Julius Caesar (dir. Dan McCleary, 2019). Phil Darius Wallace (Antony) stands over Michael Khanlarian (Caesar).
The moment that spurred Dan McCleary’s acting career, and by extension the birth of Tennessee Shakespeare Company (TSC), was a rude awakening. Specifically, it was just after his awakening — at breakfast.
To Thine Own Self Be True
Grace of Grace (dir. Dan McCleary, 2025). McCleary as Macbeth, a villain, yet “too full of the milk of human kindness.”
He was a journalism major at then-Memphis State at the time, in the 1980s, but, he says, “I kept gravitating over to the theater school.” He quickly made an impression on Joanna “Josie” Helming, the celebrated director and teacher in the department of theater and dance, and an emeritus faculty member at the University of Memphis today. McCleary was intrigued when she asked him to meet with her.
“I remember she took me to breakfast one Saturday morning,” he says, “which she had never done, and I was hopeful that she was going to tell me that she wanted to cast me in something.
“Josie was famously frank, and she said, ‘I’m so glad you’ve arrived. Order your breakfast, and then I want you to leave Memphis. Sell your car, put all your belongings in two bags, get on a Greyhound bus, and go to New York. And I don’t want you to come back.”
As McCleary sat flabbergasted, Helming pledged to get him situated with a drama teacher in New York. Then, McCleary remembers her saying, “But if you choose to stay, don’t you think for one minute that you’re going to be allowed in the theater department. I will not cast you. You’ve got to go, and you’ve got to make the choice right now.”
He followed Helming’s counsel to the letter. “I did exactly what she advised,” he says. Once on the East Coast, “I matriculated at Temple and made my way as an actor there. And I remained in the Northeast for the next 20, 25 years.”
As You Like It (dir. Dan McCleary, 2008). Rehearsal for the company’s outside performance.
In the Temple, In the Town, the Field
He worked at Shakespeare and Company in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts, in New York, in Boston, and around the country. “I had a very rich artistic and personal life there, but I thought, ‘I’m not engaged in what I really feel was the original function of theater.’ I wanted to be more introductory, more controversial, more surprising,” he says. He also wanted to be in the South, and to be outdoors, not unlike those Depression-era thespians who created the Memphis Open Air Theater in the grassy space that later became the Overton Park Shell. “After looking at a lot of outdoor Shakespeare companies, I began to refine a strategic plan for what a theater company would look like for me, and what it kept looking like was the necessity of a community. I wanted to go where I felt there was a need.”
McCleary’s hometown came into focus as one such community, and things began to fall into place, especially when he reached out to his first theatrical mentor at Germantown High School. “I started to talk to Frank Bluestein, who introduced me to theater, and his welcoming response was immediate,” says McCleary. “He agreed to partner with me in attempting to launch it here, because we thought that Memphis was long overdue.”
A Midsummer Night’s Dream (dir. Stephanie Shine, 2016). A performance at the University of Memphis.
Thinking big came naturally to Bluestein, whose vision had brought the first Fine Arts Department to Germantown High in the ’70s, and with it the Poplar Pike Playhouse and the school’s award-winning educational television facility, GHS-TV. Knowing the Germantown arts landscape and its patrons well, he had heard from Father Gary Sturni of St. George’s Episcopal Church that one of the church’s neighbors, Barbara Apperson, wanted to support the fledgling company. As did the City of Germantown.
“We moved into the Germantown Train Depot and became its docents for one dollar a year for many years,” says McCleary, “and we rehearsed and performed at the church and on Barbara’s property for our first production of As You Like It, where the play begins in the church. And then when Rosalind and Celia got banished, our Irish musicians and actors took the audience out through the church and onto Barbara’s candlelit property, and we finished the play under the trees.”
That was in 2008, but not everyone in the community was on board, according to McCleary. “A lot of neighbors didn’t want theater people there. I remember politicians in Germantown telling me they didn’t want people from Memphis there. We had neighbors running their leaf blowers while we were performing, and they had a lawsuit pending against us to prevent us from performing. But nothing adverse ever happened.”
We Know What We Are, But Know Not What We May Be
Stephanie Shine is TSC’s associate artistic producer, previously the artistic director for the Seattle Shakespeare Company.
As all this was fomenting, McCleary recruited another partner in the cause — and something more. “I hope he told you we’re married!” quips Stephanie Shine, who recently became associate artistic producer after 14 years with the company. Previously, she worked as artistic director and in other capacities for the Seattle Shakespeare Company for 15 or 16 years, she says. When she and McCleary met, and he was concocting the plans for TSC, she consulted on the education program and and ultimately became the company’s education director in 2009. “So really, I’ve been here forever.”
