(Courtesy of the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival)
On Friday, May 16, the St. Louis Shakespeare Festival’s crews were hammering away in the glen, preparing the set for the following week’s tech rehearsals. Phones buzzed a warning just in time for people to take cover. A minute later, gale-force wind whipped through the glen and knocked all their work asunder.
Tom Ridgely, producing artistic director, was in his office, gathering the trophies he would present to the Sumner High graduates at that afternoon’s commencement ceremony. Five years ago, Sumner was slated to close—until the Festival and other arts organizations pointed out how catastrophic that would be, and what a cultural loss, for The Ville, the historic heart of the North Side. Authorities relented, and the school was given a strong new arts focus. These would be the first grads who had studied four years in that program.
Ridgely figured Commencement would still take place; this was just one more bad storm. Then the production manager texted him photos of the glen. Swiping though, each worse than the last, he swallowed hard. Okay, that’s serious. The forty-foot back wall was on the ground in pieces. The lighting tower—a scaffolding made of steel several inches thick—had been snapped off its concrete base. The “Green Room Tree,” a grand old oak where the actors hang out, lay on its side next to a giant hole where its roots had been ripped from the ground.
Ridgely hurried to the glen. Then a friend who was giving him a ride to Commencement pulled up and yelled, “The Harlem Tap Room is gone!” An iconic corner bar in The Ville, swept away in seconds. He was trying to take this in when his wife texted: she had seen the tornado from their balcony, and she was on her way to Forsyth School to pick up their three- and five-year-old daughters.
The school texted, too: the kids were okay. Ridgely settled into the audience to wait for Sumner’s delayed ceremony—and to wonder how long it would take to rebuild their set. His wife called—texts were not going through—and told him Lindell was completely impassable; how was she going to reach the girls? “I don’t know,” he said helplessly. “Just take a different road!” She wound up parking a mile away and walking, half running, to the school, where sixteen three-year-olds had sheltered with their teacher in a two-stall bathroom because there might not have been enough time to make it to the basement in the next building.
On Saturday, staffers from the Missouri History Museum joined Festival crews and actors in the Shakespeare glen to help with the clean-up. They swept up fallen branches—the trees surrounding the hospitality tent had been clipped two stories shorter—and shards of glass from all the broken lights. The wall’s four sections had pulled apart, but all the damage could be patched, so at least its continuous forty-foot mural, a detail from a seventeenth-century Dutch painting, would not have to be repainted.
The custom pieces that were supposed to anchor the light tower to its concrete pads were hastily re-ordered. Tech rehearsals started only a day late. The show opened on schedule. Then, during the safety-check review of the fight scene before the first performance, young fit Laertes felt a sudden, vicious snap of pain. It was inexplicable; it felt like the floor had jumped up to attack him. He limped his way through the show; it turned out he had ruptured his Achilles tendon and needed surgery.
Ridgely and the director were casting about for a replacement when Ophelia texted: a good friend had played Laertes several times and had just finished a role; he was on his way back to New York. They flew him in, and after a four-hour rehearsal, he went onstage that evening.
Was that the end of it? “Well,” Ridgely drawls, “the run’s not over yet!”
I think of the famous superstitiousness of theater people, how they will not speak the name of Macbeth but call it the Scottish play. “We find all sorts of clever nicknames to avoid saying…it,” Ridgely admits. “Although I’m in my office now, not in the theatre, so I should be free of any curse.”
“Then say it,” I suggest. He hesitates.
“Macbeth,” he finally mutters, then breathes deep. “That felt a little weird.”
The superstitions come naturally: “Artists have rich imaginations,” he points out. “And theaters tend to be spooky places, dark, with nooks and crannies and unidentifiable sounds.”
Surely, then, this string of crises must have felt like omens, trees come to Dunsinane?
He shrugs it off. “A tornado’s obviously a freak thing. And just driving around North City—photographs don’t even show you, because all the destruction can’t fit in the frame. Those are the real problems. Ours were relatively solvable.”
Hamlet is a thoughtful play, deeply introspective, laced with violent, yet often accidental, destruction. Far more appropriate for the occasion than Macbeth would have been. But The Tempest would have worked even better. “When I got here five years ago, the theatre had one policy, a rain policy,” Ridgely recalls. “We had the wettest summer on record that year, then the hottest, then Canadian wildfire smoke, now a tornado.”
We are swimming in a sea of troubles, all of us. Yet the show goes on.
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
