Interview with Scranton Shakespeare Festival
Founder and Artistic Director of the Scranton Shakespeare Festival Michael Bradshaw Flynn joins me to discuss how SSF came to be, how it has grown in these last ten years, and their focus on new works with the upcoming Scratch Night event. (More interviews here.)
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Scranton Shakespeare Festival’s Scratch Night
TUNE IN: March 4th, 2021, 7:30pm est - Click Here
Four plays battle it out for a chance to win a spot in our 10th anniversary summer season, alongside our Shakespeare and musical productions.
Each play will present a short excerpt for the audience and judges to cast their vote. Come along, cast your vote, and help decide which show gets chosen!
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If you’d like to read the interview instead, a rough transcript is below.
Interview with Scranton Shakespeare Festival
Michael Van Osch: Hey, this is Michael Van Osch from Hark Journal. Thank you again for joining us. Hark Journal is where we send you a two-minute meditation every day, based on Shakespeare’s wisdom to help you have a better day, a better career, and hopefully a better life. And today in our interview series, I’m very pleased to be talking to Michael Bradshaw Flynn from Scranton Shakespeare Festival.
Hey Michael, how are you?
Michael Flynn: I’m doing well, Michael, thanks for having me on today.
Michael Van Osch: Absolutely. Thanks for joining us. How are things up in Scranton?
Michael Flynn: Scranton is doing just fine. The snow is finally starting to thaw a little bit and we are getting ready for our big 10th season. And it’s a big year for us because we are moving forward with what we’re hoping is going to be a live season.
But as you can imagine with, COVID and all of that, we have a lot of logistical questioning and all different sorts of problems and different things to work out and sort of strategizing how we’re going to safely produce five different shows as well as an educational component. So we’ve been, we’ve been quite busy, but you know, it’s been a little, it’s been hopeful.
So we’ve been having a good time over at Scranton Shakes.
Michael Van Osch: Well, good, good. Excellent. And now you’re the founder and artistic director. And I’ll read a bit of your bio here in a second, but tell us about that. You said you’re in your 10th season. Why did you, why didn’t you start Scranton Shakes?
Michael Flynn: Sure. So when it was a little bit over 10 years ago, so about 11 or 12 years ago, I was working on a production of Hamlet in Binghamton, New York.
And funny enough, all of the performances were snowed out. So we rehearsed this play. We, you know, got up in costume fittings and sure enough, we performed at like three or four times because you know, it was primarily for students and the schools were constantly being canceled for performances.
But during this time I kept thinking that I would really love to have some sort of live theater in my hometown. And, you know, Scranton has a very rich theatrical history. And you know, of course, there are some national tours that come through it, but as far as having a regional theater in the community itself, you know, I feel like that’s slightly lacking.
So while this was all going on, I was thinking I would really love to do this back in my hometown. I had worked at summer stocks and central Pennsylvania at Millbrook Playhouse out in Lock Haven, Pennsylvania. So I had always, you know, another Pennsylvania theater thinking to myself, I wish that I had this in my hometown.
And so one year I had talked with some local community people who I knew were fans of Shakespeare in the Park, out at the Delacorte Theatre in New York, we’re big fans of Joe Papp’s mission. A few other people who might not have known too much about Shakespeare, but did enjoy live theater. And after a few conversations, we decided that we would give it a go.
I was able to reach out to my alma mater the University of Scranton, which was really supportive of housing the actors for a month. And we put together this production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that consisted of ladders and kiddie pools. And, you know, we were hoping that we would get 200 people to show up.
We were putting pamphlets on windshield wipers and, you know, hospital parking lots, you know, and to our surprise, we had well over 900, a thousand people attend our first two performances. And from the passing the hat and the modest donations that all of these people were able to give, we were able to officially become a 501 C 3 organization.
And we were really excited about that because it showed that there was a desire to see this kind of programming. So the second season we came back and we did a production of Comedy of Errors. And again, it was the same sort of thing. We went with something that was a little bit more comedic, fun, and that year instead of just doing two performances, we doubled it and made it four performances. And we had terrible weather. And at this time we were still completely outdoors. So we really nervous about what that would mean for us, especially given the fact that we’re free admission. So we have no… we generate nothing from ticket sales because they don’t really exist for us.
So we were really nervous about what that would do, but people showed up in the real chairs in the rain and took their umbrellas, and just waited for us to. To perform. And so, you know, the cast was sort of there and we were like, do we continue this? And we did. And people stayed and at the end, a rainbow came out and then the next year was our third year.
