In the fall of 1987, James Madison University professor Ralph Alan Cohen taught a seminar on Shakespearean stagecraft built around Henry V. The following spring he staged it, using a warehouse space dressed up to look like an Elizabethan yard, with student Jim Warren playing the lead and fifteen actors covering every role Shakespeare had written for the scene. Nobody involved has claimed it was a great production. The cast had a good enough time that Warren suggested they take the idea on the road. Cohen said yes. He’s since explained the decision as a matter of principle: “If I said no, I would be denying that this stuff would work.”
That yes produced the Shenandoah Shakespeare Express, and the Express eventually produced the Blackfriars Playhouse, the only re-creation anywhere of Shakespeare’s indoor theater, which opened in downtown Staunton in September 2001 and turns 25 this year.
Fourteen High Schools and a Room Full of Scholars
The company started cheap and stayed cheap on purpose. Its first tour hit fourteen rural high schools with a trimmed-down Richard III, no sets to speak of, actors doubling up roles, pacing kept brisk because nobody had the budget for anything else. Two years in, the company played Julius Caesar for a conference room of Shakespeare scholars in Philadelphia. Cohen went in braced for humiliation. Instead the scholars loved it, and a prominent critic later wrote in Shakespeare Quarterly that he hadn’t thought about the plays the same way since seeing them perform. By 1992 the company was paying its actors and touring three shows a year, with stops at the Folger Shakespeare Library and dates overseas.
The idea for an actual building came from a cattle auction ring. A visiting scholar in 1996 asked Cohen if he knew Harrisonburg had an Elizabethan theater, then walked him to a stockyard: one door for animals coming in, one for animals going out, an auctioneer’s platform in the middle, functionally a theater in the round. Cohen borrowed the space for a scene and called the local paper, who sent a photographer. A former Staunton hotelier named Joe Harmon saw that photo and phoned Cohen with a question nobody had asked him before, would you be interested in building a real theater in Staunton.
That conversation sat mostly still for two years, a few meetings of a local boosters group and not much else. Then in 1998 a separate Richmond effort, aiming to build a Globe Theatre replica, approached Shenandoah Shakespeare about partnering. The Staunton talks picked up fast after that, and the ambition grew alongside them. Building a re-creation from scratch either way, the reasoning went, so why not re-create the specific building Shakespeare’s own company had performed in, the original indoor Blackfriars, gone from London since 1655 and never rebuilt anywhere in the 350 years since.
No blueprints of the original survived. Architect Tom McLaughlin worked from surviving Tudor buildings, court records, probate documents, and construction plans for later theaters influenced by the Blackfriars, with input from former Shakespeare’s Globe research director Andrew Gurr. The finished building, all timber, built of Virginia oak and fitted into a modern storefront on Beverley Street, cost just under $4 million and opened on schedule in September 2001, funded by a partnership between the city, Augusta County, the Commonwealth, and private donors.
The Week Payroll Almost Didn’t Clear
The theater nearly sank the organization that built it. By the mid-2000s, incoming business manager Tony Smith discovered in his first week on the job that the company didn’t have cash on hand to make payroll, even in weeks when it was otherwise flush. Smith called the finances what they were, the casual dysfunction typical of a creative nonprofit, and started treating the business side with the same discipline the actors brought to rehearsal. The education programs, the group ticket sales, the scholarly conferences that had grown up around the touring years turned out to be load-bearing, not extra, the thing actually keeping the lights on rather than a nice add-on to the mission. Grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Virginia Commission on the Arts stopped being optional and became structural. The organization posted its first profitable year not long after, and started building an endowment around the same time.
That near miss doesn’t make it into most of the anniversary materials, but it’s the part of the story that actually explains the outcome. Small-town arts projects open with grant money and a ribbon-cutting all the time and quietly fold once the excitement wears off. This one nearly did. What kept it from happening was unglamorous, better bookkeeping, an honest accounting of which programs actually paid the bills, and a willingness to lean on public arts funding instead of treating it as beneath a serious company.
Twenty-Five Years Later
The company formally became the American Shakespeare Center in 2005. It built the country’s first MFA program in Shakespeare and Performance with Mary Baldwin, started a recurring international scholarly conference, and picked up the Commonwealth’s Governor’s Arts Award in 2009 for turning Staunton into something people travel for. This year marks 25 seasons since that first performance in the Playhouse.
None of it was inevitable at any of the points along the way, a rented warehouse in Harrisonburg, a borrowed cattle ring, a newspaper photo that caught the wrong, or right, person’s eye, a payroll crisis that could have ended things quietly. The building that exists instead is timber joinery and candlelit staging modeled on a theater that vanished from London in 1655, tucked into a storefront on a street that also sells cigars and gelato a few doors down.