Interview with The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
Interview with The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
Great new interview with the Executive Director of The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company Katherine Mayberry. The company tours Michigan year-round bringing Shakespeare to numerous communities. Katherine also teaches Theatre and English at Grand Valley State University, a Shakespeare Bootcamp program at the Interlochen Center for the Arts, and a Shakespeare major at the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. (More interviews here.)
Follow The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company here:
Website: Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
Facebook.com: @pcshakespeare
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Twitter: @pc_shakespeare
Youtube: The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
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If you’d rather read the interview, a rough transcript is below.
Interview with The Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company
Michael Van Osch: Hey, this is Michael Van Osch. Welcome to the HARK Journal. The HARK Journal is a daily meditation that we send to your inbox to help you have a better day based on the wisdom of Shakespeare. So if you haven’t signed up for that, please do. We’re coming up on our one-year anniversary and it’s growing like a weed.
So we appreciate everybody that’s already on board. And this of course is our interview series. And we’re going to be going to Michigan today and I’m very happy to introduce you to everyone. Katherine Mayberry from the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. Hi Katherine. How are you?
Katherine Mayberry: I’m doing well. Thank you.
Michael Van Osch: Thanks for doing this for us. We appreciate having you on.
Katherine Mayberry: Oh, thank you so much for having me. I’m excited.
Michael Van Osch: So you guys as a company are getting ready to go back live after your year off, like everybody else. Tell us a little bit about Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company you’re in Western Michigan, correct? But tell us about it.
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, we are. So we’re actually a touring company based in Western, Michigan and the closest big city to us is Grand Rapids if people are familiar with Michigan. So that’s the region that we are in, but we tour all over the state and occasionally out of state as well. And we actually have existed since 1998.
And the company has existed in sort of two different formats. So in 1998, there was an actor from Chicago named Frank Farrell who visited our region to work as an equity guest artist with the Grand Valley Shakespeare Festival, which is housed at Grand Valley State University. And I happened to be an undergrad at Grand Valley at that time and worked with him as a guest artist.
He was interested in starting a Shakespeare company that would perform in the summer in the county parks in our area here in Michigan, he was, is an avid hiker and really loved theater in the outdoors in that way. And so he put together a cast of local actors to do that. And I was in one of those first casts.
And we worked that way for multiple years. And Frank being based in Chicago sort of backed off had worked with the company a bit and left it in the hands of the people who were local here. And then I went away to the MFA program at the American Shakespeare Center/Mary Baldwin University. And when I came back, I decided that what I really wanted to do was sort of expand what we were doing with Pigeon Creek.
So at that point, we transitioned from purely a summer company that was doing one production every year to a year-round company with either four or five productions that tour to multiple venues all over the state. So since 2008, we’ve been in that more year-round touring mode.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. Fantastic. So you’re one of the founding members, obviously, you’re now the Executive Artistic Director or Executive Director, sorry. And what has it been like? Preparing to come back now this summer after Covid?
Katherine Mayberry: Well I mean, I’m sure you’re hearing similar things from all kinds of companies. We have been on sort of a watch and wait kind of track for a while.
You know, when the shutdown first happened, we were in the middle of a rehearsal period. We were three weeks into rehearsal for Macbeth. We were supposed to be opening up at the end of March last year. And so the first thing that happened was, you know, we closed our rehearsals down. I’m thinking, well, maybe we’re going to pick it back up.
And then that didn’t happen. And so that production was canceled and pushed forward. We thought about this year and then the same thing happened with our summer show. You know, we thought maybe it would go ahead, and then it was canceled and pushed forward. We thought again about this year. And so that was the process for the first few months.
And then eventually we realized we probably need to actually decide that we’re going to not keep directors sort of hanging and you know, keep our cast of Macbeth sort of hanging about when this is going to happen. You need to frame it. You know what exactly it’s going to be. And of course, as we’ve gotten more and more information has been easier to firm up when it was going to be. The state of Michigan had quite stringent restrictions, which I think is wonderful.
