There are distinct advantages to being the new guy on the block, when it comes to the Berkshire County theater scene. If you’re like Great Barrington Public Theatre (GBPT), for instance, founded in 2018, you might not have your own infrastructure to maintain. You’d also be free to iterate and experiment, to take a fresh approach to everything. You can keep costs low and creativity high.
In a win-win for both entities, the Great Barrington Public Theatre puts on new work, often by local talent, in local space that would otherwise go unused. GBPT rents the Liebowitz Black Box, with eighty seats, and the McConnell Theater, seating three hundred, from Bard College at Simon’s Rock. The company has recently shifted from the first to the much larger latter space, in order to accommodate its first of two ensemble pieces of the season, a new comedy called “Public Speaking 101,” in previews as of July 14. This summer marks a big leap for GBPT in all respects, and it’s finding an eager, receptive summer audience.
GBPT co-founder and Artistic Director Jim Frangione discovered the Berkshires in 2003 when he was living in New York and doing a summer play up here, when he also met his wife, Simons Rock Professor Anne O’Dwyer. A protégé of director David Mamet (Frangione appeared in five Mamet films over the years, including “State and Main“), Frangione is a well-established film, stage, and voice actor. Fittingly, for a man with a rich, clear baritone voice, Frangione says his day job is as an audiobook narrator, where he specializes in crowd-pleasing love stories. “I do hundreds of romance novels,” he says.
For ten years before the creation of GBPT Frangione helped manage the Berkshire Playwrights Lab, which ran a staged reading series at the Mahaiwe Theatre, with a seating capacity of seven hundred. But, says Frangione, “no one ever started a stage company to do staged readings.”
He and friend Deann Simmons Halper co-founded GBPT, and she now serves as Executive Director. Their first season, 2019, they put on a play Frangione had written, called “Breakwater,” and a couple of readings of new plays. In 2020, of course, everything was shut down, and all plans for expansion were put on hold. But expand they soon did. Tristan Wilson, Managing Director, came on board the following spring, and 2021 was GBPT’s first real season, with three plays produced. It was a resounding—and surprising—success.
“We hoped to bring in $40,000 of revenue, and we doubled that,” says Frangione. People, he found, really wanted to see new works. The great summer could also be partly attributed to luck of timing. Frangione calls the influx of visitors to the Berkshires that began at the onset of the COVID pandemic “The Great Northern Migration.”
“I think people coming from New York and elsewhere are hungry for theater, and for new plays.” In keeping with the theater’s mission to support local playwrights, Frangione also runs a Monday night Zoom group for budding playwrights through GBPT to workshop new works. “We like to nurture writers. We’re really a playwrights’ theater.”
The 2022 season started with four new solo plays: Alison Larkin’s “Grief, the Musical…a Comedy“; “The Bard, The Beat, The Blues“; “The Shot“; and “Leave Your Fears Here.” The season continues now with two ensemble plays, the first of which, “Public Speaking 101,” opened for previews on July 14. The season will close with “Things I Know To Be True,” which will run from August 4 to 14. (Five out of this year’s six shows are world premieres, with “Things I Know To Be True” having its premiere in Milwaukee in 2019.)
GBPT is supported by ticket revenue, Mass Cultural Council funds, and individual donors (“theater angels,” in Frangione’s words) and board members, some of whom also make their properties available for actors’ housing. “Our budget when we started out was very tiny, now we’re over 300,000.” As a small, local start-up operation that’s serious about keeping both ticket prices and subject matter accessible, Frangione is always looking for community engagement and involvement and puts out an explicit call for them in the program, which seems to be working. The board is growing along with the budget, with three new members likely to come on this season.
Frangione is directing the current production, written by local writer Mark St. Germain, which he says, “is about a group of people who are taking an adult community college class to get over their fear of public speaking, and it’s taught by a neurotic community theater actress, and it’s quite funny.”
Playing the Reverend Montavius Lester in “Public Speaking 101” is long-time New York-based actor Nathan Hinton, who, prior to arriving in Great Barrington, had just wrapped a shoot for CBS show “The Equalizer.” As for the five-character show, Hinton says, “What’s cool is it’s about a group of misfits wanting to be comfortable with themselves. I think it’s something that as performing artists we all have some sort of connection with…It’s kind of a bit of a therapeutic release.”
In GBPT, and of working in Great Barrington generally, Hinton finds a welcome relief from the pace and pulse of the city. “It’s nice and laid back. Very chill.”
In terms of material for this late COVID season, when reconnection is still tentative, and there’s still so much fear and uncertainty about the future, Frangione has looked for work that’s summoning our better angels. “Coming out of COVID, I really wanted to program this season about humanity, and empathy, and being kind, and transformation, and healing. I think all the plays we’ve programmed this summer have that common thread that runs through them.”
GBPT shows have often been selling out, but, Frangione finds, not until the last minute. Perhaps one mark of the COVID era is an aversion to making plans ahead of time, since they can so easily be dashed. “It’s just the nature of where we’re at these days.”
“Public Speaking 101” runs from July 14 through July 24 at the McConnell Theater of the Daniel Arts Center at Simons Rock in Great Barrington, and tickets are available on the GBPT website.
