Summer is typically theater downtime, but this year that ain't so! Curious about this season's peculiar swelling of festival-structured productivity, I contacted various theater-makers to find out more.
Part 1: Frank Corrado from the Pinter Festival at ACT
(running now through Aug 26)
What is the origin of the Pinter Festival?
Harold Pinter is my favorite playwright, and I have very much enjoyed acting in his plays. So when his life ended on the 24th of December, 2008, after nearly a decade of battling a series of devastating illnesses, I was motivated to prove to the theater community in Seattle that Harold Pinter had written 28 plays other than Betrayal, even a few that were as good and as "accessible." I approached the artistic leadership at ACT Theater and proposed a series of readings, and in March of 2009 Pinter Fortnightly commenced with a reading of No Man's Land, a play that had never been professionally produced in Seattle. Fewer than 40 brave souls attended that first reading, but a lively discussion of the play took place afterward, and more such evenings were immediately scheduled. After another few, the audience had increased and the Fortnightly series had become something of a flagship staple of the Central Heating Lab program at ACT.
What are the drawbacks to a festival format?
Well, know that I'm both an actor and a producer, so there is definitely greater pressure on me, now that I'm largely responsible. In other words, it's my ass on the line. Well, mine and a few others, but they are the usual suspects. More power to them.
How diverse are the experience levels of the artists involved in your festival?
The artists involved are all accomplished and established veterans, as many of them have been involved in the Pinter Fortnightly series. For Pinter to be done well and done right, you need to have performers of a certain caliber that can not only handle the challenges of Pinter's particular dramatic aesthetic, but who can speak his language with fluency. It's a language where silences can be deafening and where torrents of words can obscure meaning and skirt around the issue at hand—which is really just another sort of silence. It's not easy, but any actor worth his or her salt relishes doing it.
How does your festival affect the community?
What does the community get? A chance to see a repertory cast of actors play a variety of roles in rarely performed plays by an extraordinary playwright, access to free films and affordable theater, pride in supporting local actors and artists, and the community gets to have a hell of a lot of fun.