Shine couldn’t argue with McCleary’s assessment that Memphis was a city in need. When she came to Memphis for the first time, she says, “There wasn’t anything [like Tennessee Shakespeare Company] within a few hundred miles. Dan and I were both at the point in our careers where our interest was more in service, and how we could give. We’re more interested in what art does and how it helps. And we came to Shakespeare independently with great passion and commitment.”
Indeed, starting with the high school classes Shine and McCleary led even before their debut under the trees, building skills in the community has always been integral to the company’s mission. Countless Memphis parents, including me, have seen an interest or even love of Shakespeare kindled in their children through the Tennessee Shakespeare Company’s ongoing educational outreach. But the company takes that philosophy seriously among its own members, as well.
“That was the other thing I wanted to help create,” says McCleary. “A professional theater company where we could train artist-managers and artist-teachers. Everyone here is a manager, everyone here is an actor, or a director, or designer. Everyone here is a teacher, and this is what Shakespeare’s troupes were when Shakespeare was a shareholder in his playhouses. There were no directors in those days. There were poets and there were actors, but they managed. They controlled their own professional fate. That’s what everyone at Tennessee Shakespeare Company does as well. When we’re able to identify young, talented, and driven people, we invest in them here, and we find programs that help train them. And you know, if they may be better off someplace else, I pull a Josie Helming on them. Otherwise, I really want them to stay.”
Summer camp on the Tabor Stage, where students “can speak it for themselves and gain immediate ownership of the text.”
Be Great in Act, As You Have Been in Thought
One of McCleary’s goals in founding the organization was to be “introductory.” That has meant taking the Bard where the Bard doesn’t typically tread.
Visiting schools has only comprised part of that effort, but their work in that regard has been formidable. The Macbeth Initiative brings company actors into schools, where they enact scenes and guide students through the still-relevant themes of “the Scottish play.” The Romeo and Juliet Project uses that famous tragedy “for freshman students to imagine and rehearse life-saving choices in the face of armed violence, peer pressure, prejudice, and inadequate guidance,” as the company’s website notes.
Inhabiting the character of a king at TSC Summer Camp.
Then there are the many seasonal camps, teacher training sessions, and adult classes they offer. This includes work with the juvenile-justice system, the Veterans Administration, and others. “We serve those groups, and our community, with a variety of acting classes that we offer people, not necessarily so they’ll become actors, but to give them the joy of speaking verse and living in these plays, and experience the community it can provide,” says Shine. “So I always think of us as being a full-service organization.”
McCleary thinks a crucial part of such service is simply getting more people to speak Shakespeare’s words aloud. “I started to discover that many of our children in Memphis who were in high schools couldn’t read the Shakespeare text and that their reading levels were below par. And that’s when I decided that I should never come into these classes with paper or books again. We know the plays, and we come in and we speak the text, line by line behind them, so the students can then speak it for themselves and gain immediate ownership of the text.”
The company’s Free Shout-Out Shakespeare Series is the ultimate testament to the power of speaking these words. “Shout-Out was a brainchild of Dan’s,” says Shine. “He wanted us to be out in the community, almost like a Shakespeare pop-up. It used to be sort of like guerilla Shakespeare, and now it’s really become something to reckon with. Now we’ll send 12, 13, 14 actors out with a set, costumes, full productions at places where you wouldn’t normally imagine a play might be [staged]. We think that Shakespeare belongs in the lives of everybody.”
The series was especially welcome during the first years of Covid, but it predated the pandemic by several years. And even now, it continues to gain momentum. As McCleary sees it, it “comes from us taking Shakespeare to others, as opposed to counting on others coming to us for Shakespeare.”
Free Shout-Out Shakespeare Series: The Comedy of Errors (dir. Dan McCleary, 2024). Bringing the Bard to Bartlett at BPAC.
The Play’s the Thing
The populism inherent in the Shout-Out Series is at the heart of Tennessee Shakespeare Company, and it colors every production. As McCleary explains, “Shakespeare was a revolutionary. He was a rebel. And probably the place he would have most loved living in, maybe one of the top three or four places in the country, would be Memphis. We’re such a boiling pot, and he populates his stage with everything and everyone and every gender and every color and every religion and every ethnicity that the world had. If he hadn’t been so close to Queen Elizabeth and King James, he could have been hanged — you weren’t supposed to put those people on stage. He gets away with it.”
