Ars Longa, Vita Brevis

Sixth Annual Blackfriars Conference

2012-01-05T21:12:00.000-05:00

During October I, and everyone else in the Mary Baldwin SAP (Shakespeare in Performance) program, was absorbed in preparations for the Sixth Annual Blackfriars Conference. The Blackfriars Conference is held every other year at the Blackfriars Playhouse, organized by staff at the American Shakespeare Center, and run with the help of SAP students. The Blackfriars Conference is a place where scholars and practitioners gather to “explore Shakespeare in the study and Shakespeare on the stage and to find ways that these two worlds -- sometimes in collision -- can collaborate.”

The Blackfriars Conference, or the attitude behind it, was a determining factor for me when picking a graduate school. The about quote is exactly the kind of work I am interested in, and I will be lucky enough to attend two conferences while I am a student.

The papers at the conference are mostly presented on stage in the Blackfriars Playhouse. Conference attendees are encouraged to use performance in their argument: papers that use actors are granted thirteen minutes; papers that don’t, ten. Half of the paper sessions are staffed with actors from the American Shakespeare Center and the other half with SAP students. I was fortunate to be one of those students and was able to participate in several papers.

Participating as an actor presents several challenges. You get the text 1-4 days before you have to perform it. There is virtually no rehearsal time other than a tightly scheduled 15 minute meeting with the scholar. As an actor, you want help the scholar get across their argument, you want to perform what the scholar is looking for. But some scholars are better than others at describing what they need. You have to work to translate what they tell you into performance. Also rewarding was the wide range of texts I was given to perform. There were pieces I was extremely familiar with and could perform off book, such as Silvia in the final scene from The Two Gentlemen of Verona, but there were also pieces from plays I had never heard of, indeed, from plays no one had every heard of, such as William Percy’s Mahomet and His Heaven. Oh yeah, and then there was that scene from Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess where I had to deliver a long speech in Latin. (Well, it may have only been thirty seconds long, but it sure felt like an eternity!)

I cannot emphasize how quickly the week seemed to go by, and how rapidly I felt like I had to prepare each text. But that is also good practice for me. I am a super-preparer, so when I am put in situations where I’m not able to do the kind of text work I typically do, it helps me flex a different set of acting muscles.

But this wasn’t all. After the conference wrapped up for the day, attendees would have dinner, then attend an evening performance of the American Shakespeare Center, and then some would stick around for Late Night Plays at 11pm. I was in two of the late night plays. First on Wednesday night of the Conference was Meet Ben Jonson by Michael J. Hirrel. This was presented as a staged reading, but all of us in it, under the direction of Shannon Shultz, had workshopped the piece earlier in the semester. The play linked together the Wars of the Theatre plays through their descriptions of characters representing Ben Jonson, John Marston, and Thomas Dekker.

The second play I was in was a performance of the first half of Michael Poston’s The King’s Tragedy, directed by Ben Ratkowski. The King’s Tragedy is a new play written in the style of an early modern drama. We had been rehearsing this for about a month, and I had a lot of fun playing the proud villain of the piece, Alonso, who murders his brother in order to become king. I had three soliloquies in the piece, which gave me my first extended opportunity to play with audience contact on the Blackfriars Stage. Like so much else, it went by all too quickly.

But we students had a lot more to do than just perform. SAP students also provided rides for scholars, airport pickups, hospitality, stage management and technical support, and more. Several of us, myself included, also helped live-blog the conference. Every paper session and keynote was posted about on the American Shakespeare Center’s Education Blog.

The keynote speakers for this years conference were George T. Wright, Stephen Booth, Scott Kaiser, and Tiffany Stern. I don’t think it’s possible to find a more intelligent, fascinating group of people. I was fortunate enough to assist Scott Kaiser, so not only did I get to watch him prep for his keynote, but I also got to trap him in my car for a 30 minute ride and pick his brain about new plays and playwrights.

Kaiser’s talk was absolutely the highlight for me. I was thrilled from the moment it was announced he would be coming, because I had owned his two books, Mastering Shakespeare and Shakespeare’s Wordcraft, for years. Shakespeare Wordcraft is used as a text book for the SAP program, but as a director and actor I have found Mastering Shakespeare indispensable. While holding auditions for Richard III recently, I used something from Kaiser’s book at least three times. So it was a treat for me to meet this man in person.

In the book, Kaiser walks you through multiple techniques for analyzing and performing a Shakespeare text. His keynote, to my great delight, was him demonstrating the techniques he writes about. His keynote was very well attended, not only by conference attendees, but by SAP students, and the ASC actors.

It was wonderful to meet other practitioners as well, such as Beth Burns from Hidden Room Theatre, and Katherine Mayberry of Pigeon Creek Shakespeare. Though I didn’t get to meet her, I enjoyed the talk that Kristin Hall from the Atlanta Shakespeare Company gave. She discussed the company’s mission to perform the entire canon, and how they tacked on Double Falsehood for good measure. She noted that the actors didn’t give any credit to the theory that Shakespeare had a hand in Double Falsehood, and one way they said they could tell was that it was harder to memorize. A fascinating notion for attribution studies, and one that I think has weight. I had always thought that it was the iambic pentameter that made Shakespeare easy to memorize. After working on verse pieces not by Shakespeare, I have found that this isn’t completely true. I think part of Shakespeare’s genius is the ear he has for human speech, and the inherent logic of what he writes. This is not something you fully realize until you work on text by his contemporaries, and it is just one more education experience this program has given me.

Grad School: Shakespeare's Theatre

2012-01-03T09:23:00.000-05:00

My New Year’s Resolution should clearly be to be a better blogger. After all, so many exciting things were happening during my first semester of graduate school, and I did not find time to talk about any of them. The semester lasted three months, and each month was taken up with a different project. In my mind and memory, the semester had three distinct parts.

My first month was absorbed in a class called Shakespeare’s Theatre, guest taught by visiting professor Roslyn Knutson. Knutson is intelligent, unbelievably well-versed in the subject matter, and just delightful to be around. The class was a lot of work - it was a three-credit course squeezed into a month of time. We studied the playhouse world and the economics and realities of making theatre in England at the time of Shakespeare (1583-1616). We met three times a week, read an average of five plays a week, and countless pages of scholarship. It was intense. During the month of September I was in the library every night until midnight.

But it was worth it. What a way to start off a graduate school career! I learned a lot about current scholarly arguments when it comes to play printing and touring. I re-read favorite contemporary plays like The Spanish Tragedy and Edward II. And I was introduced to such gems as Mucedorus, A King and No King, and A Larum for London.

What I found most fascinating was watching scholars try to grapple with the realities of playhouse requirements versus what they thought an actor was capable of or not capable of. There are many questions regarding how playmaking worked in this era, but we know for a fact, thanks to Henslowe’s Diary, that actors were constantly putting on new scripts for audiences. If a play was performed six times, it was a hit. Most plays only got one or two performances. We have no way to tell how well the actors were memorized, or what their characterizations were like. Did they play a wide range of roles? Or did they play the same type of role in much the same manner in every play?  

As a performer, reading scholars downplay and disbelieve the abilities of actors is painful and head-shake inducing. Many arguments from these scholars would go along these lines “The evidence points to _______ as a possibility, but there is no way the actors could have ___________, so they must have ________.” Some arguments also went along the lines of, “Modern actors are incapable of __________, so the early modern actors were far more talented.”

The thoughts about this all lead to a pipe dream project. When my theatre company is more established and we have a group of regular actors, an ensemble that knows each other well, I would like to put on a mock early modern season for, say, a month. Follow a sample schedule in Henslowe’s Diary for how often a play was repeated, and how often a new play was performed, and fill the schedule with extant plays.

Granted some concessions would have to be made. The early modern actors were able to spend a majority of their time in a playhouse. Every actor in DC has to pursue work other than stage in order to pay the bills. So actors would have to get their scripts well in advance in order to have time to memorize.

Despite the differences, I think it would be a worthy experiment. It would certainly test the actor’s memory. Would we be able to learn the lines for 20-some plays and keep them in our heads? Would the actors be able to create dynamic characters? Would actors fall into patterns? Tricks? A similar style for each play? Also -- how would the text change in performance? How accurate would each actor’s line speaking be? That might tell us a lot about genesis of different textual editions.

I don’t know what all the answers would be, but I have no doubt that we would find some actors more capable than others. I’m sure the same thing was true in the early modern era. Richard Burbage’s memorization skills must have been impressive.

My first substantial graduate school assignment was for this class. A ten-minute oral presentation on a topic of my choosing. In a class one-month in length, there is not time to write a twenty-page paper. Still that oral presentation date came up quickly, and for a while I had no idea what topic to choose. But one day I was flipping through my Norton and I read the headnote to Titus Andronicus, written by Katherine Maus. She wrote, “Even by the standards of Shakespeare's contemporaries, however, Titus Andronicus is an extravagantly bloody play.” Given the plays I had been reading, I couldn’t help but question the veracity of such a statement. So there I had my topic. Ten minutes on violence and death in early modern plays. If you know me, you will not be surprised that I was attracted to this topic.

I found that most tragedies tended to have 6-8 deaths. Titus Andronicus has thirteen (not counting the fly), nine of which happen onstage. In the time I had to research the only play I read that beat it was A Larum for London, which also has thirteen deaths, but all of them occur onstage.

But I also surmised that one could judge bloodiness by the type of acts that were performed, not just body count. Some favorite stage directions from the era:

“he dashes out the Child's brains.” -- Alphonsus of Germany
“flays him with false skin” -- Cambyses
“wounds gaping... holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom.” -- The Devil’s Charter
In Selimus, after removing the eyes of Aga, the title character orders his hands cut off, and then “Opens his bosome and puts them in.” When Aga returns blind and mutilated to his king Bajazet, he says “Witnesse the present that he sends to thee, / Open my bosome, there you shall it see.” The stage direction tells us “Mustaffa opens his bosome and takes out his hands.”

I would not try to ever deny the bloodiness of Titus Andronicus. But I did find that there isn’t a single act of violence in Titus that you can’t find elsewhere in the early modern canon.