And that’s when we started diversifying our program a little bit. And incorporating new works and musicals as well. So it’s continued to grow. And even though you know, our purse strings are still slight the demand and the audiences continue to grow with us. So it’s been a pretty encouraging and humbling and gratifying 10 years.
So that’s how it started. Sorry, I ramble a bit.
Michael Van Osch: Thank you. I mean, congratulations, you know, that’s fantastic. I mean, you’re bringing something to the community there that obviously was needed. And you know, and I love the fact that you know, you’ve hit that 10-year mark, and you guys are still going.
And so that’s, that says a lot of good things about what you’ve done as well. So let me read a little bit of your bio to the folks so they know who we’re talking to here. So obviously Michael is the co-founder and artistic director of Scranton Shakespeare Festival. And you’re as you said, a Scranton native you’re based out of New York City, and you’ve served as the associate director for Broadway productions of It’s Only A Play and The Front Page.
Recently you worked on the national tour of The Sound of Music. I love it. You’ve also served as associate director at the Lincoln Center Theater for their production of Dada Wolf, Papa Hot, sorry, and the assistant to the playwright at LCT for the Tony-nominated production of The Nance. Now you do a lot of directing obviously, and you’ve directed a number of off-Broadway productions, some of which we’ve got here, Camel, the new play by Charlie Clyde and The First Man.
And you’ve also directed at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. Fantastic. And there for Scranton Shakes, you’ve done a lot of the directing there too it sounds like: Pirates of Penzance, Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado, Damn Yankees, Footloose, Troilus and Cressida, and it goes on and on. So thank you again for joining us.
And one of the things I wanted to really ask you about is you’ve got this special thing coming up this week called Scratch Night. So what is Scratch Night? Tell us all about it, please.
Michael Flynn: Sure. Scratch Night is a particular event that’s pretty popular over in the UK. And it’s essentially like an open mic night for writers and sometimes poets and it’s, it’s a celebration of the spoken word and a good friend of mine, a past Scranton shakes actor has gone on to produce, started producing production company, Lawryn LaCroix.
And she started this company Pink House Productions, which have produced really exciting new works as well as some really cool film pieces. She and I were chatting and she knew that I really love it. Creating new works because of course, there was a huge emphasis with our organization on classical work.
And, and that of Shakespeare and his contemporaries, but also, you know, I like to think that sometimes we forget that Shakespeare wasn’t just a writer. He was also a producer. He was also an actor. And he was also, even though there wasn’t necessarily a director during that time, he was also probably a director.
So, I think that if Shakespeare was alive today, he probably would be experimenting with all different. Forms. And so I think it is important that not only are we celebrating the works of the past, that are still very relevant to, you know, society today but also that we are, you know, serving as a nurturing incubator for the talent of tomorrow.
And so that’s why so Scratch Night was basically this very democratic way of figuring out what are talents that people want to see? So in the past, we’ve had really exciting opportunities where certain playwrights like Douglas Carter Beane have come to us and said, you know, I really love to experiment with these new ideas.
And so we’ve had a number of new plays, but this time I kind of wanted to expand our reach as far as where these works are coming to us. So we started this Scratch Night. And we basically set our prompt as “ghosts”, which you could take as literally, as you would like to, or you can take it as metaphorically as you’d like to.
And we asked the writers of the world to send us a 10-minute excerpt of a play. And, you know, the only stipulations were that we didn’t want it to have too much of a previous life. So if it had a reading somewhere, that was okay, but if something was actually in performance, it wasn’t quite what we were looking for.
We really wanted to make sure that, you know, this place of Scranton would be where the work germinated. And we were really fortunate because we had well over 300 submissions, 317 I think was the exact number. And we had a wonderful panel of very diverse judges of all different, you know histories and credentials, sort of cross-reference and score all of these really great plays.
And then from that list, the top 25 were brought into the next stages and we evaluated those. And then eventually we whittled that number down to six, and then we whittled it down to the final four plays. And from those four plays, we’ve basically recorded excerpts and we have the playwrights and some really cool actors and directors and very different interpretations of these works that we’re going to.
So this Scratch Night, which will be a live event. We’re super excited because Saturday Night Live’s, Heidi Gardner is going to be hosting as well as a panel of really exciting industry judges. Yeah. And we’re, you know, we’re really excited because we’re hoping that the audience will also sort of say what works they really liked or wanted to see more of.
And we’ve got this really great panel that will, you know, sort of guide us and say what they think works. They would like to see on sort of an industry level. And so we’re going to basically see what play will be taken. Being that fifth slot of the new work at our 10th season which is really cool and exciting.