I happen to think our state government did a really good job with that, but it does mean that we waited a long time for performance venues to even be open, you know, for it even to be an option. And then we had to think about even if it’s legal for us to hold a performance, is it really safe. So, but now we’re going back into performance in August.
So we have one show that we’ll perform in August. And then another show that will be a complete touring show that’s happening this fall. And we were trying to keep our commitments to the directors that we had signed on to work during the shutdown. So we’ve moved those productions that we’ve talked about with them forward to next season, where we’re really hoping to get those people that we were so excited about working with here and get those productions going.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah absolutely. So obviously I’m looking at your bio here and I want to read some of it to folks. Shakespeare has been your life since probably undergrad. If not before that, we can talk about that in a second. Let me highlight a few things here. So obviously you mentioned that you did your MFA in Shakespeare in Performance at Mary Baldwin at the American Shakespeare Center.
Fantastic place. And you also studied at the London Theater Exchange and at LAMDA, and you’re a teacher. You teach classes in English and theatre at Grand Valley State University. Is that in??
Katherine Mayberry: It is in Allendale, which is a very small town right next to Grand Rapids.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Okay. Got it. And let’s see what else here.
Yeah, you also teach a summer Shakespeare Bootcamp program at the Interlochen Center for the Arts and a Shakespeare major in minor at the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp. And it sounds like you’ve taught kind of all over the place, all over the country and for different companies and also Festival Valee Christi in Genoa, Italy.
Wow. How did that come about? That sounds like a terrible place.
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, that was a wonderful workshop teaching experience. And that actually came about because the woman who’s the Artistic Director of that festival, her name is Kiera Makino was here teaching at Grand Valley as a visiting professor for a while.
And so she and I were colleagues and she, every year, as part of that festival offers workshops for professional actors in Italy and wanted them to have a Shakespearian texts workshop. So I got to travel to Genoa, which was amazing. You know, got to take a little day trip to the Cinque Terre when I wasn’t teaching.
But one of the coolest things about it was that many of the actors in my workshop didn’t speak English. So they were working from translation into Italian and doing the same text exercises that I was doing in English. And that some of the actors who were English speaking were able to do with it Shakespeare’s original texts, but they were working with the sort of, what’s considered the most classic translation in Italian.
And a lot of the Italian translations are in a different meter because the sort of classic meter in Italian that fits the rhythm of Italian, is different than the iambic pentameter. So it was really interesting. To see their reaction to the exercises that we were doing and have them say, oh, you know, actually all these things that you’re talking about are applicable.
Like if we’re talking about acting in verse, some of those principles worked no matter what the structure of the verse is and those kinds of things. So that was really cool. So I was working with a translator in the room with me while I was doing that teaching.
Michael Van Osch: That’s great. Let me ask you this. I mean, when did the Shakespeare bug bite you, or was it younger than college or was it in college, why Shakespeare?
Katherine Mayberry: Oh, my gosh. Well, I mean in some ways I think there’s kind of a faded hang out. I mean, I say that partially joking, but there’s a tradition on one side of my family of giving children’s Shakespearian names.
So my name comes from Taming of the Shrew. I have a mother who’s a Rosalind, right. You know, it goes back several generations. I had a great-grandmother who was a Viola. So. And you know, everyone in my family has always read Shakespeare. I started off as a dancer when I was in middle school and high school and thought I was going to go into professional dancing and sort of made a pivot to acting when I was in college.
And I happened to be going to a college that had a Shakespeare festival. So the first thing that I acted in was Shakespeare. And that that’s sort of what started me on that as the focus of my performance and production career.
Michael Van Osch: You know, and this fascinates me too. And I try to always ask this as, as a teacher of Shakespeare as well.
What do you feel like, I mean, it does so many things, but for young people, especially, what do you feel like Shakespeare brings to them when they have not experienced it yet?
Katherine Mayberry: Oh, my goodness. I mean, I, for one thing, I, I think as a teacher, I always am really eager for them to experience that as performance first before they start reading it on the page.
