Interview with Summit Players Theatre
Fun new interview with A.J. Magoon, Executive Director of Summit Players Theatre in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We discuss the company’s unique and creative niche of touring Shakespeare productions and workshops to Wisconsin’s state parks. Originating as a senior project for a group of Marquette University students, the company is moving forward sharing Shakespeare with children and adults of all backgrounds. (More interviews here.)
Follow Summit Players Theatre here:
Website: Summit Players Theatre
Facebook.com: @summitplayerstheatre
Instagram: @summitplayers
Twitter: @summitplayers
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If you’d rather read the interview, a rough transcript is below.
Interview with Summit Players Theatre
Michael Van Osch: Hey, it’s Michael Van Osch. Welcome to The HARK Journal. So glad to have you back again. This is our interview series, and today we are speaking to a company in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. I’m proud and pleased to be able to bring you A.J. Magoon from the Summit Players Theatre company.
A.J. Magoon: Hey Michael, how are you doing?
Michael Van Osch: I’m doing great. Thanks for joining us.
A.J. Magoon: Thank you for having me. I’m excited to be.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. As soon as I heard about you guys, I really wanted to have you on because you’re doing something that I feel is really unique. So let’s dive right into it. Tell us a little bit about who the Summit Players Theatre company is and what you do.
A.J. Magoon: Absolutely. So, Summit Players Theatre is the only company in Wisconsin, that’s doing this particular assortment of things in the particular way we do it. We do free Shakespeare, educational workshops, and performances in state parks across Wisconsin, every summer.
And so this summer in 2021, we’re doing 24 days. Programs at 20 or 25 different programs at 24 state parks across the state June 12th to August 22nd. We show up, we do a 45-minute educational workshop, and then we follow it up with a 75-minute, six-actor performance of a show - this year it’s The Winter’s Tale.
And so we’re, we’re really aiming at family-friendly. We’re really aiming at community accessibility, kind of creating a system where it doesn’t matter if you’ve had Shakespeare experience in your past, it doesn’t matter if you’re six and you’ve never even heard the name, or if you’re 106 and you remember doing Romeo and Juliet in high school and not really liking it. The goal is that it’s fun and it’s engaging and it’s accessible regardless of who’s joining.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. That’s fantastic. So am I getting it right? That you as a company, you go out on, on the weekends or is it just during the week, and then you hit a state park, do a performance and a workshop, pack up, go to the next one?
A.J. Magoon: That’s pretty much spot on. Yeah. So we do, we do Friday, Saturday, Sunday, performances.
And each day we’ll be in a different park. So we’ll show up somewhere on Friday and then travel out on Saturday and again on Sunday. We’ve got a partnership with the Wisconsin DNR which is how we get access to all of these parks, but they’re also very wonderful and generous and they’ll provide us with campsites.
So, a lot of the time the company is camping right alongside the community, after the shows, which is really cool. It kind of makes hiring interesting. Cause you got to find people who are, you know, educators and performers, but also outdoorsmen in a way like people gotta be comfortable, comfortable with a little camping.
Michael Van Osch: Good with bugs. Right?
A.J. Magoon: Exactly. You know, and we’re pretty good about not going to make you rough it and you know, put up a pup tent. We’ve got pretty decent tents and things to provide people. They don’t just gotta wrap themselves in a tarp and sleep outside.
So that’s good.
Michael Van Osch: Well, that sounds great. Wow, fantastic. Now how many years old is the company? And am I right that you joined kind of a little bit before COVID?
A.J. Magoon: Yeah, so it’s interesting. So we’re a seven-year-old company. We were formed in 2015. That was when we did our first tour.
And we’ve done, this is our sixth tour because obviously COVID kind of threw a wrench in the whole touring prep plan. I actually joined right with the beginning of the company. I was one of the founding members. But I was at the beginning, just an actor and a teaching artist. So it was founded in 2015.
The idea kind of came around in the summer of 2014. Hannah Klapperich-Mueller was the original founder of the company. She was the original executive director. And at that time she was an incoming senior at Marquette University in the theater department. And she was camping with her family up at Pottawatomie State Park in Door County and was hiking and noticed this amphitheater, the park has this amphitheater. It’s this nice little stage, you know, it’s a little grove of trees. They’ve got like a kind of a projection screen. Like if they want to do naturalist presentations or something like that. And some benches, you know, it’s a very simple little space.
