SHAKESPEARE LIVES ON SHELTER ISLAND

First there was Hamptons Shakespeare Festival, in Montauk, for whom I worked as dramaturg for the six best summers of my life -- As You Like It, Twelfth Night, The Tempest, Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter's Tale, The Taming of the Shrew -- and which David Brandenburg has been trying to revive, so far without success. Then, when Josh Gladstone became the director of the John Drew Theater at Guild Hall, I was able to work on Julius Caesar, Macbeth and Hamlet. The two experiences were very different: one outdoors and the other indoors, one all romantic comedies and the other the darkest tragedies. But in two ways they were alike: they exhibited artistry in the highest degree, and they lost money. So, for the past five years, there's been no Shakespeare east of Shinnecock -- no Bard in Bridgehampton, no Avon in Amagansett, no William in Wainscott, no . . . well, you get the idea.

So I've pined, and languished, and made occasional summer forays into New York to keep my Shakespeare jones mamageable. But this past weekend, as if in some kind of time warp, Shakespeare came back to me. A company called the Green Theatre Collective, very young, enthusiastic and talented, has been roaming the Northeast, performing for a night or two in unlikely venues. What makes their work eco-theatrical is their tiny footprint: they don't build sets, they don't use artificial lighting (and so perform at 5 PM), they wear street clothes, and there are very few of them: on Sunday, we watched seven talented actors bring As You Like It to life at Sylvester Manor, essentially a working farm with some cultural ambitions on Shelter Island, with only an sail-less windmill as a backdrop.

Part of the process of paring down involved cutting the text and doubling most of the parts, which is part of the fun: the aristocratic Rosalind was equally convincing both as the male Ganymede and as the sluttish Audrey, and the fearsome Charles the Wrestler, at court, morphed into a gentle elderly peasant in the Forest. Sarah Hankins, the director, deserves full credit for making the limitations into benefits. She omitted Jaques's tedious and unnecessary farewell speech at the end; instead, the audience's peripheral vision caught the melancholy fellow ambling sadly away from the festivities on stage, a sad and moving moment.

I talked to the company's executive director, Hal Fickett (who played Orlando; everyone wears several hats) about the logistics of the operation. In a way, it's very simple: like their itinerant sixteenth-century forbears, they roam the countryside, accepting what humble food and lodging they can promote, living by their wits and Shakespeare's. They're living proof that large ensembles, expensive machinery, and modern technology are almost beside the point. There's an argument in the last act of A Midsummer Night's Dream in which Theseus, defending the efforts of the amateurs who are presenting a play so tragic it's funny, so bad it's wonderful, by saying, about plays in general, "The best in this kind are but shadows, and the worst are no worse, if imagination amend them." His bride Hippolyta replies, "It must be your imagination then, and not theirs," and she's hit the bullseye: the more imaginative work the audience has to do, the more rewarding their experience will be. Lope de Vega, the great Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare's, described theater as merely "two boards and a passion," but as the Green Theatre Collective is proving, you don't even need boards if you have enough passion.

The company's website is http://www.greentheatrecollective.org/.