Up, Up, And Away

Macbeth. Photo by Alastar Dimitrie.

Last winter, two theatre artists left Southeast Michigan around the time that residents were suffering through a polar vortex. They relocated to Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (UP) where it was even colder. With a lot of talent and very little cash—about $10K raised from family, friends, and their own savings—they set out to build a theatre. By late spring, Alastar Dimitrie, executive director of the Upper Peninsula Shakespeare Festival, and Jamie Weeder, the theatre’s artistic director, had mounted The Tempest on the Presque Isle bandshell, where couples sometimes marry when the Marquette Symphony and other musical groups aren’t playing there. It had never accommodated a theatre before. In the fall, UP Shakespeare moved into the Ore Dock Brewing Company, where it did Weeder’s immersive production of Macbeth in an old building with sandstone walls and rough-hewn timbers that came from an old barn. There had been concerts and lectures in the brewery but, again, no theatre.

Brave New World

The couple set out to find a venue that would fit their budget and to cast a show in a community that, as far as they know, no Equity actor calls home.

It’s no wonder. The Upper Peninsula contains 29% of the land area of Michigan but just 3% of its total population, and winters are freezing, snowy, and long. The city of Marquette, where they settled, is home to Northern Michigan University and denser than most of the UP, but it is still far from what they had experienced when working before.

The Tempest. Photo by Jamie Weeder.

Dimitrie has family in Marquette. “He brought me here, and I fell in love with the place,” says Weeder, whose day job with a non-profit in Ann Arbor was threatened by funding cuts. She sent out job applications, and when a good offer materialized in Marquette, the pair packed up and relocated before two weeks had passed.They found themselves in new territory in more ways than one. “Communications seem to travel at a slower pace around here, which could be mistaken for a lack of enthusiasm,” Dimitrie reflected shortly after they began their quest. However, after meetings with the city’s Arts and Culture office, the city Parks and Recreation Department, and the Marquette County Convention and Visitors Bureau, he was pleasantly surprised. Everyone was happy to have them in town.

“Parks and Recreation has been very helpful as far as the space is concerned. They usually require payment up front, but they said they were willing to work with us on a timeline,” says Dimitrie, noting that four performances with insurance came to about $1,000 for The Tempest on the Presque Isle bandshell. However, they would only have the space for three hours for each performance, leaving little time to set up and strike, and limiting what they could do by way of design.

As they began to plan, they began to wonder: Just how many goodly creatures were there here? They didn’t know any local theatre artists. Weeder half-jokes that starting a theatre was a good way to find friends with common interests. Before their arrival, there were university productions aplenty, and a theatre in a boathouse that does light comedies and historical musicals, but a high school troupe had offered the only Shakespeare in town; adults joined teens in these shows.

“Although there are some solid actors up here, there are, unsurprisingly, far fewer actors overall,” says Dimitrie. “It seems like every adult actor in the area was taking part in a production of As You Like It to be put on by Westwood High School’s theatre troupe this past summer,” he noted as they began to cast. “There were not a lot of choices, as expected, but pretty much everyone who showed up brought something interesting to the table,” adds Dimitrie. Finally, they jobbed in two Equity actors, and Dimitrie appeared as Ariel in Weeder’s production. Local players filled the other roles.

Less Than Perfect

Macbeth. Photo by Alastar Dimitrie.

“Everyone came through by the end, but there was a definite mixture of preparedness and work ethic,” he says. “You had professionals who arrived at the first rehearsal off book, and other actors who had to be threatened with imminent replacement to get off book, and yet other actors who never truly got off book.”

It had rained throughout the previous summer, and weather in the area is always unpredictable. This summer, perfect weather welcomed the new theatre.

The venue was less than perfect. Sure, the shell boasts useful levels and has good acoustics and plain white lights to supplement natural lighting. “The stage is nice to look at in an unobtrusive kind of way. It’s located in a beautiful park,” says Dimitrie, explaining that the locale could serve as part of the set, with a forest behind the stage and a view of Lake Superior and the Upper Harbor ore dock behind the audience.

But the isle is full of noises, not all of them idyllic. Freighters get loaded with iron ore at the dock, and the roar of taconite pellets rushing out of metal shoots into waiting vessels can be more than a small distraction. “This is a massive concrete and steel structure equipped with shoots that funnel taconite pellets from freight cars on top into the holds of freighters below,” says Dimitrie. With unpredictable boat schedules, it was impossible to know if or when a performance might be interrupted. It happened twice.

Moreover, performers shared the stage with yellow jackets, a serious concern since one actor is severely allergic. Eventually, the nest was removed without incident.

Macbeth. Photo by Alastar Dimitrie.

