Shaw Festival's artistic director freshens the season's offerings
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Jackie Maxwell, artistic director of Canada's Shaw Festival.
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In her ninth year as artistic director of the Shaw Festival, which she calls "a big, huge, exhausting job," Jackie Maxwell seems inexhaustible. She has just signed on for four more years, saying there's still lots she wants to see done, including upgrades to the theaters, scheduling new playwrights and "repositioning Shaw, showing why people should see him."
The company's titular playwright usually provides just a couple of each year's 11 or 12 plays, but in the festival's 50th anniversary year, there are four Shaw plays, including "Candida," chosen because it was the festival's first presentation in its first year.
And the festival has extended its "mandate" to go beyond plays written during Shaw's long life (1856-1950) or more recent plays that deal with that period to allow adaptations of Shaw himself. Ms. Maxwell has begun commissioning playwrights to give the fresh stage life to Shaw's many quirky later works. This summer's "new version" by Michael Healey of "On the Rocks" is the first, and others are under commission.
She also has expanded the festival to contemporary playwrights who are Shavian in their concern for social ideas. This season includes two challenging pieces (both recently seen in Pittsburgh), Andrew Bovell's "When the Rain Stops Falling" and Suzan-Lori Parks' "Topdog/Underdog." She even imagines producing an August Wilson play.
This season sees a return to Shaw's most expansive, most Chekhovian work, "Heartbreak House," directed by Ms. Maxwell's predecessor, Christopher Newton. Another director is Molly Smith, head of Washington, D.C.'s famous Arena Stage, who directed "My Fair Lady."
"I admire Molly," Ms. Maxwell says. "She de-barnacles the plays."
So does Ms. Maxwell. This season she dug into the Irish repertory, directing "Drama at Inish" by Lennox Robinson -- surprisingly, the first Irish play that she, with her Irish heritage, has directed at the Shaw.
She is considering other playwrights, such as Tom Stoppard, a quintessentially Shavian playwright who mixes showmanship with ideas, looking longingly at his epic trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia."
She points out the festival hadn't done any O'Neill or Tennessee Williams until she took over. "When you do 'Cat on a Hot Tin Roof' and 'Topdog,' your temperature changes," she says.
This new project of freshening up obscure Shaw plays is assisted by a legal quirk. The copyright on Shaw's works in Canada and England ran out at 50 years, so they are now all in the public domain. But in the United States, that copyright was extended to 75 years, so those latter plays are still in the tight control of the Shaw Estate, which does not easily allow any changes to be made. But time will have its way.
-- Christopher Rawson
First Published July 10, 2011 12:00 am