Capital Fringe Festival continued

2011-08-05T17:18:00.001-04:00

Here is the continuation of my accounting of the Capital Fringe Festival. If I forget to mention anyone I met or who saw my show I apologize. It was a busy couple of weeks!

Sunday, July 17
This morning started off with volunteering. I believe I was originally scheduled to work in the bar, but when I arrived they asked if I would mind doing box office instead. Um, no, not at all! I ran box office for two shows, Pinoy: A'merican Tale at the Apothecary and then since I have my car I ran over to Spooky Universe for Sanyasi. The latter is one of the many shows on the “Ooo I want to see this but I can't” List. But by running box office I at least get to say hi to Betsy Rosen and Nora Achrati, two of the performers.

At 4pm I made my way to the Apothecary to take in Stephen Spotswood's The Sisters of Ellery Hollow. Stephen is a DC playwright, and one of the many delightful theatre people on twitter. Ellery Hollow was performed by Rachel Holt and Melissa Hmelnicky. It was a lovely piece, about two sisters who were story tellers, revealing the magical circumstances of their birth and life. The script made use of beautiful imagery, and the two actresses performed with charm and spunk.

Then I rested for a short time before my second performance at 6:45pm. I felt really good about this performance. The nerves from the first performance seemed to settle, and the piece felt like it had a lot more flow. I felt like I was able to just go along for the ride of what was happening in my piece, and in the Juliet scenes, rather than worrying about whether I would forget my lines. I was blessed every performance to have friends in the audience, and this night were Jeremy, Joshua, Brett, Renee, and Richard.

After the show ended, Victoria and I ran over to the Warehouse to snag standing room only tickets for Illuminate: A Martial Arts Experience, as it was sold out. We are successful and run back to the tent to grab a little dinner. Time for the Apple and Cheddar Panini once again! While scarfing down the food we talk to the gentlemen performing Glengary Glen Ross. They are charming, in their own way, and we have a few hearty laughs before we have to leave.

Illuminate is fantastic, even before it begins. The packed house affords some memorable people-watching, and we'll just leave it at that. There is a loose story to Illuminate, basically a put-upon man learns martial arts to defend himself and masters the skill. The story is told through a series of martial arts demonstrations. Most of them are performed in blackout. The performers wear all black, and glow sticks on their hands and feet that reveal the moves. The hero of the story wears the color green, and that allows us to track who he is, even though the individual performing the role changes.

Victoria knows one of the performers, John Shyrock, and he performs my favorite part of the piece. In Illuminate, John showcases Chinese rope dart techniques. Again, the theatre is in blackout, and there are lights attached to the end of John's rope. He flings it out into the audience, whipping it back and forth. Every time you swear the rope is going to hit someone, yet it never does. Every time you flinch, and every time everyone is safe. It was remarkable.

Monday, July 18
On Monday, a second review, this one from MD Theatre Guide appears. It is extremely favorable, and, which I almost appreciate more, very well written. Positive notes aside, the review accurately represents the piece I was trying to create, describing the play as “part shakespearean performance piece, part memoir, and part literary discourse.” It seems disingenuous to praise a positive review, but it is truly a relief to find out that your performance goals have come across to a member of the audience. We in the theatre can spend a lot of time talking about good reviews and bad reviews and whether to ignore them or not, but I've always had an interest in dramatic criticism, and the thing you can learn from a review is what a specific audience member got from the production. And when that is exactly what you were hoping to portray, it's encouraging.

Tuesday, July 19
On Tuesday I head to Shrewing of the Tamed at the Shop. This production involves William and Mary students, so I run into a couple of former professors. I had gotten to meet a few of the students during the Fringe festival as well. I think it's fabulous that William and Mary is using the Capital Fringe Festival as a resource and learning experience and wish they had done so when I was a student there.

The marketing materials for the play asked the question “Can a woman be as funny as a man?” For some reason in my head I got the idea that this meant they were going to gender flip Kate and Petruchio. This isn't what happened at all. The main change was an increased emphasis on the frame narrative. It harkened back to the time when women were not allowed on stage, and so the actress-who-would-be-Kate had to prove that she could play the role as well as a man. The play then started from a point of competition that paralleled Kate and Petruchio's competition.

Wednesday, July 20
I start off by volunteering for A Year of Living Dangerously at the Redrum (more fun decorating rocks with Terry and Robert). Then I have to prep for my third performance. I'm nervous about this one because very important people will be in the audience. Beforehand I was talking to Kimleigh Smith, the force of nature behind the show TOTALLY. She's fantastic, and I think I met her one night while talking to Seth. She says simply and calmly, “Hey. Just tell the story.” She is right, and my nerves are settled. Just tell the story.

Jim Gagne, a dear friend of mine, and a brilliant teacher attends, as does George Grant, another brilliant teacher, and a man who knows a vast amount about Shakespeare and how to perform it. Just tell the story. Jim tells me afterwards that it's the first time he's seen scholarship used theatrically in a successful manner.

Thursday, July 21
Thursday is play night for me. No being a volunteer, just being an audience member. First up is Brett Abelman's The Magical Marriage Computer and other plays. Brett is another local playwright producing work at the Fringe festival. This set of plays explores love in different circumstances amongst different types of people. My friend Rachel Manteuffel is in the show, one of her parts being, of all things, Johnny Depp.

After that is the biker King Lear at the Apothecary. The piece is directed by Kelli Biggs, and starring one of my best friends, Katie Wanschura, as a gender flipped Edmund. Everyone is drinking beers, flashing knives, playing pool, talking on cell phones, wearing leather.

One Shakespeare play is never enough for Charlene, so after King Lear I'm scheduled to attend Hamlet: Reframed at the Shop. There's a little bit of downtown in between, so I hang out in the tent and talk to friends. Everybody is there that night, many to see Hamlet. Allison, Katy, Lee, Mark, Bess, just to name a few. I had been joking with some Fringers earlier in the week that the Festival and the Helen Hayes are the two times of year where we in the theatre are liable to run into any number of exes and past indiscretions. I chalk up the second one of the festival that night. I'm feeling spunky, so I command him to bring me water from the bar! I figured I could get away with it since it's the least he could do for me, and it's over 100 degrees that day, so Fringe is providing it for free. He humors me and graciously complies.

It's a good thing I have water because the heat in the Shop is oppressive. Audience and actors alike are dripping with sweat. Impromptu fans are being waved back and forth. Despite the distractions, the actors hold the attention of the audience. Hamlet: Reframed was a modern telling of the famous play, with one catch: all the soliloquies are cut. What do we get in this version? An unstable Hamlet, with unexplained behavior, and a King and Queen desperately trying to keep a country running. We don't get the ghost in this version, which prevents us from immediately siding against Claudius. The cut shed a different light on the characters. I thought Carl's objective for the production was clear, and that he successfully achieved it.

Friday, July 22
On this day I went into town just for one volunteer shift. I was scheduled from 5-8pm at the Free Store, which as Nyree, the Volunteer Coordinator, told me, is where volunteers go to die. Basically it's an extremely boring shift, in an hot and stuffy room without chairs. You sit on the floor and greet people as they come in, answer questions, lay out donations, and do your best not to sweat too much. And, true to reputation, the shift was rather boring, at least from 5-7pm.

For the last hour of the shift some performers came into the Free Store, and getting to know them made the end of the shift far more enjoyable than the beginning. First I met Drew and Sam, and later Nate and Nate came in as well. These four guys were half of OneBodyWorks, the group performing I See You. They had spent six weeks working on a farm in North Carolina, with limited access to technology, and developed a theatrical piece in response to their time there. The fellows were cute and charming, and became known around Fringe as “the farm boys.” At least that's what I called them, and everyone always knew who I was talking about. Apparently the guys found this amusing, since on the farm, they were the city boys. I hear great things about their show, but alas, I don't get to see it.

Saturday, July 23
At noon I show up in the side room at Fort Fringe to find out about that One Year Theatre project, whose postcards I had seen around the festival. But that story isn't for this blog – in short, I am involved, I designed the webpage, and you can learn more there and at the blog.

I scramble over to Spooky Universe for When ET Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Unpredictable bus schedules mean I slide in there right at curtain time and sheepishly ask if I can still get in. Luckily they hadn't started yet. This rock musical tells the story of Joan who gets contacted by aliens that dig her music and want her to be the leader of their intergalactic band. It's starring fellow standardized patient and all around awesome lady Emily Webbe, whose fantastic voice I get to hear for the first time.

Time for the fourth performance of What, Lamb! What, Ladybird! There are several friendly faces in the audience for this one. Catherine and Terrance Aselford are there. So is Kavita Mudan, one of my favorite female Shakespeare Geeks. Matthew Pauli, one-third of Clown Cabaret attends and we get to talk shop about Shakespeare afterwards.We talk about what's missing when there is one performer – the reaction of characters. A great deal of acting comes when you aren't speaking. So when performing multiple roles, especially in Shakespeare, how do you find the balance between letting some of those reactions in, and keeping the text driving forward? Two of my former co-workers, Jennifer and Krystal, whom I don't get to see nearly enough, come as well.

This is possibly my best performance. I feel very free in the moment, and I am able to explore moments in the text in a way I hadn't been before. It feels very fluid. It feels great. Until. Disaster. I am on the very last page of the script. Right in the middle of what is a very scary and emotional confession for me. And I completely blank. I know where I'm going, but I can't remember the very next line. Words stumble out of my mouth as my brain frantically searches for the sentences that have escaped my memory. I can't find them, so I move ahead to the next moment, leaving out about three lines of text. Well, it happens. You move on. But everything was so perfect up until that moment. But I almost wonder if being more connected to what I was saying is what actually made me forget what I was saying. To be truly living in the moment of what I was confessing and finding myself unable to say the words due to the nerves and the terror of admitting was I was admitting. It's a possibility, but still, Perfectionist Charlene is not pleased!

Several of us head to Busboys and Poets for dinner afterwards, along with Karen and Jim who were at the Festival that night as well.

