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American Players Theatre
T      he 1985 American Players
        Theatre season previews
        Shakespeare's The Com-
        edy of Errors June 25 in
Spring Green. Two new produc-
tions for the company will be Julius
Caesar (opening June 29) and The
Merchant of Venice (opening Au-
gust 16). Last season's highly suc-
cessful The Merry Wives of Wind-
sor will be recast and brought
forward. On August 30 three one-
act plays by the great Russian An-
ton Chekhov will open: "The Bear,"
The Proposal," and "On the Harm-
fulness of Tobacco." The summer
schedule runs for sixteen weeks with
over 100 performances. This marks
the sixth season of this remarkable
company, the only professional,
solely classical repertory theatre in
America.
  From the first 1980 season the
company has drawn rave reviews
from theatre critics from the Wall
Street Journal, the Minneapolis
Tribune, the Chicago Tribune as
well as from the local press.
In the beginning
Tn 1971 Randall Duk Kim, Anne
I Occhiogrosso, and Charles
Bright were in New York City.
Randall, a native of Hawaii, had
performed at Joseph Papp's New
York Shakespeare Festival and the
Champlain Shakespeare Festival
and in New York with the Ameri-
can Place Theatre and the Direct
Theatre. He had worked across the
country with the Yale Repertory
Theatre in New Haven, the Amer-
ican Conservatory Theatre in San
Francisco, and the Guthrie Theatre
6/Wisconsin Academy Review/March 1985
By Patricia Powell