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Curtain's going up on Marquee Theatre
By Virginia Gerst diversions editor
Thursday, July 17, 1994
What do you do if the theaters around town are not presenting the kinds of plays you really want to see?
If you are like Geoffrey Edwards and eight of his friends, you found your own troupe.
On Friday, Edwards assumed the title of artistic director of the Marguee Theatre Company, dedicated to presenting professional productions of the classics, both old and new.
"Most companies today do either experimental new work or light-type entertainments," said Edwards, a 30-year-old Evanston director with a string of professional and community productions to his credit. "Those plays are all valuable and wonderful, but they're not what interest us most. We want to do exciting, magical plays that have made a lasting mark on our cultural heritage."
Marquee makes its debut at 4 p.m. Sunday with "A Lover and His Lass," a comic hour of Shakespearean love scenes to be performed in Glencoe's Kalk Park. The production will be repeated later this month at two Evanston locations.
Within weeks, if all goes according to plan, a permanent home ("a fairly intimate space") will have been secured in the Evanston/Wilmette vicinity.
The three-play mainstage season opens this fall with Tom Stoppard's "Dogg's Hamlet, Cahoot's Macbeth," followed by "M*A*S*H." The spring brings Shakespeare's "Antony and Cleopatra."
In addition to Edwards, Marquee's founders are Peg Malloy and Kate Bolgrien of Evanston, Rachel Martindale, Glenn Rippie and Kathleen Hugo of Glenview, and Skokie residents Paul Knappenberger, Joseph Kaplan and Jeffrey Hammonds.
An additional support group of some 20 theater enthusiasts has also been recruited, and the troupe has been licensed as an Illinois non-profit organization.
All that remains now is to get on with the show.
Enter Shakespeare
"It's a mix between Shakespeare and commedia," says Rachel Martindale, who adapted the scenes and sonnets into Marquee's first production, "A Lover and His Lass." She also is directing the fully costumed professional cast of 12 actors, plus one musician.
An actress and costume cutter at Northwestern University, Martindale is using the façade of a troupe of traveling performers, The Knight of Whimsey Players, to enact the scenes. She hopes the audience will be "large and of all ages."
"You can't be too young to see Shakespeare," said Martindale, 27, who grew up in Ohio, where her mother ran a troupe that took "Bits of the Bard" into area schools.
"If you don't get the language you get the action, and believe me, 'A Lover and His Lass' is action-packed. I've cut out anything that might be confusing."
©1994 Pioneer Press