After dinner and after socializing at the tent Jim and I head to the Mountain for Faction of Fools' Fool For All. We are joined by Hannah, who is a co-worker and friend of Jim's, and on the staff at the Festival. The Fool for All is comprised of nine scenes and over 40 artists. Not every scene is performed every night, so it's always a different show. The production also serves as a learning experience for the artists, as they vary in experience and skill level. Some are professional clowns, others have just taken a class or two with Faction. I know next to nothing about Commedia dell'Arte, but while watching it becomes clear that there are three levels of skill to mask work. The first level: actors who are wearing the mask. Second: actors whose faces match the mask. And the third level, the level of the uber talented Matthew Wilson, are actors for whom the mask becomes a natural part of their face. It's fun to note how this works, and also to see so many friends on stage, like Gwen Grasdorf, Karen Beriss, Steve Attix, Paul Reisman, Grant Cloyd, and Sarah Olmsted Thomas.

The show is followed by more socializing at the tent, with some of the aforementioned persons, and also audience member extraordinaire and extremely intelligent guy, David Tannous. He tries to convince me to join him for Meagan & David's Original Low-Cost Creativity Workshop, but it's midnight, and I'm exhausted. I try to convince him to see my show on Sunday instead of the one he's already got a ticket to. Neither of us succeeds. Nevertheless, it's lovely to talk to him, and I've already run into him at another theatre event since Fringe.

Sunday, July 24
Here it is. The final day of Fringe. I start of at the Goethe Institute seeing John Hefner's The Road to Nowhere. Hefner is a friend of mine, and an accomplished solo artist who has toured his shows to several Fringe Festivals. He had given me advice throughout the process. I'm glad that I could make it to his show, especially as it's been quite a while since I saw him in person. He was pretty busy. As the title of his show implies, he went on a long road trip that kept him away from DC. Then he fell in love, got engaged, oh yeah, and just had a baby. Busy guy.

My final performance is in the afternoon. Friends Kelli, Katie, and Rachel are in the audience. The fact that it is over doesn't seem quite real.

We pack up my car with the set pieces. Then I have one last play to see, Belle Parricide, directed by Catherine Aselford and Nick Allen. Catherine and the playwrights have been working on this piece for something like two years. I saw a staged reading of one version of the script quite some time ago, and it has grown and improved immensely. Five female playwrights wrote short pieces about Beatrice Cenci, portraying the girl and the murder of her father in different lights. After the show I head into the tent for some final socializing and to say goodbye to everyone.

The Capital Fringe Festival was an amazing experience for me this year. I did things I had never done before. I wrote and performed a one-woman show! I went places that terrified me, and survived, nay, grew as an artist. I made a piece that was about me and about the kind of theatre I love, and infused with the kind of thinking I do. And though it was made from a very specific standpoint, audiences responded positively. It was so rewarding to discover that this dual approach that I have spent so much time talking about, so much time thinking about, this actor-scholar path, could have a tangible existence.

Will this have an after-life? I'm not sure yet. I know that if I were to perform it again, there are a couple more things I want to look up, a couple places I want to cut, and a couple places I want to add. Three people commented on the educational possibilities of the piece.

Two different people told me I should present this play at the Blackfriars Conference that the American Shakespeare Center hosts every two years. And indeed, working on this play is the very thing that confirms that I am making the right decision in attending the MFA program at Mary Baldwin this fall. The program explores the two pillars of scholarship and stagecraft, and that is exactly what my play turned out to be. And it wasn't my intent to make it that; the play came to this status naturally, simply by virtue of what I find interesting.

But the most dear compliment of the experience was relayed to me by Victoria. An actress she has worked with came to the play along with one or two other actresses, all who had played Juliet. They told Victoria that afterwards they found themselves talking about the piece and how exciting it was because I did things with Juliet they had all been told they weren't allowed to do.

And that's the point, really, I think. Let's get this false idea of Juliet as the willowy ingenue out of our heads. Let's not play what we think she is. Play instead what Shakespeare gives you in the text. Let a young actress bring all the charm and all the tempestuousness and all the lust and all the strength that she can. For that is what Juliet is: mercurial and strong, logical and loyal, curious and giving. There has never been a 14-year-old like Juliet, nor will there never be. And that is the magic of this play, this character, and Shakespeare's writing.

Fringe Week 1

2011-07-28T11:05:00.001-04:00

The first couple days of Fringe I am not involved. I am rehearsing like a madwoman. It is a lot of work to memorize one hour worth of text. Luckily the majority of the Shakespeare is in my head already. What’s not is soon learned, thanks to the rhythms of his text. I get it, but not word perfect. This is a disappointment to me, the perfectionist. I find that little words slip. The yous and thous sometimes get mixed up. And in this line is it will or shall? Hath/Doth/Does? Surprisingly, I find it’s harder to be perfect when you are memorizing multiple characters. Somehow it’s a little easier to keep track a single character’s reasons from flipping from thou to you, than it is to keep track of five characters. But I work really hard on it. When characters say similar things, it’s easier for them to get jumbled when you are speaking both versions. And with an hour-long show, there is a lot of text floating around in my head.

The words I am writing myself are easy to learn. Mostly because I don’t have to get those perfect. The quotes from people in the past are difficult, particularly the non-contemporaries. The writing from the Victorians in particular, is complex, with ornate structure, and multiple phrases, making for some rather long sentences.

Victoria and I communicated with our savvy tech, Sean Eustis, over email in the week leading up to the Festival. We told him want we think we needed, and he let us know that he could do exactly that. He even had access to a projector, and all the necessary equipment.

Those final days before opening were nerve-wracking. Would I remember the lines? Would anyone see it? Would it even work? Would I still have a voice after giving a walking tour on Friday and another on Saturday? But soon Sunday was here.

Sunday, July 10
Our tech is at 10:30am. The space – The Bedroom. We meet our venue manager, Terry, who seems great, and his equally great partner in crime, Robert, who is managing The Redrum, the other space in that building. These guys with aplomb put up with my sarcastic “charm” for two weeks. We get started a little late due to parking issues. Thankfully the rest of the festival parking and transportation remains on our sides.

Our set is small. It has a dagger and a coil of rope, both conveniently borrowed from our previous production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. There is the ever-important vial, which I’ve had in possession for months, due to needing it for publicity photos. The largest piece is the bench, which comes from Victoria’s furniture collection. I worry about possible damage, but it returns to her house unscathed two weeks later.

As is always the case with tech, one never gets done as much as one wants. It’s all pretty much spent setting up the technical elements. Which I suppose is really the point. But we actors always want to run the show!

Where do we put the projector? Here I walk in the way of it, there audience members’ heads pop up as shadows. We have to adjust the text size of the words it is projecting. Then we have to figure out the lights and the cues. The Bedroom has an inordinate amount of lighting instruments for a space that small, but I’ve been warned not to complain about it, as lots of lights are better than no lights at all, which is the state where the Festival started.

We go through the lighting changes. We have the Shakespeare scenes – some in day, some in night. Day Wash. Night Wash. We have what we affectionately call “Scholar Wash” for all the parts in between. Before we know it, it is 1pm, and our tech time is over. One hour to show.

Quick! Eat! Bathroom! Stretch! What are my lines again??????

2pm comes, and I must walk out onstage, begin “I have a faint cold fear that thrills through my veins” and take the ride.

I survive. I don’t lose my place. I have a couple moments where the corner of your brain separated from your acting says, “Wait. Is that what happens next? Did I skip something?” But I turn out to always be in the right place. I have a couple people I know in the audience, but also people who I don’t know, including some big Fringers. My former roommate Karen Beriss is in the audience with her mom. My friend Kerry drives from Towson to try and make the show. She doesn’t make it in before the doors close, but thankfully decides to wait until around so that we can still hang out. I more than survive the play. Some people stand to applaud.

My heart is beating and I am covered in sweat. Victoria, Kerry, and I head over to the tent to chat (and drink!). While I’m there three patrons who were at the performance approach me and say how much they liked it. One is David Kessler, the man who will be the 2011 Fringe Fanatic. I had met David at previous theatre events, and he saw me perform in last year’s Fringe Festival. I run into him throughout the next two weeks, and enjoy finding out what he has seen and what he has loved. His favorite seems to be iKill, a work getting a lot of buzz, but one I am unable to see.

These positive audience responses mean that What, Lamb! What, Ladybird! works as a piece of theatre! Whew! But now I have a week before my next performance, and adrenaline to spare.

Being a full time artist, and knowing that I will lose money on this production, I cannot buy tickets to see all my friends’ shows. Of the 124, I believe I know people involved with at least 30 of them, possibly more. I discover that you can sign up to volunteer with the Fringe Festival. Every shift you work yields you a free ticket. Score! I initially start with four shifts, but quickly add more.

Monday, July 11
Working. Resting. The first review arrives. It’s a bad one, though not the kind you can be upset about, or take personally. The writer likes my acting, but misses the entire point of the piece. She seems to come in with a preconceived notion of who Juliet is (she dismisses her as a “lustful teenager”), and is unable to let it go. When a review is more about how silly Juliet is, and less about what you are actually doing in your piece, what can you really do? Though I do wonder, if she missed it so entirely, maybe it means the piece isn’t working theatrically. But everyone else who saw that first performance got it. And then I remember hearing a local actor say he didn’t like Venus in Fur because he doesn’t enjoy plays about theatre people. I am reassured by the fact that what is obvious is some is not so obvious to others. (If you don't know the play, Venus in Fur takes place at an audition, but this is only the most surface level. It really has absolutely nothing to do with theatre people.) I think secretly I am more bothered by her negative characterization of Juliet, than by her not liking the play. In my head I write essays rebutting how she sees Juliet, supported with evidence by the text. But of course, I’ve actually already written that essay. And I’m performing it. So there it is.

Tuesday, July 12
I come to the Fringe straight from some teaching work. I need to pick up some food before my first volunteer shift! I fondly recall the apple and cheddar panini that I ate several times last year. But what’s this? It’s not on the board! I asked at the bar, they tell me they can make that, no problem.

I am working box office for Losing My Religion, a solo performance, being performed in my venue. I spend more time talking to / annoying Terry and Robert. I get to meet the performer, Seth Lepore. He’s charming, personable, cute… and married. ;-) I run into him throughout the festival. I see him in the tent chatting people up. He has a list of popular shows and when they let out so that he can hand out postcards. I watch him and learn about going up to strangers and selling your show. I don’t make it to his, but he’ll next be performing at the Minnesota Fringe Festival.

