For years, the defining image of Hudson Valley Shakespeare has been temporary: a tent rising each summer, then disappearing just as quickly when the season ends. The performances lingered; the structure did not. That changes this summer.
With the opening of the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center, designed by Studio Gang architects, the company enters its first season in a permanent home—a 14,850-square-foot, open-air theater set on a 98-acre campus overlooking one of the most dramatic stretches of the Hudson River.
“It represents the work of many hands,” says artistic director Davis McCallum. “We have benefited enormously from the support and input of our community throughout the process.”
The project has been years in the making, catalyzed by a pivotal moment in 2019, when a parcel of land was offered to the company. “Almost a hundred acres of land overlooking the most majestic stretch of the Hudson River was gifted to a nonprofit theater company,” McCallum recalls. “Nothing like this has ever happened.”
The opportunity posed an immediate question: What kind of theater should they build? The obvious answer—an indoor, year-round venue—was ultimately rejected. “We said, ‘We don’t want to create an indoor theater,’” McCallum explains. “We’re Hudson Valley Shakespeare. Being in the place is essential to why we make the plays.”
Instead, the company doubled down on what had always set it apart. Designed by Studio Gang and built to LEED Platinum standards, the Scripps Theater Center is open to the landscape while offering protection from the elements—a structure that frames, rather than replaces, the environment around it.
That decision shapes everything that follows.
A Theater Built for Presence
For McCallum, theater begins with proximity—not just between actors, but between actors and audience. The new space amplifies that dynamic. Its three-quarter thrust brings spectators into close contact with the performance, while the surrounding landscape remains an active presence.
“There’s something hardwired into our psychology,” he says, describing the signature HVS staging in which actors approach from a distant horizon. “Seeing a group of figures approaching together—it makes your heart rate rise. It’s thrilling. It’s a little terrifying.”
The effect is elemental, even ritualistic. McCallum reaches for analogies that predate theater as we know it: gathering, watching, anticipating what happens when one group meets another.
That emphasis on fundamentals extends to the company’s aesthetic. “I prefer essentialism to minimalism,” he says. “It’s not about doing something small. It’s using the simplest elements to do something robust and full-blooded.”
In practice, that means stripping away excess while preserving scale—an approach that relies on actors, language, and audience attention rather than elaborate design.
It’s also a bet on something increasingly rare: sustained focus. “We’re in the attention economy,” McCallum acknowledges. “But I think there’s a counter movement. Come touch grass, get off your phones, look into somebody else’s eyes.” The theater, in this formulation, becomes less a product than a shared act—what McCallum describes as “acts of collective imagination.”
A Season in Conversation
The 2026 season reflects that philosophy while testing its range. Two Shakespeare plays anchor the lineup: “As You Like It” (June 10-September 18) directed by Miriam Laube, and “King Lear” (June 12-September 17), directed by McCallum. The pairing offers a study in contrast—comedy and tragedy, pastoral escape and political collapse—but also a shared concern with identity, family, and the structures that shape both.
For McCallum, “King Lear” carries particular weight this year. “My dad is King Lear’s age and he’s at the very end of his life,” he says. “My son is graduating from high school. Sometimes you just get the right play at the right moment in your life.”
Alongside Shakespeare is a new production of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg’s “Les Miserables” (August 12-September 27), directed by Jenn Thompson. Its inclusion continues a gradual evolution in HVS programming—one that predates McCallum but has accelerated under his leadership.
“Shakespeare was a new writer when he was putting those plays on stage,” he says. “It makes sense to put his plays in conversation with other great writing, including writers working today.”
The common thread is not genre but scale. McCallum describes the selections in cinematic terms: the ability to move between intimate human moments and broader social forces. “You feel the close-up,” he says, “but also the wide shot—society, justice, politics.”
That sensibility extends to the musical, which he sees as a natural fit despite its different form. Like Shakespeare, it relies on a large ensemble, direct audience address, and a sweeping narrative arc.
A Permanent Home, A Broader Horizon
If the aesthetic remains consistent, the infrastructure around it has changed dramatically. For decades, the company operated under the constraints of a seasonal lease. “We were performing in a theater that came down to zero and got packed away in trailers on Labor Day,” McCallum says.
The new campus removes that limitation. Performances now extend further into the fall, with plans to gradually push into October. That shift opens the door to expanded programming, including school matinees that bring students into direct contact with the plays they study.
It also enables new forms of engagement. Indoor spaces on the campus will host smaller events—cabaret nights, readings—during colder months, creating a year-round rhythm without abandoning the outdoor core of the experience.
Future phases include artist lodging, designed to house cast and crew on site, further integrating the company into the landscape and reducing the logistical friction of production.
Taken together, these changes shift HVS from a seasonal event to something closer to a cultural campus—a place to spend time before and after the performance, to gather, to participate.
The Question of Community
That word—community—comes up frequently in discussions of regional theater, often as a kind of shorthand. McCallum is more specific. “I believe that sharing space and acts of collective imagination is good for the human spirit,” he says.
For him, the appeal of theater lies not just in the work itself but in the act of gathering. Returning actors become familiar faces; audiences form their own continuity across seasons. “People want to feel like they are part of that circle of belonging,” he says.
The new campus is designed to reinforce that impulse. It’s less a destination than a setting for participation—closer, in McCallum’s analogy, to a camp than a hotel. “You have to put your energy into the center,” he says.
That ethos carries into special events like “Assembly: A Procession of American Luminaries,” part of the festival’s annual Highland Lights program. Taking place on July 4, the large-scale, ambulatory performance invites audiences to move through the landscape as it transforms—community-built lanterns illuminating the dark, a chorus rising from within the crowd, and figures from across American history called forth in a collective act of remembrance and renewal. Developed in collaboration with Processional Arts Workshop and composer Heather Christian, the piece unfolds not as spectacle but as participation, with Hudson Valley residents shaping everything from the lanterns to the voices that carry the score.
For all the changes, McCallum remains focused on continuity. When he talks about the new theater, he returns not to its architecture but to a moment: actors appearing on the horizon, moving toward the audience. “It’s the oldest trick in the book,” he says. “And it just works and works and keeps working.”
In that sense, the Samuel H. Scripps Theater Center is just an extension—a structure built to hold an experience that predates it. After decades of impermanence, Hudson Valley Shakespeare now has a stage of its own. What happens on it remains, as ever, contingent: on the weather, on the actors, on the audience, on that fragile and unpredictable exchange between them. The essential things haven’t changed at all.
