have to ask, and listen: What is our place in this community? There are great arts institutions in New Haven fulling [different] needs. Long Wharf, what they do they do brilliantly. Shubert, Collective Consciousness … I want to do what we do and we can do better than anyone else that’s a service. I wouldn’t say no [to putting on non-Shakespeare plays], but I think the question becomes: Is that what New Haven needs us to do? The tag line we use is ​“we bring classics to all of New Haven.” Everyone deserves great theater and a connection to these plays that have changed lives for 400 years. I feel like there is a place for me to contribute to the larger conversations. There can be places where artists are valued as the ​“entertainment.” In New Haven there’s an opening where I [and ESC] can [by being considered more than ​“entertainment”] add to the conversation. Isn’t that what everybody wants in their life?

Click here for tickets for the Elm Shakespeare Company’s benefit performance, Women of Will. The performance is Sunday, April 3, at 4 p.m. at the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts at Southern Connecticut State University.