YOU GUEST IT

All The World’s A Stage, Particularly At Monomoy Theatre

by Bernard Cornwell

            This year you can cross the Atlantic in style, visit Verona, Paris or Transylvania, and do it all without leaving Chatham.  You can witness history’s most famous family feud or cheer on an ugly duckling.  You can go to the Monomoy Theatre.

            The theater’s 52^nd season is underway with a production of “Anything Goes,” Cole Porter’s hilarious musical set on a transatlantic liner and, with seven more productions to follow, the company will be kept busy ‘til the end of August when, in keeping with a tradition that goes back half a century, a stool and a broom will be placed at center stage and will stay there until a new company arrives for another summer. 

            The theater was empty when Elizabeth Baker discovered it in 1957.  A broom was propped forlornly against a stool and, ever since, the stool and broom have guarded the stage through the dark winters.  Elizabeth Baker’s husband, John, was the president of Ohio University, and it was Elizabeth’s dream that the University’s School of Fine Arts could use Monomoy to give their drama students an intense summer of performance.  Monomoy is a boot camp for actors, and the program is brutally demanding.  By midsummer an actor could be rehearsing one play in the morning, a second in the afternoon, performing a third in the evening, and all the time learning the lines for a fourth.  The miracle, repeated annually, is the extraordinary high standard of the productions.

            I had better declare an interest.  The older roles are usually played by Equity actors, mostly from New York or London.  Theater is an illusion, and one way to destroy the illusion is to have an old person played by a twenty-two year old, so professional actors (and directors) come to Chatham to leaven youth with experience.  Julie Harris, the undisputed Queen of Broadway, was persuaded to come from retirement to appear in one of last year’s productions, and somehow, amidst this talent, I was roped in for a small part.  This year I shall be a priest, a monk and a doctor, so yes, I am biased.  I am also astonished.

            The core of the company is still recruited from Ohio University, but students, both undergraduates and post-graduate, also come from a half dozen other schools.  They audition for the privilege of living for 10 weeks in overcrowded, crumbling houses and working till they drop.  They have two days off all summer and are rewarded with a stipend that hardly covers the cost of traveling to the Cape.  Some are technicians, looking after the sets, the costumes and the lighting, but what they all possess is enthusiasm, and it shows.  There is an extraordinary energy at Monomoy Theatre.  It fizzes.  This is live theater, with all its risks and rewards.

            The Cape Baseball League likes to say (truthfully) that you can see the stars of tomorrow playing today.  I remember a performance at Monomoy two years ago.  I was standing in Elizabethan peasant costume on the outside steps that lead to stage left.  Inside, beyond the black curtain keeping out the summer evening’s sun, Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” was unwinding its magic to an enthralled audience, and from Veterans Field, just across a belt of trees, came a beautiful rendering of The Star Spangled Banner.  Two girls were singing the anthem before the Chatham A’s baseball game, and I had a pulse of pride that our town could provide two such perfect entertainments.  On stage you sometimes hear the crack of bat on ball, and I’m sure the baseball crowd can sometimes hear the chorus singing in the musicals.

            Not every Monomoy actor will go on to be a star, or even a professional, though alumni can be seen all across Hollywood, Broadway and on your television screens.  I’ve watched a sold-out production in London’s West End that was directed by a Monomoy alumni.  The boot camp turns out good troupers.  This is not student theater; it is serious, dedicated, and often dazzling, and Chatham is incredibly fortunate to possess the company.  Live theater carries a unique charge.  Each night is a tightrope walk, yet amazingly, night after night, despite the weariness and the workload, the magic works.  It is orchestrated by the theater’s director, Alan Rust, and his wife Jan, and supported by the generosity of the Steindler family, but in the end it is the audience that makes it possible.  The company is here for you.  It is for you that they work.  It is for you that they conjure Verona, Paris and Transylvania, and without you Monomoy Theatre would be nothing but an empty stage, a stool and a broom.

       2009     “Anything Goes” runs till July 4; July 7 to 11, “The Learned Ladies of Park Avenue”;  July 14 to 18,  “Mark Twain’s Is He Dead”;  July 21 to 25, “Dracula”; July 29 to Aug. 8, “Honk!”;  Aug. 11 to 15, “Romeo and Juliet”; Aug. 18 to 22, “A Trip to Bountiful”; Aug. 25 to 29, “Room Service.”  Call the box office at 508- 945-1589 for tickets.

            Chatham resident Bernard Cornwell is the author of more than 40 books, the latest of which is “Agincourt.”