If you've ever gone to the Berkshire Theatre Festival, in Stockbridge, MA, you know that the parking situation can be like a screwball comedy, with student volunteers sending you and your car in circles and sometimes into ditches. Now, as an 80th birthday present to itself, BTF has unveiled a new master plan for its grounds that will not only improve the traffic flow but also create garden areas for having a glass of wine before a play or during intermission. Kate Maguire, artistic director of BTF, unveiled a computer-generated rendering (above) for the plan by Okerstrom-Lang Landscape Architects of Great Barrington, MA, when she announced the summer season yesterday at a luncheon at the Red Lion Inn. She said the scheme may take several years to implement, and will make the BTF campus more "accessible and patron friendly." BTF has dubbed the plan "The Link to the Future" because it will create a landscaped walkway between the 122-seat Unicorn Theatre, which is located in the landmark barn on Route 7, and the Main Stage on Route 102 (the former Stockbridge Casino that was designed by Stanford White in 1888. Maguire vowed that the rural ambience would be maintained even as the land is leveled. "The boulders will be gone," she says. "but there will be no blacktop!"
Maguire said she felt great pressure to put together an extraordinary season for BTF's 80th year, and she'll present a mix of new plays and modern masterpieces such as Edward Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? starring Richard Chamberlain [left] and Jan Maxwell; Harold Pinter's The Caretaker and Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot. As for new work, Maguire is especially excited about The Book Club Play, by Karen Zacarias, a humorous look at the rivalries and and friendships in a book club of thirtysomethings and Pageant Play by Matthew Wilkas and Mark Setlock, a wicked satire set in the world of children's beauty pageants. For the fall, BTF will present Eleanor: Her Secret Journey by Rhoda Lerman. Maguire thinks this play about the crusading First Lady will have considerable resonance during the final weeks of the presidential campaign. "To hear the words of Eleanor Roosevelt seems pertinent and important to me," she says.
