In the months leading up to our 2012 Main Stage season, we are profiling some of the artists shaping our productions. —The Tempest, Spunk, Blithe Spirit, and Hamlet—in our e-newsletters. This month, we’re featuring renowned Bay Area actor René Augesen, who will make her Cal Shakes debut as Ruth Condomine in Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit. What follows is the transcript of my email interview with René. To sign up for our email newsletter, click here. 

Manoel Felciano and René Augesen in ROUND AND ROUND THE GARDEN at A.C.T.; photo by Kevin Berne.

You’ve been an A.C.T. Core Company Member since 2001, and have performed at Lincoln Center and the Public Theater in NY and on stages throughout the country. What’s your experience with outdoor theater?

I’ve not worked in outdoor theatre for a very long time. Around 20 years ago I worked at Trinity Shakespeare Festival in Fort Worth. I did Ophelia in Hamlet and Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew one summer, and Juliet in R & J and Luciana in The Comedy of Errors another summer. I’m told the weather in Orinda is much more fickle than Fort Worth!

What’s your experience with Noël Coward? Can you share any early thoughts on the role of Ruth Condomine or on Blithe Spirit in general?

In my first year at A.C.T. I actually did a production of Blithe Spirit in which I played Elvira (Condomine). It should be pretty interesting and odd doing a show a second time, playing a different character. I remember Shona (Tucker, who played Ruth) finding it particularly challenging to pretend like she didn’t see me; we kept cracking each other up because of it.

Mark Rucker directed you in Once in a Lifetime at A.C.T. What do you like about working with him? What do you think he’ll bring to this production?

I’ve actually worked with Mark a number of times. He directed me in one of my very favorite shows, The Rainmaker. I love working with him. I think he’s one of those rare directors that intuits what each actor needs, individually, and gives them that. He takes the time to know who you are as a person and as an actor and very generously morphs, sometimes several times a day, into exactly what you need at the time. It’s difficult to know when an actor needs to hear more or less from a director at any given moment. He somehow knows. And he’s always up for a game of “what if…”.  So he’ll bring to this production what he always brings, collaboration and fun and color and idiosyncrasy.

What or who inspires you right now? Any particular writers, music, current events, people, et cetera?

I fear anything I write here will sound pretentious but here goes.

I could go with the obvious and say Shakespeare. But it is true that I pick it up often. That I daydream about doing it quite a bit. That I secretly work on it. That when I teach it I keep working on it even after the class ends. And that I’m a bit obsessed with the actual “work” that it takes to do it.

But also I’m lately sort of obsessed and inspired by and always looking for performances and actors that don’t announce themselves, that transform into character without seeming to shout “Look at me! Look how good I am!” Bryan O’Byrne, Mia Wasikowska, Viola Davis. Performances that sometimes transcend what otherwise might have been mediocre material.

And finally, if you could have appeared any play in history, what (and/or where, and/or with whom directing or sharing the stage with you) would it be?

OK, this is really hard! I’d love to answer with my dream cast and play on the Broadway stage, now—but I feel like that’s cheating. So I’ll say Our American Cousin, so that I could throw my body over John Wilkes Booth and change the course of American history for the better. I’m kidding.

I don’t know! Maybe do Macbeth with Marlon Brando in the 1960s with Harold Pinter directing? That might be awesome!

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In the months leading up to our 2012 Main Stage season, we’ll be profiling the creative minds behind the season’s productions—The Tempest, Spunk, Blithe Spirit, and Hamlet—in our e-newsletters. For this season’s kick-off installment, we’re featuring actor and Oregon Shakespeare Festival favorite Michael Winters, making his Cal Shakes debut as the sorcerer Prospero in Jonathan Moscone’s season-opening production of The Tempest. What follows is the full transcript of Cal Shakes’ email interview with Mr. Winters. To sign up for our email newsletter, click here.

You’ve done your share of Shakespeare at OSF, Seattle Shakespeare, and elsewhere. What have been your favorite Shakespeare roles so far, and why?

Right now my favorite Shakespeare role I’ve gotten to do is the one I’m in the middle of doing now—Falstaff. I did Part 2 of Henry IV at Ashland last summer and am on my way to PlayMakers Rep in North Carolina to do the part in a compilation of Parts I and II. It’s such an exhilarating role, rich and various, especially if you get to do the second part. It seems the character was so popular that Shakespeare expanded on him a great deal in Part II, taking him all sorts of places that he didn’t have time and space for in Part I. He just gets more and more human—sweet, sour, boisterous, clever, vulnerable, dangerous, overwhelming, and unforgivable—as the plays go on. Huge challenge, huge satisfaction. As real and inimitable as a character in a play can get. I got to play King Lear several years ago, also an immense challenge but so much more stressful, dark, and despairing. Physically much harder, but again, unlike anything else you ever get to do in a character. I also had a ball playing Lucio in Measure for Measure many years ago. Such an unregenerate slime bucket but, again, alive as can be— and very funny.