News of the new theatre spread quickly, and audiences were not put off by bandshell issues. “We had an average attendance of about 85 per performance, which I thought was pretty good for an inaugural production in the UP,” Dimitrie reports. “We even had a few people up from Wisconsin who had been following us on social media. Speaking as a perfectionist, the results were far from perfect, but I know we gave the audience something rich and strange.”

As The Tempest came to a close, Dimitrie and Weeder were still looking for a space for an October production of Macbeth. A tunnel under what had been Cliffs Mine was now a museum. It was, Dimitrie says, “a little out of the way, but it has a wonderful, ominous quality.” They also explored the basement of an old corset factory and a brewery in Marquette.

The brewery won out. Weeder had seen the National Theatre of Scotland do an immersive production of a play at the Corner Brewery in Ypsilanti, a city in Southeast Michigan. “I felt I was dropped down somewhere. You’re in a place you recognize, and it changes, and you’re right in the middle of it.” Now she wanted to do an immersive production where people could drink a beer while seeing the play. “As soon as I saw that bar, I knew it was my kind of space,” she says. Dimitrie concurred. “It’s already a wildly popular place for locals to attend concerts, lectures, and other events, so why not Shakespeare?” With the ambient lighting, the stone walls took on a medieval look—perfect for the play.

If only they could have rehearsed there. “The Ore Dock Brewing Company was very accommodating about letting us rehearse there when nothing else was going on, but there was usually something going on,” Dimitrie recalls, noting that the search for a rehearsal space took almost as long as the search for a venue. They were offered a middle school gymnasium, but that was in Gwinn, 30 minutes away. They wound up in a chilly storefront, a space that didn’t approximate the bar, especially not with spectators sitting in and around the acting area, but they were grateful for the donated space in nearby Ishpeming.

Toil And Trouble

Macbeth. Photo by Alastar Dimitrie.

They had planned to scale the play down and use just five actors but wound up double-casting 13 players and keeping the text almost entirely intact. Some of the actors had never been in a play before, none were Equity members, and nobody had done immersive work. Even with Weeder’s stage diagram, the experience challenged the company.

Rachael Tillson, who handed out programs for The Tempest, had never stage managed when she took on the job for Macbeth in a venue that would have been a challenge to anyone. A backstage area “that’s not really backstage” required actors to find a place to stand when offstage so they weren’t seen from some seats. They also had to watch for floor boards that creak, reports Tillson, who made sure costumes and props were where they needed to be.

Weeder also needed to fit people in and give them all good seats. The limitations of the venue inspired her to leave more to the imagination than a traditional stage might have done. She decided it wasn’t essential for audiences to see everything, so sometimes actors played out of view of anyone, their voices echoing through the space, sometimes coming from different points as they moved about the perimeter. On stage, they were sometimes silent.

Props were few and simple for what Weeder calls a “trunk show. The props were literally in my trunk,” she says. Sometimes, a single prop could serve as a metaphor for an action. For instance, one of the witches, played by a young girl, set a giant bucket of blood on someone’s table, put a finger in and screamed, all to suggest (spoiler alert!) the murder of Duncan. Macbeth, on the other side of the bar, emerged with blood-covered hands. “Seeing his reaction to what he did was more brutal than fake violence,” Weeder says.

Adds Dimitrie, “We had minimal design elements because, in some way, the stage itself is a design element,” he says, noting that the space is wired for lighting used by bands; they were able to use the brewery’s lighting and sound systems.

Macbeth. Photo by Alastar Dimitrie.

“Audiences were pretty robust,” says Dimitrie, who reports that the performances not only sold out but at times, 120 patrons filled the brewery to over-capacity. The popularity of the brewery was only part of it. There was a lot of buzz for the play, which was included in the city’s marketing material for Halloween activities in the area.

With audiences still clamoring to see the show, UP Shakespeare wanted to extend the run until they learned the brewery would not be available. There were other spaces in town, but the show had been so completely designed for the space, it would have been impossible to mount it elsewhere without reimagining it.

For the winter, UP Shakespeare’s revels now are ended, and thoughts turn to next summer and beyond. “We really got lucky with the weather, but in the future, I would love to be able to have some kind of shelter for the audience,” says Dimitrie. It might be nice, too, to play in a different park, where they have more control over noise. They have been in meetings with Art on the Rocks and the Hiawatha Traditional Music Festival, important organizations on the Marquette arts scene, to discuss opportunities in the area.

They are proud of the work they did this season. Dimitrie says, “Overall, I would say that the most satisfying aspect for me was seeing that Shakespeare can pack a bar on a Sunday night in the UP.”

Davi Napoleon, a regular contributor to Live Design, is a freelance writer based in Michigan. Her book is Chelsea on the Edge: The Adventures of an American Theater.

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