Given the dicey theatrical climate, Intiman Theatre's hiring of Bartlett Sher - known for his risk-taking approach to the stage - as its artistic director might have seemed foolhardy to some observers.
Many a theater supporting an operation as large as Intiman's would have clung to the tried and true, afraid that unfamiliar artistic choices would scare off part of its core audience or, worse yet, bomb entirely.
But Intiman's gamble on Sher appears to have paid off. Sher, a Queen Anne resident, has been garnering high praise for his adventurous work ever since his arrival at Intiman from New York in March 2000.
What Sher says what he wanted for Intiman and its audience was unpredictability, with each production offering a distinctly unique theatrical experience.
A vital element is Intiman's diverse mix of classical and contemporary works. Intiman's last season ranged from the Italian mask theater of Carlo Goldoni's 1743 farce "The Servant of Two Masters" to a contemporary psychological thriller, "The Dying Gaul," by Craig Lucas.
Then there is what Sher does with his productions. For "Cymbeline," Sher ignored the increasingly commonplace tactic of setting Shakespeare in an era and place far from the Bard's Elizabethan England or any environment suggested in the script.
Instead, Sher boldly time-warped between centuries and countries, inhabiting his "Cymbeline" with cowboys, Renaissance Italians and medieval Japanese nobility.
That the mish-mash of cultures worked at all - and even clarified the play's crazy quilt of plots, characters, comedy and tragedy - is surprising.
Sher says his unusual choices succeed in part because he follows a tenet of the late Tadeusz Kantor, an experimental visual and theater artist in Poland.
"[Kantor] would say you have to make an autonomous work of art that lives within its own rules and makes sense inside of itself," Sher says.
With Shakespeare, Sher says, there also must be logic to the flowery Elizabethan language lest the actors and audience lose the meaning of the words.
Sher should know the language after working on 18 different Shakespearean productions, including as associate artist at the Idaho Shakespeare Festival. He even served as associate director to Sir Peter Hall - who created and ran the Royal Shakespeare Company among other endeavors - on productions of "Measure for Measure" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" at the Mark Taper Forum.
Sher's exposure to the artistic philosophy of Kantor, the subject of Sher's graduate dissertation, was seminal.
"All of his rules about making a great piece of art, great theater, are constantly on my mind."
Add to that Sher's days in experimental theater and you have his willingness to trust his gut when it comes to taking risks.
For "Cymbeline," Sher's intuition told him to cast Iachmo and his cohorts as high Renaissance Italian courtiers and the mountaineers as cowboys.
"[Iachmo] was very cosmopolitan, very decadent, and the question was what does that suggest?" Sher says. "When I read the mountaineers' lines, they were very close in our mythology to the Old West."
In November, Sher put his "Cymbeline" to the ultimate test. Presented in conjunction with New York's Theatre for a New Audience, Sher's "Cymbeline" became the first American production of Shakespeare to grace the stage of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Sher bluntly admits to being nervous about how the Brits would respond.
"There's a natural cultural inferiority that we're still in the colonies when it comes to Shakespeare and England."
But the Queen's subjects loved the fresh and very American take on the play.
Sher's next production is perhaps even more audacious than his "Cymbeline." To open Intiman's 30th anniversary season on March 29, he is taking on Shakespeare's revenge tragedy, "Titus Andronicus," an epic of intense emotional proportions that was Shakespeare's first big hit.
"Titus Andronicus" is the story of an honorable warrior who returns home in triumph from the war between the Romans and the Goths only to have to defend his family as they are caught in political upheaval.
"It's a play about somebody devoted to his country who is betrayed, and what do you do when you've given everything?"
Although the play was chosen long before Sept. 11, Sher believes it is relevant to the aftermath of the tragic event.
"We're being asked a lot as citizens, and we're willing to do it, but it's a profound bond that's very delicate."
Sher and his wife, actress Kristin Flanders - theatergoers may know her from such shows as A Contemporary Theatre's "Dinner with Friends" and "Lady from the Sea" at Intiman - live in Queen Anne with their 14-month-old daughter, Lucia.
Queen Anne reminded the couple of Brooklyn Heights, a place they both liked.
Sher, whose directing has taken him all over the country, is glad to be settled in one place.
"I think theater is better in relationship to a single audience," Sher says. "You build a history together with relation to the work, so when the work changes it has resonance with the audience."
It will be interesting to watch history in the making given Sher's already intriguing work.[[In-content Ad]]
