Carissa Dixon
Frank has firmly imprinted his aesthetic on APT.
The sun is assaulting the outdoor stage at American Players Theatre. It's a Friday afternoon late in May, the third week of rehearsal for the company's production of Much Ado About Nothing. Some of the cast are living dangerously in shorts and tank tops; others are wearing oversized white dress shirts to keep off the sun and mosquitoes. They're working on the play's longest and most complicated scene, the aborted wedding in which the young bride, Hero, is rudely shocked by the accusation that she is a "rotten orange," an "approved wanton," a "common stale" who "knows the heat of a luxurious bed." David Frank is directing. It's the last Shakespeare he will do as head of the Spring Green company.
It's hot. He's almost 70 years old. APT's spring rehearsal schedule is brutal for directors: eight, 10, sometimes 12 hours a day, six days a week. But David Frank is all energy. He puts a lot of body into it. There's a table set up for him in one of the front rows, and an umbrella to sit under, but he's standing in the aisle, a sun hat hanging useless on his back, performing a quirky pantomime in sync with the actors rehearsing onstage. Sometimes he seems to be reacting to the scene as it unfolds; other times it seems he's trying to call it forth.
The Friar speaks: "You come hither, my lord, to marry this lady?" Claudio, the bridegroom, answers: "No." The director pulls his head back and extends his palms toward the stage as though to say "Wait! What's this?" As the nuptials unravel, his head darts from 12 o'clock to 3, then over to 9 and back to 3, tracking the movement of the actors. He locks his hands behind his neck and points his elbows straight toward the stage. He dashes across the aisle and sits in the first row to appraise the blocking from the right side of the house. He jumps up and sits two seats farther to the right, then jumps again and moves three seats more. He reaches out to touch an actor on the shoulder and move her a few feet stage left.
Claudio chokes, "You seem to me as Dian in her orb,/As chaste as the bud ere it were blown...." Frank holds his right hand out, closes it into a soft fist, draws it into his chest. "But you are more intemperate in your blood than Venus, or those pampered animals/That rage in savage sensuality." He holds a hand out, palm up, thumb touching forefinger. His mouth hangs open in a circle. He cries softly: "Ohhh." He's probably heard the line 30 times this week. He's probably read it and dissected it hundreds of times since scheduling the play last fall. Yet still it pulls this cry from him, as though he's hearing it for the first time.
Either that or he is one hell of an actor. And he swears he's not.
Frank has been doing this for 23 years, as APT's artistic director since the 1992 season and producing artistic director (meaning he's also been responsible for the business side of the operation) since 2005. At the end of the year he will retire, leaving the company in the hands of Brenda DeVita, an APT veteran who took the title of artistic director last January, and a new managing director, Carrie Van Hallgren.
Frank came to Spring Green to replace APT's founders, who departed, tired and demoralized, after 12 years struggling to keep the company afloat. When he arrived, APT was about $800,000 in debt and limping along at the pace of four shows a year. As he leaves, the company has paid off all its loans and added facilities and improvements worth about $13 million more. This year APT has done nine shows, including four indoors in the Touchstone Theatre, which came online in 2009. The company sells about 110,000 tickets a year and runs at an annual budget of about $5.5 million, which makes it the "country's second largest outdoor theater devoted to the classics."
David Frank is reserved, modest and extremely self-effacing. He would never claim credit for turning the company around. But his role in the drama was a big one. As the curtain comes down on APT's 35th anniversary season, he deserves to take a bow.
Frank was born in the U.K. and educated in English schools, where his interest in literature and history blossomed into a passion for Shakespeare. He attended Rose Bruford College, a theater school in London, and upon graduating was offered a job he found easy to turn down: five pounds a week, small acting parts and a lot of prop-wrangling in a small theater hours north of the city.
"My alternative was a free trip to the U.S."
Frank's father was a military attaché at the British embassy in Washington, D.C. He hadn't seen his folks for a few years, so he decided to spend the summer with them before renewing his job hunt in England.
He already knew he was not going to be a successful actor. "There was always a little voice in me, talking to myself from the outside, saying I think you look rather stupid. Or, Are you sure? That seems like pretty rotten acting. Well, if you want a self-fulfilling prophecy, that's it. If you're an actor thinking I'm feeling rather stupid up here, you can be guaranteed you will look it."
Still he wanted a life in the theater, and he found it by accident on his summer sojourn.
