Charlie Newell's war

For a venerable institution, Court Theatre of late has been making some surprisingly wily moves. While companies of similar age and stature have settled into familiar patterns of Shakespeare-Dickens-repeat, and others employ the trickle-down programming, mounting last year’s New York hits, the Court, by contrast, is aging into eclecticism.

The University of Chicago–based company’s current season alone includes avant-garde icon JoAnne Akalaitis taking on Caryl Churchill’s version of Seneca; a rarely seen, mid-’70s number from the Negro Ensemble Company; a main-stage directing credit for storefront scamp Sean Graney (covering pervy Brit bad boy Joe Orton, no less); and a radical take on Shakespeare’s little-seen gore fest, Titus Andronicus, adapted and directed by artistic director Charles Newell. This week sees a revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s 1945 musical Carousel, also directed by Newell.

So what’s the big idea?

There is no big idea, Newell insists. “We never start at a place of, ‘Let’s make this season be about X,’” says the director. Instead, he says his own choices for the company, as well as the input he gets from Court’s artistic associates and staff, are driven by an impulse the director Peter Brook describes in his book The Shifting Point.

“You read a text and you have a hunch of an idea, you have a guttural, instinctual response,” Newell says. “It’s not particularly logical, it’s not particularly thought-out, it’s really not articulated. Then in choosing to pursue that piece, you discover why you had that hunch.”

Sounds awfully seat-of-the-pants for a company that specializes in “classic theater.” But as Newell explains, a broad definition of what makes theater classic is really his whole point. “I’m constantly challenging myself to think about: What is it, how do we define it, how can we talk about it, what can we do that makes people think more broadly and aggressively about” the definition of classic, says Newell.

Rather than the traditional friends-Romans-countrymen bit, where the classic designation is based on “whether or not they were written some X number of years ago, or written by a white European,” in Newell’s words, Court’s characterization is more subjective and more inclusive. “It gives us a challenge to keep asking ourselves the question, Could this piece be [a classic]? Will we think about this piece this way in five years or ten years or 100 years?”

As Newell rightly points out, any work by an esteemed ancient Roman like Seneca or any established go-to Shakespeare is afforded classic status, whether anyone actually knows the work or not. “A play by Seneca—by anyone’s definition wouldn’t that be a classic? But the thing is, no one has ever seen it. Very few people have ever seen the play Titus Andronicus,” he says. “Is it a classic if it’s not being done now, but has relevance and resonance and power now? Why would you call it a classic if nobody knows it?”

Court holds court on the University of Chicago campus (Newell’s a university employee), but in recent years, the theater has made a concerted effort to reach out to the community in which it lives. With its Hyde Park home base, Court, as one of the South Side’s few resident theater companies, enjoys a unique position to reach an infamously underserved African-American audience, a fact the company recognized when it staged August Wilson’s Fences two years ago.

That show’s overwhelmingly positive audience response has led Newell, in association with director Ron OJ Parson, to make African-American work a priority for the company. “What’s been very gratifying is how quickly African-American folks are finding Court for the first time,” Newell says. New marketing director Adam Thurman, late of Congo Square, intends to capitalize on these nontraditional theatergoers to expand Court’s base.

Newell (who next will take on the Tony Kushner-Jeanine Tesori musical Caroline, or Change, about the relationship between a black maid and her white employers in 1960s Louisiana) is clearly jazzed by the audience-building prospect, though he emphasizes this is no fleeting fancy: “What we have to be is authentic in our commitment.” Seems like a classic strategy.

Court rides the Carousel starting Saturday 15.