Interview with Shakespeare onthe Sound Director Mary Robinson

Every year Shakepeare on the Sound brings the great plays of Shakepeare to Pinkney Park in Rowyaton CT.This high quality professional theatre offers fine culture and delight to Connecticut audiences while they picnic in the beautiful park on the sound. I talked with veteran director, Mary Robinson about this season's play " All's Well That Ends Well


Mary Robinson, Director, Shakespeare on the Sound

 'All's Well that Ends Well" is not one of Shakespeare's most perfomed plays and yet it
has wonderful challenges .  Mary enjoys the opportunity to direct the talented equity actors whose performances bring this classic treasure to life. While being true to the intergrity of the work, Mary delights in playing with the ending and what Shakespeare leaves a bit open to interpretation.



William Shakespeare

 The provocative challenge to the conventions of gender unfolds under the stars in the natural outdoor amphitheater of the park in Rowayton where a family-festive audience assembles on blankets and low-slung deck chairs with picnic baskets crammed with goodies

View of the Sound from Pinkney Park Rowayton, CT

All’s Well That Ends Well” was selected for the theater’s 20^th anniversary from Shakespeare’s inimitable 34-play palette that poetically synthesizes what it means to be human and crackles with wordplay and wit

Costume Sketch for All's Well That Ends Well



As opposed to the Elizabethan era, however, she is setting the play in an Edwardian time bend, the early 1900s. The above sketch is one of costumes.

ABOUT MARY ROBINSON

In a career spanning more than three decades, Mary B. Robinson has directed more than sixty theater productions in New York City and around the country and has taught directing at Manhattan Theatre Club. She was the first recipient of the Alan Schneider Award in 1987, a national award in honor of the late director, she was nominated for a Drama Desk Award in 1986 for her production of "Lemon Sky" and she won Philadelphia's Barrymore Award in 1995 for "Of Mice and Men." She is one of fifty directors profiled in the recent book "American Women Stage Directors of the Twentieth Century." For the past fifteen years, she has taught directing at New York University (where she heads the undergraduate directing program at Playwrights Horizons Theater School), and Brooklyn College's MFA Program. She has directed many student productions, including Shakespeare's "Twelfth Night," "Richard III," Troilus and Cressida" and "The Tempest," and Chekhov's "Three Sisters," "The Cherry Orchard," and "The Seagull," as well as Clifford Odets's "Golden Boy," Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" and Alice Childress's "Wedding Bank," at New York University's Graduate Acting Program, the Juilliard School, Rutgers University, Brooklyn College and Playwrights Horizons Theater School (NYU). For many years she was a board member of the labor union Stage Directors and Choreographers Society. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, playwright Erik Brogger, and their son, Chrtistopher.

 

She is also the author of "Directing Plays, Directing People, A Collaborative Art

ALL's WELL THAT ENDS WELL
PERFORMANCES
    .
The production runs from June 11th to June 28th on Tuesdays through Sundays—Mondays are dark as they say in the theater—with patrons permitted to stake out space on the grounds of Pinkney Park in Rowayton CT, with a blanket or deck chair starting at 4 p.m., 3 ½ hours before the curtain.. Most nights, one hour in advance, there is a special preview presentation for children. The main production starts at 7:30pm.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
www.shakespeareonthesound.org

christina-haskin@hotmail.com