Theatre for a New Audience opened its Polonsky Shakespeare Center in downtown Brooklyn last fall, billing it as the first theater built in New York City for Shakespeare and classic drama in half a century.
The occasion was historic, but the location was no surprise. The area now known as the Brooklyn Cultural District already housed the several venues of BAM (the entity formerly known as the Brooklyn Academy of Music) and the Mark Morris Dance Center.
If asked to speculate where the next new American Shakespeare theater might rise, I would have guessed someplace like Chicago or Los Angeles.
How wrong I would have been. The architectural firm of H3, Hugh Hardy and Associates, designers of the Polonsky Shakespeare Center, has been engaged to build a state-of-the-art Elizabethan theater (if that's not a contradiction in terms) in the town of Greensboro in Vermont's Northeast Kingdom, home of the Greensboro Arts Alliance & Residency (GAAR) in association with New York-based Mirror Repertory Company since 2005. In the tradition of the theaters of Shakespeare's time--The Globe, The Swan, The Rose--the new theater will be called The Mirror.
The advisory board for the project includes Tony Award-winner Mark Rylance, director Nicholas Hytner and Cordelia Monsey of the Royal Shakespeare Company. So it has precious little excuse for turning out poorly.
Rylance has called the Polonsky Center "wonderful for plays. It doesn't have a character that forces itself on you. It's a neutral space that is waiting for the words of the actors to fill it." Along the same lines, talking about the theater's three-story glass facade, Theatre for a New Audience artistic director Jeffrey Horowitz told Playbill, "We talked a lot about transparency. The theatre is not a citadel."
Mirror Rep/GAAR currently present their Vermont productions on about as "neutral" a space as one might imagine: the Greensboro Town Green. Tony-nominee Marla Schaffel (Jane Eyre) returns this summer for her third season, appearing in The Miracle Worker opposite 11-year-old Vermont-native Macy Molluer. The other main stage production is Carousel. Both open in late July.
