Shakespeare & Company Is Up to the Challenge

What better way to raise money for a theater company than with a one-time-only theater event? Shakespeare & Company, which needs to raise $1 million to get an $800,000 challenge grant from the Kresge Foundation to complete its $10 million capital campaign, invited supporters to see a staged reading of A.R. Gurney's Ancestral Voices on Monday, July 20. Gurney, who decided to read the roles of the grandfather and Uncle Roger himself, asked Jake Robards (left) to come up from New York City to play Eddie opposite Berkshire theater stalwarts Annette Miller (above), David Adkins and Corinna May. Before and after the show, young actors and older patrons mingled, eating and drinking heartily in true Shakespeare & Company fashion.

Michael Miller, the former chairman of the Shakespeare & Company board—whose wife, Annette, starred in Ancestral Voices—with his daughter Deborah Miller and his granddaughter Eve Strickberger; actors Josh McCabe, who will be in this fall's production of The Hound of the Baskervilles, and actress Elizabeth Aspenlieder.

Actor Tom O' Keefe, who's appearing in Measure for Measure (through September 5), with Eric Tucker, who directed Pinter's Mirror (though August 2).

Beebe Nelson, who was the first director of Shakespeare & Company's summer institute for high school students, and Duncan Nelson, who has been a friend of A.R. Gurney's since the 1960s; Arthur Collins, who wore his trademark white suit, with Helga Orthofer.