A method to their madness: Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s big gamble to expand

Despite popular misconceptions, theater professionals don’t usually roll out of bed in the morning quoting Shakespeare. But, as live theater audiences continue to shrink dramatically, some may be looking at Santa Cruz Shakespeare and thinking of the famous line of Polonius in “Hamlet”: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.”

The 2020 pandemic brought about a crippling contraction in theater companies across the country that, for many, has turned into an existential crisis — “audience demand fell off a cliff,” said one analysis. On the West Coast, the fabled Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland faced enormous budget shortfalls that forced it to scale back its 2023 season. And Berkeley’s California Shakespeare Festival (Cal Shakes) paused production entirely in 2023. Locally, Jewel Theatre, Santa Cruz’s only other Equity company, closed its decadelong run at the Colligan Theater.

In that environment, the chutzpah and optimism at Santa Cruz Shakespeare — zigging while everyone else is zagging — can indeed look like madness. In July, SCS will embark on its most ambitious season ever, presenting a record number of five productions between now and the end of 2024. The company is also under the control of new blood — artistic director Charles Pasternak is taking over sole leadership for the first time (he shared the role last summer with outgoing A.D. Mike Ryan), and managing director Lorne Dechtenberg is experiencing his first summer at SCS. The new leaders are also suggesting that the big new 2024 season is only the beginning of a transition from a summer-only festival to a year-round company, partly to fill the breach left by the closure of Jewel. 

The company reveals the 2024 season and its ideas for the future at a preview event at Bookshop Santa Cruz on Monday.

“It’s risky,” conceded Pasternak, “like all things in the nonprofit arts world. But, we’ve been riding a wave of surprising success post-pandemic. We had the luck of an outdoor venue. And we had the strength of two factors whose praises I don’t think get sung enough: repertory theater [an acting company producing more than one play at a time] and Shakespeare. Those are things people truly love and return for. So, we’ve been lucky not to be in the tenuous position some theaters have been in.”

SCS will present its customary three shows this summer — Shakespeare’s “As You Like It” and Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” open in mid-July, followed by “Hamlet” in August. Then, the company breaks new ground with a production of the Tennessee Williams classic “The Glass Menagerie” to take place in the fall. All of those performances are to take place at the company’s eucalyptus-scented venue, the Audrey Stanley Grove at DeLaveaga Park. Later, after Thanksgiving, SCS returns with a holiday small-cast production of “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens at the Veterans Memorial Building in downtown Santa Cruz. 

The latter production marks a return to the company’s presence in the holiday season. In its previous incarnation, Shakespeare Santa Cruz, the company for several years presented lavishly staged “pantos” based on well-known fairy tales at its former home on the UC Santa Cruz campus. “A Christmas Carol” won’t quite be like the pantos of the 2000s, said Pasternak.

“We’re not mucking with the story at all,” he said, “but we’ll be doing it with five professional actors and maybe one or two children. It’s going to be meta-theatrical, wild, storybook theater.”

One of those actors will be Ryan, the artistic director and face of SCS for 10 years, in the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. Julie James, the founding artistic director of Jewel, will also be in the production.

“We’re looking at doing the Cratchit family scenes in Spanish,” said Pasternak, “so that we’ll have a bilingual element to the production.” 

The budget for the new five-production season stands at $2.7 million, an increase from last year’s $2.25 million. The company is increasing the number of outdoor performances at The Grove from 52 in 2023 to 70 this year — that number does not include the performances of “A Christmas Carol,” which will take place indoors. The company sold just shy of 15,000 tickets in 2023, the highest of any year at The Grove, which seated about 425 last year.

Lorne Dechtenberg is the company’s new managing director (the distinction between an artistic director and a managing director is similar to the distinction between a director and a producer on a movie set; the former makes artistic choices while the latter works to make those choices work financially). He comes to Santa Cruz from Lexington, Kentucky, where he ran the Bluegrass Opera & Music Theatre (the “Bluegrass” is a reference to Kentucky, not the genre of folk music; the company specializes in musical theater and light opera). Dechtenberg said that, after the pandemic, many performing-arts groups went conservative to try to survive, reducing the cast size of their productions, for example, and focus on donors and passive income at the expense of audience development. SCS, by contrast, is betting on its faith that its audience will come back in significant numbers. 

“One of the reasons I’m really excited by and I’m thrilled to be now co-leading the company with Charles,” he said, “is that we didn’t acquiesce to that kind of choice. We said, ‘No, no, no. We believe that our folks will come back. We know that we are in a community that has good public health and amazing arts support. And so we’re going back to The Grove. And we’re gonna ask our audience to come back with us.”

When he first began to research SCS as a potential landing spot, Dechtenberg said his primary question was “Why are they an outlier?” in the increasingly diminishing world of live, in-person theater. “I’ve just begun to see how much this community truly loves Shakespeare, which is frankly not all that common in a community this size, to see that robust support,” he said. “And many cities that are even twice or three times this size can’t support an Equity theater company, like this community does. It’s quite impressive.”

That audience support has convinced SCS that now is the time to jump to the next level of prominence, and plant its flag in other parts of the yearly calendar. The program for 2025 will not be announced for a couple of months yet, but Dechtenberg did reveal that the company will produce a musical sometime in ’25. The company is also actively looking at various indoor venues to present plays when weather or leasing agreements make The Grove unavailable. Those alternative venues could include the Colligan Theater in Santa Cruz, or a venue in Watsonville. 

“In my vision,” said Pasternak, “the summer season could potentially accommodate another show. The fall could definitely accommodate a rep [schedule]. So, I can see a world where we’re doing four shows in the summer, two shows during the fall that runs into ‘A Christmas Carol,’ which runs into the spring where we look to do two or three small shows somewhere. I mean, we could be doing eight or nine shows a year, which would, at that point, make us the biggest festival on the West Coast.”

It’s not merely the number of productions that matters, of course, but the kind of productions as well. For 40 years, it’s been a tradition in this company to produce a Shakespearean comedy, a Shakespearean tragedy, and then a non-Shakespeare play that, to use the company’s lingo, is “in conversation” with the chosen Shakespeare plays. This year, counting Wilde, Williams and Dickens, William Shakespeare is, in fact, outnumbered in the company’s season for the first time. There are only 38 plays in the Shakespeare canon, and only half of those are regularly produced. Pasternak said that the reliance on Shakespeare is part of the company’s secrets to success and he committed to continue to produce at least two Shakespeare plays every year. But there is potential for big growth in the non-Shakespeare segment of the festival, particularly when it goes year-round.

“Shakespeare is the backbone,” he said, “absolutely. He’s the core of what we do. But I’m not looking to add more Shakespeare. I’m looking to add more and more playwrights that can be in conversation with Shakespeare, the great voices that we just don’t have the space to produce now — Shaw, Chekhov, Ibsen, and even more contemporary writers as well.”

Though neither has been around for long, Pasternak and Dechtenberg are both steeped in the 40-plus-year history of Shakespeare in Santa Cruz. The risk of expansion, they say, is built on the real support that local audiences have demonstrated to this company — when UCSC withdrew its support and the company had to reinvent itself a decade ago, to its emergence from the pandemic. That support, said Pasternak, has proved to him that has the luxury to be bold. 

“My goal,” he said, “is to do one thing every year that scares me, and this year that’s moving into the fall and the holiday season. Next year, I know what it is. Even the following year, I know what it is. But one or two things at a time.”

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