And she said, you know, I feel like I’ve noticed all over the parks in Wisconsin, that there are all these little amphitheaters in the parks, and they don’t get used for much. They have a presentation every so often, but that’s about it. You know, you walk through and a kid will be playing on the bench, but they’re not really getting used for like making art.
And so when she got back to school that fall, she got a group of her classmates and she said, what if we, as a senior project of sorts, what if we went out and we did a tour of Shakespeare? We just went to a few state parks, and we tried to kind of highlight these under-used performance spaces set in and said, you know, you don’t have to go into a theater to see a show.
You can just make theater in other places. And so, they put together Summit and they set up this plan. They got in contact with the DNR and raised some money. I joined sort of very close to the beginning of the actual tour that year - I jumped in at like April of 20, of 2015. Someone else had had another opportunity and had to drop out and.
I think we hit 15 parks that first year, maybe. Yeah, it was 13. But we did a low teen number of parks that year and it was a very like let’s just try this out. We were all just kind of like, you know, kids that were experimenting, and then we realized that there was a genuine demand. People really enjoyed what we were doing and it wasn’t just us goofing off in front of like 10 people.
We were getting 70, 80, a hundred people going to these shows. And so, we said let’s make this a company and let’s go professional and, and stop kidding around and do this for real.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. That is a great story. I love it. I love to hear that you’ve been successful and it’s continuing on.
Let me tell the folks that are watching a little bit more about you because I have your bio here. So you graduated Summa Cum Laude and Valedictorian from Marquette University. Congratulations. Very nice. BA in theater arts. And as you said, you’re a founding member of the Summit Players Theatre. And of course, you’re the executive director now, too.
And you’ve done a lot of theater around the Milwaukee area. Theater credits include work with A First Stage, Theatre Gigante, Is that how you say it? Voices Found Repertory, Theatre Nervosa, and so many more. And also it says here in Milwaukee Chamber Theater’s Young Playwrights Festival. Does that mean you’re a playwright as well?
A.J. Magoon: I’m not a playwright, but yeah, they have a wonderful program where every other year they mentor young playwrights from local high schools. And then they pull in professional actors to put their plays on stage, which is a delight to be a part of.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, we talked before we got on the line here that it’s important for you - one of the things you love about doing this, is giving access to Shakespeare to people. And in the natural setting of it all as well. So, what do you feel like people get from it? They’re out camping, they probably don’t even know that this is happening tonight… and we’re out camping and we see this and you must get feedback all the time? What’s it like?
A.J. Magoon: I mean it’s really why you do it, right? That’s kind of the whole upshot of why Hannah and I, when we were working together in the January and February sort of dark night of the soul when you’re writing a million grants and, you know, prepping the policy paperwork and it’s deeply demoralizing – it is all worth it, you know, for the people who come.
And I love the people who come and they say, oh my God, you know, my six-year-old has never seen anything. And she just was totally engaged. We opened last weekend at Richard Bong state recreation area, which is down sort of in the Southeast part of the state. And we had this wonderful moment where like an hour into the show, 15 minutes left, a bunch of kids from the beach came over and stood in the very back of the house and then stood there for maybe a minute and then realized this is something they were interested in. Then walked all the way down the center aisle through the audience, to like the very front and all sat down and stuck with it for the rest of the show.
And I love that kind of stuff. And the accessibility thing is so big for us. And it’s in so many different ways, right? There’s the cultural accessibility we’re creating Shakespeare shows that are short, they’re 75 minutes. They’re six actors and they’re kind of cut so that they can be very understandable.
A lot of the archaic references, the jokes, or the classical references that aren’t compelling to modern audiences are going to get trimmed out. But also there’s this geographic accessibility if you live way to the Northwest of Wisconsin. This is a professional theatre experience that you can enjoy without having to drive to Milwaukee or Madison or the twin cities.
You know, without having to invest a ton of money into going somewhere else, to make a whole trip of it. And it’s something that you can see if you’re a kid, especially, or if you’re just a very imaginative and creative adult. You know we try to keep the production values simple, not for lack of resources, right.
