Shakespeare in Alaska, part 1

PJ PAPARELLI: Ironically enough, Juneau right now has two Shakespeare plays playing at the same time. Our company is playing Twelfth Night and a smaller company, Theater in the Rough, is producing Comedy of Errors. And so actually Juneau is getting quite a large dose of Shakespeare and they will every year get two or three Shakespeare plays. So it’s actually, our audiences, at least in the last ten or fifteen years, have seen quite a bit of Shakespeare.

I think the differences with the two companies are pretty exciting. I mean, the Theater in the Rough by its name really just relies on the plays itself and community members sort of excited about the plays and there’s a great raw quality to it that’s very exciting and engaging, and our theater, at Perseverance, you know, the resources are a little bigger so an audience can get a little more of sort of fully produced experience where there’s set and costumes, period set and costumes and so on and so forth. So it’s really nice that the audience gets sort of theater two different ways.

But I think our audiences—the thing about Alaska, there’s this great connection to the outdoors and to a great spirit that’s around us. You move to Juneau for a very specific reason and once you visit here you understand why. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place and the community is very interdependent on each other because, you know, it’s very hard to get out. The only ways out are by plane or by boat, and so that spirit that’s in the community and around the community, Shakespeare taps into.I mean he had such— the plays so deal with the great spirit and the great forces that are around us and there is something very epic about Shakespeare as there is something very epic about this place. So it really suits the place very well.

But at the same time, I think it’s wonderful for an audience that lives so far away to sort of even go further away by going in a Shakespeare play, sitting there listening to it and going to a far, far-off place—far away from them, but yet feel very connected emotionally to what’s happening on stage. So I think that, I don’t know, it’s just suited for a great land. A great playwright, I guess, is suited for this great place.

The audience is not one socioeconomic level. It’s just not. It is so much like European theater where you have the wealthy, the middle class, and the poor all together come to see our plays. I mean, you could sit next to a businessman or a legislator for the Alaska legislature, right next to a fisherman. And, you know, the fisherman might not have bathed that day, and that’s exciting. It is of the people, and so that sort of upper echelon that, you know, are in some of the bigger cities, it’s just not here in Juneau. You can see Shakespeare and everyone goes to see it. It’s not just the elite, and that’s the most exciting thing.

Because there’s this great energy that happens when all those same people are gathered in one place to experience something that across the board they all feel, you know, or they all have learned something no matter what place in life they’re in. So that’s truly one of the most exciting things about being here.