The Arden Players (TAP) is a recent welcome addition to the Santa Fe theater community. The company has presented accessible, intelligent, and entertaining productions of Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing (2006) and The Merchant of Venice (2007) and is currently in pre-production and rehearsals for a Spring 2008 set of performances of the Bard’s Scottish play at El Museo Cultural Center.
The Arden Players is the brainchild of Deborah Dennison. She has transformed her life-long devotion to and passion for Shakespeare that has informed and defined her tenure in professional and community theaters into a successful dramatic troupe. A contemporary Renaissance woman of the stage, Deborah has produced, directed, acted in, designed and constructed sets and costumes, and served as publicist and company psychologist for the Arden Players Santa Fe Shakespearean productions.
Deborah Dennison seemed destined to lead a life in the theater. Her mother was Carol Gould, an actress who appeared in the first-run Broadway classics The Heiress, Johnny Belinda, and Winterset. Carol regaled her young child with stories of her friends and colleagues in the theater, some of whom were Katherine Cornell, Bea Straight, and Basil Rathbone. Tales of her mother’s career on the stage fascinated a young Deborah, especially those of John Barrymore, then in the last stages of dipsomania, who backstage was never without a drink in his hand or his pet raven on his shoulder. As a pre-teen, Deborah would play over and over a recording of Barrymore performing in high melodramatic fashion the soliloquies of Shakespeare. A defining moment for eight-year old Deborah was a trip with her parents to see a young, dashing, pre-Liz Richard Burton in the lead role of Shakespeare’s Henry V.
Deborah heeded her mother’s advice not to consider the theater as a career choice (“too much depends on luck and connections and too little depends on talent”) until she decided to apply to the Central School of Acting in London for a summer short course. Central has a well-earned superior reputation in the theater world, numbering among its graduates Judi Dench, Laurence Olivier, and Vanessa Redgrave. Using speeches of Rosalind from Shakespeare’s As You Like It, Deborah not only won a place in the summer course but also was invited back to join the main class of twenty from an eventual pool of five thousand applicants. While attending Central, she attended many famous productions of the 1970’s at The National Theater at the Old Vic, including the opening night performance of Peter Shaffer’s Equus, Maggie Smith in The Beaux Stratagem, Ingmar Bergman’s production of Hedda Gabler, and Diana Rigg in Jumpers. She was hooked.
Deborah Dennison went from London directly to New York to begin a life in professional theater. She worked at the CSC Repertory where she performed in Shakespeare, Shaw, and Ibsen while playing leads in Chekhov’s Plantov and Moliere’s Tartuffe. Performing for a decade in the professional theater in New York, Deborah also had the lead in Turgeniev’s A Month in the Country for NYC Repertory. Directing mostly contemporary work, she also produced and directed an evening of Elizabethan poetry, music, and dance entitled The Intrigue of the Pavan. Deborah even found time to help design and build two off-Broadway theaters, The Empty Space and Studio One in the Ballroom of the Ansonia Hotel. From New York Deborah traveled to Los Angeles and began work in films.
I recently asked Deborah about TAP: “Why Shakespeare? Why Santa Fe? Why now?”
Her reasons are two-fold. The first reason is personal. Deborah stated that with all her valuable training and experience she did not want to have any regrets about not doing something significant with Shakespeare when she had the opportunity. Her second reason for founding TAP is cultural. As a noted art capital of the world, Deborah felt that it was sad that there were no regularly scheduled conventional productions of “the greatest playwright of the English language.”
As for operating a theater company on a shoestring budget, Deborah says that it is doable because of her training, skill, and experience in set and costume design. For example, she made twenty-five Elizabethan costumes for TAP’s latest production of The Merchant of Venice. She also reveals that it helps that she is a “terrible bargain hound.” In fact, Deborah finds that her biggest problems are not financial. TAP suffers from a lack of performance and rehearsal spaces and an acting pool that has a sense of entitlement she did not find among the union professionals in New York and Los Angeles. As a result, she has had to recruit actors new to Shakespeare and even new to the stage. Ironically, this last fact has led to her fulfilling part of the company’s mission statement of bringing accessible Shakespeare to the Santa Fe community. The new actors bring an enthusiasm and energy to the productions and are mentored by a cadre of highly experienced, highly intelligent veteran actors. This lively collaboration among actors, support staff, and director is the true joy for TAP founder Deborah Dennison who is enjoying the experience of watching her fledgling company evolve into a self-sustaining ensemble.
Deborah Dennison’s response to my query about any conflicts she may have with wearing many hats for TAP’s productions was a hearty laugh. She finds herself constantly arguing with herself. Her major battleground is the one between her vision as designer and the reality of the situation as a producer. She reveals that compromises are most often the result of time constraints and not due to finances. Furthermore, she states that the “biggest trap” for a director is acting in a play that one is directing. One can’t critique oneself or “see” oneself objectively. Areas such as comic timing may suffer. Finally, Deborah argues that in an era when specialization is often the key to success, the chief gratification for one “who is interested and fairly skilled in many art forms is that one can run a small theatre company.”
TAP’s first two productions were co-produced by the Santa Fe Playhouse who provided the venue for the company’s fully realized plays. The Playhouse provided TAP “the opportunity to get on its feet.” Both Much Ado about Nothing and The Merchant of Venice reflected director Dennison’s belief (borrowed from John Barton’s Playing Shakespeare) that “Everything an actor needs to act in Shakespeare is in the text.”
As a result, Deborah does not put Shakespeare’s comedies “on a pedestal” or treat them in an “overly cute, sanitized manner.” If the text calls for broad, coarse, silly, gross, or Monty Pythonesque humor, the director needs be attuned to such demands. In like manner, Shakespeare creates nuanced characters that reflect his interest “not in black or white but in gray” and a director must honor such complexity.
TAP’s next production is Macbeth. While Deborah Dennison is primarily concerned with creating good work, she does have a contemporary take on the play: “This is a play of a warrior society that is highly relevant for today even though we no longer use broad swords. Women must compete in the same brutal and aggressive way as men do. In the play, I’m grappling with the nature of morality. The conventional wisdom argues that Duncan is the Christian ideal and Macbeth is the pagan id. Yet Duncan orders the death of the Thane of Cawdor based on a flimsy rumor while Macbeth demonstrates many positive traits of a good leader. I hope our production reflects this complexity.”
The Arden Player’s production of Macbeth will be performed on the three weekends following Easter at El Museo Cultural with matinees on Sundays. In the discussion stage are a Saturday matinee with a post-performance discussion of the play by the company and a panel of Shakespeare scholars and a weekday performance for Santa Fe students.