And in some ways it’s, it’s “I’m losing control”, which is a wonderful thing because it’s a much more sort of democratic way of selecting what this new work will be. But all of a sudden what’s just been wonderful was to read even the scripts that we weren’t able to go with for one reason or another, just to sort of be able to like a sponge absorb all of the really interesting stories and parallels as well.
The distinction amongst all these different voices and, you know, what’s sort of stirring the writers of today and tomorrow, and to be able to read all of those scripts, especially at a time where, you know, we are, I am at least sort of stuck at home was really wonderful. And to just sort of visualizing all of these different worlds.
And that’s just been a really wonderful opportunity for me to learn as just a person in the arts about, you know, all of these different narratives and I’m really excited to see what play we’ll be joining our other titles in this 10th season. It’s pretty. Exciting and mysterious.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Well, that’s exciting. So the event is this Thursday night. That’s the fourth, I believe at 7:30. Is it? And it’s a zoom event, obviously.
Michael Flynn: Correct. Okay. Yes. Yes. It’s a zoom event. You can go on our website and get tickets. We’re really excited. And you know, there is a slight price.
It’s at 7:30 March 4th, and that will go to, of course, a very small stipend that we’re offering to the writers, as well as the actors and the directors who are taking part in this. Because, you know, we did have some pretty high standards going in there. We asked that everyone was off book which, you know, isn’t always the way of a zoom reading and we also have recorded everything.
So that way, even though the event itself will be live and the discussion with the different writers and the hosting will be live and the judge’s feedback will be live in, the voting will be live. We did want to make sure that, you know, we didn’t run into any, you know, occasions where the reading will be happening live and someone’s Wi-Fi cuts out and then wait to you see, you know, and then we just run into a train wreck of and it also allowed for some pretty creative, innovative and exciting editing for us to sort of change the format of what is usually expected in a zoom reading. So that’s been fun.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. As I said, it’s only 10 bucks. I’ve already got my ticket. People who are watching this, get your ticket. This sounds like a really cool event. I’ve not been part of something like that before and, and kudos to you for then, you know, making it part of this coming season.
Cause that’s the neat thing too, is to take it, workshop it I suppose, and then really make it happen for the writer and for your community, which again, kudos. That’s fantastic.
Michael Flynn: Thank you. And, you know, it’s been funny because some people have been sort of saying, you know, we’ve had it a variety of Genesis stories with each of these plays.
Some of them were created three days time before the deadline and they were like, okay, prompt “ghosts”, let’s go. And then, you know, just. Stephen King-it I guess, and just wrote for 72 hours and submitted this play. And then other people were like, I had this play in my trunk about ghosts and I never thought it would go anywhere.
And I took it back out and I read, developed it, and changed it. And then other people were like, well, it wasn’t about ghosts, but it is now. So it’s just been really exciting to sort of see how people take that theme and run with it. That’s been really fun too. And thank you. I’m really glad. Thank you for getting a ticket.
I’m really excited. To have you and you know, we’ll see, we’ll see what happens.
Michael Van Osch: Absolutely. So let’s talk then about what’s what you hope to have happened this summer with your next season. And do you still do that? Usually in normal times, quote, unquote, normal. Do you do everything outdoors still?
Michael Flynn: No, no, no, no, no. In fact, as soon as we were able to get under a roof, we did. And, and that’s just because you know, where we started, we were really grateful for our little nursery, the first two years, we were at a beautiful local park, but we were next to a hospital.
With a helicopter pad on top. And we were, you know, a freeway with radio frequencies, you know, and then we were fighting with the antique car show that was coming, you know, the second day of performance. So we were grateful as soon as anyone would open their doors to us. We’re at a few different local theaters, but we also started doing a lot more site-specific work, which has been really exciting for our community.
So we did a production of How to Succeed in the Marketplace at Steamtown Mall, which is a mall that was built in the nineties, but it has these fantastic fountains and a glass elevator, and huge spiral staircases. And we did a really cool production of a cabaret that was, took place in a very intimate Speakeasy. And we did a production of damn Yankees at PNC ball field, which is of the Yankees minor league stadium, which was really cool. And that one was technically outdoors. And the last performance, literally the storm clouds were brewing. And as we were leaving buckets of rain came down on us.
So this year we obviously have to do it because, you know, last year, as soon as we heard about COVID, we made the very fast pivot to adapt to radio plays. Which was a really wonderful learning experience for me and our team. We didn’t have much of a history with radio broadcasting, and I primarily worked in theater.
