On Aug. 5, the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival opened its 2022 season at the New Mexico Veterans Memorial Park in collaboration with Vortex Theatre and the city of Albuquerque, bringing Shakespeare to New Mexico in an accessible fashion with free tickets and local talent. This season includes performances of “As You Like It” and “King Lear” and will run until Sept. 3.
The festival, one of only 14 free Shakespeare festivals nationwide, serves to lower the barrier of entry for audiences to enjoy the work of one of the most beloved playwrights of all time by presenting his plays in an accessible fashion at no cost to audience members, according to the festival’s website. The two plays a part of this year’s festival are directed by Julia Thudium (“As You Like It”) and Debi Kierst (“King Lear”), two widely acclaimed veterans of the local theater scene.
The festival began as a summer season of Shakespeare at the Vortex Theatre, entitled “Willpower,” before moving to Civic Plaza in 2013 and renaming itself to “Shakespeare in the Plaza,” according to artistic director Peter Kierst, who has been a part of the festival since its inception in 2010. In 2019, the festival moved to the NM Veterans Memorial Park in partnership with CABQ and was officially renamed the New Mexico Shakespeare Festival.
Peter Kierst, a constitutional law professor and Shakespeare scholar who plays Lear in this year’s production, performed cuts on the scripts to make them suitable for a modern audience.
“We want to make sure that at all times the story is clear. As theater artists, we’re primarily storytellers … So we make them accessible by editing them so they are easy to understand. We don’t dumb them down, we don’t change the language, but (we make) sure the story is moving forward in a coherent fashion,” Peter Kierst said.
“As You Like It” is this year’s comedy, concerning the niece of a duke fleeing into the forest to escape persecution and finding love in the process. It’s a pastoral comedy featuring classic Shakespearean hallmarks such as the wise clown, cross-dressing woman and a marriage finale tying all threads together in holy matrimony.
What drew Thudium to this play in specific was the openness it offers and the way it lends itself so easily to music — the entire cast plays instruments in a Celtic folk style to accompany the play, ranging from the ukelele to the mandolin.
“(The cast) is all incredibly musical and have this sort of wonderful, full feeling when they’re all jamming … I always knew I wanted this sort of Scottish/Celtic vibe to it,” Thudium said.
“King Lear,” this year’s tragedy, follows a mythological British king as he rejects the daughter who loves him and embraces the two who flatter him, going mad with the end of his reign. Debi Kierst directs her husband Peter Kierst in the titular role.
“It’s huge and canonical, and it’s a gigantic process … A project as big as ‘Lear’ probably requires deeper digging and a richer thought process,” Debi Kierst said.
For Debi Kierst, herself a retired theater teacher, directing Shakespeare provides its own sets of challenges, including increased rehearsal, research and teaching the actors to understand the text itself. This process is often arduous — rehearsals began June 27 after months of preparation, with auditions being held in January.
“I find directing Shakespeare so much more fulfilling. It’s really exciting and fun to work on a play that is so rich and so full … It’s kind of you and the Bard, you and Shakespeare. Obviously there’s collaboration with everybody else too, but the material is so rich that, honestly, I prefer it,” said Debi Kierst.
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Though it’s often dependent on weather, the festival averages out at about 200 audience members per performance, according to Peter Kierst. He credits the low ticket prices for drawing such a wide and diverse audience.
“We are a New Mexico Shakespeare festival. We’re very much committed to being a homegrown, by-New Mexicans, for-New Mexicans Shakespeare festival. We don’t need to go any place else to find talented actors,” Peter Kierst said.
A complete calendar of performances is available on the festival’s website.
Spenser Willden is the culture editor at the Daily Lobo. He can be contacted at culture@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @spenserwillden
