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Special Section: Literary Rights, Licensing & Mgmt.
The set of The Cherry Orchard at Chautauqua
ered and frankly that’s fine with me.”
As far as what a show costs to lease
from the publisher: “I ignore it,” she
declares. “The difference between paying
11 percent royalty and a 9 percent
royalty is not big enough to be an
influential factor,” she says. For Doubt,
for example, she is paying a 10 percent
royalty, and for Tuesday’s with Morrie
she’s paying 11 percent; Other older
plays, like Inherit the Wind are 8 percent
or 7 percent; then there are the royaltyfree
works like Shakespeare, and older
19th century works by the likes of
Shaw and Wilde, and they figure into
a season. … but bottom line is she
would rather put a play like Doubt on
her boards quickly than wait to see if
the royalty goes down.
The financial factor that does factor
in is how many actors a play takes — a
big cast can put the biggest dent in a
budget. But first and foremost: “My eye
is how we can serve this audience.”
The Chautauqua Theater Company
Chautauqua, New York
Vivienne Benesch and Ethan
McSweeny, Artistic Directors
Founded in 1983, the Chautauqua
Theater is a resident professional summer
theatre with a popular summer
program of plays that challenge and
delight a theatre-savvy population.
With a conservatory of artists, a combination
of students and professional
actors, Chautauqua has an atypical
audience, though the current coartistic
directors are trying to expand
beyond that.
“The institution itself has 10,000 squarefeet
on five square miles of campus, so
our primary audience is on the grounds,”
says Ethan McSweeny. “But we’ve been
working to extend that to other communities
in western New York.”
As far as sculpting a season, they
have a couple of particular needs to
meet. “Part of every arts organization
features a training component and we
have a conservatory with top actors,”
McSweeny explains. “Every year 500
people audition, with only 14 making
it.” Since younger actors are part of
the program, they lean toward choosing
productions that have good roles
for actors in their 20s. For their first
season, the two chose All My Sons by
Arthur Miller, for example.
Unusual for this theatre is that
they get to purposely look for plays
that have a big cast, Benesch points
out. With the resources they have in
the conservatory plus their ability to
attract top professional talent, “we
need to pick big plays.”
Otherwise, they approach a specific
season by identifying certain ideas. “We
try to offer our audience a full range,”
McSweeny says. “We try to do one classic
American play, a 20th century classic,
and also something more contemporary,
which usually ends up being a comedy.”
“And we always end our season
with a Shakespeare production,”
Benesch adds. “And recently we did
The Cherry Orchard, which we chose
specifically for a couple of artists we
wanted to bring back who we had
worked with previously — and used
that as an anchor for the season.”
“It’s always important in a summer
festival season that one show can
become the anchor,” McSweeny says.
However you anchor your season, the
quest for the perfect one goes on.
28 April 2008 • www.stage-directions.com