I didn’t have a ton of film experience. So it was a great lesson of learning. What you can do in post, you know, it was like, I had the pleasure of doing a production of The Merry Wives of Windsor, which we adapted. So it was The Real Merry Wives of Windsor. And it was very much a Bravo TV show, which lent itself in my opinion, quite well to the.
You know, superficial shallowness of that script. And so, we had a lot of fun with that, but what was weird was you thought the play was one thing, and then all the actors leave and then you start playing with music and editing and speeding things up and it’s like, Oh wow. This is totally different than a play where, you know, you have the previews.
And so that was a pretty cool experience. But this year because it’s such a landmark, we wanted to strive to do something live, to celebrate our 10th birthday. And that’s why we figured we’d rather do something that was possible. So we didn’t want to cross our fingers and say our prayers, that we’d be able to be in a theater.
We figured that the best way for us to guarantee to do theater outside was to, you know, find somewhere very vast. And there is a place in Scranton, which is called the Scranton Iron Furnaces and it’s a historical site, a state site. And these are they’re these gorgeous iron furnaces that are just so majestic, so large built in like the 1800s.
And it’s like a vast park. And behind you, what will serve as the backdrop of our stage, are these gorgeous stone arches of where people forged iron, like way back when Scranton was a driving force in America’s economy and then behind it, you have a beautiful little creek.
So it’s a glorious park, which has plenty of space for distance for our audience as well as distance for our actors. But, it does mean that we’re going to have to perform come rain or come shine, which we haven’t had to do in quite a few years. So it’s sort of like us going back to our roots which is nice.
But yeah, we really appreciate a roof, but this year we’re acting alongside mother nature again. So yeah, we hope she behaves with the social distancing.
Michael Van Osch: Hopefully we don’t have to. Well, we’ll see you. Right. Fingers crossed. We’ll see what happens.
Michael Flynn: Absolutely true. It’s true. Yeah, I think we’ll be okay. We’re looking at a lot of data that we have to collect from people, and it will be a bit of tracking, but we’re pretty confident that we’re going to be able to adhere to both local and national health guidelines.
And you know, it might mean that you have to, the audiences may have to, wear a mask, but I think our community and our people tend to really appreciate what we’re doing. And I think the desire to see some outdoor theater after a year of being stuck indoors, people are going to be willing to make that small sacrifice, especially after the year and a half at that point that we would have all had to endure.
So I’m maintaining optimism and I think we’re going to get there and, you know, we’ve had some reassuring data in the last week or two, so I’m really hoping that we’re going to get, we’re going to get off all five shows up there.
Michael Van Osch: Fantastic. Yeah. Well, can’t wait, can’t wait. So for everyone that is listening to this, I’ll also put in the show notes, everything about Scratch night, which is this Thursday night, I’ll put your website, all the other places that they can follow you and check out everything else that’s going on too. So, Michael, I really appreciate you doing this for us. It was great to meet you. One last question. And after we say goodbye, stay on the line.
But one last question and that is if Shakespeare was on this call with us and you got to ask him one question, what would you ask?
Michael Flynn: That’s a good one. I suppose I would ask him two things. One, did you get any help? But two, did you, in your wildest dreams, could you fathom making the impression and having the amount of impact and legacy that you’ve had? What did you have any sense of that or was it just writing on a page for you or was it just a job to make the money to feed your family and your wife and live a lifestyle?
Or was there any sense that you’d be remembered for the legacy that he inevitably did have? I guess that’s those are the two questions that are coming to mind. Yeah, that’s good. Is there, are there any other ones, are there any other ones that we don’t know about from you?
Michael Van Osch: That’s right. Yeah, show us what they are. Exactly. Well, thank you so much, Michael. This has been Michael Bradshaw,
Michael Flynn: So I’d want to know what quarto he likes, but sorry, I’m screwing you up here, Michael. Now you can see, I couldn’t think of anything and now I’m not going to stop. You’ve opened up a stream of consciousness, I guess I’d ask him what quarto he likes better.
Michael Van Osch: You know, the funny thing is of all the people that we’ve interviewed here, no one’s ever had the same question. So it just, you know, I love to hear these. This is great. Well, I will let you go for tonight. I know you’ve got other meetings to go to.
Michael Flynn: Yes. I mean, I’ve got a lot for him.
Michael Van Osch: Great. So for people that are watching this again, I’ll put everything in the show notes for you and Michael Bradshaw Flynn thanks so much for joining us. Stay on the line here when we say goodbye but take care of the best of luck on Thursday night.