"I was in D.C. for some weeks, and it was really fun. I had no idea, but there was a whole diplomatic culture there -- offspring of diplomats -- and I met all sorts of fascinating people. The State Department would allow you to work for a nonprofit organization, so I got what I thought would be a temporary job as house manager -- which is senior usher -- at the closest theater that would have me, which was Center Stage in Baltimore. The thought of a house manager with an English accent was tempting to them. The pay for them looked a very small amount; to me it looked like riches that I couldn't imagine. The next thing I knew I had an offer of a job next year."
Frank brought a few assets to the job besides the accent and his willingness to work cheap. One was a kind of technical training in classical theater -- vocal technique, verse-speaking and the like -- that was not then common on this side of the Atlantic. Another was an affection and knack for teaching. Plus he was young, ambitious and eager to do almost anything.
"This was the mid-'60s. The regional theater movement in this country was just beginning to really get going. We were young, anything was possible, and we didn't look where we were leaping, we just leapt. Center Stage had a high school touring company and a children's theater, and I was always saying, Please, can I try directing something? And there were never enough people. So usually they would say, You've got an English accent and you can name most of the Shakespearean works? You've got it. So I just kind of got involved in that theater."
Frank met his wife, Barbara, there; they married in 1968, and they worked on children's productions together. "If the script didn't exist, we'd write it."
Meanwhile he was writing grants and taking on administrative tasks. "I began to discover that I actually was a decent manager. In fact that was the aching need."
There were plenty of artists around; what these fledgling theaters really wanted was someone who could run a business. Eventually Frank became the general manager.
"Definition: If it wasn't specifically allocated to someone else, it was my problem. I had to learn accounting. Oh, I'm terrified, but I'm excited. Can I learn accounting overnight from a library book? And the answer is, if you get the right book, you can.
"Well, not quite overnight."
After five years at Center Stage, Frank got a call from another regional company that had started up in the '60s, the Loretto-Hilton Repertory Theatre in St. Louis, now commonly called St. Louis Rep. They had fired their managing director after a disastrous budget-wrecking season, and they asked Frank to apply for the job. He was just 27 when he arrived. By the end of his first year he had turned a $135,000 deficit into a $36,000 surplus; by the end of his fifth the subscription base had expanded nearly fivefold. He was developing a reputation as an astute executive, but he was drifting away from his first love.
"Mostly I was managing, fundraising, dealing with the board. Directing a little bit, but there was no time to direct. If I pulled out a text and was reading it and someone knocked on the door, my first instinct was to bury it, feeling guilty."
So after eight years in St. Louis he went to Studio Arena Theatre in Buffalo, N.Y. -- a smaller theater where he could be artistic director.
Frank was there for 11 years, during which time, he says, the company again went from debt to relative prosperity. But Buffalo was too close to Stratford to do much Shakespeare, and close enough to New York that Frank felt pressure to employ Broadway and TV actors past their prime -- not stars, exactly, but names. It wasn't his thing. When the artistic director job opened at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, one of the biggest and best-established nonprofit theaters in the country, Frank jumped to apply. Oregon Shakes (as the insiders call it) had the history, the audience and the resources to do it right -- with dramaturges, voice and text coaches, and a standing company of classically trained actors.
"That's the job I'm craving," Frank recalled years later. "And I'm pretty sure I'm going to get it." They flew him out to Oregon. They got along famously. They started checking his references.
And then they hired the other guy.
"It was the biggest disappointment of my life."
Meanwhile in Wisconsin, American Players Theatre was in turmoil. Two of the founders, the artistic brain trust, had just announced unexpectedly that they were bailing out: Randall Duk Kim, the heart and soul of the company, a very highly regarded classical actor; and Anne Occhiogrosso, his longtime collaborator, who had taken the title of artistic director in 1987. A third founder, administrator Chuck Bright, had departed in '87, and the fourth, James "Dusty" Priebe, had left the company very early on but had recently returned as general manager. Priebe was now phoning and faxing theater contacts all over the country, hurriedly searching for a new artistic director to plan the upcoming season. One of the people he consulted was the retiring artistic director at Oregon Shakes, who told him about the guy they hadn't hired.
So on a hot afternoon in July, just weeks after losing the job of his dreams, David Frank huffed his way up APT's fabled hill and inhaled the bouquet of their infamous porta-potties. He has told the story often: "The reek was almost visible, it was so strong." He settled into the moldy velour of one of APT's recycled movie-theater seats and watched the kind of Shakespeare the company's founders insisted on: "an extraordinary production of The Winter's Tale -- but the longest one I had ever seen. They didn't cut a word. Not a word! In the heat of that afternoon, it couldn't have been more challenging.
"And there were 400 people listening to the entire thing -- spellbound! Oh God, if I could do that...."
Sheldon Wilner, who was managing director of APT from 1988 till 2005 (and deserves a share of credit for the company's success), was happy to welcome Frank aboard.
