For the past several summers, I have traveled to an array of summertime theaters and reported back to CityBeat readers about what I’ve seen, encouraging them to travel elsewhere for some worthy entertainment. I’ve visited the Stratford and Shaw festivals in Canada and the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in West Virginia. This summer, I headed to Spring Green, Wisconsin, to take in five of the shows produced by American Players Theatre (APT) for its 2025 season, which opened in April and continues through early November. APT is nearly 500 miles from Cincinnati, making for a drive of close to eight hours. That’s a long trek, but it’s completely worth it.
APT has been around since 1980, when it was created on 110 acres of wooded farmland in rural Wisconsin with the intention of staging plays by Shakespeare in an open-air amphitheater. The first performance there was A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By the mid-1980s, it added other classic playwrights to its repertoire, and more recently, it has occasionally staged a world premiere. Each season offers nine productions in rotating repertory using the Hill Theatre, which seats 1,088, and the newer indoor Touchstone Theatre, a freestanding black-box with seating for 200. Both venues are reached by gravel paths that wind through the woods, and both are surrounded by a lush forest. The Hill Theatre is extremely flexible, often incorporating some of the surrounding vegetation when a play’s story needs a natural setting.
A typical APT season plays to more than 110,000 people, who come from across the upper Midwest. An acting company of 40 professionals work throughout the season; many of them play multiple roles. The performers do not use body microphones; they are coached to project their voices, which are modestly amplified by area mics. Their voices often mingle with bird songs and nighttime insect sounds.
Here are some notes on the shows I saw:
ANNA IN THE TROPICS by Nilo Cruz. This 2003 Pulitzer Prize winner is the story of a family-owned cigar factory in 1929 Florida. In a tradition beginning in Cuba, a “lector” is hired to read novels to the women employees who roll cigars. In this story, he shares Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina with a Cuban-American woman and her daughters who are soon swooning over — and identifying with —this passionate, romantic tragedy. As the play unfolds, the events of the novel become uncannily parallel to the lives of the characters, for better and for worse. It’s a beautiful, poetic piece of theater, full of music and steamy interactions. Lector Juan Julian (Ronald Román-Meléndez) charms each woman, much to the dismay of a husband of one daughter and an uncle who wants to be rid of the distraction and automate the daily work. The clash is tempestuous, but there’s always time for some sinuous cigar smoke to waft through the night air at the Hill Theatre.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM by William Shakespeare was APT’s very first Shakespeare production back in 1980, and it’s been produced several times to satisfied audiences. It works perfectly at the Hill amphitheater, since most of the story of romantic mismatches and confusion happens in an enchanted Athenian forest. Director David Daniel made an interesting casting decision: Puck, the sprite who carries out the bidding of the fairy king Oberon (Jim DeVita) is played by a pair of rambunctious, high-energy actors who race up and down the theater’s aisles. Joshua M. Castille performs using American Sign Language. He and Casey Hoekstra sometimes speak together, sometimes separately, as playful halves of the mischievous role. The “rude mechanicals” who amateurishly stage a skit are the comic heart of the production, especially Sam Luis Massaro as the preening goofball Bottom who ends up with an ass’s head. (He was the ill-tempered uncle in Anna in the Tropics.)
THE BARBER AND THE UNNAMED PRINCE by Gavin Dillon Lawrence. A world premiere commissioned by APT is being staged indoors in the intimate Touchstone Theatre. It’s the story of a gentrifying neighborhood in Washington, D.C. in 2012. The story swirls around Kofi (David Alan Anderson), a stubborn, proud Black barber who refuses to give up his shop even as the African American businesses around him are disappearing, replaced by upscale residents and businesses, mostly white. His son Prince (Jonathan Gardner), a good student, is eager to move on, but he’s also being drawn into bad behavior. Others frequenting the shop offer opinions and recollections, especially Smitty (Cedric G. Young), who has visions about ancestors captured in Africa and brought to slavery in North America. The death of an actual local D.C. musician, funk/go-go band leader Chuck Brown, is a sign of changing times; his music pervades the show. Lawrence’s script features wry humor, but a pervading air of sadness and a tragic ending make this a memorable production — one certainly inspired by playwright August Wilson.
THE WINTER’S TALE by William Shakespeare. This infrequently produced play was written toward the end of Shakespeare’s life. It opens with a tragic tale about the foolishly jealous King Leontes (Nate Burger), who wrongly accuses his pregnant Queen Hermione (Laura Rook) of an affair. His obsession leads to a disastrous trial and then her death following her daughter’s birth. Following intermission, the story jumps forward 16 years when the repentant, guilt-ridden Leontes surprisingly reunites with his teenaged daughter Perdita (Molly Martinez-Collins), thought abandoned but raised by some very comic shepherds (David Daniel and Josh Krause). It ends happily with an unlikely magical twist. This was another Hill Theatre production that took special advantage of the forest growth around and behind the stage.
FALLEN ANGELS by Noël Coward. The hilarious high point of the APT shows I attended was this classic farce by the erudite British playwright. It was onstage during a sunny Saturday matinee, so the Hill Theatre’s stage and part of the audience were shaded by a gauzy canopy over a swanky 1920s art deco London flat. It’s the story of two married women, bored with their mundane husbands, who learn that a suave Frenchman they each had premarital affairs with has come to London, seeking to reconnect. Phoebe Gonzalez (the naïve, romantic younger daughter in Anna in the Tropics) is petite, tart Julia Sterroll; Laura Rook (the wronged Hermione in The Winter’s Tale) is willowy, anxious Jane Banbury. Their antic performances of Coward’s witty, high-speed dialogue fuel this hurtling comedy, and it also features some very elaborate and well-executed physical slapstick. Colleen Madden played Saunders, a saucy Scots maidservant full of profound wisdom about any topic that arises, based on her seemingly endless (and unbelievable) series of life experiences. Amusingly, the sexy Maurice Duclos is played by Ronald Román-Meléndez, the lector from Anna in the Tropics. Two other familiar faces in this cast: Nate Burger (King Leontes in The Winter’s Tale) is Julia’s husband Fred, and Sam Luis Massaro (previously seen as the angry uncle in Anna in the Tropics and foolish Nick Bottom in Midsummer Night’s Dream) is Jane’s dense spouse. All in all, a bravura demonstration of the versatility of APT’s acting company.
More than two months of performances remain for anyone willing to head to Wisconsin. The shows I didn’t see: William Inge’s 1953 drama Picnic; Yasmina Reza’s three-actor comedy Art; and Nina Raines’s Tribes, about a young man who’s the only deaf member of a dysfunctional family. (It was staged here in Cincinnati back in 2014 by Ensemble Theatre.)
Tickets and information: americanplayers.org.
This article appears in Aug 20 – Sep 2, 2025.