John Shea (6/02 Last Call - "The Tempest")
Excerpt from Ferrini Productions 6/02: John Shea | Last Call
Last Call: Dreams, Main Street and the Search for Community
A non-fiction film by John Stanton and Henry Ferrini
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LAST CALL: Dreams, Main Street, and the Search for Community is a look at how places like The Bosun's Locker help create that fragile ideal called community. It is a cautionary tale about how gentrification coupled with the runaway economy of the last two decades affected local culture.
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Narrated by Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and longtime summer resident Russell Baker, Last Call includes interviews with former Bosun's Locker owner Preston Manchester, Walter Beinecke, Jr., American Book Award winner Nat Philbrick (In the Heart of the Sea), Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author David Halberstam, actor John Shea, and a dozen folks who lived through those times and those changes. Last Call premiered in 2002 at the Nantucket Film Festival with three sold out screenings.
Credits
Henry Ferrini: Director of photography, editor
John Stanton: Writer, director, producer
Russell Baker: Narrator
Corky Laing: Music supervisor
© Ferrini Productions
Excerpt from Inquirer & Mirror 7/10/08: John Shea
The Bard’s influence far-reaching even today
By Joshua B. Gray
Long-time island resident and film, television and theater actor John Shea said that during the 1970s he also tried to bring such a festival to the shores of Nantucket. With his production of “The Tempest,” Shakespeare’s last play and one that was set on an island, Shea said staging the play proved to be no easy task. “As someone who tried to bring Shakespeare to the island, I learned how difficult a process it was,” he said. “I cast using only my friends at the time. Drunken sailors were played by real drunken sailors out of the Bosun’s Locker (a former Main Street bar). I know how hard it is to do Shakespeare, but especially on the island. How lucky the island is to have someone with her vision.”
© Inquirer & Mirror
Excerpt from Mahon About Town 12/15/10: John Shea
Looking Back At “Last Call”
by John Stanton
I remember John Shea telling a wonderful story about being on Nantucket fresh from the Yale Drama School and wanting to put on Shakespeare’s play “The Tempest.” It was a long and rambling story about trying to put on a play in which the audience would follow the actors to several locations on the island, which stood in for Prospero’s island of exile in the play. It was a story filled with the energy of youth, with cooks and carpenters, fisherman and waitresses, that he tried to turn into actors. It ended, like much of that decade, with the realization that, “there was just too much craziness going on in those days to pull it off.” It was perfect. I tried for a month to fit it into the film. In one edit version the film began with a series of island images played out over Shea’s voice telling the story. But it ended up on what, in the days when films were made with real film, was called the cutting room floor. It exists only on some piece of videotape tucked away in a box in my office.
© Mahon About Town
Excerpt from Nantucket Today 6/14: John Shea
John Shea films a sense of place in Grey Lady
by John Stanton
Somewhere there is a videotape of John Shea telling a story about his efforts to produce a version of Shakespeare's play "The Tempest." It was filmed for a documentary, but not used in the final cut. He is remembering 1968, when he found his way to Nantucket.
The story has several typewriters set up on the bar of the infamous Bosun's Locker, pages of the play typed out and handed to the local commercial fisherman, waitresses, the hippies who had also gravitated to the island; those who would be the actors.
There was an expectation that the audience would follow the players to places around this island that would reflect the island home of Prospero. You can hear the memory of ambition and the certainty of youth in Shea's voice as he tells the story. It ends with a shrug of his shoulders. The recreational drugs and everyday madness of the decade finally overshadowed his efforts to make the play happen.
"To me Nantucket has always been like 'The Tempest,' Shea said recently, as he ordered a late supper at the Starlight, after a long day of production for his new film, "Grey Lady." It has been almost 50 years since those days in the late 1960s and much has happened in his career as an actor and director, but he still feels the same way about the island. "The social nobility, the islanders themselves, the Calibans, who are the heart and soul of the island and you never know until you life hear year-round," he said. "You can have a summer home here for 30 years, like I did, but you're only dating the Grey Lady. You don't marry the Grey Lady until you live here."
© Nantucket Today