The year isn't half over, but it's already a banner one for the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. In January, the small professional theater company received an anonymous $1 million donation. Last month, on Shakespeare's birthday, it chalked up its first National Endowment for the Arts grant.
The $25,000 matching grant from the NEA's Shakespeare for a New Generation Program put the Baltimore festival in good company. Among the 34 other theaters honored with this round of grants were the Tony Award-winning Oregon and Utah Shakespeare festivals as well as Washington's Shakespeare Theatre Company.
But though "money is a good soldier," as Falstaff says in The Merry Wives of Windsor, these monetary gifts do not mean that the 13-year-old Hampden-based festival is any less mindful of its overall battle strategy.
Its new season, being announced today, consists of three plays - Macbeth (July 6-22), Sophocles' Antigone (Oct. 19-Nov. 11) and The Winter's Tale (April 4-27): the first production will take place in the Evergreen House meadow; the other two will be at the company's home at St. Mary's Outreach Center, a former Episcopal church.
The lineup has one fewer play than the past two seasons. "We're doing three full productions instead of doing two smaller productions in the middle," explains artistic director James Kinstle. "It's the same size annual budget, right around $600,000."
Or, the festival is heeding the wisdom of Romeo and Juliet's Friar Laurence and moving "wisely and slow. They stumble that run fast."
Like Shakespeare, Kinstle, 39, is an actor. His Baltimore Shakespeare Festival credits have included portraying Shakespeare himself, in a biographical drama called Love for Words, and stepping into the role of Iago midway into rehearsals of Othello when the actor who was originally cast got a role in John Waters' movie Pecker.
Not only has Kinstle played the Bard, but in recent years, he has increasingly come to resemble him. However, the artistic director's choice of footwear - red sneakers - harks back to his early days with a local improv troupe called the Flying Tongues, whose trademark was red Converse hi-tops. Sipping a Coke on the porch of the Rosecroft home he shares with his wife, Joan Weber, and their 8-year-old daughter, Ruby, he spoke about the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's past and future as well as his own. Seven years ago, after working in one of the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival's education programs, you were invited, somewhat to your surprise, to apply for the artistic director's position. Has your background in improvisation helped you run the Baltimore Shakespeare Festival?
