The 23rd season of Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival includes an old favorite, a new favorite and a show artistic director Terrence O’Brien will tackle for the first time.

Performances will begin June 20 and, while the exact order of openings is not set yet, O’Brien hopes to open the three shows — “Pericles: Prince of Tyre,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” — in consecutive weeks.

“We’ll be running repertory the entire summer,” O’Brien says. “It’ll be great for the actors who enjoy switching parts, doing one play one night and doing something hopefully very different another night. And with the third play, people actually get to have a night off every so often.”

The festival — presented in a tent on the grounds of the Boscobel Restoration in Garrison with a majestic view of the Hudson Highlands — approaches its 23rd season in a time of uncertainty for non-profit theaters.

O’Brien says he and festival executive director Susan Landstreet will huddle to consider the impact of the economic downturn  and then chart a way forward.

“I don’t think we can — without some examination — go straight into the way we’ve always done it before,” he says. “We need to make sure that our private donations are up to where they need to be and then figure out how big of an acting company we’re going to have and so forth. I’m holding off on some choices until I see where we are.

“One way to do it would be to cut every department by “X’ percent,” he says. “If you scale back cast size you kind of lose what we’re all about. We would lose the quality of our work if we made the cast smaller or went with a company that had fewer professionals.”

But O’Brien sees a silver lining to economic stormclouds.

“In my mind, what we need to do is to look at the current economic situation as an opportunity,” he says. “I feel like anybody who is trying to make the choice of ‘Do we get on the train and go and see a Broadway show and spend $600, wrestling with the transit system, having a fast dinner and taking the train home or we can take our cars, have a beautiful picnic in this extraordinary outdoor setting, see theater that is of very high quality for about a third the price?’

“This could be a real opportunity for us and I’m hoping we can make a few converts in the process.”

The festival, started as a fund-raiser in 1987, has grown into a regional theater that has won raves from critics and patrons for its clear, unadorned approach to Shakespeare and other classic works.

Plays are presented without sets and with the slightest of props: At Hudson Valley Shakespeare, an evening of theater means the words, the actors and a patch of well-worn earth.

The festival’s reach extends well beyond the tent. There’s a year-round education component, including a touring company that presents fully-staged productions (“Macbeth” this year), a program to teach student actors how to speak the speech, an artist-in-residence program that puts theater professionals in the classroom, a the summer apprentice program for college students and a Teaching Shakespeare summer institute.

But the summer plays are still the thing and this year’s offerings are a study in contrasts.

“Pericles,” one of Shakespeare’s late plays, tells the story of a prince who finds love, loses it and then travels from one farflung place to another. As in last season’s “Twelfth Night,” there is a shipwreck. And, as in last season’s “Twelfth Night” and “Cymbeline,” there is a family reunion.

“I don’t know if it’s my age or what, but I just find myself more affected by the late plays, where he’s more mature in assessing — fairly but in some cases, harshly — his own life and the plight of humans,” O’Brien says.

In the late plays, the endings aren’t really happy and they’re not easy, he says. The heroes are wiser for the experience.

“Modern storytelling and movie editing owes a lot to Shakespeare, who began that whole thing about changing locations, having a five-line scene there, jumping somewhere else and having a longer scene, jumping back and forth in time, stretching some things out and having other things happen very quickly.”

Things might not get more cinematic than the journeys of Pericles.

“There’s a lot of adventure in his story,” O’Brien says. “There’s something about his restlessness and urgency that propels him an compels him to go to all the different places. Sometimes, he’s running toward something, sometimes, he’s running away. And the reunion with his daughter at the end is so powerful and more primal than the one in ‘Cymbeline.’”

O’Brien says he’s still reading and re-reading the play to get a feel for characters.

“Sometimes, I’ll just open it up and pick a particular scene and try to look at it carefully. Then I’ll look at another one, but not necessarily beginning, middle and end. That’s just me and my counter-intuitive way of going about it. I start to figure out what the story is about without having to thread a plot through it.”
He says figuring out the characters out of sequence lets him learn about them outside the context of the play.

“Much Ado About Nothing,” was last performed at the festival in 1998, and continues the festival’s cycle of repeating favorites every decade or so. A director has yet to be named for the play, which is a battle of the sexes.

“Beatrice and Benedick are smart and mature and witty — and they’re not Romeo and Juliet,” he says. “They’re passionate but they’re not desperate. They have much more command of who they are and are able to take their time more.”

“The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)” is a madcap retelling of the entire Shakespeare canon in 97 minutes.

O’Brien will once again direct and has asked the 2008 cast to return for 2009: Christopher V. Edwards, Noel Velez, Jason O’Connell and apprentice Katherine Abbruzzese, who handled the considerable backstage chores and made a brief appearance.

“It did way, way better than anyone expected and it was extended a week last summer,” O’Brien. “With only two and a half week’s notice, the extension sold out completely.”

Three-show summers make for a busy spring of auditions, rehearsals and meetings with the technical staff — and a busy summer, to the Sept. 6 closing night.

“If it isn’t a lot of work, it’s kind of not worth it,” O’Brien says. “I wouldn’t change places with anybody, even in June. It’s too much fun.”

Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival
www.hvshakespeare.org
Call: 845-265-7858

Photo of Terrence O’Brien, top, by Carucha L. Meuse/The Journal News

Second photo: Noel Velez, Christopher V. Edwards and Jason O’Connell romp their way through “The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged).” Photo by William Marsh.