After the volunteer shift, I’m hanging out in the tent to see Karen Beriss et. al. perform in the free Clown Cabaret show.

I notice the apple and cheddar panini is now on the board! It remains there for the rest of the festival! My work here is done.

After a delightful Clown Cabaret, I talk to Karen about the show. Whether the projections and the scholars names work, and the switching between parts. She says it all does, and it doesn’t bother her not having more information about the people I’m quoting. Her main note: Lose the noisy plastic water bottle. She gives me a plastic goblet to drink from for the remainder of Fringe.

Wednesday, July 13
I have another volunteer shift. But at this point I really can’t remember what show it is for… From the schedule I can deduce that it was probably for The Morphine Diaries, which is also at Terry and Robert’s venues. Those guys have a collection of colored sharpies and a bucket of rocks, and we pass the time making art.

I hang around the tent awaiting the 9:45pm showing of Cabaret XXX. I know 75% of them: Karen Lange, Allyson Harkey, and Toni Rae Brotons. I think I met all these ladies on twitter first, before in real life. Their show rocks. They basically are playing scorned lovers singing angry songs about their exes. And all four performers have great voices. And they are backed up by a wonderful band. They give out tattoos and condoms and t-shirts. I take a lesson from Seth and talk to the people sitting near me. I tell them about my show. They tease me when I take a condom, in mock shock, “Why, Juliet!” The man at the table gives me his as well, saying he can’t use it because it’s probably too small. The two women with him look mortified, but also amused.

Friday, July 15
I slip back to the Fringe Festival for more Clown Cabaret. My friend Lindsay joins me, and we get to catch up a bit. We head to Busboys & Poets with the clowns for dinner. Then I remember my other Fringe staple, the Apple and Gorgonzola sandwich. Yum. With sweet potato fries!

Saturday, July 16
A very full day. I am volunteering from about 10:45 to 3:30. I do three box office shifts, but I’m not sure I can even guess what shows they were for. I think A Year of Living Dangerously, again with Terry and Robert. Then I think King Lear in the apothecary. There I run into Bill, a local theatre performer who saw my opening performance. He tells me it was the best college lecture he had ever scene. It’s a compliment, and I know what he means. Then I think it’s Patrick & Me at the air-conditioned Goethe Institute! The venue manager there, Kate, is a lot of fun to talk to, with a healthy appreciation of Shakespeare.

I take off from volunteering and decide to go see A Piece of Pi at the Apothecary. It is fantastic. Three male clowns who have very much honed their types and their relationship to each other, perform a series of physical comedy clown skits. They take juggling tricks and other known scenarios and twist them with clowning. One of them is “weak” and skinny. One is “the strongest man in the world!” One is quieter, and maybe not the brightest. They are wonderful.

I get on the bus and hurry over to Spooky Universe on 16th to see Emily Morrison’s But Love is My Middle Name. It’s a lovely piece as she takes us through her stories of love and not love, singing the songs that defined her life. I hope she can make it to my piece, as I see connections between them. (She does, and sees them too). Fun Fact: Emily and I once auditioned for a production of Romeo and Juliet together, and neither was cast.

When it ends, I have to rush back to the tent. The bus isn’t coming on time, so I walk. It takes me exactly the 25 minutes I have before Hotel Fuck. I’m familiar with most of this cast. The delightful Frank Britton everyone knows. I know James and Gabe, and I know who Jay and Christopher are. I’m not sure I can describe the piece, other than to say that the title accurately prepares you for the experience. I feel like part of Fringe is seeing at least one crazy, wacky piece, perhaps with nudity, and this year, Hotel Fuck is that piece for me.

I carry my script with me everywhere, and whenever there is down time, I read over my lines.

That’s the first week! More soon!

What, Lamb! What, Ladybird!

2011-07-26T10:23:00.003-04:00

This has been an incredible summer. I have not been able to blog as much as I wanted. Okay, I haven’t been able to blog at all. I’m disappointed because I wanted to better document starting my own theatre company and launching with The Two Gentlemen of Verona. I’ll come back to that in a later post, because now I want to talk about the Capital Fringe Festival while the experience is still fresh in my mind.

Throughout last fall, Romeo and Juliet is on my mind. While living in DC, I’ve auditioned for the role of Juliet three times, and not gotten cast. The funding for a production with a director that wants me to play the role does not come through. This is irking me. I’m starting to feel the time run out. I remember reading David Tennant say that he thought once he hit 30, his chance for Romeo would be over. He got his in. At 27, I see that 30 approaching. Though there is no obvious rule about it, it seems to make sense. To play Romeo, and Juliet, one has to be old enough to handle the text, to feel what they are going through, but young enough to carry off teenage impetuousness and innocence.

I spend a lot of time talking about it with others. My roommate Karen says we should mount our own production. We talk about what we could do with it. Small cast? All women? Maybe just three of us, or four of us. It sounds like a good idea, but then we realize that Joe Calarco has already written that play.

The Capital Fringe Festival keeps coming up in the process of my discussions with her and others. The perfect opportunity to mount some sort of production. But what sort of production should it be? It needs a reason for existing other than the fact that I want to play Juliet. I begin to play with the text. How do I make a piece about Juliet, from her perspective?

I talk to other friends about it, and somewhere the notion of a one-woman show comes up. How to do it? How to make it about Juliet? I think about Kate Norris’s one woman Hamlet: Now I Am Alone. Is this piece like that, but with Romeo and Juliet? Am I just doing a short version of the play where I play all the parts? Do I just do Juliet’s scenes? I read the play again, but I skip all the time she’s not on stage. I’m surprised by the fact that the entire plot remains intact. I hit upon an idea where her scenes are the main through line and when Juliet hears about something happening, parts of that scene come in. But this seems less like a one person thing, and more that it needs multiple actors. And the piece needs one concept, not two.

I keep playing, I keep talking to people, I get frustrated messing with the text. I worship Shakespeare, so I don’t want to do all this crazy stuff with his text. I just want to do his play! I’m close to giving up on the idea entirely. On New Year’s Day I have coffee with a friend, Jessica. I had come home from a party that morning and found my first wrinkle. I have a slight freak out, not about getting old, but about not being able to play Juliet. I haven’t worked since September. I need to create a project. But creating work on your own is hard. I’m frustrated from not acting. I have some things going on in my personal life. I have graduate school auditions to prepare for. I’ve just taken the GRE. Lots of stress. And I need theatre. I talk to my friend, a fellow actor and director, and she tells me to do it. Do a one-woman show in Fringe about Juliet. Just do it. The only caveat from her is not to name it something stupid. “Like what?” I ask. “Like ‘Kickin’ it Solo with Juliet!’” she answers.

I am still conflicted. The application is due January 7th. I write it, but I’m not sure. But I can’t stand not acting. I have to do something. I realize I’m also scared by the prospect of a solo piece. Well then, I think, you have to do it. I make myself mail in application.

I get into the festival, but I still don’t know exactly what I’m doing. What will this piece be? Who the hell will I get to direct it? Can I do this on my own?

I don’t have to. On January 11th, my life changes. I meet Victoria Reinsel at a callback for The Comedy of Errors at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. I am given the side of Adriana. She, Luciana. I know it makes sense that I am reading Adriana. Sass and strength I can pull off. But really the harder part is Luciana. We read the scene in the side hallway before auditioning. “Oh.” I think. “This woman knows what she is doing.” We audition. At some point during the scene I slap her ass as a sign of sisterly affection. I apologize afterwards, after all it’s a little personal for someone you just met. She laughs and says, “No, that was great!” Now when we meet people, she tells them we met when I slapped her ass in an audition.

It’s the best audition with a stranger I have ever had. We exchange cards and 2 days later we meet for coffee. We talk for hours. We agree on seemingly everything when it comes to Shakespeare. She’s worked for the American Shakespeare Center, and attended the MFA program at Mary Baldwin, one of the graduate schools I am applying to (and where I will eventually decide to go).

In short, we keep getting together, keep talking theatre and life for hours, and at the end of February launch our own theatre company, Brave Spirits Theatre. We perform first in June with a six-actor production of The Two Gentlemen of Verona (but that’s a blog for another time).

In any case, I now have someone I can create theatre with, and I have a company to produce my Fringe play. Naturally, of course, producing, directing, and acting in Two Gents means my Fringe project doesn’t get as far as quickly as I would like. I watch July approach and am still unsure of the final form of my play.

Victoria and I sit down and I read through Juliet’s scenes. I already know that I want to start with her last soliloquy: “I have a faint cold fear thrills through my veins / That almost freezes up the heat of life.” The question is, is it necessary to have Juliet’s death? Looking at the text, that scene belongs so much to Romeo. Juliet is awake for about five lines before she stabs herself. Plus, everyone knows what happens at the end. Is it needed to show it? Could I just end with the first few lines of the soliloquy that I perform at the beginning?

Victoria agrees with me that starting with the soliloquy is a great idea. And also that the death scene isn’t needed. But she also agrees with the little voice inside of me saying that simply doing Juliet’s scenes isn’t enough. She suggests maybe we connect the scenes with Juliet’s thoughts about what’s going on. That I write some connective materials. Something that we don’t hear from Shakespeare. Even if it is a simple as, “I never meant to hurt my family.”

This idea terrifies me. First of all, I am not a playwright. Second, to write something that has to stand up next to Shakespeare’s text seems an impossible task. I am incredibly nervous. Victoria tells me to journal as Juliet and see what comes out.

I’m scared, but I make myself do it. I surprise myself by coming up with some really interesting things. One section of it makes it into the final piece, the paragraph where Juliet (or I) comments on our first time giving sex with Romeo, prior to the Lark/Nightingale scene.

But as I’m journaling as Juliet, I also write down my own thoughts about things that happen in the play, about Juliet the character and how I relate to her. I write things that I have never admitted to anyone. When I hand the papers over to Victoria, I think I tell her that the second set is an “invented narrator,” not quite willing to admit some of my hidden feelings.

When we meet again, Victoria tells me that she really likes the stuff that I wrote as me and that we should explore that more.

So at this point I have a few things that I’ve written that I like, that I think have dramatic possibilities. And I know I want to focus on Juliet’s scenes. And I know I want to start with the potion soliloquy. But there is still some sort of connective thread that is missing. The only answer, when you have an approach like mine, is to spend a day at the Library of Congress.