And, you know, to approach it in the classroom in terms of what we’re looking at is meant for performance. We’ve got to think about how do we speak these words out loud? And what’s the physical story that’s being told that we can sort of discerning from the embedded stage directions and those kinds of things.
And I think once kids get a few keys to how to understand it and not be intimidated by it. The inventiveness of language is something that they can take from it. The sort of identifiable experiences that characters are going through and how they express those things. And you know, I always think some of that expressiveness in the language. It’s very modern.
I mean, it’s the same kind of expressiveness that’s going on in hip hop music, right there, you’re using rhythm to express emotion. And there’s the invention of new words, but you can tell what those new words mean by the context. And like some of those kinds of things. So I feel like once students have those kinds of things pointed out to them, there are still language functions like that going on in our popular culture.
Like, let’s think about this, not as something that we’re reading, because it’s old and we’re supposed to know it, but like is it a live thing, vibrant thing. My experience is that kids love that.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. And kind of on that thread then back to the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company you use original practices. Tell me more about how you use that with your productions?
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, I know like in some circles, original practices have become like this controversial term to talk about, right. Because some people hear that and they think like, oh, you’re making museum Shakespeare and you’re trying to give people some sort of a time travel experience and that’s not really what I’m thinking about when I’m using original practices at all.
I think what’s inspiring to me about original practices is what it does for the relationship between the actors and the audience. So if you perform in universal lighting, right.
As they had to in Shakespeare’s time, because they didn’t have electrical lights in their theaters, then the actress can see the audience. And that gives rise to direct address. Right? There are lines that these characters are speaking directly to those people. We’re not pretending that they aren’t there.
And if you’re doing thrust staging, the actors are out in the audience space and surrounded by the audience. And to me, that feels much more like the performance event is something that we’re all in together. There is actually a given take because I can see the reactions that people are having.
And I can, I don’t have to take my line the same way that I did last night if someone reacts differently to it tonight. So original practices have sort of been my path or my window to get to an almost immersive form of theater. Now there are some people who get to that, like from a sort of post-modern perspective, right?
It just happens that the way that I’ve gotten to that is by exploring the ways that these plays were originally performed to the extent that we can know those things. But we do know something about the physical theaters. We know that actors were doubled. We know that there was cross-gender casting going on. Those kinds of things.
And that interaction between actor and audience and the fact that when you’re performing, for example, without a whole lot of modern tech, you’re performing without elaborate scenery, you’re performing without lighting effects, those kinds of things. Engages the audience’s imagination, right.
Makes them have to sort of fill in the blanks, makes them active participants in that way. To me that makes Shakespeare feel very alive and modern. So it’s my preference as an audience member too. I think sometimes not always, but sometimes when I see presidium productions with very elaborate setting and I’m sitting in the dark that’s what can make Shakespeare feel sort of distant and not related to me.
So, you know, that’s my preference. It doesn’t mean that original practices is the only way to stage these plays, but that, that really has sort of captured me in the time that I’ve been working on it. And, you know, it’s interesting. Even before I knew that term, when we first started Pigeon Creek, Frank made all of us read John Russell Brown’s book Free Shakespeare, which was actually written in the 1960s.
And Brown is not using the term original practices, but that certainly is what he’s describing. So we were already thinking about those principles and we were performing outdoors on a very shoestring budget. So some of those things were out of necessity, right. Were doubled into multiple parts because we couldn’t have that larger cast are looking directly at the audience because we’re outside.
You know, so some of those things came about organically with the start of the company.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. And I guess does that, that probably dovetails too, to your education at Mary Baldwin in the American Shakespeare company as well, because isn’t that the way they approach things as well?
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, absolutely.
And you know, one of the reasons I ended up applying to that program is that I met Ralph Cohen. Who’s one of the founders of the ASC at a speaking engagement that he was doing and just felt like everything he was saying were the things that excite me so much about theatre, like about that relationship between actor and audience and that immediacy.
