Veteran actor and director Frank Farrell has been attracted to outdoor theater throughout his career, so much so that he attempted to stage outdoor productions in winter while serving as founder and artistic director of Theatre Hikes at Morton Arboretum from 1997 to 2010.
It didn’t work all that well, he recalled with a laugh.
“Summer is the time to go outdoors for theater,” said Farrell, who’s following his own advice by adapting and directing a 100th anniversary production of Edgar Lee Masters’ classic “Spoon River Anthology” with Citadel Theatre of Lake Forest. The show will be performed in three locations on subsequent weekends beginning July 29 on the lawn outside the Brushwood Center of Ryerson Woods in Riverwoods and continuing Aug. 5-7 at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest and Aug. 12 and 14 at Elawa Farm in Lake Forest.
Farrell, whose association with Citadel Artistic Director Scott Phelps goes back to the early ’80s when they were both performing free Shakespeare at Piper’s Alley in Chicago, said “Spoon River” was meant to be a change of pace from the outdoor summer Shakespeare they created together the last two seasons — including “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “As You Like It.”
“Scott thought it would be good to do something different to surprise our audience…something with poetry,” Farrell said.
There’s a great deal of poetry in “Spoon River,” a collection of 209 poems in its original 1915 anthology and 244 poems in its 1916 second-edition. Envisioned as a communiqué by deceased former residents of the fictional town of Spoon River, the poems tell the life stories, scandalous secrets and everlasting regrets of 244 characters, many inter-connected.
Playwright Charles Aidman adapted a theatrical version of the poems in 1963 that’s commonly staged today, but Farrell decided to create his own take on Masters’ magnum opus, going back to the original poem and winnowing them down to roughly 40, performed by six actors and two on-stage musicians — Mark Adamczyk and his daughter Rania Adamczyk of Lake Bluff. In addition to underlying music for many of the poems, the Adamczyks will perform an opening and closing song and three individual songs over the course of the roughly one-hour production, all using Masters’ words as lyrics.
While the characters are dead, Farrell said he worked hard to ensure the production’s mood did not turn funereal.
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To enliven the proceedings, he arranged for the original live music to be part of the show’s fabric and cast about for various means of presenting the material as vivaciously as he could, while remaining true to the spirit of the show.
Finally, Farrell said, he felt properly inspired by a story he heard on the radio about a modern trend in which people include personal messages in their own obituaries. The gist of the story, he recalled, was that this was considered something new — that the dead might have something meaningful to say to the living. Yet Masters was onto that idea 100 years ago.
“That’s what I want this show to be: a celebration of life in death,” Farrell explained.
‘Spoon River Anthology’
When: 7 p.m. July 29–31, Aug. 5–7, 12 and 14
Where: July 29–31 at Brushwood Center of Ryerson Woods, 21850 N. Riverwoods Road, Riverwoods
Aug. 5–7 at Woodlands Academy of the Sacred Heart, 760 E. Westleigh Road, Lake Forest
A fundraising performance with a suggested donation of $15 will be held at 7:30 p.m. Aug. 12 at the Citadel Theatre, 300 S. Waukegan Road, Lake Forest.
Aug. 12 and 14 at Elawa Farm, 1401 Middlefork Drive, Lake Forest
Tickets: $15
Contact: (847) 735-8554; www.citadeltheatre.org