To She or Not to She

Sidonie Garrett was a student at Harrisonville High School when her worldview widened from Fleetwood Mac and Harper Lee to include William Shakespeare. She's been a fan ever since.

"I had a great high school English teacher and, when we read Macbeth, she made it clear this was literature to be read aloud," Garrett recalls. "It just came alive. It was very visceral, and I loved the intensity of the story."

Now Garrett is headed into her second summer as artistic director of the Heart of America Shakespeare Festival. Someday she hopes to direct Macbeth, but first she has to deliver Hamlet for the festival's eleventh season, which opens next week.

For the first time in several years, the Shakespeare Festival is mounting one play for the entire four weeks instead of staging two shows on alternating nights.

"The board of directors said we were looking at another challenging financial year and said, 'Bring me options,'" Garrett explains. "So I put together budget plans and show ideas -- about five different configurations. If we were going to do one play, we wanted to do Hamlet, because it's huge; it's a big canvas. And this show has not been professionally produced in this city since the Missouri Repertory Theatre did it in 1979."

The one-show option doesn't necessarily translate into 50 percent less work, though. "It's really not a cut-everything-in-half decision," Garrett says, laughing.

After Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet is probably Shakespeare's most-famous play -- which is both a blessing and a curse. Some audiences will find its familiarity inviting; to others, it may evoke a "been there, done that" response. "Everybody knows this play, or thinks they know this play," Garrett says. "It's probably the most-quoted, and many people have their favorite Hamlets. So there's a level of trepidation as well as excitement."

Of the three most recent screen Hamlets, only the one starring Kenneth Branagh (as opposed to Mel Gibson or Ethan Hawke) played the text at its full four hours. Garrett's quick to note she's not doing that; in fact, she's cutting 1,100 lines from the 3,900-line text.

"I was talking to our composer, Greg Mackender [before rehearsals began], and I said, 'I'm thinking of this show as a runaway train.' It will be alive."

At this point in her directing career, Garrett has the luxury to trim a piece like Hamlet. That wasn't always the case. One of her first projects was an experimental production of The Widow's Blind Date thrown together with friends ten years ago. That was followed by Eric Bogosian's Sex, Drugs and Rock & Roll, staged at the Unicorn during the theater's summer hiatus.

"It was the golden times," Garrett recalls. "I got to pick what we did, produce it and spend my own money. People in the theater get excited about stuff like that. Even though I didn't make a dime, there was a purity about it that cannot be met commercially."

Then the stakes got bigger. Garrett directed local playwright Ron Simonian's Thanatos as it developed from a workshop in a raw performance space to a Unicorn production to, ultimately, an Off-Broadway production in New York. Since then, she's been drawn to plays with gristle, like Spinning Into Butter and The Tangled Web.

For Hamlet, Garrett has surrounded herself with a host of present or former Kansas Citians, such as Mark Robbins, Scott Cordes and Jan Rogge -- actors with whom she's so comfortable that they can all, she says, "speak in shorthand." And she doesn't just encourage collaboration; she expects it. "Casting is 98 percent of what I do, and I don't want to work with actors who don't want to communicate with me," she says.

Playing Kansas City's Hamlet is Jason Chanos, who was so fine in last summer's one-man Fully Committed at the Unicorn.

Garrett has a few acting credits on her résumé, such as several years in the Rep's A Christmas Carol, and she doesn't rule out pursuing that side of the footlights again someday. But the director's chair is where she wants to be sitting right now.

"My job is about finding new ways to say something," she says. "But I'm not a puppet master. I'm an eye, a facilitator. I've been fortunate. People look at my work, like my work. And they've trusted me to work in their theaters."

Garrett's version of Hamlet won't be the only Shakespeare on this year's arts calendar. The Shakespeare Festival marks the first production of a twelve-month, citywide collaboration of arts organizations called Shakespeare All Year. Signed on so far are the Kansas City Symphony, the Lyric Opera, the Lied Center, and the Coterie and UMKC theaters.

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Postscript:Last year, former Kansas City actor Dean Kelley did something he had wanted to do since he was four years old: He ran away and joined the circus. After Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey held open auditions for clowns for the first time in thirty years, Kelley landed a job and is now a performer in the 133rd edition of the circus, playing Topeka's Kansas Expo Center June 12-15.

Kelley, who has appeared on several Kansas City stages and has clowned for a while at Science City, says he's racked up 200 performances since January. "I've never worked harder, and I'm having the time of my life," he says.