Our History

The Ithaca Shakespeare Company is a professional theatre organization in Ithaca, NY, that has gone through several stages of evolution in its history.

Roots

The Company's roots lie in the Red Bull Players, which started as a student theatre organization at Cornell University. It was founded by Jeremy Lopez and consisted mainly of English Department graduate students who enjoyed performing works of English Renaissance drama at Risley Theatre. They took their name from one of the most popular (and rowdiest) of the theatres operating during Shakespeare's time, the Red Bull.

Stephen Ponton took over leadership of the group in 2001, when he arrived in Ithaca as a Ph.D. candidate in Cornell's Department of Theatre, Film, and Dance. He expanded it into a community-wide organization that welcomed both students and members of the larger theatre community in Ithaca. The first production of the expanded organization was Shakespeare's The Tempest in 2002. This indoor production combined lights, sound, and an experimental approach to staging with careful attention to language and pacing to create a performance that one audience member called "the most exciting thing I've ever seen in a theatre."

Growth

At that point, Melanie Uhlir -- Caliban in The Tempest and a founding member of the expanded group -- came up with the idea of starting an outdoor Shakespeare program at Cornell Plantations. She found a site that could be used as a ready-made playing area, Plantations Director Don Rakow jumped at the idea, and planning began in earnest for the first Shakespeare at the Plantations production.

This would be quite different from the work the group had done on The Tempest: it would be outdoors, during the day, using natural light and live music only, performed at a wooden pavilion surrounded by the trees and gardens of the Plantations. In other ways, however, our approach to performing Shakespeare was unchanged, emphasizing the details of language, rhythm, and character dynamics, with the goal of making Shakespeare both clear and exciting to everyone. This first Plantations production also established our practice of drawing cast and crew members from the widest possible spectrum of theatre enthusiasts in Ithaca: members of the local community, students and staff from Cornell, Ithaca College, and area high schools, and Equity actors working as Resident Professional Teaching Associates at Cornell's Schwartz Center for the Performing Arts.

The show was Antony and Cleopatra, performed in July 2003, and was a great success, clearly demonstrating the potential of a program like this for the area. Actors David Dietrich and Robert DeLuca and costume designer Lauren Cowdery joined on this production, and are still with the company.

Additional productions followed each summer after that: Sir John Falstaff and the Merry Wives of Windsor in 2004, Richard III in 2005, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in 2006, Hamlet in 2007, and King Lear in 2008. We became a professional company in 2005, when funding from Cornell University allowed us to begin paying all of our artists every year and producing our shows under Equity contracts.

Many things have changed over the years, but the important things have stayed the same: our overall approach to performing Shakespeare's texts; a staging style that harkened back in technique and spirit to Shakespeare's own theatres; and a belief that this program should provide an opportunity for a wide range of local theatre artists to work on Shakespeare in a professional environment that is serious, collaborative, collegial, and, of course, fun.

We look back very fondly on these early productions, but after King Lear in 2008, it became clear that we were outgrowing our performance site. As beautiful as it was, the Nearing Summerhouse was never intended to be a theatre, and our audiences -- which by this time had tripled in size since the program began -- were getting too large for the site to accommodate. So the group began making plans to move to a larger performance site, in Jackson Grove in the Newman Arboretum.

The growth of the program away from its original location presented a number of challenges to be overcome -- a larger space to fill with action and sound and the lack of a ready-made stage and "set" like we had at the Summerhouse, for example -- and these challenges were accentuated by the fact that the program lost all of the funding it had been receiving from Cornell University in previous years.

A New Name: The Ithaca Shakespeare Company

As part of the planning for the 2009 show, a group of core members who have been involved with the program for several years -- since the very beginning, in some cases -- formed a planning committee to guide the program into this new phase. One of the first decisions was to begin using the name "The Ithaca Shakespeare Company" for the group, as more representative of who we are and what we hope to accomplish at this stage of our evolution. We chose the very popular A Midsummer Night's Dream for the 2009 production, for its appropriateness to our new location in a magical grove of oaks and yew trees. And Midsummer was the first production in the series directed by someone other than Stephen Ponton: J.G. Hertzler, a Resident Professional Teaching Associate at Cornell, stepped in to direct, with Ponton acting as producer and artistic director for the group.

To help out with the production costs of this show, Cornell Plantations awarded the group a grant, and Moosewood Restaurant held a special benefit brunch to raise additional funds. The company is very grateful for these efforts, but still had to pull Midsummer together on a much smaller budget than the shows of the previous four years.

Despite this reduced budget, Midsummer turned out to be the company's largest, most technically complex, and most successful production to date. It had the largest cast, the most intense rehearsal schedule, the most elaborate set and sound design, and the largest audiences of any of our shows. The production was seen by nearly 3,000 people, with audiences as large as 600 per night. The amount of work required to pull this off on such a diminished budget was tremendous, but the fantastic response from the audience was certainly worth the effort.

Looking Forward

As we now look forward from this point, we see great potential for further expansion of this program. The success of the 2009 production of A Midsummer Night's Dream provided a clear demonstration of the feasibility of our long-term vision of creating an Ithaca Shakespeare Festival in the not-too-distant future.

We are grateful for the support that so many people have offered this program in the past, and hope we will continue to maintain its high standards and unique spirit as we move ahead into the next stage of its development.