Under the Greenwood Tree: A Celebration of Kentucky Shakespeare

by Tracy E. K'Meyer

Overview

In the summer of 1960, director C. Douglas Ramey took his Carriage House Players theater company down the street from their Old Louisville venue to Central Park, where the actors performed scenes from the Shakespeare classic Much Ado about Nothing. Buoyed by the enthusiastic audience response, Ramey's company returned to the park the next year for the first full season of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival. More than sixty years later, Kentucky Shakespeare is now the oldest free, non-ticketed Shakespeare in the Park festival in the country. To commemorate the sixtieth anniversary of the festival, in spring 2020 Kentucky Shakespeare cooperated with students in the University of Louisville's Department of History to record twenty entertaining and enlightening oral interviews with longtime members of the company. In Under the Greenwood Tree, author Tracy K'Meyer captures the history of Kentucky Shakespeare in a series of carefully selected and edited transcripts of these interviews. In these pages, past and present cast and crew share their memories of the company's history, performances in the park, and the positive impact of its many outreach programs, from its inception in the 1960s, to its slump in the early 2000s, and on to its recent renaissance. An illuminating record of the collaborative artistry that brings Shakespeare's works to life, Under the Greenwood Tree offers readers a peek behind the curtain at the group's steadfast stewardship of the most important literature in the English language.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780813198835
Publisher:	University Press of Kentucky
Publication date:	02/06/2024
Series:	Kentucky Remembered: An Oral History Series
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 1.00(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Tracy K'Meyer is professor of US history at the University of Louisville, where she has served as codirector of the Oral History Center. She is the author of "To Live Peaceably Together": The American Friends Service Committee's Campaign for Open Housing and Civil Rights in the Gateway to the South: Louisville, Kentucky 1945–1980.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Prologue
1. Act I: The Plot
2. Act II: Putting Shakespeare on its Feet
3. Act III: In the Park
4. Act IV: All the World's a Stage
5. Act V: Reviews and Reflections
Appendix: Methodology and Acknowledgements

Editorial Reviews

So much Shakespeare happens outside major theatres in the biggest cities. Tracy K'Meyer's Under the Greenwood Tree provides a lively look into the history of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival and the work it's done over more than seventy years to bring Shakespeare to audiences wherever they are and regardless of their background and preparation. The story she tells is not just about Shakespeare, but about the Festival's continuing role in supporting cultural democracy.

Joyce MacDonald

Theatre companies are notoriously bad at telling their own stories, and the inspiring, implausible story of Kentucky Shakespeare – the longest-running non-ticketed Shakespeare Festival in the US – definitely deserves telling. Happily, historian Tracy K'Meyer has taken the key first step, collecting first person accounts that cover the company's long history – from early productions (Othello played on a boxing ring!) to the company's ascension in recent years as an artistic/educational powerhouse that draws huge summer crowds to the heart of the city - and now operates year-round, as well. 

Marty Rosen

Under the Greenwood Tree documents and celebrates the history of Kentucky Shakespeare's gift to the people of Louisville—six decades of free summertime Shakespeare in the park. Told in the words of the company's actors, directors, producers, and managers, this history is, by turns, comical and sobering, but always lively and engaging. As the book follows the ups and downs of Kentucky Shakespeare, it leaves the reader wanting to know what happens next.

Kathryn L. Nasstrom