Jason Compton
A line of actors with scripts.
A 2019 reading for ‘London Assurance’ written by Dion Boucicault.
Name the local theater company that’s performed on the lawn outside the Esser Place building in Middleton, the breezeway outside the American Family DreamBank, and in the Midtown District Police Station’s community room — as well as the Arts + Literature Laboratory and the Bartell Theatre.
Stumped? It’s Falconbridge Players, originally an offshoot of the Madison Shakespeare Company, founded in 2019.
The driving force behind Falconbridge is Jason Compton, a freelance business and tech writer and consultant, who is also a producer with the Madison Shakespeare Company. Falconbridge — named after a character in Thomas Heywood’s play Edward IV — emerged from an effort by Madison Shakespeare Company to broaden its repertoire with works by other 17th century playwrights.
In looking for those plays, Compton began uncovering a range of works that have entered the public domain as their original copyrights expired. “There are so many works out there in the pockets of the public domain that didn’t quite fit Madison Shakespeare Company,” Compton says. He characterizes them as “lesser known, lesser appreciated. Yes, they are old enough to be free, but also I feel they are intriguing enough to deserve more attention.”
He says he began thinking about other works that classically minded actors would be interested in exploring and saw the need for a new group with “another brand and another vibe” — plays either much older or much newer than Shakespeare’s works.
He has also gravitated to the public domain because “it gives me freedom and flexibility to edit [the script] at will,” Compton says. “I have a soft spot for classic stories that belong to all of us and I look for ways to be creative with them. I am particularly fond of those productions that have been locked up in library vaults and were forgotten.”
A case in point — a play called Conscience by Don Mullally that Compton describes as having “a decent-length Broadway run, but it fell off the map.” Compton saw it referred to while reading reviews of plays from 1924: “When I saw the luridly mediocre review, I thought, ‘I need to know more about this play.’” Compton located an original script in a special collection at the New York Public Library. With the library’s cooperation, a friend scanned the manuscript and Compton has been waiting to bring it to life ever since. “That’s the ultimate,” he says.
Falconbridge began with an open call to local actors; those interested were emailed a script and, if they showed up on performance night, would be given a role in an impromptu staged reading.
As interest in the events grew, that became less practical, says Compton, and finally, because of the pandemic, “the eagerness of actors to just ‘show up and do a thing’ had gone away by 2021.”
Benjamin Barlow
Jason Compton wearing a blue shirt and black vest.
Jason Compton is on the lookout for the underrated.
Compton now casts everything in advance and there are an average of three rehearsals. A typical Falconbridge staged reading involves between six and 15 actors; in 2023 more than 25 performers will have appeared in a Falconbridge presentation by the end of the year, Compton reports.
Actors still perform from scripts, but with a minimal amount of stage blocking and scenery added. “It’s more than just actors at music stands with scripts,” Compton says. That’s been the format for an active couple of years, mostly at Arts + Literature Laboratory and one full production at the Bartell Theatre.
In 2022, Falconbridge put on “Edna St. Vincent Millay Was Working Some Stuff Out,” theatrical readings of two of Millay’s forgotten plays, Two Slatterns and a King and Aria da Capo, as well as some of her poems, at what was then Dark Horse Art Bar.
Earlier this fall, Compton paired two dark one-acts, Eugene O’Neill’s Ile and August Strindberg’s Facing Death, in a reading at the Arts + Literature Laboratory.
“Falconbridge projects give some additional latitude to explore some darker scripts like the unsettling words of Millay, and the O’Neill and Strindberg,” Compton says. “I like the opportunity to explore some of those darker scripts that not everybody sees the commercial appeal in.”
This fall Compton also worked with local playwright Nick Schweitzer to tackle Schweitzer’s A Timely Intervention By the Former Barber of Seville (Figaro’s Final Adventure), an original translation/adaptation of Pierre Beaumarchais’ 1792 play La Mère Coupable. With it, Falconbridge turned in its first fully staged production, held at the Bartell Theatre.
Falconbridge just concluded its Halloween production called “Penelope Haunts Twice,” with Thomas Hardy’s “The Lady Penelope” and Vincent Starrett’s “Penelope,” involving two different female spirits with the same name.
Falconbridge’s final production this year will be George S. Kaufman’s The Butter and Egg Man, a comedy about hitting it big on Broadway. “I have been watching and waiting for this one” to come out from copyright, Compton says, calling it the perfect prototype for Mel Brooks’ 1967 film The Producers. It will be read Nov. 28 at the Arts + Literature Laboratory. Kaufman was best known for comedies like The Man Who Came to Dinner and You Can’t Take it With You co-written with Moss Hart; The Butter and Egg Man is Kaufman’s only solo play.
“I love theater because it allows us all to get together in the service of doing a performance,” Compton says. “I love theater’s immediacy and the reinforcement it gives to expressing ourselves through shared experience.”
