Sunday Lunch with Barbara Gaines
As we sit down for lunch at Navy Pier's Riva restaurant, Chicago Shakespeare Theater director and founder Barbara Gaines glows with the slightly flustered enthusiasm of a parent about to send her only child off to a highly competitive college.
The company's production of "Henry IV, Parts One and Two," is about to move from Chicago, where it has run for five weeks, to England, where it will be performed as part of the Royal Shakespeare Company's prestigious Complete Works festival. The logistics of moving a play -- including all of its sets, its cast and technical elements like its lighting design -- across an ocean are daunting. But the challenge is well worth it, says Gaines, because of what it means to have the company perform on Shakespeare's home ground at Stratford-Upon-Avon.
Once the company arrives in England, Gaines says she plans to take them all for a walk, along the River Avon to Holy Trinity Church, where Shakespeare was christened and buried. There, she says, they can all "say our own thank yous, privately, to the old man who started it all."
Though Gaines is no elitist -- there's hardly room for snobbery at Navy Pier -- she is willing to say, that, yes, "I do believe that Shakespeare is a civilizing influence."
"As artists, we are involved in trying to clarify the human condition," she says, managing not to seem self-conscious about it.
No need to elaborate
The Henry plays, in particular, she says, have an important resonance for a modern world in turmoil.
"The real 'gasp' line for contemporary audiences comes when the prince [Hal, son of Henry IV] is advised 'to busy giddy minds with foreign quarrels.'" She says, "Basically, they're setting up a phony war in France to distract people from a civil war at home."
Pausing to take a bite of her Caesar salad with well-done salmon, Gaines doesn't elaborate. She clearly doesn't feel she needs to.
But later in our meal, she returns to a similar theme, recalling the scene when Prince Hal worries to Falstaff that his ragged army seems to be composed only of poor men, and Falstaff answers, "Tut, tut; good enough to toss; food for powder, food for powder; they'll fill a pit as well as better [men.]"
"When you think about all the leaders who have sent men into battle as food for [gun] powder," she muses, "Expendable. ..."
A conversation with Gaines is something of a mental roller coaster ride. Though she describes her approach to theater, and to Shakespeare in particular, as "not what you call 'intellectual'; it's very visceral," she is obviously a sophisticated and subtle thinker, one incredibly well-versed in the texts with which she works. But Gaines, 59, also waxes poetic about her love for shopping at Target and how being awarded an OBE (the Order of the British Empire, an honor granted by Queen Elizabeth) didn't change how she does her laundry or cleans up after her dog.
'That money was gone'
Gaines' striking humility -- some have characterized it as frailty -- is rooted in the experiences that led her to found Chicago Shakespeare. After spending four relatively successful years acting in New York, in 1980 she returned to Chicago (a city she'd fallen in love with as a Northwestern student) and soon found herself unable to work, limping around on a badly injured knee.
"All the money I'd made in New York, after two years of being unemployed, that money was gone," she recalled.
So, with $1,000 left to her name, she started giving actors' workshops on Shakespeare, her favorite college subject, and hoped that something might somehow change.
"I thought my life was over," she says now. "O-V-E-R."
Those workshops led to Gaines' first Chicago production: a creatively staged "Henry V," held on the roof of Lincoln Park's Red Lion pub.
That was exactly 20 years ago. And it's hard for Gaines to decide whether it's too long or too short a time to be believed.
She smiles brilliantly at the thought of moving from the rented rooftop to Stratford-Upon-Avon -- and doing it largely on her own terms. Enthusiasm seems to spill out from her tiny frame.
"You never know how the British critics will receive these plays," says Gaines, who is much-loved by Chicago audiences and generally well thought of by local critics. "But for me, that's almost beside the point. For me, the miracle is that we're there together."
[In fact, the British reviews do later turn out to be rather mixed, with the Chicago actors' faux-English diction coming in for particular criticism. There often seems to be an essential Catch-22 for Americans doing Shakespeare in Britain: they're either too American to get it or trying too hard to be English.]
Chicago Shakespeare approach
But Gaines' opinion of her cast is already solid. She describes herself as having been a "good actress," in contrast to the "great ones" whom she directs today.
"When I say, 'Chicago's finest actors,'" she says, "that's synonymous with this country's finest actors."
And she proudly contrasts the Chicago Shakespeare approach -- employing largely local actors, producing lesser-known works along with the traditional blockbusters -- with what she calls "the New York approach," featuring high-profile TV and movie actors in in-the-park productions of the old favorites.
"I lean toward the complex [Shakespeare plays]," she says. "The 'problem' plays are only problems because they expose our own issues."
For the rest of the afternoon, Gaines' issues will consist mainly of figuring out how to manage her company's biggest-ever road show. But for now, she is happy to sit still for a moment and to enjoy the view from Navy Pier.
