An Unexpected Bright Spot in Theater? Look to Wisconsin.

For a regular theatergoer, a recent July evening in rural Wisconsin was peak surreal.

It could have been the sight of an amphitheater packed to its 1,075-seat capacity for a weeknight performance of the fairly obscure French comedy “Ring Round the Moon.”

Or maybe it was that the actors didn’t have mics, which is a rarity nowadays. From my seat, I could see audience members leaning in, transfixed by those unamplified voices.

“They’re here to listen,” Brenda DeVita, the artistic director of American Players Theater, said of the faithful who flock to Spring Green, about an hour west of Madison.

A.P.T., in its 45th season, describes itself as a language-based company, which explains why it has doubled down on idiosyncratic choices in the current theatrical landscape. One is not doing musicals. Another is eschewing mics.

That last is partly a practical choice since A.P.T. productions — nine this season, with the last closing on Nov. 10 — are done in repertory. This means the actors are always busy rehearsing or performing, leaving little spare time to add microphones to tech rehearsals. But banking on the glory of the human voice is primarily an artistic decision: Nothing comes between the actors, their words and the public.

“My first question was ‘Is it miked?’” the New York-based troupe member Triney Sandoval said, recalling an early conversation with Carey Cannon, an associate artistic director. “Everyone has switched to mics and I really don’t like it — it’s hard to tell where the voice is coming from.”

I certainly always knew who was speaking and from where during “Much Ado About Nothing,” another show at the Hill amphitheater. Even when someone was pretend-lurking in the brush off the side of the stage, every word remained distinct.

“Often people will say, ‘Oh, it’s magic,’” said Vanessa Stalling, who is directing Nick Payne’s “Constellations” at A.P.T.’s indoor venue, the 201-seat Touchstone Theater. “But it’s not magic: There’s rigor and work and intentionality behind it.”

One of A.P.T.’s major distinctions is that it has a dedicated voice and text program, and assigns one of its nine coaches to each production. Their purview includes dialects, dramaturgy and the techniques necessary to modulate indoors and project outdoors. Breathing is key, for example, as well as posture. “You don’t want your head to be wagging around,” Sara Becker, the program’s director, explained. “You want to point your mouth toward a hard surface, almost like playing pool, where you’re banking a shot.” (At the Hill, this usually means targeting the eaves at the back of the auditorium so the sound can bounce back rather than disperse into the air.)

Naturally this extends to helping the performers deeply engage with text and cadence. Gavin Lawrence, a member of the core acting company who directed August Wilson’s “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” this summer, mentioned that an actor in that play had been amazed to receive coaching. “People tend to think that August Wilson’s language is simple because it’s just Black vernacular,” Lawrence said. “But it’s just like a meter in Shakespeare: If you change a word or a syllable, you change the rhythm, you change the musicality. The voice and text people help us use the language to kind of catapult the truth, the emotion all the way to the back row. It’s hard work and that’s why I think a lot of us keep coming back, because we can always get better at it.”

Founded by Charles Bright, Randall Duk Kim and Anne Occhiogrosso, A.P.T. kicked off in 1980 with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and “Titus Andronicus.” Such was the focus on European classics that it took 12 years to get an American play, “Our Town,” on the boards. David Frank,  a former artistic director, brought in pieces by such wits as Sheridan and Shaw in the 1990s, before DeVita further expanded the boundaries in the mid-2000s.

DeVita started as an actress and landed in Spring Green when her husband, Jim, was cast in the 1995 season’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Henry V” and “She Stoops to Conquer.” After becoming the company manager that year, she was named associate artistic director in 2004 and artistic director 10 years later. Under her leadership, the voice and text department was developed, as were A.P.T.’s core company and the acting apprentice program. She has also moved the programming goal post, starting with plays by 20th-century American giants like Miller, O’Neill, Williams, Hansberry and Wilson — already considered classics everywhere else, but newbies at a place where the 19th century still felt a little daring.

DeVita then used the Touchstone, which opened in 2009, to program plays by Stoppard, Fugard and Albee, followed by contemporary works including Jen Silverman’s “The Moors,” Tarell Alvin McCraney’s “The Brothers Size” and, this season, the world premiere of Michael Hollinger’s “The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool.”

Now that the diversification of programming is part of a national conversation about theater, A.P.T. is expanding initiatives it had already started, slowly but surely. “It was part of Brenda’s vision to challenge the people who live here to say, ‘There are other ways of thinking, there are other cultures who have fables and stories to be told,’” said Dale R. Smith, an A.P.T. board member.

The organization seems to be navigating those waters more smoothly than many of its peers, partly because the artists are involved in the process. Lawrence, for example, said the company’s leadership was “not just talking the talk, but actually walking the walk when it comes to diversity and inclusion, and looking at ourselves in the mirror and saying, ‘Oh, we’ve been doing this wrong. We need to get this better.’”