I do so, planning to read and read and read about the play until some brilliant idea strikes me. Amazingly, this is exactly what happens. I sit down, with the statue of Shakespeare looming over my head, and search for Juliet in the catalog. I discover the following Subject listing: Shakespeare, William, 1564-1616 --Characters --Women. I order everything in it that might talk about Juliet. When the librarian brings me books, she asks, “Are you going to be able to get through all this?” I am, because I don’t know what I’m looking for, and some of the books will quickly and clearly become not it.

I am already familiar with the series Players of Shakespeare, which has many interviews with well-known actors (mostly from the Royal Shakespeare Company) in which the actors talk about a specific role they play. I order all 6 volumes in order to find out whether anyone has spoken about Juliet.

While I’m waiting for those, I am flipping through other books and I discover the lynchpin. Helena Faucit’s On some of Shakespeare’s female characters. This book contains a series of letters written to a friend where Faucit waxes poetic about the roles she has played and what they have meant to her. Juliet is clearly the most dear to her, for she wrote twice as much on her as on any other character. It surprises me to find a Victorian actress so enthralled with Juliet. And Faucit was not the only one of the period to write about the character. I have found my starting place.

One reviewer of the final piece noted that as a modern woman, it was “wrong-headed” to look to the Victorians, as their conception of womanhood was so different than ours. Victorians, at least as we view them, have a very unprogressive, restrictive view of womanhood, based in the idea of femininity, charm, and obedience. (Though what history records versus what people thought in their hearts could be two very different things, and I often feel that we today are not really so different as those in the past, but again, that’s another topic.)

BUT – this is what makes it all the more remarkable that they would attach themselves to Juliet. If what we think of as the Victorian ideal was completely true, these women should have eviscerated Juliet. She talks back to and disobeys her parents. She has sexual feelings. She commits suicide. She speaks up and says what is on her mind, rather than merely doing what she is told. And these Victorian actresses worshipped her. I find that fascinating! (As a note, Shakespeare’s source is written much more as a cautionary tale – we are supposed to see in R and J’s death a punishment, or at least result of, their immodest behavior. Shakespeare’s text, however, does not judge these young lovers.)

I find quotes from actors and scholars, past and present. The piece quickly takes shape. I am quickly able to create a through-line. And it’s precisely what I find engaging. After all, actors have so frequently been ignored when it came to Shakespeare scholarship, something that has thankfully been changing in recent years. Of course, this is yet another reason why it is amazing to discover these documents actresses have left behind.

I’m still struggling with the form. I dream frequently about this play, which makes me all the more anxious. But one day in a fit of panic, when my brain will not shut off, I see in my head how the play should end. Helena Faucit’s writing allows me to start with the soliloquy, as I wanted to. And I realize the emotional place the play has to go to in order to end with it as well. But this time it’s not Juliet speak those lines, it’s me.

The question remains how to present these quotes? My brain tells me that I should project the names when I am quoting someone, thereby making it clear when I am speaking as myself, and when as someone else. How Moises Kaufman should the script be? Should I say the persons name before each quote? I think the projections are enough. How much like Gross Indecency should this be? Do I need to inhabit a character for each of these writers? Do I need to use accents???

We decide no. To just keep it simple.

I am a bundle of nerves when I hand the script to Victoria. I pace about the room as she reads over it. She comes to the final page. She looks up to me, nods, and says, "I like it."

The script is finished, at least for this incarnation. Three things are interwoven. Shakespeare’s text. Quotes from scholars and actors. My own opinions and memories. I have never seen a play like this. I have no idea whether it will work. I tell people it is halfway between a play and a paper. Will the play part work to support my thesis? Will the paper part be dramatically viable? We shall find out at the Capital Fringe Festival.

to be continued…

Titus Androgynous, Second Performance

2011-03-21T09:20:00.003-04:00

The second performance was less frantic, and a little more polished, in terms of lines, entrances and exits, props, etc. Still, there were surprises and there were many moments that were different from the night before.

One of the results of not having a rehearsal process with a tech week is that costume problems don't get discovered before the show is in front of an audience. Shannon, our Titus, had to adjust her costume for the Sunday matinee, for she discovered last night that her wooden dagger kept falling out of her sash. Saturday night it actually happened in the final banquet scene when Saturninus and Tamora had sat down to eat. Shannon played it off great: she picked the dagger back up and smiled with sheepish innocence as if to say "how did that get there??"

On Sunday it was another person's sash that caused some live theatre magic. This was near the opening of the play after Titus has declared Saturninus the emperor. Sarah was speechifying and her sash had come off her shoulder. As she moved and strode around the stage it slowly slipped down her body, and the rest of us stood on stage wondering how to help her. It finally started tangling around her ankles, and there was this moment we all had -- will this make her trip?? So Shannon said "Madam--" (again, interesting gender coloring -- the ad lib was automatically feminine, though in the text we keep all masculine pronouns). This brought the sash to Sarah's attention. Sarah stayed 100% in character, laughed it off, and said something along the lines of "Oh! I am embarrassing myself in front of the tribunes! One gets so excepted with you are made Emperor of Rome!" And she sold the ad lib so well that there were members of the cast that did not realize the lines weren't part of the text.

We also had a great moment of an actor impulse creating "accidental" blocking that turned out to be oh-so-right. In a moment I'll talk about another choice of JJ's (our Tamora) that I got to ask him about, but I did not remember to ask whether he meant for this moment to happen the way it did, or if it just occurred (what I'm about to describe did not happen during the Saturday performance).

It is the scene after Bassianus has stolen Lavinia from Saturninus. Titus has slain one of his sons in the fight. They are all met before the Emperor, and Tamora pleads with the Emperor to be merciful and forgive Titus. Tamora says:

Then at my suit look graciously on him,
My Lord, be ruled by me, be won at last,
Yield at intreats, and then let me alone:
I'll find a day to massacre them all,
And ‘rase their faction, and their family,
The cruel Father, and his traitorous sons,
To whom I sued for my dear son's life.
And make them know what 'tis to let a Queen
Kneel in the streetes, and beg for grace in vain.
Come, come, sweet Emperor, come Andronicus.

At some point during this speech, JJ walked over to Shannon, put his hand on her shoulder, and forced her to kneel. Titus's sons then had to follow suit. I found this fascinating: a) due to the reverse gender, our Tamora is taller than our Titus, and so it is believable that Tamora could have some amount of physical power over Titus; and b) because of what the text brings next.

Saturninus. Rise Titus, rise, my Empress hath prevailed.

So Titus and his sons stand back up. The scene continues:

Titus. I thank your Majesty, and her, my Lord.
These words, these looks, infuse new life in me.

Tamora. Titus, I am incorporate in Rome,
A Roman now adopted happily.
And must advise the Emperor for his good,
This day all quarrels die Andronicus.
Sweet Emperor, we must all be friends,
The Tribune and his Nephews kneel for grace.

Instead of this line becoming a description of what was happening, JJ played it as a command. Titus and his sons were forced to kneel twice in a very short amount of time, a humiliating action. In the scene playing out this way, it became very clear how much Tamora was toying with the Andronici.

My final lines changed as well. Sara had mentioned when we were working out fights on Saturday that when Saturninus is killed her crown fell off her head and made a huge thump. She pointed out that it may be on the floor for someone to give to Lucius. I said I may be able to, but it depended on where the blocking fell at that moment. On Saturday night I couldn't do anything with the crown because it fell behind Sara, and close to her body. I couldn't really see where it was, and it would have been awkward to try and get it.

When Saturninus died at the Sunday matinee, however, the crown slid off her head, and the momentum caused it to slide along the floor towards me. It was close to me, and very much in my character's awareness. From my point of view, Lucius seemed to notice the crown as well. It certainly gave me a "how can I turn this situation to my advantage?" feeling.

So when it came to my line, I was able to pick up the crown, stride to the center of the playing space, and kneel before Lucius, presenting the crown. Now that the crown's been picked up, the issue is created of where does it go - does it end up on Lucius's head? If so, who puts it there? Elizabeth told me that when this happened, she had a moment of "how do I deal with this crown before me?" but then her text gives her the answer. Lucius says:

Thanks gentle Romanes, may I govern so,
To heal Rome's harms, and wipe away her woe.
But gentle people, give me time awhile,
For Nature puts me to a heavy task:
Stand all aloof.

So she/he was able to waive off the crown with "give me time awhile."

We had a great talkback after the Sunday matinee with our audience. We spent a while discussing gender, and what the swapping did. Some audience members said they got used to it pretty quickly, and it didn't matter; some said they never quite got used to it. We discussed whether it made the play even darker to have feminine bodies performing these acts of violence.

There was also a discussion about why Titus Andronicus was chosen. Many audience members seemed less familiar with it, and Cyndi, our Bassianus, pointed out that at one point in Philadelphia, over 100 years passed between productions of this play. Felipe, our Lavinia, pointed out that theatres find extremely violent plays difficult to pull off. We live in a movie society, and movies have vast technology that can make anything seem real. In a very violent play you have to work harder to convince the audience, because if they see the holes in the combat or the blood work, it no longer seems real. I pointed out that the play also has a reputation as "lesser Shakespeare" and that attributes to it being done less often.

We also talked about the nature of the Bare Bard and whether they are as successful with tragedies as they are with comedies. One of our audience members said that he prefers seeing comedies on the Saturday night, because the frantic energy and the mistakes add to the fun, but he likes seeing the tragedies on the Sunday matinee, because they are well served by the extra bit of polish.

Speaking about the spin the changed gender put on the play reminded me that I had a specific moment I wanted to ask JJ about. In Tamora's scene with Aaron, Tamora has a line comparing the two of them to the Prince and Dido. JJ gestured to himself on the word "prince" when normally Dido, the Queen of Carthage, would be the equivalent one in the story to Tamora. I asked him if that was a conscious choice, or did he do it automatically because of inherent male identification with the word "prince?" JJ said it was a conscious choice because he decided that in this version, his Tamora, being male, was the Prince in the story. The choice certainly worked in the context, the moment passes so quickly, and the word "prince" highlights Tamora's status as royalty, particularly with an audience not immediately familiar with the background of such classical allusions.