It’s not that we cannot do better, but that we want in the winter’s tale, Camillo and Diane, we have them riding in on brooms as horses at one point because a kid is going to see that kid is going to see these two characters in red togas and on brooms and go, I’ve got a bedsheet.
I’ve got a broom. I could do this. I could make this kind of thing. It is not only understandable to me but like Shakespeare is within my grasp if I wanted to do it myself, which is cool. I love that.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, absolutely. That’s fantastic. How did COVID affect you guys?
I mean, obviously, you missed last summer, but tell us a little bit about that. Cause I know it’s something we in the theater business we’re all dealing with or hopefully it’s over soon, but it’s not.
A.J. Magoon: Right. Yeah. And yeah, it was it’s interesting. So, I took over as the executive director in September of 2019.
So we were deep in preparations for the 20 20 season in March and, you know, everything kind of hit and we, as everyone, we didn’t really know what to expect or when things would be over. When governor Tony Evers closed a number of the Wisconsin state parks in late March of 2021, well, that wasn’t good.
And at the time we took those parks off of our schedule and we condensed it and we said, okay, we’ll do July and August because by them surely things will be improving to a degree. And then obviously, no. And in May, we just had to cancel the whole tour outright. You know the thing to say is that it would not have been possible without the rest of the team that like I took over the leadership and did my best to steer in the right direction.
But especially our Education Director Caroline Norton. We have this fantastic program of online summer educational programming. We really leaned into the workshop aspect, the educational aspect, because obviously live performance really wasn’t a thing. And because it was kind of hard to translate what exactly we do as performers onto a screen, but the education was a little more straightforward, right?
So she came up with this whole three-month menu of educational stuff that I deemed No Bummer Summer Digital Shakesperience. And so we launched that on YouTube and on Facebook and through our website. Caroline would do Weekly Wednesdays with Will videos.
That kind of was like a 4-to-10-minute deep dive into some sort of concept about Shakespeare. You know, iambic pentameter or just the history. We digitized some of our full workshops so that you could act along with us as we did them. We did a digital scavenger hunt.
So, you know, we can’t be in the parks, but you can go into the parks and while you’re there, look for a Bush of Thor or look for this or that, that is mentioned in the text. And it really that kind of helped us keep the spark alive and say listen, we’re coming back and you know, we’re gonna keep fighting for our mission, even if we can’t be in person with them.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, that’s fantastic. Speaking of mission, what do you want to share what your mission is?
A.J. Magoon: Yeah, sure. So, our mission is to create engaging experiences for audiences regardless of their age or their background.
Michael Van Osch: Love it. And tell us a little bit more about the workshop side of things when you’re in the parks.
A.J. Magoon: Yeah, absolutely. This is a really exciting year for us because for the first year since we opened, since we started as a company, we have a new workshop curriculum. So, the first five years we were presenting this workshop called Playing with Shakespeare, Get Outside with Will, which was sort of this general overview of who is Shakespeare? What did he do? You know, why is he important? Why are we still doing him? And then talking about the relation of Shakespeare to the outdoor setting and sort of the importance of why we do Shakespeare in the parks, why that’s such a relevant thing?
Why is that something that gets done so often? And then this year, because a lot of people now who have seen us had done that workshop, there comes a time to switch it up a little bit. And so once again, Caroline, our education director, took that challenge on and she wrote this workshop called Inside Shakespeare’s Story - The Winter’s Tale, which is geared more towards the actual text of the play we’re doing.
So, what’s The Winter’s Tale? The characters are still very interactive. Opportunities for people to enact the characters or talk about nature settings or things. But now specifically talking about, you know, what is The Winter’s Tale, what’s the plot and then really diving into why do this show this year? Like why is The Winter’s Tale an important show to do? At a certain point, we recognize that you want to have something that’s engaging and interesting.
You know, we’re not going to do a 16-hour lecture. But at the same time, they can handle this discussion on the topics of the show and like, why is it important to do a play like The Winter’s Tale this year? And so the workshop is, is very focused on yeah. On, you know, still talking about Shakespeare for those people who might not know him as well, but for those people who do the ability to kind of dive deeper into an exploration of the specific.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah, right. I love it. And do you do that before the show?
