Globe of America seeks a shipboard Shakespeare

David Fox-Brenton beheld the gloomy, cavernous former boiler room of the Queen Mary -- docked, as usual, in Long Beach.

“Can’t you see ‘Macbeth’ in here?” he asked. “You don’t have to do much. Just throw up the lights in the recesses.”

Actually, a few other tasks take precedence on the to-do list of this producer and actor who plans to bring Shakespeare to the Queen Mary: Raise at least $500,000, hire talent, start a children’s theater company. Then transform an adjacent exhibit hall of the old ocean liner, where he hopes that audiences of up to 500 people can see “Much Ado About Nothing” as early as November.

Only after all that has been accomplished does he plan to turn the boiler room into a home for tragedies such as “Macbeth.”

The big ship’s foundation is providing an estimated $250,000 in in-kind facilities and services to help launch Fox-Brenton’s project, which he calls the Globe of America.

The Queen Mary plans are actually a downsized version of the Globe of America’s recent goals. Fox-Brenton formed the company in Minnesota, where he spotted an 1890-vintage brewery building on the Mississippi that reminded him of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre on the Thames.

After the owner of the building -- the city of Minneapolis -- turned down his proposal, Fox-Brenton turned to the private sector and found allies at the area’s mammoth Mall of America. He drew up plans for a village that would have abutted the mall. Replicas of the important buildings in Shakespeare’s life, including theaters, would be filled with some of the mall’s millions of patrons. They would see plays, shop, dine and stay at an inn -- all under a giant climate-controlled dome.

That dome, however, raised the projected cost to $186 million. Fox-Brenton says he had commitments of $25 million -- until, in the wake of Sept. 11, 2001, the mall was listed as a potential terrorist target, after which the pledges dried up.

So Fox-Brenton turned to California, where his most conspicuous enterprise as a producer took place more than two decades ago. He created and ran the California Shakespearean Festival in Visalia, between Bakersfield and Fresno, from 1976 to 1981. The festival culminated in two summer seasons that drew praise from New York as well as California critics. But it couldn’t pay the bills.

This time, Fox-Brenton has picked a location that’s within an easy drive of millions, some of whom already go to the Queen Mary and other Long Beach attractions. Some of the same staff who worked at Visalia have joined the Long Beach project.

Fox-Brenton says he hopes the area’s modern “Medicis” will help create a nonprofit that might eventually expand beyond shipboard theater to include Elizabethan shops and cafes -- so for-profit merchants would provide rent revenue for the nonprofit theater.

“It may catch on,” says South Coast Repertory artistic director Martin Benson, who remembers the Visalia festival and has recently advised Fox-Brenton. Benson notes that the Queen Mary, originally a British ship, might be a good match for classical British theater. Fox-Brenton “is great at developing ambitious plans. But it’s a question of whether the funding will be there.”

For now, the Globe of America consists primarily of a shipboard acting academy that began this month, with six students. The plan is to begin the children’s theater in the spring and attract audiences to “Much Ado” in the fall -- if enough money is raised. Then audiences might discover whether the Globe of America is much ado about something -- or nothing.