It was a fascinating weekend, as a Shakespearean, and as an actor, and I certainly hope they will have me back again in the future!

Titus Androgynous, First Performance

2011-03-20T20:26:00.002-04:00

I have survived my first Bare Bard at Maryland Shakespeare Festival. This one certainly had a lot going on: violence, no rehearsal, large cast, plus the reverse gender cast. Things certainly went wrong on Saturday night: people of course had to call line, entrances and exits were flubbed, props were forgotten, but in the end, we did the play. The story happened. That was what I found remarkable.

The moment that I had mentioned before was near the end of the play. All the deaths have occurred and Marcus and Lucius have speeches explaining what has occurred and asking for pardon from the Roman people. Aemilius, who up to now is really just a messenger with a name, steps forward and declares Lucius to be emperor. Aemilius takes the reins and what he says happens. “Lucius our Emperor, for well I know / The common voice do cry it shall be so.” My joke is that I am Aemilius the Emperor Maker, as opposed to Warwick the King Maker. (Oh nerdy obscure Shakespeare jokes!)

I was curious about this moment because Maryland Shakespeare had sent all the actors a packet of information and staging and rhetoric and language, to help us prepare for this Bare Bard. Part of the packet dealt with status, and how what words you use to refer to someone should dictate the physical action – “Sir” vs “Lord” vs “Emperor.” Due to that information, I know that when I proclaim Lucius emperor, I should kneel. And if the people onstage are listening to my line “the common voice do cry it shall be so” they should follow suit and kneel as well. In the original text of Titus Andronicus, there is a crowd line that follows Aemilius’s line, concurring with what he has proclaimed. But that line was cut in our script, meaning that very few people would have had any reason to read that particular moment and to know what was about to happen. Without the crowd line, there was nothing to point the other actors to what they should do, and it would just be up to them to listen and act appropriately. And they did. Everyone on stage followed suit. Yay!

Part of this was due to this moment occurring at the end of the play, after we had collectively had a couple moments already of “oh… should we all respond…????” and so I think we were all more aware of moments like that and more comfortable in responding to them. At the beginning of the play, Saturninus is proclaimed emperor, and we didn’t have a crowd response. We had a meeting this morning and that was a moment that was brought up – how we all really wanted to say something, but were nervous about vocalizing something that wasn’t in the text. I think we’ll all be more comfortable with that sort of ad lib in today’s matinee.

I think the most useful aspect of these Bare Bards is the sense of freshness, of things unfolding for the first time before you, because that is exactly what is happening. Without four to six weeks of rehearsal, the story isn’t drilled into your head. Even though we know the story, the details are all hazy for us, and that’s what allows the surprises to happen.

I had two specific moments where I felt the magic of events occurring right in front of me, or receiving information for the very first time.

The first was when I run in to tell Saturninus that Lucius has gathered an army and is on his way to attack Rome. All I knew in my head was that Saturninus and Tamora had some lines and then Saturninus says something like, “Aemilius do this message honorably.” And I respond, “Your bidding shall I do effectually” and exit. So I go on stage, deliver my message, and then I am waiting for my cue line, waiting for Saturninus to tell me what to do. What happens in the scene is that Tamora comes up with the entire plan. I’m standing there listening to Tamora’s ideas, but I’m not going to do anything until The Emperor tells me to. It was a interesting, and unexpected, dynamic, particularly because Sarah, playing Saturninus, was playing this scene a little frantic and like she/he didn’t know what to do, and she/he took a moment before playing, “Yes! We will do that plan!” It was a very cool moment to live through with my fellow actors.

The other thing I noticed had to do with the ending of the play – living through the story, I don’t think you feel that Rome’s troubles are over. It seems like a rough, violent society, and one that will stay that way. I know Elizabeth feels that Lucius is very honorable, and that she/he puts Rome first, but that doesn’t change the fact that the way we put Rome first is through immediate retributive violence. Lucius calls his son up to say goodbye to the dead Titus (the young boy’s grandfather). There is this sense of Lucius telling is son to take the scene of carnage in and learn from it. And there is this tenderness to the Andronicuses saying their farewells to Titus.

Then Lucius flips on a dime and has his speech about Aaron the Moor’s punishment. And it’s mean. And cruel.

Set him beast deep in earth, and famish him.
There let him stand, and rave, and cry for food:
If any one relieves him, or pities him,
For the offence, he dies.

It’s two very different colors, and says a lot about the character, and the world of Titus Andronicus.

Now it’s time to warmup and get ready for the matinee!

Titus Androgynous, Day 2

2011-03-19T18:16:00.003-04:00

We are currently on our two hour dinner break, after being at the church from 9:30am. We began the morning with some physical and vocal warmups, and then headed straight into an entrance and exit run. That was quickly dispatched, but helpful because I'm now an attendant to the emperor and have to follow him/her around and now I know where I am supposed to be. I have become Aemilius, the curtain holder!

The death of Bassanius

Then the majority of the morning was spent on stage combat. There are a lot of deaths in Titus Andronicus, so all that violence had to be worked out safely. Quick decisions were made about weapons and blood (red fabric). Then we went through the play and practiced each death and moment of violence, one-by-one. Meanwhile people could go off and work on lines and text.

How do we cut of Titus's hand?

I used the time to double check all my entrances and exits. And since I have many scenes where I stand on stage without lines, it's my job to stay out of the way. So I checked the chart to see where other characters would be entering, to make sure I could pick a spot on stage that was out of the way.

We stopped for lunch, and I got to geek out more about Shakespeare (this time it was through sharing my undying love of the Histories). I got to have a conversation with Stephen Lorne Williams, a lovely man whom I had seen perform in Measure for Measure at the American Shakespeare Center. When I introduced myself to him in the morning, I think I surprised him by asking him about a specific choice he had made on the line "If any in Vienna be of worth / To undergo such ample grace and honour, / It is Lord Angelo." Williams delivered the final words with a big fat question in his voice. I knew this production had been directed by Patrick Tucker, who believes strongly that the First Folio has all the answers, so I wanted to know if this choice was suggested by First Folio punctuation, or just the idea of the actor. Williams said he think it was just his choice in the moment.

The deaths of Chiron and Demetrius

When lunch was done the last few deaths were plotted out. Then, at about 2pm, our facilitator Abbie Isaac came up and gave me another line! That's the kind of thing that happens in this set up -- you have to figure out who says random unassigned crowd lines. It certainly keeps you on your toes! People also planned the interlude music. I'm excited that a suggestion of mine, half made in jest, was accepted, and I'll be playing my recorder for it. Then we found out when the intermission is and blocked the curtain call.

And in an hour we are due back. In two hours we perform. There is little pressure on me, since my role is small, so I'm getting to observe the process a lot. When they say there is no rehearsal, they aren't kidding. Nothing we did was anything like a rehearsal. None of us know what is going to happen tonight. I am involved in one important moment at the end of the play, and I don't know where the two people I need to interact with will be standing. I don't know how or if the other people onstage will respond to the plot point that I put out there. (I'll explain more after the performance). But I'm very excited to see what happens.

Titus Androgynous, Day 1

2011-03-18T23:26:00.002-04:00

We arrived at the church at 5:30pm. The night started off with food and mingling. Hi, I'm so and so, what's your name? Who are you playing? were the commonly heard questions, along with, Have you done one of these before? This Bare Bard has quite a few of us who are taking part for the first time, including the actresses playing Marcus, Bassanius, and Saturninus.

As we were eating the conversation naturally turned to Shakespeare geekery. The question of families appearing onstage together was discussed -- what plays have a child and both parents? Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth (Macduffs) were the ones that easily came to mind. Someone asked about Merry Wives, and that was confirmed. Then Comedy of Errors (one of the few where it turns out well for mother, father, and child), Pericles, and The Winter's Tale. Loving the histories as I do, I was able to point out Margaret, H6, and Prince Ned in 3H6, the French King, Queen, and Alice in H5, and the Duke of Aumerle and his parents in R2. Any others that we missed?

Before long it was time to stop being nerdy and time to start... being nerdy. We began the evening with group warmups. Chairman Mao's warm up, which I hadn't done in years, some Linklater, and some tongue twisters. We passed a sound and motion around a circle, and played a name game while tossing balls. This last exercise was difficult because most of us had all just met. If you had the ball, you had to make eye contact with someone, say their name, and then toss them the ball. We added movement and something tells me the act of recall along with panic, eye contact, and having to change spots on stage, felt something like what this performance tomorrow will feel like.

Then we did a status exercise. Talking about status has always been one of my favorite tools, as I feel it's extremely enlightening. The most difficult part was remembering who everyone was playing. Then as we were told we had to line up according to status, the questions came -- is this the top of the show? Is Tamora a Roman Queen, or a Roman prisoner? Actual status, vs. personal perceived status? We discovered, of course, that this is a play where the status of the characters in Rome change quite a bit. Aaron the Moor was also an interesting piece of the puzzle. In general, everyone speaks badly of him. But Tamora is sleeping with him, and her sons sometimes show a grudging respect. Part of the status exercise is about it being displayed by how others treat you and how you treat others. Others treat Aaron as low, but Aaron does not act subservient to them.

The night finished with a couple brave actors taking the stage to test out making direct audience contact in speeches and playing with rhetoric. The speeches were quite unpolished, but there was something electric about them all the same. It was very exciting to watch. Bassanius wanted to do his speech were he tells Saturninus to pardon Titus. Instead of just ending there, the actress playing Titus stood up and said her line in response, coming out of the audience. Then the actor playing Tamora stood up and moved from the audience space to the acting space. It all seemed so spontaneous, because it was. And there was a magic in that. A magic I'm looking forward to seeing more of tomorrow night.

And now it's time to sleep, for we start back tomorrow at 9:30am.

Titus Androgynous

2011-03-18T12:46:00.005-04:00

Right now I am packing a suitcase and getting ready to head to Frederick, MD for the weekend. Once there I will be packed in with a group of actors who together will put on a production of Titus Adronicus with barely any rehearsal. It's one of Maryland Shakespeare Festival's Bare Bards, and my first time participating. The play was cast and scripts were sent out about a month ago. We all arrive (hopefully) completely off book. We get together for dinner and a workshop on Friday night. We rehearse (mostly exits, entrances, and fights) on Saturday. We perform Saturday night and Sunday afternoon. We drink.