Have you done The Tempest before? Can you share some early thoughts on your role as Prospero at Cal Shakes?

Yes, I played Prospero just two year ago here at the Seattle Shakespeare Company. I loved that as well and really look forward to another crack at it. The concept of that production was, for me, very compelling, and one of the reasons I’m so excited to do it at Cal Shakes is that I know Jonathan’s production will be completely different and provocative so it’ll be like starting from scratch, but I already sort of know the words. I guess Prospero is kind of a mini-Lear, emotionally at least: a total rage-aholic, still nursing, feeding a grudge against his brother over all the years he’s been on the island, letting that hatred and resentment corrupt his mind and the ways he deals with his, what—children? subjects?—Miranda, Caliban, and Ariel. The miracle of his cure, his healing, is very moving to me, courageous, humbling. Quite beautiful. And such terrific language.

In 2000 you were awarded the Fox Fellowship by TCG, to study in Britain and then hold a workshop on the language of Shakespeare. How has that experience affected your craft, and your life?

The Fox Fellowship, which I was so lucky to get, gave me an opportunity to study with David Hammond for two weeks at University of North Carolina, followed by two months in London where I worked with Mark Wing-Davey and Michael Langham for several weeks each, and went to the theater virtually every night. The whole experience was a dense and lively mix of study, discussion, activity, and theater-going that gave me a renewed energy for my work, and new ideas about how to approach it. Perhaps the most practical outcome of the whole process was that it led to the production of King Lear that I was in, directed by Mark and produced by PlayMakers Rep, where I had worked with David. My original project proposal was to learn more about speaking Shakespeare, but the heading was so general that it left lots of leeway for all kinds of learning in many areas. I’ve always been grateful for the kick start it gave me for the next phase of my working life.

What’s the first piece of theater you ever saw? Alternately (or in addition), what was the first piece you saw that really made you think, “I want to be a part of this”?

I remember seeing a production of HMS Pinafore that the local high school did when I was 8 or 9 that is probably the first theater experience I can recall. There was also a music-tent summer theater that produced road-show musicals in Cleveland; I saw a production of West Side Story there when I was in junior high school that I remember sent chills up my spine. It simply jangled my suburban world and made me aware of other places, other lives, other possibilities that I don’t think I have ever managed to shake. I don’t recall then thinking ‘Oh, yeah, that’s what I want to do with my life,’ but subconsciously it must have had that kind of effect. It’s odd that both those memories are about musicals, since that’s not the road I eventually ended up on. My first Shakespeare memory, in fact, is from the same junior high period, when we were bused into the Cleveland Playhouse to see Macbeth and all I remember of that was the buzz on the way home that we could see Lady M’s bra through her nightgown. Not very elevated. This was the time of my life though, when I had one of those extraordinary teachers who seem to shove you into a room where you meet the rest of your life. That’s probably my first real conscious step. She directed the school plays and was passionate, fun, supportive, eager, and serious. She’s really the one to blame….

What or who inspires you right now? Any particular writers, music, current events, people, et cetera?

I’m afraid I’m so old-school. Shakespeare still inspires me the most. Endless possibilities—endless. There are plays I think I’m just tired of and then I’ll see a production, or be in one, that amazes me all over again. I love watching they way actors and directors solve all the old questions, the moment-to-moment mysteries of the plays. Never get tired of that. Also crave any chance to do Chekhov, Shaw, and Tom Stoppard, any time; they all thrill and challenge me. Like I said: retro. I am also in love with movies, can’t get enough, they inspire and move and excite me. Almost any kind, old or new, foreign or domestic. They open my mind, make me consider things I might not otherwise. I try to keep up on politics and current affairs, but I’m afraid they tend to be the opposite of inspiring for me.

And finally, if you could have appeared any play in history, what (and/or where, and/or with whom directing or sharing the stage with you) would it be?

I’m nothing if not consistent … I want to see a Shakespeare in the Globe or Blackfriars. How briskly did they speak it? Did they really do them in two hours’ time? What did they sound like? What did they consider good acting? How would their perception of ‘real’ acting compare with ours? Did Burbage rant? Did Armin speak more than was written down? How did audiences really respond? Did they understand everything? How much did they participate and how did that affect the way the plays were performed? All that stuff.

Subscribe now to get the best seats at the best prices for The Tempest and the rest of our 2012 season.

