The Rooted Voyageurs are back for a fourth season of “art without admission,” bringing free, open-air theater to parks, wineries, and farmers markets across the Hudson Valley and Berkshires. Their 2025 production: “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”—abridged, family-friendly, and joyfully chaotic—will pop up in locations from Hillsdale to Copake to Poughkeepsie, delivering a 90-minute mix of mischief, love, and enchanted donkey transformations to anyone who happens to stumble upon it.
“Someone comes by for strawberries or a bottle of rosé and walks into a full Shakespeare production,” says Devante Owens, the company’s artistic director and cofounder. “And then they stay. That flash-mobbed-by-Shakespeare moment—where people fall in love with the Bard again—is what I live for.”
Founded in 2022 by Owens and Zoe Wohlfeld, the Rooted Voyageurs operate on a simple, radical principle: theater belongs to everyone. There are no tickets, no gates, no barriers—just actors, audiences, and the occasional thunderstorm. “The weather is always a challenge,” Owens admits. “But we work closely with our venues to make sure we have shelter or rain dates. You have to be flexible when your stage is the great outdoors.”
This year’s play selection, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” might seem like the obvious crowd-pleaser—fairies, love potions, pratfalls—but Owens sees deeper currents running through it. “Yes, it’s funny and magical,” he says. “But it’s also about how power—misused or unchecked—can upend the world. A father threatening his daughter with death for defying him, a climate in chaos because of the fairies’ domestic dispute, a worker turned into a donkey for someone else’s entertainment. Shakespeare doesn’t stop there, though—he offers us a path to redemption.”
Owens views the play as a blueprint for change. “The path out of chaos isn’t passive,” he says. “It takes reflection, action, and the will to imagine something better.”
The play features Abigail St. John as Hermia and Snout, Allison Galen as Puck, Bernardo Brandt as Theseus and Oberon, Dana M. Harrison as Bottom and Egeus, Francesca Anne Maurino as Cobweb and Starveling, Francesca Hansen-DiBello as Helena and Snug, Joslyn Eaddy Meléndez as Demetrius and Quince, Kate Nourse as Philostrate, Tanya Gorlow as Titania and Hippolyta, and Taylor Slonaker as Lysander, Mustardseed, and Flute.
Rooted Voyageur’s mission—community-building through accessible, resonant theater—has only grown sharper since the company’s founding. “As support for the arts becomes more precarious, it’s crucial to bring theater down to its core: a gathering of people, a story, a shared moment,” says Owens. “Our bare-bones approach is intentional. You don’t need a revolving stage to understand love, jealousy, or transformation. You just need actors and an audience.”
This summer, the Rooted Voyageurs once again bet that Shakespeare in a park—or a vineyard—can be enough to reawaken a sense of shared humanity. As Owens puts it: “Theater teaches us how to see each other again. And if it can do that while making us laugh, cry, and shout? Bliss.”
This summer’s performances include:
Hillsdale Hamlet Park in Hillsdale: Friday, June 13 at 7pm
Marist University in Poughkeepsie: Saturday, June 14 at 2pm
Sand Lake Center for the Arts in Averill Park: Sunday, June 22 at 7pm
The Spencertown Town Park in Spencertown: Friday, June 27 at 7pm
Les Trois Emme Winery in New Marlborough, Massachusetts: Sunday, June 29 and Saturday, July 12 at 3pm
Little Apple Cidery in Hillsdale: Saturday, July 5 at 3pm
Millbrook Winery in Millbrook: Sunday, July 6 at 3pm
Stable Gate Winery in Castleton-on-Hudson: Sunday, July 13 at 2pm
Copake-Hillsdale Farmers’ Market: Saturday, July 19 at 11am
This article appears in June 2025.