So that’s one of the things that steered me towards that as my graduate degree.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Sounds good. Well back to Pigeon Creek. Tell us more about a few things here, especially, with regard to your touring and the Rose Theatre. We want to, I want to know about that more, and I’m sure everyone else does.
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, absolutely. So like I say, we’re a touring company. We take each of our productions. So we typically have either four or five production spread over the course of the year. Each of them usually visits about five or six venues in Michigan. And unfortunately, this is one of the things that we’re really dealing with now with the pandemic.
We had a venue that was kind of what I would call our anchor venue in the city of Grand Rapids where we would run each show for multiple weekends that closed permanently during the pandemic. So we are in the position now of needing that venue. So that’s one of the things that we’re going through and I’m betting that there are other touring companies that now that they’re moving back into live performance are facing that same thing.
So that’s one of the ways that depends on it has affected the arts the touring shows and touring exhibitions and things like that are facing shuttered venues. So you know, but we have multiple regular venues where we go. Each of our shows or sometimes, you know, there’ll be a venue that wants to do our shows as like a one time a year event.
Here’s our annual sort of residency — So a lot of our venues actually, partly because of the original practices and wanting to do thrust staging, and that kind of thing is non-traditional theater spaces. So rather than going into a large proscenium theater and sort of trying to force our style of performance into that architecture, we might go more into like community centers and set up our own thrust stage and curtains and you know, like shape the space to work with us.
However about the Rose Theatre…2012 was the first time. We lucked out because completely independent of us performing in that space. There’s a fine arts camp right in our area called the Blue Lake Fine Arts Camp and Blue Lake received a donation specifically to build a replica Elizabethan Playhouse at their camp.
I mean, just like this amazing serendipity from our point of view. And so they built this it’s called the Rose. It is not strictly speaking exactly a Rose replica. It’s more of an amalgam. It takes some characteristics from The Rose and some from The Globe. And it’s on a smaller scale built primarily for campers, middle school, and high school campers.
So every year at camp, there are these campers who get to come and be Shakespeare majors and perform in the space. And so Pigeon Creek formed a partnership with the camp and there’s also a public radio station, a classical music station that’s housed there. So we work with them every year. Before camp starts in the summer and after camp ends in August to do performances that are benefits for that public radio station. So we’re the only outside group that gets to perform in that space. And it happens that we are making our return to live performance at The Rose in August.
We were so sad not to be there last year. So we get to do one night in The Rose at the end of August this year.
Michael Van Osch: Talk about a gift from above, right?
Katherine Mayberry: It’s absolutely incredible. And like I say you know it happened without us even being involved in the decision to build that. And then I was contacted by the person who’s the head of theater at the camp.
To see if I wanted to apply to teach the Shakespeare major there. And of course, you know, why would I not want to teach Shakespeare to middle school students in The Rose? That’s amazing. And so I started teaching those Shakespeare students there, and then eventually, we were able to craft this partnership with Pigeon Creek.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. That sounds amazing. So what are the shows that are on the docket for you? The productions for this coming season.
Katherine Mayberry: Yes. So we have not announced our 2022 season officially yet that announcement will come in September, but for the rest of this year, we have Twelfth Night happening at The Rose in August.
It’s August 28th, in case anyone needs to put that on their calendar. We only get one night. So we want to make sure people get out there for that. And then we have a touring production of Measure For Measure that we’ll play in the fall. And we do have some virtual things that are happening as well. Some carry over from our virtual programming that we started during the pandemic.
We actually are probably going to carry over some of that because even though we were all kind of chomping at the bit to get back into live performance. There are some things that, that are great about virtual performance. I mean, first of all, it’s accessible to people no matter where they are geographically.
But it also gave us the opportunity to do some staged readings of scripts that we might want to consider in the future for full production. And it gave us the opportunity to commission some new scripts, which we’re really excited about. We actually commissioned a couple of playwrights to do radio plays.
