ARTS—
John R. Briggs – The Troubador's return
By Jessica Lowell – Photos Trice Megginson
John R. Briggs sits hunched at his desk in his office,
a cubicle in the corner of a room full of cubicles, and reviews spreadsheets
on his computer screen.
Down the hall, around a corner, and up a flight of stairs, a good portion of his staff is armed with steel daggers and rapiers, and they are doing their best to learn to kill each other.
He doesn't seem concerned. Briggs is the producing artistic director of the Off Square Theatre Company, and the choreographed mayhem is part of his plan to establish a professional regional theater company in Jackson, Wyoming. The theater is part of the Center for the Arts, a new building on South Cache Street, just two blocks from Jackson's Town Square.
Plays performed there are drawing audiences year-round.
In some ways, Briggs has been working his way back to his native state since he left in the mid-1970s.
"I had every intention of being a professional actor,
but there wasn't really any opportunity in Wyoming," he says.
Briggs succeeded in building an acting career, but he didn't rely on that alone. He has also written and directed plays—"Shogun Macbeth" is his adaptation of Shakespeare's tragedy of bloody ambition for the Pan Asian Repertory Theater—and musicals in theaters from Dallas to Miami and from Broadway to Lowell, Mass., where he helped found the Merrimack Repertory Theater.
After nearly three decades gone, Briggs was ready to
return to Wyoming, and he was ready to build a professional theater.
A new venture
The lobby of the center's Ordway Theater faces Snow King Mountain, an appropriately dramatic backdrop for the drama unfolding inside. The rapier and dagger fights seem to be going well.
The Off Square Theater Company employs professional actors for its roster of productions, and the training that's under way on this early October day is part of that. Under the direction of Michael Jerome Johnson, the actors are learning how to fight with rapiers in their right hands and daggers in their left for the upcoming production of Romeo and Juliet.
The actors are dressed comfortably in jeans and T-shirts, but the blades they wield are all business – heavy and sharp. Even though they are working at quarter-speed, it's still a workout. The clash of steel competes with the occasional squeak of rubber shoe soles on the lobby's polished concrete floor and the rasp of the actors' breathing.
Johnson shows one actor how a rotation of a wrist can deflect the deadly arc of the thin blade thrust in his direction. He repeats the move and asks the actors to practice the flicking movement until they're at ease.
The short-term goal, of course, is to make sure the actors don't get hurt in the close confines of the stage set while making the fights look real.
The longer-term goal is to elevate the skills of the company's actors to expand the universe of plays they can perform to the whole range of theater—comedy, musicals, and drama.
As producing artistic director, Briggs has two areas of responsibility. The first is providing the financial mechanism for the company to produce plays, and the second is supporting this kind of training.
"I have a very serious goal of trying to create a
professional theater so that it can speak for and represent Wyoming," he
says.
Center Executive Director Steve Schultz says having Briggs as the producing artistic director has had a tremendous impact.
"From a high level, I can tell you that the Center for the Arts needs to have a healthy and vibrant theater. John has had a substantial, positive impact on raising the quality of the resident theater company," Schultz says, "and that's a critical facet of the success of an organization like the Center for the Arts."
Briggs has gone worked to involve the community in the theater, especially the community's children. Schultz says he's invited children from across the region to see Off Square's productions. "Some of these students probably have never seen live, professional theater before."
Sowing seeds sowed early
I pretty much knew I would be involved in performing and music from the third grade on," he says. "I had been given the ability to sing, and I enjoyed it and doing it for people. When I got to high school and started doing plays, it seemed a natural thing to do."
Even though he was sure of his calling, he tried on a couple of other vocations along the way. At 12, he started spending time in his cabinet-maker uncle's woodworking workshop. A childhood dream to be a cowboy led to a summer working on a ranch when he was 15. A summer spent working on a harvest crew when he was 18 took him from Texas to Canada.
"I had plenty of opportunity to find out how to do other things and work with my hands," he said. Nothing drew him as strongly as the world of performing.
If you were in Laramie about 40 years ago, you might have seen Briggs and his fellow actors just about anywhere. They performed in coffeehouses, church basements, Prexy's Pasture, and on the steps of campus buildings.
"It was a different time," he says, noting Laramie was not immune to the turmoil roiling the rest of the nation.
"The intellectual pursuit was interesting. The people in the theater weren't satisfied with six shows a year. We were working with others on about 25 shows."
After graduating from UW in 1970 with a degree in speech and drama, a chance opening at Kelly Walsh High led Briggs from Laramie to Casper, Wyoming, where he spent four years teaching drama. What he learned in Laramie, he brought to his students. Unlike other schools with their modest rosters of two productions a year, Briggs led his students to perform six times. Like the football team, they started practicing before the school year started, and they didn't stop until the school year was done.
During the summers, he and his wife at the time moved to Jackson, where from 1971 to 1974 he was the resident director of the Jackson Hole Opera House and Dirty Jack's Playhouse. In 1974, his wife was hired at a dinner theater in Shreveport, Louisiana, and that started his years on the on the road.
He gained his Equity card, split from his wife, and spent six years in New York City. He never worked as a waiter there to supplement his income; instead, he used his hard-work ethic and woodworking skills to build sets.
In 1978, he helped start the Merrimack Repertory Theater in Massachusetts, commuting between there and New York. When that paled, Briggs, now remarried, left the East Coast for Dallas, Florida, and Georgia.
Then he came across a piece in a trade publication advertising a professional theater in Wyoming. For some time, Briggs had been contemplating returning to Wyoming and starting a professional theater of his own. Over several summers, he scouted towns across the state, looking for a likely location.
Other theaters exist in the region. In the Denver Center Theater, Colorado's capital city has a nationally prominent regional theater. Utah is home to several theater companies. Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming had none.
The notice in ArtSearch drew him back to Jackson.
Coming full circle
The theater is a strong draw for Savannah Poinsett, too. Now in her third year as a student at the University of Wyoming, Poinsett spent last summer working at the Off Square Theater as an assistant stage manager. She helped run the rehearsals and the shows. She also stage managed one of the later productions in the summer.
Her boss was a man who wore many hats. "He helped with the tech work, loading in and loading out, and helped us set up," she says. "I really respect him."
For Poinsett, Briggs was a hard man to get to know at first. "He was kind of hard to read, fairly serious. After a while I saw him lighten up, once the show opened. He's a really nice guy."
Without a chance to work for the theater, Poinsett says she probably would have spent her summer working at a summer camp. "This past summer was the best opportunity for working in theater so far," she says while on an internship at Walt Disney World in Florida. Opportunities are available at community and local theaters, but the experience she gained in working for a professional theater company was invaluable, she says.
"I feel lucky that there is such a high quality theater
in my hometown," she says. "John brought in Equity dancers and
choreographers. A Broadway producer watched one of our shows, and he went
out to dinner with us."
Like Briggs, she has plans to leave Wyoming to get experience. And like Briggs, she has plans to return to her home state when she's ready.
"This is a good place for me to start," she says. It's taught me enough to search out opportunities elsewhere."
Briggs sees his opportunities in Wyoming now.
"My wife and I are very excited to be here. We've got some tough rows to hoe if we're going to succeed in making the Off Square Theatre a success, and giving it a regional presence as a theater company."
Right now, that means working every day, up to 14 hours a day. In the current season, Briggs has directed six of eight shows. He's hoping to shift some of his directing duties next season, because this schedule is keeping him from his writing. Instead of working on his play, he says, he's been too busy writing letters asking for money.
"No one set out to make it happen," he muses. "And there's nothing to prevent us from doing it. All it takes is will, time, and money."
