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Shakespearean performance brings back flood of memories

By Willys Peck

The deeper I sink in my descent into my dotage--August is my 84th birthday month--the more I find the past intruding into my thoughts. It doesn't take much to release a flood of memories on a wide range of subjects.

The most recent occurrence of this nature was a modern-dress production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream given by San Francisco Shakespeare Festival players in the Cupertino Memorial Park outdoor theater. It was an amazingly polished production, performed by professionals in the Actors Equity Association, and details such as sound and lighting were just right. What's more, Cupertino's Shakespeare in the Park is free, with voluntary contributions inoffensively sought.

So what am I doing writing a Saratoga column praising Cupertino? Well, at the risk of sounding too municipally chauvinistic, I'll say that this production was very Saratoga. We've had our Midsummer moments, thanks mainly to the late Dorothea Johnston, who has been a frequent subject of these columns. With this particular play, we're going back to 1934 and Miss Johnston's first production in the Theatre of the Glade, behind the old Saratoga Inn. The Inn was located on the site of its namesake, the Inn at Saratoga condos.

Olivia De Havilland, who had played the title role in Miss Johnston's Alice in Wonderland the previous year, played Puck in this initial Glade production. Olivia went from the Theatre of the Glade directly to Hollywood, appearing in Max Reinhardt's Hollywood Bowl production of Dream in 1934 and in the producer's movie version in 1935. But she wasn't Puck, she was Hermia.

That 1934 Glade presentation was the first one of Miss Johnston's productions that I had missed, since our family was away on vacation. That theatrical lady had me in her shows from my very early childhood. It wasn't acting talent--if there was any--that got me into her productions. It was a laryngeal quirk in my throat that enabled me to give bird calls, a condition that lasted until my voice changed.

So here I was, giving offstage bird calls in Miss Johnston's 1935 Glade production of As You Like It and playing the title role and chirping in her 1936 production of The Cricket on the Hearth. I even appeared onstage as the Spirit of the Cricket.

Other Theatre of the Glade Shakespeare productions included Romeo and Juliet in 1938; a repeat of As You Like It, minus my bird calls, in 1939; a repeat of Dream in 1940; and Merry Wives of Windsor in that year. The last Glade production, titled Distant Drums, was by a Marin County playwright and screenwriter Dan Totheroh.

Getting into this subject opens the door into my LIP service domain, and I'm not referring to the dictionary definition of "service with words only." That's LIP, not lip, since the former is the acronym for my Living In the Past tendency. It doesn't take much to activate it. For instance, in looking at the Village bar called the Bank, because that's what it had been, I think of the 1937 holdup, when the bank manager followed the bandit onto the street and fired his gun at the fleeing car.

I also think of the time, I'm pretty sure it was in the late 1930s, when the man who did janitorial work there killed himself with a gun before opening hours, and his body was found by the manager. The suicide's last name was Sylvester, and he lived in a cottage up the street that is now the Blue Rock Shoot. I never knew the man, but he had a couple of daughters who were in grammar school when I was.

The account I heard was that Sylvester had been in submarine service in World War I, and that experience had gotten him into some kind of condition where he heard a constant noise in his head that literally drove him out of his mind. He apparently saw death as the only solution.

Well, there are a lot more pleasant memories associated with the old Village, like barber Pat Bucaria playing his banjo between customers in his shop next to the post office, which was just down from the Bank. And it was nice to stop in for a Coke, or an ice cream cone, at the Saratoga Drug Store soda fountain, where the Golden Mirror is today. Life somehow seemed a lot simpler then, or maybe that's just the LIP service kicking in.