Hopefully somewhere in the middle of all that craziness I'll find time to blog and tweet about the experience. I've been wanting to take part in one of these projects for a long time, so I'm very excited to see first hand how it all works, or doesn't. There are already a couple moments that I am curious about.

And if that isn't enough wackiness, this Titus Andronicus is reversed gender! I'll be playing Aemilius. The cast also includes Shannon Parks, JJ Area, Maya Jackson, Sarah Thomas, Lindsey Mitchell, Cyndi Rose, Liz Hostetter, Elizabeth Jernigan, Erin Brannigan, Emily Karol, Felipe Cabezas, Christina Frank, Anne Nottage, Colby Codding, and Corey Mullen. The production is facilitated by Abbie Isaac.

March 19 -- 8pm
March 20 -- 2pm

Sunday’s performance will be followed by a spirited post-show discussion. No two performances are ever the same, so come twice! $15 suggested donation at the door. Seats fill quickly, so reserve in advance by emailing Karen@mdshakes.org or by calling (301) 668-4090.

Performances located at:
All Saints Episcopal Church
21 North Court Street
Frederick, MD 21701

Swan Day 2011

2011-03-17T17:50:00.002-04:00

Once again this year I have been working with some other wonderful women to organize DC's Swan Day. SWAN Day/Support Women Artists Now Day is a new international holiday that celebrates women artists. It is an annual event taking place on the last Saturday of March (Women’s History Month). You can find out more about this event, by visiting the website, http://www.womenarts.org/swan/.

In DC, Swan Day is produced by Catherine Aselford and the Georgetown Theatre Company. It will take place on March 26 from Noon to 6pm at various locations in Georgetown. Events include films, storytelling, visual art, and a short play reading festival. It is the latter that I am most involved with. So on Saturday the 26th you can find me at Grace Church (1041 Wisconsin Ave, NW), for much of the day, helping to run the staged reading festival. I am also directly involved with three of the works.

Woman at Bat
by Heather Meyer
I will be directing the reading of this short play about three women and their love of baseball. I'm thrilled to have actresses Katie Culligan, Lisa Hill-Corley, and Melissa Robinson on board.

Tiger Lilies
by Victoria Z. Daly
directed by Jessica Aimone
In this lovely play that jumps around in time showing key moments in the relationship between a mother and a daughter, I will be playing the part of Vanessa.

The Body Washer
by Rosemary Frisino Toohey
directed by Catherine Aselford
I will be playing Amy, a journalist reporting on the murder of a young woman at a military checkpoint.

Right before the Staged Reading Marathon, at noon at the Georgetown Barnes and Noble, I will be taking part in Dishing with the Girls, an open discussion between a panel of women artists and the community.

But Swan Day events have already kicked off! Today I took part in Soar with The Swans, a sneak peek event at the National Museum of Women in the Arts between 2:00 – 3:30 p.m.

The afternoon included poetry; storytelling; the screening of SIS, an award-winning short film about the relationship between sisters; & a staged reading of 10 Page Drama, a short play about playwriting. Between performances, attendees can test their knowledge and win SWAN cookies by playing Name That Woman Artist.

For this pre-Swan Day event, I played Julia in the staged reading of 10 Page Drama by Samantha Kuperberg, directed by Catherine Aselford. The cast also included Jonathan Lee Taylor, Heather Benjamin, Terence Aselford, Jacinda Bronaugh, Frank O'Donnell, Stefan Aleksander, and Krista Cowen.

Julie Taymor's THE TEMPEST

2010-12-22T12:24:00.002-05:00

Going into this film, I knew I wasn’t likely to be offended by any of Taymor’s choices. I don’t really like this play, so it isn’t holy and untouchable to me. It’s not a great play. I have a theory that its reputation arose solely based on the incorrect identification of it as Shakespeare’s last play. His farewell to the stage. We know now, of course, that he worked on plays after The Tempest. I think if we had always known that, The Tempest would never had reached the status as one of his great works. Because it’s just not that good. So that’s my prejudice going into this work.

The movie opens with a shot of a sandcastle. It begins to rain and the sandcastle is washed away. As it deteriorates, the camera pulls back and we see that the sandcastle is in the hands of Miranda (Felicity Jones). The rain is coming from a maelstrom at sea that we can see devouring a ship. Miranda begins to run.

Miranda runs until she finds her mother, Prospera (yes, that would be Prospero in Shakespeare’s original text). Prospera (Helen Mirren) is standing on a cliff, arms raised, staff outstretched, screaming. She is controlling the storm. Shakespeare’s text is a bit ambiguous on how much power Prospero has versus how much Ariel has to do for him. Taymor’s version clearly shows Prospera as a sorceress. She even spells Miranda to sleep with a very pointed “I know thou canst not choose” rather than simply remarking on Miranda’s weariness.

Making Prospero a woman is not a new choice. It’s been done before. It works well with the coexisting malevolence and softness that Shakespeare has written into the character. Making her a mother gives a tender feeling to the way Prospera brings Miranda and Ferdinand together. But making the character a woman also adds to her unpleasantness. For when Prospera threatens Ariel by recounting how she rescued him from the evil witch Sycorax, you can’t help but feel that Prospera is a little like Sycorax herself. Consider the description of the witch: “This blue-eyed hag was hither brought with child, / And here was left by the sailors.” Sound like anyone else we know?

Prospero has been a woman before. It’s a choice that has worked before. So I’m not really sure why Taymor feels the need to invent text to explain the choice. Instead of just sticking with the story and changing pronouns, Taymor writes a new monologue for Prospera – one that explains that she was married to the Duke and it was when he died that all her problems began. This is the issue where the Shakespeare purist in me comes out. It seems weird then that her brother can take over the dukedom, since if she married the Duke, her brother is of no blood relation. Is Taymor suggesting the usurping has more to do with the fact that they didn’t want a woman in charge than it does with Antonio being power-hungry? If so, she doesn’t make this clear.

The second choice to talk about is the casting of black actor Djimon Hounsou as Caliban. Again, not a new choice, but one that absolutely is in line with the text and connects the character to a modern audience. Embracing a post-colonial interpretation drives the point in the text home. Prospera has taken the land from Caliban, usurped his place, just as her brother usurped hers. It makes us uncomfortable to hear the white Prospera refer to Caliban as “slave;” so too does the accusation that the black Caliban has attempted to rape the white Mirada. And it should make us uncomfortable. Prospero/a should not be a character of straightforward likeability and goodness. S/he should have lost part of his/her humanity while on that island. The casting of a black actor, or, say, an American Indian actor, helps make this clear to us given our history of oppressing. Plenty has already been written about post-colonialism and The Tempest, so I'll just leave it at that.

For the most part the acting is very strong. There’s an absolutely lovely moment between Ariel and Propera when she says “I shall miss you; But yet you shall have freedom.” The beauty of Shakespeare’s text manages a couple times to rise above the rest of the film. This happens, as it should, with Miranda’s “O wonder! / How many goodly creatures are there here! / How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world / That has such people in't.” And at the end, when Mirren gravely states, “And thence retire me to my Milan, where / Every third thought shall be my grave.” … “Every third thought shall be my grave,” For as much as I don’t like this play, that’s a damn good line.

I have no strong opinions on Russell Brand, but then it’s no secret that I never like clown characters. Some people are praising him, some people hate him, some people say, “he’s not playing Trinculo, he’s just being himself!” Well I had never heard of Russell Brand before this movie, so I wouldn’t know. It’s hard to go wrong with Helen Mirren and Alan Cumming. And Felicity Jones is the most delightful Miranda I have ever seen. Not that that’s saying much. Let’s be blunt, Miranda and Ferdinand are crap parts. They are boring, wispy children that spend the entire play sighing. Jones demonstrates how to make the part come to life with considerable charm and believability. Her counterpart, Reeve Carter as Ferdinand, does not. His lack of talent, skill, and presence is the most offending part of this movie. He spends the entire movie with one expression on his face. He seems unable to portray any emotion. And don’t even get me started on his poor enunciation or complete inability to speak Shakespearean verse properly. It’s embarrassing.

I can’t help but feel very sorry for Ben Whishaw, a young British actor of considerable talent. I was very excited to hear about this casting, glad that he would be getting some recognition. But his performance is buried in Taymor’s attempt to make Ariel more spirit-like. I heard Taymor claim in interview that they used as little CGI as possible. Well, she should have used even less. A lighter hand would have yielded a more powerful result. As I watched Ariel zip around the movie screen I couldn’t help but wish that she had taken the same approach toward Ariel that Peter Jackson took towards Legolas. There was no question Legolas was otherworldly and light, but he didn’t have to be see-through and float around the screen to prove it.

And this is the real shocker of the movie: Taymor, know for her acuity with visuals, completely fails at using special effects. They destroy any magic or malevolence this story might have. They are cheesy (Ariel flicking the boat to pieces) and inexplicable (Ariel’s here-today-gone-tomorrow breasts). It is astonishing that Shakespeare’s most visual text, one that includes sea storms, spell casting, air spirits, and monsters, has been performed on stage successfully for over 400 years, yet when someone makes a film, and has all the resources to make those images come to life, the play falls apart and the magic is lost. I can think of no stronger argument for the importance and endurance of theatre than that very fact.

Other bloggers’ thoughts on this film:

http://blog.shakespearegeek.com/2010/12/review-julie-taymor-tempest.html

http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2010/12/julie-taymorrsquos-tempest

On Playing Beatrice

2010-12-07T14:55:00.001-05:00

During August and September I was playing Beatrice in an outdoor production of Much Ado About Nothing with The Shakespeare Factory, an original practices troupe. I meant to be a better blogger through the process, but the road to hell yada yada yada. Still there were several thoughts and topics swarming around in my head as we rehearsed and performed that I knew I wanted to write about.

First of all, it is of course a great privilege to play the role. There’s a reason all Shakespeare actresses want to add this role to their resumes. I was excited to have the opportunity because it was this year that I really felt ready for the role. Or ready for my first stab at the role. I’m sure I’ll play her again, and I’m sure I’ll play her better, but I felt emotionally and mentally prepared to take a crack at the role for the first time.

