The Shakespeare Theatre on the Sound

There is a building in Stratford, right on the edge of the Housatonic River where it opens into Long Island Sound, that was for nearly three decades the most ambitious Shakespeare festival in America. The American Shakespeare Theatre opened here on July twelfth, nineteen fifty-five, with a production of Julius Caesar, and for the next twenty-seven years it brought professional Shakespeare to a small Connecticut town that had named itself, purely by colonial coincidence, after Shakespeare's own Stratford-upon-Avon.

The theater was founded by a group of American arts patrons, among them Lincoln Kirstein and Lawrence Langner. It was built in the style of an Elizabethan playhouse, with a thrust stage extending into the audience. The first artistic director came from the Old Vic in London. The company that followed was exceptional: Katharine Hepburn performed here. So did Christopher Plummer, James Earl Jones, Christopher Walken, Ruby Dee, and Fred Gwynne. The Timex Corporation donated a sundial in nineteen fifty-six, described at the time as the world's only properly calibrated one.

The last full professional season was nineteen eighty-two. The building stood empty for years after that, the subject of competing redevelopment proposals and occasional community theater performances. On January thirteenth, twenty nineteen, the theater burned to the ground. The cause was never definitively determined. The loss was total. Nothing was recovered from the building.

What stands now on the site is a cleared lot overlooking the Sound. The town that shares a name with Shakespeare's birthplace no longer has a theater building worthy of the name. The coincidence of geography, the Elizabethan stage built on a Connecticut riverbank, the three decades of professional production: all of it ended in a January fire.