Fresh takes on the Bard

ATLANTA — Jeffrey Watkins and Richard Garner came to Atlanta about 20 years ago and decided the city needed a Shakespeare troupe.

It’s probably a good thing they never got together.

Watkins puts on rowdy, Elizabethan-style productions, faithful to the original text, on a small, unadorned stage at his New American Shakespeare Tavern in downtown Atlanta.

Garner, now 48, gives directors a chance to try such concepts as setting “As You Like It” in the Old West or “Julius Caesar” in Huey Long’s Louisiana.

“I’m not so concerned that it’s a traditional telling of that story, as long as it’s a faithful telling of the essence of the story,” said Garner, a graduate of Berry College in Rome, Ga., who received theatrical training in San Francisco.

The Georgia Shakespeare Festival, which he co-founded in the mid-1980s, performs at Oglethorpe University, just northeast of Atlanta.

Oglethorpe’s Conant Performing Arts Center, which opened in 1997, seats 509. It replaced a tent that had been erected each year since the festival began in 1986 with a two-play, 25-performance summer season.

The Festival, Oglethorpe’s resident company, now does three plays each summer and one more in the fall. It also conducts a school tour program with an abbreviated version of a Shakespeare play.

School groups from around Georgia attend matinee performances at both the Festival and the Tavern.

Watkins, 47, arrived in Atlanta in 1983. A native of Dallas, he had worked as a street magician in New York and Chicago.

The following year, he got a chance to produce a Shakespeare play at Manuel’s Tavern.

“We only had 120 people in there. But the audience and the actors were in the same space and the comedy just exploded off of the stage,” he said.

Watkins returned with another play the following year. “We really didn’t have to try to sell tickets. It was an annual event.”

But the ceiling was so low that “you couldn’t have a sword fight or hire a tall actor,” he said.

Watkins also put on a few shows at nearby Excelsior Mill, then grabbed the opportunity to rent an old warehouse across the street from Crawford Long Hospital. He scraped together enough money to convert it into a Shakespeare tavern, using whatever materials were at hand. In the spring of 1990, he opened with “The Tempest.”

The plywood floors creaked, and the Tavern had only 180 seats, but the intimate atmosphere allowed Watkins to stage plays his way.

“It’s so important that the audience sees the actors seeing the audience. That performance reality was very much what I had experienced as a street entertainer,” he said.

Watkins calls his brand of Shakespeare “original practice.”

“I’m not trying to do it just the way they did it, but the play has to live in the space between the actor and the audience. For the Elizabethans that was a very active space, and there wasn’t a lot else on the stage except a costumed actor speaking text and whatever props were required.”

In the late 1990s, Watkins raised more than $2 million, which he used to buy the building and expand and renovate the space. The Tavern now has a balcony, seats 245 and has a poured concrete floor.

An adaptation requires more than putting actors in period clothing and requiring them to speak in appropriate accents. For the Festival’s 2001 “Julius Caesar,” actor Bruce Evers steeped himself in Huey Long lore, and the killing of the poet Cinna was staged as a lynching.

Garner said the point of the lynching was made stronger by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, which took place weeks before the play opened in 2001.

A black actor played Cinna. “It became all the more poignant that someone who doesn’t look like everyone else is lynched,” Garner said.

In October, Garner directed a gender-switching production of “The Tempest,” with longtime company member Janice Akers as Prospera.

“Does it make it a different, yet equally interesting story? That’s the conclusion we came to,” Garner said. “Some of the differences have to do with the relationship of a father versus a mother to a daughter and between a man and woman to power and to revenge.

“Folks said they’d seen many ‘Tempests’ before and this one opened their eyes to a fresh look at the play. That’s a success for us.”

Each company does work by other playwrights, and each performs rarely produced Shakespeare plays.

The Festival also is planning to do “Coriolanus.” The Tavern, which operates nearly year-round, took on “Richard II,” “Henry IV, Part 1,” “Henry IV, Part 2,” and “Henry V,” in consecutive weeks in November, with Maurice Ralston as Henry IV and Brik Berkes as Prince Hal.

“I wanted to do something we would all remember for the rest of our lives,” Watkins said.