Obstacle becomes asset for theatre festival

By Casey Gillis

Published: July 12, 2008

For Endstation Theatre founders Geoff Kershner and Krista Franco, the Sweet Briar College campus offers a wealth of unique theatrical opportunities.

“At Endstation, we’re really interested in environment, in what makes theater exciting,” says Kershner, an Amherst native. “Why see theater rather than a movie?”

With its red brick buildings set on rolling hills and lush, open fields that offer views of the mountains, Sweet Briar was the ideal location to put on an outdoor production for their first-ever Blue Ridge Summer Theatre Festival.

“Romeo & Juliet” will be performed in front of Sweet Briar’s Benedict Building.

“We knew we wanted to do an outdoor Shakespeare, so I went wandering around the campus, looking for inspiration,” says director Bill Kershner, chairman of Sweet Briar’s theater and dance departments and Geoff Kershner’s father.

Benedict’s second-floor balcony sealed the deal, and the production team quickly got to work on the logistics. The brick walkway leading away from the building is now the stage, and the grass on both sides of it will be where the audience sits.

“What really appeals to me is that we can move the action in and out of the audience, so that Romeo is standing among the audience during the balcony scene, and he’s standing among the audience when he first sees Juliet,” Bill Kershner, also an Endstation board member, says.

An outdoor production has its challenges, and you’d expect weather to be one of the biggest. But he says it hasn’t been as great a factor as he’d expected. Still, they’ve built in several rain dates just in case.

Having no real backstage area was another issue, but he found an interesting way to fix that problem: seating the Montagues and Capulets on the grass with the audience, where they’re having a picnic and from where they join the onstage action when the script calls for it.

“It’s one of those things in creative work (where) an obstacle becomes an impetus for creativity,” Bill Kershner says.

He set the production in 1901, the year Sweet Briar was founded.

“1901 is a nice period where the ladies wore these beautiful white dresses,” he says. “It looks great. It’s really neat to see everybody in those Edwardian costumes against the backdrop of Benedict. It feels right.

“It seems (almost) like a garden party.”

A garden party that can get rough at times.

“What’s fun about an outdoor production,” he says, “is the fight scenes can be more real.”