"He understood money!" Wilner told me, still sounding slightly amazed 23 years later. "It's an important thing for an artistic director, and a lot of them don't."
Wilner, whose forte was marketing, was growing the audience and increasing revenues but butting heads with Kim and Occhiogrosso. "Randy and Annie," as everyone around the theater calls them, were creators, visionaries, idealists -- but not promoters. They didn't want to "market" their work, they wanted it to speak for itself. David Frank, by contrast, had a record of commercial success. He knew how to cut costs and had a cheerful attitude about selling tickets. A reporter for The Capital Times quoted him saying he had no problem doing Shakespeare's better-known and more audience-friendly plays: "If you have to prostitute yourself -- what a way to go!"
As it turned out, Frank was also a good fit with the founders' aesthetic vision and with the audience they were developing, which prized the company most of all for making Shakespeare's language clear and accessible. Frank does not insist, as Kim did, on performing Shakespeare's plays exactly as they appeared in the Folio of 1623, but he is a text man. For him it's all about language and poetry.
David Daniel, the leading man in this year's production of Much Ado, told me, "You can tell where a director's feelers are out. I've seen directors walk around the room and talk to themselves as the show's going on, because they don't need to listen, they're just watching and feeling it. On the opposite end, I've seen David in a rehearsal sit at the table and close his eyes as he's listening, because what he would see doesn't matter as much to him as what he's hearing. For him it's aural. You could put this play on radio and David would change very little of it.
"Everybody says they're working on language. You won't find a Shakespeare theater that doesn't say they are working on language. But David is the one who doesn't stop working on it. At the expense of other things. A lot of directors will say yes, that's important. But when you look at the amount of time they will spend working on a particular line or speech and what David spends working on that line or speech -- that's the difference. David doesn't let go of it."
He didn't have an easy time of it when he first arrived. Actors who were there say it took him, and them, years to adjust to each other and develop a vocabulary for what he was after. And actors new to the company are sometimes confused and frustrated trying to understand him. But Frank's aesthetic has been firmly imprinted on APT. The veteran actors talk with almost a single voice about "letting the image do the work" and "unpacking the metaphor" and "holding the idea aloft." They can't always explain exactly what they mean, but they know it when they see it, or hear it, and evidently so does APT's devoted audience.
Indeed, the company Frank has molded in Spring Green has a lot in common with the company envisioned by the founders in the 1970s. Kim and his cohort wanted to establish a center for classical theater in the Midwest, far from the hubbub of the coasts, where the playwright's text would always be the star of the show. They wanted a rotating repertory schedule, to provide "variety and incentive to the audience, freshness and challenge to the actors," and they wanted a permanent company of actors who would work together over many years, because Kim believed the power of Shakespeare's plays came out of such collaboration. APT is one of the few true repertory companies left in the U.S. In 1996 Frank established a core company that now numbers 11 actors; many of them have been working together for 15 years.
The founders wanted to perform Shakespeare's more difficult and lesser-known works along with the crowd-pleasers. Though APT has yet to do The Two Noble Kinsmen, since retiring their debt in 2003 they have done Cymbeline, Timon of Athens and Troilus and Cressida. The founders wanted a company that would "meet its educational responsibilities to a younger audience." In addition to the usual student matinees and summer camps, APT employs actor David Daniel as its "education director"; in the off-season, he tours Wisconsin schools teaching workshops in Shakespeare and poetry.
The founders also envisioned a year-round academy where classes of 18 actors would train in a four-year classical theater program. APT has no such thing, but each season its apprentice program offers four or five young actors training in voice, text and movement as well as experience acting in small roles and immersion in the APT approach.
In 1979 Kim was quoted saying, "I don't say we will be the best theater in the country right from the start, but from the start we are aiming there." In a blog post published just last month, the Wall Street Journal's drama critic, Terry Teachout, wrote, "APT is the best classical theater company in America."
None of this could be predicted when David Frank first trudged up the hill in the summer of '91. David Kraemer, who was chairman of the board at the time (and served in that capacity for more than 20 years), recalled thinking that Frank was clearly the best candidate for the job, but he had no idea he was hiring someone who would steer the company so steadily and for so long.
"We didn't know what we were so fortunate to get," Kraemer told me. "We were lucky as hell."
David Frank's production of Much Ado About Nothing continues at American Players Theatre through Oct. 5. He is also directing Euripides' Alcestis, translated by Ted Hughes, for APT's indoor Touchstone Theatre; previews begin Oct. 10, and the show runs through Nov. 9. Frank plans to stay in Spring Green and to continue directing shows after formally retiring at the end of the year.
