25 Years & 74 Productions - All With Your Help!!

 

Dan and I are proud, happy and a bit gobsmacked to announce that this year is our 25th summer of “Shakespeare under the Stars” and thus ISL’s Silver Anniversary! We couldn’t have done it without you!

 

This is our annual fundraising letter, made even more important by the rise in minimum wage so that it will cost us over $80,000 to pay our actors this summer. We’ve been working since January on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the Bard’s most popular play: imaginative, hilarious and beautiful.

 

We have also reached an agreement with the Fairgrounds to use their space again, albeit with Porta-Potties, so we look forward to doing indoor plays again! This is a very special year for us and looking back on 25 years, I thought you might like to know how it all began. So...

 

In 1992, after Dan’s first heart attack, we bought an empty piece of land on Wold Rd with a great view of Woods Lake. We had dreams of slowing down a bit (ha-ha!) and bringing professional quality Shakespeare to the island. In 1998, on my 50th birthday, we had a party in the field — musicians, actors, family and friends from England and the US, all helping us celebrate our actual move to the island with nothing but a water pump in the middle of a field, a composting toilet, the beginnings of a barn and the basic framing of a house.

 

The following year we performed our first “Shakespeare under the Stars”- The Tempest - with four platforms, a big grey carpet and a cast of local artists and actors. The Lion in Winter was next at the old Pope Lumber building as Stage Left began its journey. We were told by local officials and mainland actors that it would never work. Neighbors raised incredulous eyebrows at the “newbies” not having the sense to realize the impossibility of their dream, a dream no one else believed in.

 

There is nothing in the world that motivates me more than being told something is impossible. I was brought up with a quote used often by my father: “Never, never, never give up. Never.” A card from my parents is hanging on the wall beside me as I write, which reads “Follow your dreams, for as you dream, so shall you become.”

 

Language was at the heart of who I am from the beginning. Being born blind in one eye, I had to wear a patch over my good eye in an effort (unsuccessful) to force the blind eye to work, so my father read me stories while I imagined pictures. To this day I see words and letters in color and images.

 

My father introduced me to Shakespeare. Will’s words and wisdom have been part of my being since I first saw Julius Caesar at age eight. My father and I had already been quoting great tracts of Shakespeare speeches at the dinner table for years by then. I was tremendously lucky to have people surrounding me for whom language was a passion, including at school, where teachers had us up and out of our chairs exchanging impassioned verses from Shakespeare plays, and acting our socks off! My first date was a boy who decided to take me to a play because I could quote more Shakespeare than he could!

 

Part of our home life was always determined by entertaining old folk in “homes” every weekend, reciting poetry and performing, hopefully to brighten their day. It was something we were expected to do for those “less fortunate” while my parents spent every weekend donating their time to hospitals and charity work, with my lawyer father offering free legal advice to people who were unable to afford it otherwise.

 

After I graduated from 14 years in an all-girls school in London (which I think was tremendously beneficial as no one ever questioned a woman’s ability to do anything!). I went, not into law, as my father had hoped, I think, but to drama school in London, until graduating in 1969 and heading into the big world as a naïve and privileged young woman.

 

My naivety got me into a load of trouble for some years. At one point I left a good job at the BBC to spend three idyllic months on a Greek island with a young Greek I had met at a party. He was on leave from Reed College in Portland. Six months later I left the BBC permanently and flew to Portland on a rainy day in February 1971. My parents were shocked and worried. The Greek and I split up almost immediately, and I set off hitching up and down the west coast before returning to Portland where I was hired as a Director/Teacher for Portland State’s theatre department. I had, meanwhile, convinced my housemates to put on a play in our house, casting all my roommates and inviting any and all, for no fee!

 

Not long afterwards, I met Dan - in a play, of course - fell wildly in love, introduced him to Shakespeare, lost twins at six months, had our wonderful son, Alex, got married, working all the time as actors, were hired at Oregon Shakespeare Festival where we won the Tony for the best ensemble theatre company in the US, earned our AEA (union) cards and made a living in Seattle doing theatre, even after Dan’s first heart attack. We had vacationed on Orcas for years, in a tiny cabin on the north shore at Glenwood Inn (the land was recently bought by the Land Trust) and fell in love, like so many others, with the islands.

 

After Alex graduated from high school, and following the death of our parents, we made the momentous decision to move here. We aimed to start a small professional theatre company, using local artists and off-island professional actors, and to do it without charging admission. Shakespeare on-island had been limited to a high-school production, so the missionary in me saw a hole to fill that hopefully would benefit the island.

 

I had always wanted to make something of which my parents would be proud. I venture to hope they would not be disappointed in the result of our wild choices. They came to visit us in Ashland and Seattle, and we went back to England many times, but I know they wished I had stayed in England. There is never a day that passes when I do not think of them with gratitude and love. My sister will be here this summer and that means lots of laughter and deep heart-to- hearts. The distance between us is purely in miles.

 

Having Dan’s enormous talent to raise the bar for all actors, local and professional, has been the greatest blessing for every director he has ever worked with. He is just such a natural, and we are both so incredibly grateful for the generosity of time, talent and financial assistance from this community, especially as red tape, unions and regulations have raised our running costs astronomically, immersing me in financial and bureaucratic red tape for which I am simply not equipped. Thank heavens for our board members - few in number but mighty in help and knowledge!

 

This summer’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is Shakespeare’s most popular play and its mixture of love, magic and laughter reminds us all of the power of dreams. Your generosity has kept the ISL going this long, and we hope to continue to make you laugh, cry, wonder and dream as we enter the next phase of Island Stage Left. It seems that the island has taken Shakespeare to its heart, and twenty-five years has passed in a flash. Your continued financial support will enable us to continue doing what we do best, for our shared island community.

 

Thank you all!

Helen Machin-Smith