 The Phoenix Theatre is gearing up for another series of free Shakespeare and Dearing Oaks Park. Tom Talk with Bryant Mason, the director of this year's production of Macbeth. Bryant, thanks for joining us. My pleasure. You're with the Phoenix Theatre and you're opening a play this week, Macbeth, for the summer. Yes, we are. We're doing Macbeth this summer, our first tragedy. Very excited about it. Our opening performance is actually going to be on Thursday up at Bowdoin College and we're going to be performing every Thursday up there on their campus and in Dearing Oaks every Friday and Saturday. Before we get too much into that play, for people who don't know what Phoenix Theatre is, can you just describe it a little bit? We're free outdoor classical theater company bringing free classical theater to the community of Portland and southern Maine. Rob and I started the company five years ago now as well. We started with a production of Two Gentlemen of Verona. It was very well received and embraced by the community. I feel like every year we've been growing and getting a little bit, getting to know Portland better, getting to know the audience. We're seeing some people coming back year after year, which is really nice. Your audience has been growing. Has been growing. Yeah, we're growing probably at about 2% every year, which is a pretty good rate of growth for a theater company. What made you decide that you and Rob decided to create a free theater company? We worked together in New York, did a couple shows up on the Upper West Side. We did Much or Do About Nothing, and we also did The Two Gentlemen of Verona. We were doing some free Shakespeare in New York anyway, and then when he moved here to start a family with Daniela, we came up here and had a couple beers, and I came up to visit, and we started the company, and Rob and I are moving forward with Phoenix with a whole cadre of really fun individuals. Yeah, so you just enjoyed doing it in New York and decided to transplant it here? Exactly. When Rob moved up here, we wanted to keep it going. I still lived in New York City at the time, and moved up here a little over a year ago with my wife, and so now I'm here full-time as part of Phoenix. So you do show Shakespeare. There's obviously no royalties for that. You don't have a set. It's in the park. It's a nice setting already. But your actors, where do you get drawn from? We use local actors. We find the best local actors we can get our hands on. We have auditions every summer going in. And by now, we've developed a large community of actors who we've worked with multiple times. Some are able to come back and do another show with us. Sometimes they are not for various reasons, but we want to be very inclusive to the Portland artist community, sort of a place that anyone can feel comfortable either coming to see the show or working with us. We really want to support the local talent that's here in Portland, because there is quite a bit of it, actually. We've expanded a little bit. We have one guy coming in from Lewiston as well, but we're sort of like all over the southern Maine actor base, anyone we can find is who we want to use. And so sometimes people who do Shakespeare, they take a little bit of a slant on it or whatever. What's the deal with Macbeth, I mean, how are you producing that? For us, we always are going to do, well, always. We always have, and we probably will continue this way, is we want to present a contemporary context for the classical play that helps a modern audience have a better frame of reference for approaching these old stories. So for example, like with Macbeth, we're obviously not doing in Kilton broadswords no Scottish accent or anything like that. We're setting it, I'm taking a more psychological spiritual take on it, where it's, as if the whole play is, either it's happening in Macbeth's head or that it's his punishment for committing these acts to be forced to relive the events again and again and again, kind of his own little personal inferno. It's going to be mostly, we're looking at the color palette is going to be white, basically straight white, which will look beautiful in the park, really, really pop. Very minimal sets, no set, very minimal props. We try to keep it very simple and make it just about the words and the story. We do take some license with cutting of the play, but within that framework, we try to make it all about the play. Yeah, yeah, and the acting, I mean, obviously that's what's accentuated when you don't have any sets. Exactly, we'll make it about the words and about the acting and about the choices and make it interesting and helpfully, make it compelling and clear and really, for this one, distill Macbeth to a very pure essence. It sounds like anybody that's seen Macbeth before would really actually enjoy this as it from another perspective of seeing the story. I hope so. I hope so. It's a play that's done a lot and it's a wonderful, wonderful piece of work and very many layers to it and we're trying to keep a lot of that while still streamlining it and focusing it for a very sharp kind of production. Do you have a website if people want more? We do. It's phoenixtheatre.com, F-E-N-I-X, old English spelling, and theater R-E. Phoenixtheatre.com. Fine, thank you very much for joining us. Pleasure.