Grace of Grace: McCleary as Coriolanus, bringing deep readings of a tragic Shakespeare character into the mosh pit.
That, in turn, means that TSC productions are not reverent, solemn affairs. They are as boisterous, bawdy, and brazen as life itself, and therein lies their power, beyond the exquisite language. “Our Memphis audiences love to call and respond. Shakespeare would have loved it. He loves audiences that are very, very actively engaged, especially our young people. It’s like going to a football game. Some of our young people get told, ‘Don’t be loud or don’t talk during the show,’ and that’s true. You don’t want to be rude. But if you’re talking and being active in response to what’s [happening] on stage, actors love nothing better.”
Such an ethos was brought to the fore in TSC’s last production, The Grace of Grace: Shining a Light Through Shakespeare’s Broken Villains, an irreverent, yet surprisingly moving mash-up of passages highlighting Shakespeare’s bad guys, assembled by McCleary himself. As I was seated for Grace of Grace, I first noticed that the set was not your typical Elizabethan fare. Graffiti smeared the walls; a bathtub and other detritus were strewn about; and a single, glowing microphone right out of a pro wrestling ring dropped from the ceiling. Then McCleary himself emerged, face streaked in red, to the choogling opening riff of Ozzy Osbourne’s “I Don’t Wanna Stop.” As he and Lauren Gunn took on roles both malicious and comic from the Bard’s pages, their costumes were decidedly Goth, as more metal jams, Creedence Clearwater Revival, and even Taylor Swift chimed from the speakers occasionally, to great dramatic effect.
Free Shout-Out Shakespeare Series: Macbeth (dir. Stehanie Shine, 2022). Back outdoors at The Dixon Gallery and Gardens.
Meanwhile, the entire show worked on a more contemplative level, presenting three “arguments” on how to interpret these complex characters, including “Villainy as a Gateway to Compassion,” “Villainy as Freedom for Self-Responsibility,” and “Villainy as Sacrifice,” and making some pointed political observations along the way. No dry lecture, devoid of the show’s stage fighting, howling, and death, could have conveyed such themes as compellingly. This show took the Bard into the mosh pit.
Othello (dir. Dan McCleary, 2010). Paul Bernardo (Iago) and Johnny Lee Davenport (Othello) at St. George’s Episcopal Church.
With the wrap of that production, one of TSC’s “Enhanced Literary Salons,” the remainder of the 2024-25 season is in Shine’s hands. First, on March 2nd, she’ll direct another Literary Salon, “Lady Augusta Gregory, Revivalist of a Country,” with readings of works by Gregory, the co-founder of the Irish Literary Theatre who figured prominently in Ireland’s literary revival and the revolutionary spirit that it fomented. Then the company will present, from April 4-19, Saint Joan, George Bernard Shaw’s exploration of faith, politics, and humanity via the story of Joan of Arc, also directed by Shine.
These two back-to-back explorations of Irish literature and drama fit neatly into the company’s brief of presenting works embodying the best of the English language, with richly nuanced characters. As McCleary sees it, Shakespearean language has an affinity with both the Irish and the Southern literary traditions, and the company often delves into both for its non-Elizabethan material. “I really want the Southern sound,” he says. “I need the Southern actors speaking it.” The language of Southern and Irish writers, he says, “has a lot of bite in it, it’s got fight in it. It’s got a lot of grit to it, and it’s got elegance and grace to it. And so I look for scripts that have that in it. That’s my own Southern sensibility.”
TSC’s permanent home at the edge of Shelby Farms Park since 2017.
Finally, bringing the focus back to TSC’s public service as the season closes, The Children’s Literacy Gala on May 3rd will help raise funds for the company’s work in the V.A. Hospital, the Juvenile Justice System, and Shelby County schools. Such a breadth of activity is a mark of how successful the company has been here, as is its dedicated headquarters in Cordova.
“For approximately 55 percent of our audience, our performance is going to be the first time they experience the role of, say, Othello. For the rest of their lives, they will be harkening back to our actors and what they do with this role as the standard-bearers for what the role should be.
“When we bring actors here, we tell them, ‘Look, this is not where you come to get famous. This is where you come to do the sacred work of the art of the actor, and this is where you’re going to change a lot of people’s lives for the better. You’ll be the very first rung on the ladder that gets them climbing, with an investment in reading, or an investment in poetry, or an investment in Shakespeare, or better yet, an investment in themselves and in their communities.”
For more information about Tennessee Shakespeare Company, including upcoming performances, visit tnshakespeare.org.