Amid the hurry and flurry of the holiday season just past, Bay Area media outlets were busy crowning the year’s best creative achievements. We’re proud to say that our productions made most critics’ top-ten lists for 2011.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, critic Robert Hurwitt named Jonathan Moscone‘s production of Candida, by George Bernard Shaw, among the year’s ten best, calling it “buoyantly nuanced, exquisitely designed, and unexpectedly suspenseful.” Hurwitt also gave this year’s Bay Area acting MVP nod to Rod Gnapp, who played Baptista in our The Taming of the Shrew this season. On his theater blog The Idiolect, independent critic Sam Hurwitt, a.k.a. Hurwitt the Younger, included Amanda Dehnert‘s brand-new play, The Verona Project, as one of his favorite 2011 productions, “entirely new and electric, with a touch of magical realism, witty dialogue, fiendishly clever storytelling devices, and some awfully catchy pop-rock songs”; one of his two MVPs was Verona‘s Julia, actress Arwen Anderson. Critic Chad Jones gave Shana Cooper‘s production of The Taming of the Shrew a prominent place on his Theater Dogs top ten, admitting that it was a tough call between that and our Candida but ultimately falling for how “leads Erica Sullivan and Slate Holmgren brought not only humor to this thorny comedy but also a depth of emotion I hadn’t ever experienced with this play.” And Cooper’s Shrew “packed a punch” according to KCBS‘ list of the Bay Area’s best arts and culture in 2011.

Accolades must also be given to Cal Shakes Artistic Director Moscone, whose production of Clybourne Park at A.C.T. made it onto every single list mentioned above!

Read the Chronicle‘s Top Ten list here.

Read The Idiolect‘s Top Ten list here.

Read the Theater Dogs Top Ten here.

Read KCBS’ Best Ofs here.

Stacy Ross

We are pleased to welcome the inimitable Stacy Ross to the ranks of our Associate Artist company. Ross, who made her Cal Shakes debut performing in all four shows of our 1992 season (as Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice, First Witch in Macbeth, Juno in The Tempest, and Julia in The Two Gentlemen of Verona), has been seen most recently on our stage as a series of brassy (and often bloodthirsty) babes in Titus Andronicus (2011), Mrs. Warren’s Profession (2010), Macbeth (2010), and An Ideal Husband (2008).

Hearty congrats also go to playwright Octavio Solis (John Steinbeck’s The Pastures of Heaven), who this month was awarded a prestigious United States Artists Fellowship. The USA Fellows—50 in all—each receive $50,000 toward project development and related expenses. Up next for Solis is his final South Coast Repertory workshop for Cloudlands, a musical collaboration with Adam Gwon, directed by Amanda Dehnert (The Verona Project); performances begin May 1. Solis is also working on commissions for the Magic Theatre and for Yale Rep.

L. Peter Callender and Joan Mankin are currently wowing audiences in The Soldier’s Tale at Aurora Theatre; if you’d like to catch it, you need to hurry, as it closes December 18. Callender goes straight into rehearsals for Frankie and Johnnie in the Clair de Lune (Jan 20–Feb 5) at Diablo Actors Ensemble, followed in the Spring by Xtigone (April 20–May 13) at African-American Shakespeare Company in San Francisco, where he is also Artistic Director. In February, Mankin will perform at the Ashby Stage in an original piece by Joan Holden called Counter-Attack, based on the interviews with diner waitresses found in the book Counter Culture.

Nancy Carlin’s production of Trevor Allen’s Working for the Mouse ends at EXIT Theatre Dec 17. Next she’ll direct Arms and the Man at Center Rep (Jan 27–Feb 25). James Carpenter is playing Scrooge in American Conservatory Theater’s  A Christmas Carol—for the sixth year in a row—through December 24, once again under the direction of fellow Associate Artist Domenique Lozano.

Susannah Schulman and Danny Scheie in the Berkeley Rep production of YOU, NERO; photo by Kevin Berne.

Speaking of A.C.T., Janet Foster has joined their Artistic Associate Company, as well, and is their new Casting Director, to boot. She’s currently casting Scorched, the West Coast premiere of Maple & Vine, and the award-winning Higher.

Dan Hiatt will be playing Jacob Marley and many others in a very musical adaptation of A Christmas Carol adapted and directed by Rick Lombardo and running through Christmas Eve at San Jose Rep.  Jan 17–Feb 12 he’ll play Harry Wilson in The Pitmen Painters by Lee Hall (Billy Elliot) at TheatreWorks, directed by Leslie Martinson and also featuring James Carpenter and Cal Shakes regular Nicholas Pelczar.

Danny Scheie and Susannah Schulman are performing together in Amy Freed’s You, Nero at Arena Stage through January 1, reprising the roles they originated at Berkeley Repertory Theatre in 2009.  And upcoming projects for lighting designer Scott Zielinski in 2012 are Cat On A Hot Tin Roof for the Guthrie Theater, Good Goods at Yale Repertory Theater, An Iliad at New York Theater Workshop, Miss Fortune at Royal Opera House (London) and Abigail’s Party for the National Theater of Norway (Oslo).