St. Louis Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night,” which opens Oct. 2, will be the company’s last show after 41 years.
Donna Northcott, who founded the company in 1984, says the reason she’s shutting it down is simple. “I’m 41 years older than I was when I started the company.”
Despite predating St. Louis Shakespeare Festival (which recently turned 25), the smaller St. Louis Shakespeare has definitely been overshadowed by the festival, which presents the free Shakespeare play in Forest Park each summer, does the touring production to area parks, and created the original show “Romeo and Zooliet” that had its premiere this year. (The festival is not shutting down.)
“We don’t have anywhere near the funding that something like the festival in the park does,” Northcott says. “Everyone working with us has a full-time paid job, and they’re rehearsing evenings and weekends. I’m frequently working on costumes or props or all sorts of other tasks to get the show up. It’s taking its toll.”
Northcott began considering closing down the company in 2024 after she retired from her full-time job as a theater professor at Lindenwood University. She decided to finish the way the company started; “Twelfth Night” was the first show she produced back in 1984.
“It was this (attitude of), ‘Hey Mickey and Judy, my uncle has a barn. Let’s put on a show,’” Northcott says. In other words, the production was very scrappy and grassroots. She borrowed items for the set and used curtains from Goodwill to make costumes. A professor at the St. Louis College of Pharmacy let them use the auditorium on campus for $200.
All told, Northcott mounted that first production for $600. The show wasn’t a sell-out, but they did make money.
“I was thinking I’d reimburse myself for what I spent, and then we’ll divide everything else up equally between everyone working on the show,” Northcott remembers. “And the actors were saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do next?’”
So a company was born. Northcott says that, at the time, no one was doing Shakespeare except the occasional college production. She’d done her first major Shakespeare role while getting her theater degree from St. Louis University just a few years earlier.
“We did ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ and I was cast as Helena,” Northcott says. “I was the person who always got cast as the crazy old ladies or the moms or the grandmas. This was the first time I’d been cast as something that was more of a leading character.”
That experience inspired her to stage that first “Twelfth Night.”
For the second season, Northcott expanded to two shows. The company did the shows in repertory, which means that they would stage both shows at once on alternating nights and the actors that were leads in one production would have smaller roles in another.
“I was very young, and it didn’t strike me that this was absurd,” Northcott says. She also thought it would help get good actors for small parts if they could have a major role in another show.
In its third season, St. Louis Shakespeare branched out to other classics like “She Stoops to Conquer.” They’ve also done “Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” and other non-Shakespeare shows.
Northcott kept the company going even while she was in graduate school in Chicago in the early 1990s. (While there, she was in a memorable production of “Pelléas and Mélisande” with none other than Stephen Colbert.)
She’d return to St. Louis in the summer to stage shows. Over the years, St. Louis Shakespeare was able to stage every Shakespeare play, including the less popular works like “Titus Andronicus,” “Coriolanus,” “Timon of Athens” and a version of the lost play, “The History of Cardenio.”
St. Louis Shakespeare is one of only a handful of companies around the country that have done all of Shakespeare’s work.
Northcott didn’t just start St. Louis Shakespeare though. While she was in Chicago, she saw “The Real Live Brady Bunch,” a stage show from the early ’90s, where comedic actors (Jane Lynch and Andy Richter were part of it) would reenact an episode of “The Brady Bunch.”
“It was one of the funniest things I’d ever seen. So of course my next thought was, ‘Oh St. Louis needs that.’ And that’s where Magic Smoking Monkey came from.”
Magic Smoking Monkey Theatre was focused on doing parodies. It started around 2006.
“The whole aesthetic of the monkey shows is if you and your high school buddy decided to re-create ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’ in your mom’s garage with 50 bucks, this is what it would look like,” Northcott says.
The group’s first show was “Glen or Glenda” an Ed Wood film from 1953 about a man who changes his sex. Ed Wood was a notoriously bad director, and his films were awful.
“But it’s all very sincere,” Northcott says. She staged the show for around $2,000 and sold out every performance. “We even had people show up in costume.” (Ed Wood was famous for his love of angora sweaters, which people wore to the show.)
“It was just a delightful way to inaugurate a new company,” Northcott says.
Those shows are considerably less stressful than staging Shakespeare, so the spinoff company that Northcott calls the “bastard stepchild” will continue producing shows, and even has one scheduled for December, “A Magic Smoking Christmas Carol,” which Northcott is writing.
St. Louis Shakespeare though, faces too many uphill challenges.
“There’s always more new nonequity theater companies popping up, and there’s far fewer designers and technicians than the number of opportunities available for them,” Northcott says. “It can be challenging to get all of those positions filled … there’s just a lot of challenges.”
But she’s proud of what her theater company did over the past 40 years.
“I’m proud of having completed the entire canon, and I’m proud of the fact that we’ve given a lot of actors in town their first opportunity to do Shakespeare.”
The final show has inspired Northcott to invite everyone who has been involved with the company over the years back for a final hurrah.
“Hopefully, we’ll have a lot of alums there. It’s bittersweet. I enjoy the rehearsal process so much, just being in a room with talented, creative people and taking something off the page and bringing it to life. I love that so much.”
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Rosalind Early | Post-Dispatch
Deputy features editor
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