By Britton Buttrill
Georgia Shakespeare is celebrating 25 years of bringing the Bard’s best to Atlanta. In July 1986, the company staged its inaugural season – including The Taming of the Shrew and King Lear – in a tent at Oglethorpe University’s baseball stadium. Thousands braved the heat and rain to see the shows.
Twenty-five seasons later, Georgia Shakespeare’s Artistic Director Richard Garner, and actors Park Krausen and Joe Knezevich reflect on the past and present with some of their most memorable experiences.
Georgia Shakespeare holds a particularly special place in the hearts of Knezevich and Krausen, who met in the summer of 2002after graduating from the company’s internship program. Four years later, their friendship became a marriage.
Knezevich has been with the company since the summer of 1999, after he auditioned for an internship at the Southeastern Theatre Conference his senior year at Florida State University. He was one of six chosen out of about 1,200 who auditioned. After 12 years of performing with the company, he said that his favorite role has been Richard III. “He was a very physically demanding and amazing character. I had half-a-head of white hair and a creepy white contact lens… come on,” Knezevich laughed, noting that his favorite production was Metamorphoses. “It was an absolutely beautiful script to begin with, and then all the pieces and parts that came together in the most beautiful, cohesive way.”
Krausen is both an associate artist with Georgia Shakespeare and the artistic director of Atlanta’s French theater, Théâtre du Rêve. Park first came to work with Georgia Shakespeare when she was cast as an acting intern after her junior year of college at Emory University. Park said her memorable roles are Geraldine Barclay in What the Butler Saw – “Because I had to run around on stage in my underwear and a straight jacket” – and Portia in Merchant of Venice.
“It has been an honor to grow up in this company as the artists around me ripen and mature and continue to explore,” Krausen said.
Artistic Director Richard Garner’s passion for theatre began at Berry College, where he received a theatre scholarship. Although he originally planned on majoring in English, he found himself immersed in theatre during his undergraduate years and double majored in both English and Theatre.
“We only did one Shakespeare in my four years at Berry, but I had a strong affinity for it from my English studies,” said Garner, “but I knew that if I wanted to pursue acting, I needed deeper training than I got from a BA program. I needed a hard-core conservatory program.”
Garner went on to study and train with the acclaimed American Conservatory Theatre and did two seasons of summer stock with a company near San Jose, Calif., but he had been dreaming of starting his own theatre company since Berry.
“Another theater student, Lane Anderson, and I were talking about how we’d like to start a theater one day after we left school,” said Garner, “Lane moved to New York while I went out west, but we kept in touch. We both ended up focusing on Shakespeare in our post-undergrad studies and we both acted in Shakespeare companies.”
After returning to Atlanta, Anderson was talking to then-Oglethorpe President Manning Patillo and mentioned his discussions with Garner about starting a theater company. “Dr. Patillo said, ‘why not at Oglethorpe?’ The rest, as they say, is history.”
Garner said that although many things have changed with the company over the last 25 years, others have stayed the same. “GS has certainly changed its physical environment,” said Garner, “A tent atmosphere is very different from the comfort of the Conant Center Theater and we are able to invest more resources in physical elements of shows now, but one thing that hasn’t really changed is the group of artists we work with. We have some artists who have been with us for more than 20 years.”
Garner said that he doesn’t have one particular favorite play that Georgia Shakespeare has performed, but if he had to pick one, it would be Shrew: The Musical, which was adapted in 1993 and has been revived again this season.
Garner said one of his strongest memories is when the company was still performing in the tent. After it was erected on the baseball field, he would go out to the empty tent in the evening, sitting and envisioning what all of the empty space could become. “There was a sort of palpable energy and it reminded me of one of my favorite quotes from Henry V, ‘Now sits expectation in the air.’ The empty tent represented the raw potential we as a company had to make theater. That sort of sums up, to me, the way an audience feels when they sit down in a theater and the lights go out. It also sums up the attitude a group of artists have when they begin the process of telling a story and bringing it to life on stage. It speaks of artistic hope and the possibility of creatively exploring the journey of the human spirit together.”
Georgia Shakespeare is currently performing Love’s Labours Lost, Shrew: The Musical, and King Lear in reparatory through Aug. 8. For ticket information, visit www.gashakes.org
