Camelot Theatre Artistic Director Livia Genise constantly brings new energy to the theater. Camelot’s new theater building is to be constructed and open by 2011. Genise is currently portraying the incorruptible nun in “Doubt.” And there will be general auditions on Nov. 7. I met her at Starbucks in downtown Ashland to discuss what it takes for the creation of a successful theater company.
EH: What steps have you taken to build the Camelot Theater Company?
LG: I have general auditions every November. Then what I do is to take those pictures and resumés and I put them in the files of the shows for next year for callbacks. After I finish with calling back and casting one show, I’ll take the appropriate pictures and put them in the next file.
Each season the Oregon Shakespeare Festival offers special performances of plays featuring open captions in Spanish. Cuban-born Lia Beeson provides many of the translations. As we lunched at the Breadboard restaurant, Lia told me about translating for theater at OSF and her flight from Cuba.
EH: You do translations for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival?
LB: The last thing I translated was the Octavio Solis adaption of Cervantes’ “Don Quixote” for the performance featuring open captions in Spanish. In special shows, while the play goes on on-stage, they show Spanish captions for the Spanish-speaking audience. It’s different from a regular translation. I follow the guidelines for subtitling movies. The translator tries to put down as simple and as readable words as possible; 30 to 50 percent of the dialogue is supposed to be dropped off. The pride in translation is to provide language that is just as elegant and appealing as it is in the other language. You can’t do that in a caption and expect the people to read it. Usually I only do open-caption translations for them, but OSF also asked me for a full translation of “Don Quixote.”
In “Glengarry Glen Ross,” now playing at Oregon Stage Works, Joe Charter plays James Lingk, the sensitive victim of a fly-by-night real estate scheme. Joe has been acting in Community Theater since 2004, when he played in “Inherit the Wind” at the Camelot Theater. Joe is a lawyer and a part-time judge for Jackson County. We got together at Noble Coffee one sunny Saturday morning.
EH: How is it that you became interested in Community Theater?
JC: It’s something I took up. It sort of grew out of being very left brain/lawyerly. My oldest daughter said, “Dad, you need something creative to do, you have such a brainiac job.” I always thought that performing in a trial in court was like helping to write a script and be in a play.
There are a couple of superstar stage managers, Karen Kuran and Kristen Mun, running Oregon Stage Works’ production of “Glengarry Glen Ross.” For those of you unfamiliar with the field, a stage manager is the pivotal person of a theatrical production, the coordinator of all of the elements and the liaison between the director, cast and crew of a play. She is also in charge of running the show after the play has opened.
Both Karen and Kristen came to Ashland while looking at prospective colleges and fell in love with Southern Oregon University. Both have been theater arts majors at SOU with an emphasis in stage management. We chatted over lunch at the House of Thai.
Anyone who has seen David Dials as the tragic/comic Shelley Levene in “Glengarry Glen Ross” (now at Oregon Stage Works) can see that David is an accomplished actor. But David fell in love with education early on. As we lunched at Geppetto’s, he told me how he combined a life of theater and teaching.
DD: I got my BA in theater with an emphasis in children’s theater, and then I got my teaching credential. I had a wonderful teaching career for 30 years. Just for fun, just recreationally, like you would play recreational softball, I’ve been in plays all the time, except for a period of time when my kids were at an age where I wanted to be at home with them.
Bill Langan is the director of David Mamet’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Glengarry Glen Ross,” which opens Friday night at Oregon Stage Works. I have had the privilege of sitting in on rehearsals. The play is impeccably directed. Bill received his master’s degree from Yale School of Drama and has been acting professionally for 20 years, including six years in the acting company of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. We lunched on the terrace at Martino’s and discussed acting, art and politics.
BL: I couldn’t be more delighted by the quality of my actors. I love my guys. I’m so impressed. Now I can see from this “side of the table” the real meaning of the phrase, “directing is 80 or 90 percent casting,” depending on who you talk to and somewhat depending on the show. But this play is all about the actors; it’s all about the language, which I love.
As I visited with Shirley and Bill Patton in their exquisite Ashland hills home, I got to know two people who have shared a creative life together in theater. Their efforts led to the formation and success of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Shirley is now starring in “Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks” at the Camelot Theatre in Talent.
SP: Bill was the first person I met when I got off the bus.
BP: She came up to Ashland to audition in the summer of 1958 when I was general manager.
SP: Then he became the executive director. Bill’s position evolved over the years and as the festival grew. As theaters were added with more and more staff, his job description kept changing dramatically.
Ashland Theatre 