Today we’d like to introduce you to Peter Garino.
Peter, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
We are a professional theatre company based in Chicago, founded in 1995, dedicated to producing the works of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Our actors are members of Actors’ Equity Association, the union of professional actors.
We present a four-play season that is performed in six local libraries: the Newberry Library here in Chicago, and suburban public libraries in Niles, Wilmette, Highland Park, Lincolnshire and Mount Prospect. The performances, which are staged as theatrical readings of the plays, are offered free to the public and are funded by Friends of the Library organizations, a library foundation, and the support of individual donors who share our mission of making professional performances of Shakespeare available to all.
We began back in 1995 as a small group of Equity actors who frequently ran into each other at auditions or worked in plays together and shared a love of Shakespeare. There were never enough performance opportunities in Shakespeare’s plays to go around, so we decided to form a kind of reading club, meeting privately once a week to sit around a table and read one of his plays aloud to each other.
There was no ambition at the beginning for The Shakespeare Project to be anything more than just that – friends meeting and reading Shakespeare to each other. We were able to secure a reading room at the Berger Park mansion up on Sheridan Road, which is run by the Chicago Park District. There are two ingredients necessary for theatre: an actor and an audience. Actors sitting around a table by themselves reading a play is not really theatre. You could argue it’s a rehearsal, but the second requisite for theatre, the audience, is missing.
You can imagine our surprise when, upon taking a break from the play, we opened the door to our room and found several people standing outside the door who politely asked, “Would you mind if we sat in and just listened?” Actors being actors, it didn’t take long for us to agree that it would be ok for them to listen.
I think we were really just trying to be polite, but, if you think about it, when we opened that door, that is when The Shakespeare Project transformed from a reading club to a theatre company without us even realizing it at the time. We never went looking for an audience – our audience found us. Weeks went on, regular guests sat in and soon the park director of Berger Park came to us and said, “A lot of people are talking about what you are doing in there. Would you consider holding a performance that we can invite people to?”
Soon, after finalizing a staged reading agreement with Actors’ Equity, our union, we were giving regular performances in the coach house at Berger Park at the rate of one play per month. Our audiences at Berger Park were primarily senior citizens who lived in the surrounding neighborhood. We concluded each performance with a brief discussion between actors and audience members, something we still do today at each of our shows.
In our 22 years of continuous operation, we have had over 360 actors work with us – the same actors you will find working regularly at Chicago’s best theatres including Chicago Shakespeare Theatre, the Goodman, and many others.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
We also have an education outreach program which focuses on bringing Shakespeare into the classroom. Unfortunately, today many schools are no longer studying Shakespeare as part of their English curriculum. We rely on a small group of teachers who are passionate about Shakespeare and see the value of bringing performances of Shakespeare to their students.
Please tell us about The Shakespeare Project of Chicago.
We have performed each of Shakespeare’s plays at least once, most at least three times. In 2010, when I became artistic director, I instituted our Shakespeare’ Contemporaries series where each season we present a play by one of Shakespeare’s fellow playwrights from the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods including works by John Webster, Thomas Heywood, Thomas Middleton, John Fletcher and William Rowley.
We are also proud that we are now in a position to pay our actors a meaningful wage for their work and that 85 cents of every dollar we take in goes into our actors’ pockets.
With our long-standing relationship with the Newberry Library, we frequently are invited to provide programming around their many wonderful exhibitions and symposiums. This September, we will present the US premier of Rowan Williams play, “Shakeshafte”, as part of the Newberry’s symposium The Politics of Conversion. Dr. Williams is the 14th Archbishop of Canterbury and a highly accomplished writer, and, in particular, a lover of Shakespeare. His provocative play imagines a meeting between young Shakespeare and the Jesuit martyr Edmund Campion, and examines the potential influence both philosophical and spiritual Campion may have had on Shakespeare that subsequently could have informed his writing.
If you had to go back in time and start over, would you have done anything differently?
We have been very successful in achieving our goals over the past 22 years. I really can’t think of anything we would change since we have been so successful.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.shakespeareprojectchicago.org
- Phone: 773-710-2718
- Email: peter@shakespeareprojectchicago.org
- Facebook: facebook.com/shakespeareprojectchicago
Image Credit:
The Shakespeare Project Of Chicago
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