The importance of fostering relationships is also a company hallmark: between staff and artists, institution and audience. This is a theater that understands that it must sustain a base level of faith so that enough of the patrons will follow on the rides. “I like the experimental stuff, something I would never pick for myself,” said Carol Diggelman, a decades-long regular who drives from Milwaukee with her husband, Bob, and had just seen “The Virgin Queen Entertains Her Fool.” “I sort of let it percolate. I like all of it, actually.”

Returning cast members help lend a sense of continuity, and of loyalty, for the public. “We love the fact that we get to see these actors every summer in different roles, and over the years it’s been fun to watch them,” said Abby DeLong, a Madison resident. “The other thing is, it’s always quality. We’ve never seen a play here that we thought was subpar.”

A SENSE OF OCCASION begins before the shows, when theatergoers turn up for some tailgating A.P.T.-style: The woodsy grounds near the parking are dotted with tables, benches and gas grills. After the pregame, visitors make their way to the venues on lit paths winding up between the trees (shuttles are available for those with mobility issues).

Once they are in their seats, those audiences stick it out. “When it rains, you think people are going to leave but they pull out their ponchos, put them on and wait,” the actor Chiké Johnson said. “We’ve performed in the rain because we were like, ‘OK, they’re sitting, they’re watching, so we’re going to do the show for them.’ They’re hardcore,” he continued, laughing. A couple of people even described A.P.T. patrons as “the Packers fans of theater.”

Mind you, the actors themselves are a hardy bunch. Some plays have scenes that require an actor to pretend to be asleep or dead, which means lying motionless while resisting the assaults of the area’s many, many bugs.

“Here’s the positive side of mosquitoes: I think it bonds the actors,” the costume designer Rachel Anne Healy said. “They love each other and if they see someone suffering underneath a cloth — because you can have a mosquito trapped under there and you can do nothing — they will shoo the mosquitoes away.”

As in any large family, the willingness to chip in is necessary. In one breath, DeVita was talking about funding and in another, she was marveling at a piece of scenery for the production of “Dancing at Lughnasa” she’s directing. It doesn’t come as a huge surprise to learn that she grew up on an Iowa farm with 15 siblings and a mother prone to retorting “Get a grip.”

Practicality and ingrained thriftiness likely helped A.P.T. when the annus horribilis of 2020 hit. After sinking to just under 50,000 in 2021 from roughly 107,500 in 2019, attendance rebounded to about 98,650 in 2023 and should be in a similar ballpark this year.

Meanwhile, expenses have risen to $8.8 million in 2023 from $6.8 million in 2019. Costs for supplies have increased and belt-tightening is on every department’s mind. Rather than create costumes from scratch for every production, the designers are encouraged to dip into the company’s extensive stock.

Like most theater companies, A.P.T. has also rethought its way of working: It has adopted a five-day workweek, with actors doing five shows a week on average, and it has expanded its number of understudies after illness-related cancellations increased in recent years — the acting company numbers 47 this year, including a few who only understudy.

And so for the first time in three decades, A.P.T. showed an operating deficit in 2023. It was covered by reserve funds, which the managing director, Sara Young, described as “robust,” but long-term solutions to financial health are needed. Which is where APT runs into Wisconsin problems.

“No. 1, we don’t have a lot of headquarters, and many of them are Milwaukee-centered,” the board member Shana R. Lewis said. “The other problem is that our Wisconsin government does not support the arts. We are 49th or 50th in the country.” (In fact, it’s dead last.)

What the theater does have is very loyal supporters. “Some of the most powerful families, certainly in the greater Madison area, are emotionally invested in us,” said Smith, the board member. “But I’d say the secret sauce is individual donors.” Tellingly, individual giving to operations was up 38 percent from 2019 to 2023, and the board is strengthening that bond while also expanding the endowment, which has grown to more than $13 million, up from $13,500 a decade ago.

Because tough times demand mutual trust, fairness and equity remain key values. The top salaries are comfortable for the area but low compared to what many in similar leadership positions are drawing: DeVita and Young each earn just over $118,000 a year.

“I have to be able to look at my artists and artisans and ask them to do really difficult things, and if I’m ashamed and I’m somehow hiding what I make, I couldn’t do my job,” DeVita said. “That’s not noble — that’s what we signed up for here.”

And at the end of the day, purpose matters at American Players Theater. “The thing that hooked me was just working my butt off onstage, drenched in sweat, and then you get out of costume and you step outside, and you’re under this canopy of stars and it’s just beautiful,” Lawrence said. “You feel like you’ve done something worthwhile, and you feel like you’ve made some kind of impact in human beings’ lives.”