‘It’s just crazy enough that it might work’: Bay Area Shakespeare company’s ambitious fall expansion

Laura Gordon knows it’s not very often that a single director takes on two plays in one season for a repertory Shakespeare company — especially when the formerly summer-focused company is making a major expansion into fall programming.

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And she’ll be the first to tell you there’s a good reason for that.

“The reason is that, in a lot of ways, it’s kind of dumb,” says Gordon.

And yet that’s exactly what she’s doing with Santa Cruz Shakespeare’s productions of “Private Lives,” running through Oct. 3 at the Audrey Stanley Grove in Santa Cruz, and “The Last Five Years,” running through Oct. 4.

Gordon has established herself as an imaginative and skilled director at SCS over the last decade, most recently with the 2023 triumph “The Book of Will.” But this was a hugely ambitious leap of faith even for her, which she embraced with a surprising lack of resistance when it was suggested by Artistic Director Charles Pasternak.

“When he first proposed the idea to me, we said, ‘You know, it’s just crazy enough that it might work,’” she remembers.

One of Pasternak’s trademarks has been programming seasons that have shared thematic relevance. In this case, though, it’s not just a matter of artistic impact. The way that Noel Coward’s “Private Lives” and Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last Five Years” fit together both thematically and practically is one of the reasons Gordon was willing to take them on.

“They’re almost perfect plays — they’re constructed brilliantly. There’s so much wit, I think they’re very relatable, and I love the way these two crazy plays speak to each other. They’re about relationships, they’re about marriages that don’t last, necessarily,” she says. “They show humans with all of their foibles — all of their weaknesses and their strengths and their vulnerabilities and the mistakes they make. With ‘The Last Five Years,’ it’s a little more poignant in the storytelling, and in ‘Private Lives,’ it’s very arch and funny. But it’s still human.”

She’s getting a major assist from one of the company’s key behind-the-scenes (and occasionally in the scenes) artists.

“‘The Last Five Years’ is only two people, and the whole thing is it’s almost entirely sung. And I have an amazing music director, Luke Shepherd, who is a genius, and he’s doing most of the heavy lifting.”

Shepherd is known for working with actors on the precision of their delivery, which helped Gordon connect Brown’s musical to her extensive Shakespearean work — an important context for a company that always uses the Bard as its North Star.

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“I’m really learning so much from watching him work with the actors on the music. He wants to be very exacting with this in terms of the exact rhythms,” she says of Shepherd. “His feeling is, ‘Let’s learn it exactly, and then if we want to deviate from it in any way, we can,’ and by that I mean some of it is a little more talk-singing. The way he talks about phrasing is just how I talk about Shakespeare phrasing — let’s follow the rules, let’s know what the rules are, and then if we want to break them, we’re choosing to, but we’re keeping this structure that’s very, very well-written.”

Also on Gordon’s side are her casts. Coward’s play is the story of two people who have gone through a very bitter divorce from each other, and then meet again while honeymooning with their new spouses. In the main roles are a couple of actors Gordon has directed before: Pasternak and Paige Lindsey White. And she’s loving the chance to work with them again.

“It’s just a blast,” she says. “When I directed ‘The Book of Will,’ I worked with them both, and I also worked with Paige the first summer she was out here in ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ So I’ve known them a long time, and I’ve seen them play opposite each other before, so I know what their chemistry is, and I know what their strengths are.”

On the other hand, with two actors she had never worked with before handling the entirety of the music in “The Last Five Years,” she just plain lucked out.

“I love the combination of working with some actors that I know, and then some actors that I don’t know, and that’s the kind of the perfect situation that’s happening because I had not worked with Charlotte Boyce Munson before, and Chris Cherin is new to me — and, I mean, those two are crazy-talented singers.”

So apparently Pasternak was wise to let Gordon shepherd in this phase of his continuing expansion of the company to year-round programming. With major shake-ups in the Bay Area theater scene over the last few years, including the loss of California Shakespeare Theater, he sees a certain responsibility in continuing to grow SCS, and gratitude for people like Gordon and all the company members, staff, audiences and supporters who have driven its continued success.

“Cal Shakes had a longer history, they had a bigger reputation, and now that’s us,” he says. “I mean, we’re now the biggest theater festival in Northern California. And that wouldn’t have been possible without the transformation that has happened over the last decade. It takes a lot of good work and hard work, but it also takes luck — there have been little lucky things that have happened for us, too. Things that have fallen into place.”

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