And then we performed them on zoom, but you know, you can, you can experience some that by closing your eyes and just listening to the audio, that’s sort of the thing we wanted to do. So one of those plays is by a playwright named Mike Nichols, and it is a Robinhood play. And I’ve been wanting for a while for Pigeon Creek to have a Robinhood play because there was this tradition in Tudor England of Robinhood-themed pageants and that kind of thing to go with a Mayday holiday is a really popular thing in Henry VIII court, for some reason. So we have this brand new play called The Gospel of Friar Tuck and I think it is really kind of Shakespearian script. It has some parallels to some of Shakespeare’s plays.
There’s definitely a little Henry IV, Part I, and there is definitely a little Romeo and Juliet in there with a forbidden marriage that Friar Tuck performs. So there are some really cool connections, but a brand new script. So we released one episode of that. And that second episode, the final episode of The Gospel of Friar Tuck is coming out I believe next week, we’ll be done with editing and that’ll be on our YouTube channel there.
And then later on in the summer, we are recording the second in a series of Shakespearian mysteries by the playwright, David Taylor Little, and David Taylor Little is really Inspired by sort of mystery shows of a certain era like “Murder She Wrote”, and those kinds of things.
And he created this character named Arlo Whittaker, who is a theatre director, who sort of, is constantly, accidentally falling into murder mysteries and solving them. So the first of those was called The Twelfth Night Murder and that is available on our YouTube channel. And then the second one is a Taming of the Shrew-inspired piece called Arlo Whittaker and the Petruchio Problem, and that we will be recording later in the summer. And that that’ll be part of our fall season. The release of that as well.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. You got so many great things going on. It must feel great to be back at planning for the touring and all of that as well, what’s your website address? And I’ll put it in the show notes too, so people can check all of this.
Katherine Mayberry: Yeah, absolutely. So our website is PCshakespeare.com. So if you think politically correct Shakespeare, which we’re not, pcshakespeare.com. And then Facebook is just the Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company. @PCshakes on Twitter, PCShakespeare on Instagram, and the YouTube channel where we now have a bunch of virtual programming that we created during the pandemic if you just do a search for Pigeon Creek Shakespeare.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Well, that sounds really exciting, fantastic. Congrats on making it through all the big pandemic stuff and then coming out the other side and continuing on, it sounds like you’ve got some really exciting stuff going on up there in Michigan.
So thanks for joining us so much. I don’t want to keep you too much longer, but I also want to finish with the final question that I ask all of our guests. And that’s if Shakespeare was on this call with us and you could ask him one question, what would you ask him?
Katherine Mayberry: So I’ve seen other people answer this question.
So I was like, oh, I have to think about it. And there are so many things, but I think one thing that I would be really interested in because I am a big fan of the plays by other early modern English playwrights - Shakespeare’s contemporaries. I’d loved seeing those things produced. There are some of them that are my absolute favorites.
So I would love to know which of those plays did he really love? Like, were there things that he sat in the theatre or stood in the theatre maybe to watch and thought, oh man. Oh, that’s so good. I wish I could do something like that. I would love to know which, which plays those are.
Michael Van Osch: Do you have a favorite one or two of those?
Katherine Mayberry: Cool. Yeah. I think my very favorite actually is a little bit later than Shakespeare’s lifetime, so he wouldn’t have known it, but it’s John Ford’s ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore. And Ford very, definitely knew Shakespeare’s plays because that play is a sort of twisted, dark parody of Romeo and Juliet.
I mean, it very clearly observed Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, but of things that he himself might’ve seen. I would say maybe Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle. It’d be really interesting to know his reaction to that play which is just filled with sort of metatheatre and audience context.
Michael Van Osch: Love it, I wish I wish we could find out. Well, thank you so much. Everyone, this has been Katherine Mayberry, Pigeon Creek Shakespeare Company up in Western Michigan. Stay on the line here, Katherine. But again, thanks so much. Best of luck with everything going on this summer and we’ll be sure to check out all this stuff online too.
Thanks again.
Katherine Mayberry: Thank you very much. Okay.
Michael Van Osch: Take care.
