Company History & Mission Statement

History

The Frog & Peach Theatre Company didn’t start out to be noble.  We were just Members of the Actors Studio out to satisfy our curiosity. What if we could perform Shakespeare’s plays the way we’d always wanted to see them?
   
Shakespeare has a lot of important things to say about politics and sex and family and liars.  He has a lot to say about faith and regret and war.  Modern life can pretend all it wants to that things don’t get as irrational as they once did, with kings and whatnot, but come on, turn on the TV, the world is still pretty messed up.

We wanted to try a dangerous mix of Method training, voracious text analysis and unembarrassed intimacy with the audience.  We wanted to carefully cut the plays down to about the length of a movie, and see if we could turn people onto Shakespeare. Some said it couldn’t be done.

“What’s your concept,” they wanted to know, “wfhat’s your style?”

Well, for one thing, we discovered that concept-wise, back at the Globe, Shakespeare’s company all pretty much wore the nicest contemporary clothes they had, and then added just a touch of period; a Roman helmet here, an Egyptian headdress there. Cool idea, and cheap!

For another, we were a little weary of concept; you know, Mafia Julius Caesar, Cowboy King Lear, stuff like that. Please understand, big budget concepts are fun, they’re great if that’s what you want to do. But even if we’d had a ton of money, we wanted to let the story tell itself:  to let the language set the style, and trust that our fellow New Yorkers would get into it.  For Frog and Peach, our style grew out of trust in the audience.

So we called up a bunch of other maniacs, made some copies of Hamlet and got to work.  There was a great deal of hamming the first two or three readings, some wildly conflicting interpretations, and vicious arguments.  We were having a ball!  But we decided somebody had to direct this experiment.  This job went to the least hammy and most wily company member, the lovely Lynnea Benson.

Our first audience was ideal for our purposes. Believe it or not, we presented the first two acts of Hamlet to the Summer Day Camp Program at St Clements Church on West 46th Street.  We stuck to the script and didn’t modernize the text at all.  Now, these were kids of working parents in the neighborhood some call Hell’s Kitchen.

We were terrified.  But guess what?

Those kids loved it, they went wild for it!   They were rapt and silent as Hamlet and Polonius and Claudius directly addressed them, like they were important, trusted friends.  They roared appreciatively at the funny parts, and strained not to miss one bit of the combat.  We got to talk to them afterwards and they were just incredibly turned on to the story: Dad’s gone, Mom got remarried too soon; there were two-faced friends and a cute girl with a strict father. It was as if somebody were finally telling a real story to these kids.  We were definitely on to something. 

The company has been together ever since, thanks in large part to our incredibly supportive audience and our community, who, like those kids at the Summer day camp, really got into what Shakespeare has to say.

Company members include stage greats like Austin Pendlton, Earl Hyman, Oscar nominee Catalina Sandino Merino, and Karen Lynn Gorney. We also owe a tremendous debt of gratitude to the generous support and encouragement of Reverend Bob Brashear and The West-Park Church.

The Frog & Peach Theatre Company put up 17 full length productions of Shakspeare’s plays year round in the beautiful space built by Joseph Papp in what was once the choir loft of the West-Park Church on 86th Street & Amsterdam Avenue.  Sadly, West-Park is undergoing renovations that make productions there impossible.

Yet somehow we’ve managed to keep bringing full productions of Shakespeare’s plays to our community…how could we do otherwise when the demand is so great?  

Our most recent production was Hamlet at The Advent Lutheran Church and danged if we didn’t sell out every performance, our audience as richly diverse as the faces on the nearby 96th Street subway platform. We greeted many long-time friends and made lots of new ones.

You know, it seems like a week doesn’t go by that I don’t get a call from a company member, saying how he or she was out with the dog in Riverside Park or shopping in Harlem or over by MLK High School and hear “Yo, Frog & Peach!”

One special message in each of Shakespeare’s plays is that we are all in this together, and his words are like a balm to the cynicism and resentment these awful times are bringing. Our beautiful city, so divided by have & have-not, so hurting and so skeptical about what light there is to come, has a burning need for this special nourishment.

At Frog & Peach, we feel it’s our duty to provide that nourishment, and will continue to strive to do so.