“Shakespeare on the Cape
Even without such ties, however, important work is possible. As an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota, Eric Powell Holm spent the summer between his junior and senior years trying to start a theatre in South Dakota. Five actors, doing everything from stage-managing to selling tickets, brought two plays to the South Dakota Theatre Festival. “We did Stop Kiss and This Is Our Youth,” Holm says. “Lesbians and cocaine. The other shows were Oklahoma! and Barefoot in the Park. We were sort of the black sheep there.”
But Holm’s spirit was undaunted. After a semester in London exposed him to director Edward Hall’s all-male A Midsummer Night’s Dream — a product of Hall’s company, Propeller — Holm was drawn to the idea of producing “really unorthodox” Shakespeare. Sensing that South Dakota might not be the best location for it, he considered Cape Cod, where a classmate, Elliot Eustis, spent his summers. One visit convinced Holm that Provincetown would welcome cross-gendered Shakespeare, and Shakespeare on the Cape was born.
Holm’s experience in London also taught him to disregard conventional ideas of casting. Instead he focused on a single question: “Are you personally in love with this part?” “Giving a young male actor a chance to play Viola or Cleopatra or giving a young female actor a chance to play Mercutio or Hamlet has potential to tap into some true passion,” he explains. “We had a male Rosalind, an actor who was tall, melancholic, with a deep voice. He’s going to play Jacques 20 times in his life. But he’s never going to get a chance to play Rosalind again. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime experience for the artist and for the audience.”
So what does all this have to do with the University of Minnesota, with which the company has no official ties? Very little — except that SOTC productions are populated almost exclusively by U.M. graduates and current students looking for summer theatre experience. For Holm, who is co – artistic director with Eustis, SOTC is “an ideal training program” for future artistic directors.”
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[The SOTC Blog] 