A.J. Magoon: Yeah, so it’s done, it’s done an hour and a half before each performance. So that there’s a 45-minute workshop and then the actors have 45 minutes of prep, time to change gears. And then the performance.
Michael Van Osch: Yeah. Gotcha. Great. Well, this has been wonderful. So tell me, where do you see taking this company in the next five years?
A.J. Magoon: I mean that’s the thing is, I think we’ve done this great expansion. We’ve gone from, you know, 15-ish parks to 24. And I think that that may be about as many as I can justify it.
I think any more and there’d be a bit of a mutiny from the cast, you know, cause it’s taxing, and we’ve instituted good breaks and making sure that everyone is kind of taken care of because it can get taxing out on the road. But I think that in the future going forward, you know, whether we are able to then move into doing the Shakespeare in the state parks program as one component of the programming of the company, and then being able to do Shakespeare in the winter as well. Having some indoor shows, having some shows that still capture the really nice conciseness and a real sort of cut to the bone quality about cutting a show down to 75 minutes as we do. But obviously, you’re not going to take Titus Andronicus on the road for a family audience.
You’re not going to take Maccers out there. You know, there are certain shows that just aren’t going to work, but what does it look like to have a short, tight, intense king Lear that gets done for a more adult audience in December or something? I think is a really fun idea and something that we definitely play with.
And then also the idea of what can we continue to offer in the parks? Is it an expansion out of the state parks and into county parks or places where that are closer to population centers? Does it involve maybe having more than one company of actors touring in a year, you know, the Will company is going here while the Bard company does this? So I think that there’s a lot of really interesting options out there for expansion.
And I think that the demand is there. You know, it’s clear that people are really engaged. Our audiences are growing bigger every year. People are really excited to see us come back every year. And for what is still a relatively young company, I think there’s this really exciting potential to say the people are with us, you know, we’ve just got to find the resources to make some sort of expansion happen.
But then at that point, yeah. The only limit is, is what you can imagine doing, you know, and just try it out and see what happens.
Michael Van Osch: Wow. I love what you guys are doing once again. You know, folks like yourself, taking some risks, doing what you love, but also forming community by taking Shakespeare out on the road and just having fun with other people.
And I love the experiences that you’ve told us about. I think it’s fantastic. I noticed there’s a place where people can donate, because I know people will want to, what is your website URL? And I’ll put it in the show notes too afterwards, but what is it?
A.J. Magoon: If people go to www.summitplayerstheatre.com, and that is theater with an R E.
Although I think if you put an ER it will still send you to our website and people can find a full schedule out there, they can find more information about what our shows and our education are all about. We’ve got a discussion guide and a cast list for our current season with The Winter’s Tale. And then yes, the donation link and information on how to otherwise support us is several places on our site.
Michael Van Osch: Fantastic AJ. I love it definitely. Well, before I let you go and stay on the line after we say goodbye, by the way, but before I let you go, final question. I ask everybody that we interview that if Shakespeare was on this call with us and you got to ask him one question, what would you want to ask him?
A.J. Magoon: That is such a, like, I should’ve been more prepared having seen other people, but I just haven’t, I’m not ready for it. I think that if I had to ask Shakespeare a single question. Hmm. It would be if he could tell me more about Love’s Labour’s one. Cause you know, I’m just so curious.
I want to know, I guess I’ll expand that. I would, I would ask Shakespeare to tell us more about some of the plays that maybe have been lost over the years, because I’m just so curious about the other ones, you know? Are there any that we have lost over the years, that would be the next Hamlet?
Do you know what I mean? That would be the shining beacons of Shakespeare that just we’ll never know. Yeah, exactly.
Michael Van Osch: Love to know too. A.J. Magoon. Thank you so much. Summit Players Theatre company, Wisconsin, and going through all the state parks, you guys are doing amazing work.
Thanks so much for joining us. Hang on while we say goodbye here, but thanks again and best of luck and yeah, let us know how it goes. Let’s keep in touch.
A.J. Magoon: Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael Van Osch: Of course. Take care.
A.J. Magoon: You too.
