The play has seen four professional productions to date (as of spring 2000), all at major not-for-profit theaters, and several college productions, with at least two more professional and maybe half a dozen college stagings under contract. The world premiere, July to October 1996 at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, remains my favorite. The 600-seat Angus Bowmer Theater in Ashland, Oregon is a semi-thrust stage built so ingeniously that every seat affords an unobstructed view; as an audience member one feels quite intimately involved with the action on stage even while being treated to a vision of a stage “set”. And the set design, by Richard Hay (who, incidentally, is also the architect of the Bowmer Theater) was stupendous. It was the production I felt kept the best balance when exploring dramatic “effects” while remaining faithful to the spirit of the text and even the integrity of the lines. The actors were superbly cast, the artistic staff dedicated and fearless, the technical people topnotch. Every performance was met with a standing ovation, sometimes foot stomping and cheers. Some people were weeping so hard at the end that they actually had to be helped out of their seats by the ushers. Nothing can equal that experience!

Crossroads Theatre put up the next production a year later in their space in New Brunswick, New Jersey, again directed by Ricardo Khan. Crossroads has a three-quarter thrust stage in a small space—approximately 260 seats—which made for intimate theater indeed. The play was very accessible in that space, and the audience was so actively engaged that some people actually blurted out advice to characters on-stage! That same production—set, cast and all—was then transferred in less than three days to the Kennedy Center, where it played for a month on the huge proscenium stage of the 1200-seat Eisenhower Theater. Talk about rapid adjustment! And needless to say, this transfer to a vastly different space caused problems of its own.

I was less than pleased with the production at the Royal National Theatre in London, England in the summer of 1999. It was staged “in the round,” with the audience looking down on the set from all four sides, which not only obscured sight lines for big chunks of the audience but actually worked against the narrative thrust. The director consistently disregarded my input while I was present during the last three weeks of rehearsals; he even tried to manipulate my text! By opening night we were no longer on speaking terms, and the actors were primed to stage a little insurrection of their own.