Stables Theater: May 25-July 8: "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)"; June 16-Sept.
His death was announced that night by his wife, the singer Cleo Laine, at a concert at the Stables, the theater in the town of Milton Keynes that the two of them had run for 40 years.
Perhaps even more welcome, for reasons of novelty, were staples of the Sondheim musical theater stable in gratifyingly unanticipated hands.
Ms. Shelton called the criticism hurtful but conceded that it might be healthy, in this shakiest of art forms, to have a theater stable enough to incite eye rolling, not least so a new generation of upstarts can propose its own audacious solutions.
Cornelia Dike, 72, owned the old Stabler house, but had six lodgers, like Sointu Syrjala, a stage designer of Finnish ancestry, who restored the stage of Ford's Theater in Washington in the 1960s.
But he also faces the challenge of keeping the theater financially stable amid an uncertain economic picture, Mr. Eustis said.
She found a more stable family in the theater, she said, as her mother — a singer and Playboy centerfold — and her father had a tempestuous relationship.
Then there was marching down the aisle to get his diploma, now made up in clown face, the classmate I had kissed onstage, playing ingenue, Muriel McComber, in Eugene O'Neill's only comedy, Ah, Wilderness!, performed in Avery, a former riding stable turned into a theater, only he wasn't wearing clown face then, he was playing the romantic lead.
Working with a casting director, the theater recruited a stable of theater regulars, including Tracie Thoms, Carrie Preston, Terry O'Quinn, Bobby Cannavale, Kathleen Chalfant, Jefferson Mays and Kristine Nielsen.
A stack of monitors displays a flower, the stable focus of a moving theater, a magnet.
