Shakespeare’s miniature world of theater

By Johna Strickland - Argus Observer
Sunday, July 1, 2007 12:43 AM PDT

Nyssa - If William Shakespeare lived with Nyssa’s Garry Fife, he’d have to rethink the production of his plays.

Instead of humans roaming the stage in costume and character, dolls or puppets as tall as toothpicks would take the stage in Fife’s miniature Globe theatre.

Likely, these mini-Shakespearians would have all moving parts if Shakespeare asked Fife to turn his crafty hand to the task.

Fife, 70, built his model of the Globe for a high school English teacher in 1956.

“One of my school assignments was to build this for Clyde Swisher,” Fife said.

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Swisher had his class reading Shakespeare — Fife said he hasn’t read Shakespeare since — and needed a senior project for Fife.

“I liked to build things and he knew it,” Fife said. “I think one of the things was that I was talented.”

Armed with a picture of the Globe Swisher gave him and what knowledge of Shakespearian stages Fife had gleaned from class assignments, Fife began the work he estimated took a month or two.

Fife used quarter-inch plywood to give the hexagon-shaped structure walls and a roof. He made each side of the hexagon 12 inches long. Total height is 12 inches, diameter 2 feet. Fife cut the pieces with a handsaw, glued them together and varnished the wood adding dashes of green paint for the roof.

The inch tall railing for the stands took hours on its own. Fife started with a long narrow piece of pine and toothpicks.

After marking holes in the pine, Fife drilled them out, cut toothpicks to fit and put the whole thing together with glue.

Fife gave the theatre to Swisher for use in the classroom — a classroom Fife’s children attended, Garry’s wife Karen said.

“He taught Garry and all our children except our daughter. He’d retired by then,” Karen said.

When the Nyssa school burned the Fifes’ son had just been elected student body president and Swisher had happened to take the Globe home.

Thirty-five years after his first venture into crafting the Globe, Fife refurbished it at Swisher’s request.

Fife said he’s never been trained in woodworking but his family history is deep in contracting and building. Fiddling with wood or metal, though, has been a lifelong passion.

“I like building little things,” Fife said. “All my life, when I was a kid, I built my own toys, couldn’t afford others.”

Perhaps this is why the energetic Fife has spent the first two years of his three-year-old retirement remodeling his house, crafting a new tool board and building a china hutch into a wall.

Could this boundless energy and the urge to clasp a tool be a side effect of Fife’s childhood bout with rheumatic fever?

“My mother had me in a strait jacket. I wasn’t supposed to move,” Fife said.

Who knows?

But Karen knows he can build a dandy little pull out spice rack and fold-off-the-wall table.

“Garry’s a perfectionist,” Karen said. “Whatever he does, he does very meticulously.”