WICHITA MATTERS: 20 Years in the Parks

The city elections are only a month away, but at this moment, my mind is looking back to summer, rather than forward to November. Each year, ever since our family moved to Wichita in 2006, mid-June and early-September have offered my wife and I–and, as the years went by, often our children too–a fine treat: a free, all-volunteer, invariably creative and nearly-always successful outdoor play, courtesy of the Wichita Shakespeare Company. This past summer was their 20^th continuous season of operation, so I think a few words of congratulations, explanation and, more importantly, appreciation are in order.

We’re a bookish family, and a theatrical one, and civic one–which means public performances of Shakespeare plays in Wichita (and usually including a performance in parks around Park City, Derby and Andover as well) are triply appealing to us. We’re not alone of course. All across America, theatrical troupes both professional and amateur have drawn crowds every summer with outdoor performances of works by The Bard. In Wichita, the history of “Shakespeare in the Park” goes back at least to 1981, when pioneering drama aficionados like Jane Tanner (the longtime librarian at Wesley Medical Center) helped pull together fellow Shakespeare fans and organize regular performances. Wichita Shakespeare Company came together in 1999, which also happens to be where Dan Schuster and Vonda Newby (now Newby-Schuster), who are the couple I most strongly associate with WSC, first met.

The Schusters (she’s been the drama teacher at South High School for the past 22 years; he’s been a Help Desk associate at Emprise Bank for 19) have performed in and directed numerous WSC shows, and been crucial members of WSC’s board of directors and its outreach efforts, for as long as I’ve been familiar with the company. (Full disclosure: students of mine, colleagues of my wife, and one of our daughters have all appeared in WSC productions.) The Schusters attend University Friends church, and that’s been one of the company’s main audition and rehearsal (and occasionally performance) spaces for years. As an organized nonprofit (a designation that took the WSC nearly a decade to achieve), they operate without corporate sponsorships or grants. Board members pitch in to help cover costs (costumes, props, the generator for the lights they have to set up for the late summer shows), and donations from audience members are always requested–but they operate on a shoestring nonetheless. When Wichita City Parks started charging $25 a performance for WSC to put on its public shows, the seemingly small cost was a real pinch. Still, they make due, because they love it.

“I love the weird ones,” Dan told me when I asked him his favorite Shakespeare plays to see, direct or perform in.

“Not the ones that everyone knows–those are great, because all of Shakespeare is great, but doing something unusual, and surprising the audience: that’s what I love.”

This past season, Dan directed Pericles for WSC for the second time, this time imagining it as a small group of priestesses of Diana in a Roman temple, acting out the story like it was an ancient ritual performance, with just nine women playing multiple roles through the evening. (An inventive idea, and also an economical one, given that WSC always has more women auditioning for their plays than men.) It was a brilliant, delightful way to bring to life a rollicking, rarely performed part of the Bard’s canon.

Vonda’s opinions are a little different.

“Doing plays outside makes all the difference; there are some plays–like A Winter’s Tale, or Midsummer Night’s Dream especially–that are so much fun outdoors. They just lend themselves making use of the space, that really click when you’re outside and under the sky,” Vonda said.

She’s not alone in feeling that way. This past June, Jane Tanner–who has been involved in outdoor Shakespeare performances here in Wichita for nearly 40 years, in one fashion or another–asked to direct Midsummer for WSC. She’s retiring from her “real” job and will be traveling for the coming year, and wanted to a chance to do Midsummer under the summer sky, something that in all her years she’d never gotten around to doing (hey, Shakespeare wrote a lot of plays). Despite having last performed Midsummer just a couple of seasons previously, they said yes, of course–and the result (as just about any performance of what I think to be Shakespeare’s best comedy, done in the open air on a summer evening, is almost certainly guaranteed to be) was a charming delight.

These are people who work hard, doing something they love, and making it available for essentially no cost to the people of Wichita. You may think Shakespeare isn’t your thing, that you’ll never be able to understand the wordplay and dialogue, that the plots will be too drawn-out and convoluted for you to enjoy. I can’t say this strongly enough: if these are opinions formed from having to read Shakespeare plays in a college English class, do yourself a favor and, next summer, go outside and see them performed. Shakespeare was met to be acted, not read. I can’t guarantee that the low-budget, try-anything enthusiasm of the drama geeks and performance junkies who bring WSC back, year after year, will always fill you with emotion (I can remember one year when the tempting witches in Macbeth were reimagined as aliens from another planet, a choice that, to me, just seemed weird), but I can promise you that checking out their shows will put you in touch with a vibrant part of the Wichita arts scene that doesn’t get nearly the attention it deserves.

Well, elections come and go, but art–and the passion to produce it–always endures. Next year these happy volunteers will be putting on two plays they’ve never done before: the delightfully wicked Richard III, and the difficult Merchant of Venice. Watch for them around the city parks in June and September next year, and catch a show! And when you do, throw them a few bucks too, if you can. They’re part of what makes our city what it is, and a very delightful part at that. Thanks for 20 years, Wichita Shakespeare Company! I hope for many more.

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