Shakespeare Theatre’s Next Stage Dodges Rain, Delivers ‘Tartuffe’

There was just enough rain to scuttle ’s Next Stage ensemble’s free outdoor performance of “Tartuffe” early Saturday evening at in Madison.

It was to be a special evening for this troupe of young, postgraduate theater artists who are spending the summer in intensive study and outreach productions that play throughout New Jersey. As actors, according to the company’s education director, Brian B. Crowe, they serve as ambassadors of the theater to the community.

But this performance was to be staged on the Drew campus grounds outside the company’s resident F.M. Kirby Shakespeare Theatre.

Of course, lesson No. 1 in the professional theater is “the show must go on,” so it was moved, along with some 100 audience members, indoors to the black box theater inside Drew’s Dorothy Young Center for the Arts.

The sets were minimal and Moliere’s classic 17^th-century comedy was liberally edited to about 70 minutes. But this eager troupe of 10 students, plucked from some 200 who auditioned, gave a flawless performance that suggested a sophisticated handle on Moliere’s tricky, poetic dialogue.

“This summer, I’ve already acted in front of more  people than I had before,” said Alex Breaux or Oakland, Calif., who played Orgon, the leader of the French family who is taken in by Tartuffe, a con artist pretending to be a holy man.

Breaux was playing Ivy League football and studying economics and psychology at Harvard when the acting bug caught up with him. He moved on to study acting and writing at The Juilliard School in New York, where he heard about the audition for the Next Stage ensemble.

“I wanted experience in the classical rep, which I didn’t have,” Breaux said. “It’s just as intensive here (as Juilliard). But the allocation of hours is a lot different. At Juilliard, there is a lot of classroom work. Here, sometimes we rehearse close to 10 hours a day.”

“We work them very hard and challenge them,” Crowe said. “It’s a very intensive program. In addition to the two productions they alternate (“Tartuffe” and Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Lost”), they take classes in stage combat, voice, text analysis and many other things.”

Crowe said about half of the 10-member troupe came through the previous levels of study in the company’s heralded education program, which includes the junior and senior corps for ages 11 to 18. Some may take the next step, which would be to join the company’s paid Shakespeare Live! program, which performs for schools and other groups during the school year.

On this night, they all enjoyed a loud curtain call from the crowd.

“We loved it,” said Sharey Slimowitz of Livingston, who attended with friends and her husband, Dan. They had previously seen the group perform “Love’s Labours Lost.”

“We liked both, thought they did a better job with this one,” Dan Slimowitz said. “They seemed to understand it better.”