The Alabama Shakespeare Festival

It may be hard for some people to believe but Montgomery, Alabama is the home to the nation's second largest Shakespeare Festival theater. (The largest is in Oregon.) The Alabama Shakespeare Festival -- ASF, as it's called locally, or just "Shakespeare" -- sits in one of two prominent positions in Blount Cultural Park -- the other prominent position being the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts. "Red" Blount was a Montgomery businessman, a multi-millionaire construction magnate, a former US Postmaster General, and all-around philathropist. The land for Blount Cultural Park was at one time what you would call the "backyard" of his estate, and he built the theater for ASF in his wife's honor: the Carolyn Blount Theater.

ASF has been a big part of "my" Montgomery. It was built in the 1980s when I was in elementary school, and I can remember taking class field trips at St. James to see productions of Shakespeare's "MacBeth" and "King Lear" through their daytime SchoolFest program, which allows teachers and students to come see productions for a drastically reduced ticket price. This program is still in operation, and I took my students today to see a new Southern Writers Project play called "Fall of the House," based loosely on the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe.

But for me, "Shakespeare" was a part of my life in other ways, too. The steps leading from the theater down to the pond in front and the amphitheater area in front of the the museum across park were favorite spots for my friends and I to sit and play guitars on warm nights. The dark and expansive park has a hundred nooks and crannies for young couples to hide in. On sunny afternoons, I have gone a thousand times to throw scraps of bread to the ducks and swans that live on and around the ponds. I have more memories than I can count of the place, from my boyhood in the 1980s until now when my wife and I have taken out two children to play there. Sadly, the safe environment and regular stream of charitable picnickers has caused a too-large and often aggressive population of birds, and the last time we went we had to pick up the children and make a run for it!

Additionally, ASF has meaning for me, because of my past work in the theater and because my older brother worked there for twelve years in the scene shop, building the sets. He spent the last few years as the Shop Foreman, in charge of shop. As for me, in addition to my other theater work, mostly tag-along jobs with my brother, I was in a production of "Titus Andronicus" in the summer of 1989, when they needed two "kagebito" for a post-apocalyptic interpretation of the Shakespeare classic. We dressed in ninja suits and stayed on stage until we moved scenery between scenes.

Not many people would guess that Montgomery was home to this impressive theatrical experience. Every time I read the program for a show, the actors' and actresses' credits are from well-known TV shows, Broadway, and other nationally recognized theaters. But we do.