Beatrice is glorious. It’s clear from reading the play, or seeing the play, that she is a great character. But when you play her, you can’t help being in love with her. I am also incredibly envious of her. She is everything I want to be. She is all my best parts, with none of my faults. The woman is smart, smarter than anyone else around her, including Benedick. This is a very frustrating position to hold – when no one seems able to keep up. Add to this the fact that she is in a world where her power and autonomy are limited. Where she can resist the traditional roles of male and female only to a certain degree. She has been hurt and disappointed in love and yet she never gives way to the kind of bitterness and negatively that I feel. Sure, it would be possible for an actress to take all of Beatrice’s witty comments and give them a bitter edge, but I think to do this too much is to miss part of the character – for I think many of her lines feel very light and I have to believe Leonato when he says, “she is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then.” Sure, she is accused of being curst, but Don Pedro also says she has a “merry heart.”

Her heart is so open and so generous and so loyal. Beatrice never doubts Hero’s fidelity and she puts everything on the line to save her cousin. I think she is fully aware of the fact that she could lose Benedick’s affection forever when she asks him to kill Claudio.

People may want to accuse Beatrice of the fault of pride. Hero certainly does in the duping scene. But Hero is playing a trick on Beatrice, so how much she really means what she says is open to interpretation. Beatrice may be scared of relationships, scared of marriage, scared of losing power to a husband, scared of being hurt again by Benedick, but when she hears that he loves her, she conquers her fears and commits fully. She delivers a soliloquy, one of the few times in the play that she speaks in verse, and the only time she refers to Benedick with the more intimate “thee/thy/thou.”

What fire is in mine ears? Can this be true?
Stand I condemned for pride and scorn so much?
Contempt, farewell; and maiden pride, adieu;
No glory lives behind the back of such.
And Benedick, love on, I will requite thee,
Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand.
If thou dost love, my kindness shall incite thee
To bind our loves up in a holy band.
For others say thou dost deserve, and I
Believe it better than reportingly.

This actually brings me to the first of three topics that I wanted to address. This moment was to me the most difficult moment in the show, and preceded by the most difficult scene. And I think many people have difficulty with the Beatrice Duped scene. Shakespeare’s not doing the female characters any favors. The Benedick Duped scene comes first and it’s funnier. All we are doing is repeating a joke that has already been made. The scene is redundant. And for an actor such as myself, the scene has additional difficulties. I don’t believe in the actor being funny. I believe in the writer being funny and the actor playing the scene. But in this (comic) scene, where I was supposed to be funny, I had no lines. And then I had to end the scene with ten lines where Beatrice does a complete 180. She hears criticisms about herself and decides to change immediately. How many people can do something like that? Her courage is astounding.

So just think about everything an actress has to pull together in this moment:
1. Speaking verse – a change for Beatrice
2. Direct audience contact
3. The extreme pain of hearing someone you love say terrible things about you
4. The immediate decision to change behaviors
5. The extreme joy of hearing that Benedick loves her
6. Talking to Benedick who isn’t there
7. A final line that sounds awkward to modern ears

Then you have to take all that and still strike the right tone and level of levity considering the fact that you are in the middle of a comedy, and the end of a comic scene, and the heavy stuff comes later. Conversely, it’s also really possibly to underplay this speech. So basically I was never satisfied with how I played this speech. In the end, I had to just trust the vision of the director, who wanted to keep this moment on the lighter side. But there’s a lot to explore there, and I don’t think I got it all.

The difficulty of that moment did not surprise me. It’s a speech that has always given me pause whenever seeing the play or reading it. But the second topic I wanted to talk about was what did surprise me about Beatrice. The play is a delightful comedy, but when I was playing Beatrice I did not feel like I was in a comedy. The wedding scene, where you have nothing to say, followed by the Kill Claudio scene, where emotions and rage and words pour out of you, is incredibly taxing. After this she has a short scene with Benedick and then the final, wrap up scene where love finally wins. It all ends happily, but in terms of time, it happens very quickly after those raw emotional scenes. I found myself as worn out and drained by Beatrice and I was by Isabella in Measure for Measure. Isabella is practically raped and led to believe that her brother is dead. It’s a rough character journey to go through, and Beatrice’s journey was as much a rollercoaster, and as exhausting. And that really surprised me. Of course the side-by-side existence of witty comedy and terrible tragedy is what makes Much Ado About Nothing so brilliant.

Thirdly, I want to address one specific moment. at the end of the play “Peace, I will stop your mouth.” This line is famous amongst Shakespeare scholars. Every time you see this play, Benedick says this line. The only version of this play we have is the Quarto from 1600. In this text, this line is marked as Leonato’s. It was a later editor (Theobald) that assigned the line to Benedick, and most editions after have followed suit. The Arden edition notes the line as Leonato’s. The Folger gives it to Benedick, despite its insistence on following Quarto notes in other locations, such as claiming that Leonato has two brothers and not one.

I was quite excited to learn on the first day of rehearsal that we were following the Quarto and giving the line to Leonato. After all, I had never seen it performed this way. And naturally, as a Shakespeare scholar, one has to be interested in how choices like this change a play or scene.

The Arden buys into Leonato saying this line because it “is in keeping with his characteristic attempts to stage-manage this scene, and his role as Beatrice’s guardian; it also provides for a more egalitarian accommodation between the lovers than would Benedick’s own declaration of intent to silence Beatrice” (emphasis mine). And it was really for that second reason that our director liked the choice, and it is also the reason I was interested in it. After all, when Leonato delivers the line it can be said to both Benedick and Beatrice, instead of just to Beatrice.

In the course of my research I consulted the RSC edition of this play. If you have not seen this series, which is relatively new, I highly recommend it. The editions include interviews with RSC actors and directors that are quite enlightening and thought-provoking. When asked about this moment, director Nicholas Hynter said, “There are all sorts of reasons to give the line to Leonato that look good in the study. … But in the theater, it’s blindingly obvious that the line is Benedick’s.”

I immediately rejected Hynter’s statement because he seemed to be concretely denying the viability of the choice to give the line to Leonato. Nonsense, I thought, surely it can be made to work. You can’t just categorically deny that.

Hynter was right; I was wrong. When you are living the play and the characters it just has to be Benedick’s line. This was something else that really surprised me – that something with clear possibilities intellectually turned out to be so obviously wrong theatrically. Harriet Walter says in the RSC edition exactly what I discovered in my rehearsal process: “I am convinced that it is better to give the line to Benedick, and I don’t find it is a sinister suffocation at all. Rather, it seems to be a restoration of their usual banter but with love behind it now.”

I discovered that it actually felt more suffocating, more sexist, to have Leonato say the line, especially having lived through what Beatrice lived through. She saw her uncle immediately side with the men against Hero, and react in an incredibly vitriolic way. He is horrible to Hero in the wedding scene. This man then arranges to have Hero marry Claudio despite what he has done. Then to have that man tell you to get married and then control how it happens – it does not feel good.

And it turns out not to be a suffocation when Benedick says it. Beatrice is smarter than Benedick. Every encounter they have, she wins. Like Berowne, Benedick always has to duck out of the witty banter when he finds himself at a loss for a response. If he says, “Peace, I will stop your mouth” it is simply a continuation of this relationship, full of love and deference to her wit.

My production kept the line as Leonato’s since that was the choice that had been made. And I think the difficulty of the moment was diffused due to the fact that Leonato was played by a female actor (still as a male role though). But I still appreciated the fact that we were exploring and discussing the moment. We all talked about it in a conversation close to opening and the director agreed that is probably was always meant to be Benedick’s line. But it was certainly fascinating to get to discover that fact for myself.

Oh, I lied. There is a fourth topic I want to discuss. And that is the magic of original practices. In an original practices production, the goal is to involve the audience, and we as actors work to let them know that they are allowed to respond however they see fit. During Much Ado About Nothing we had a couple of audiences that were with us at every moment, and they let us know it. It was thrilling. When Beatrice and Benedick are face to face for the first time after the duping scene and they final admit their love, the audiences loved it. I would say, “I love you with so much of my heart that none is left to protect” and then run into his arms and we would kiss for the first time. As we were kissing, audiences would cheer. It was magical. It was exhilarating. An experience like that reminds you just how rewarding acting can be.

(Photos 1 and 2 by Kelly Dowling. Photos 3 and 4 by Kevin Hollenbeck)

Becoming an Actor/Scholar

2010-11-28T13:56:00.000-05:00

I'm currently in the process of applying to graduate schools -- I'm looking to get my MFA in Acting. This weekend I'm being the work on all those essays and personal statements that I have to write. One of them wants me to write about a defining life moment that has nothing to do with theatre. Um... I get that they want me to be well-rounded, but I don't think I have any life-defining moments that have nothing to do with theatre. Well, maybe the ones that have to do with religion, but I'm not sure I really want to be that personal. I've had people tell me that they don't know anyone that is as into theatre as I am, and so everything in my life I'm pretty sure I can relate to theatre in some way. My brother's fiancee joked that I could write about the moment I met her, but the night we met we watched Hedwig and the Angry Inch!

Anyway in order to prepare for writing these essays I have been digging up old pieces of writing and I've discovered a blog that I wrote and then never posted. It's sort of the companion piece to the posting after SAA 2010. I was supposed to post this one first, but I guess I never did. Here it is:

Today’s blog will give you a little bit of history: how and why I decided to change my career designation from Actor to Actor/Scholar.

I have always been interested in knowledge. I do inordinate amounts of research when I am in a play; the amount of research is only limited by how much free time I have. When I do a production of a Shakespeare play I always pick up the Arden edition and read all the notes; I also seek out other editions of and essays about that play to read.

Last year the Shakespeare Association of America moved their headquarters to Washington, DC which is also where they were holding their annual conference. I decided to attend the 2009 conference as an observer, since I wouldn’t have to pay for travel and room. I figured three days surrounded by lovers of Shakespeare could not go wrong. And I was right. The event was life-changing, and as such was both exhilarating and depressing. Exhilarating because I felt like I found a part of myself that was missing. Depressing because bridging the two worlds of actor and scholar will be a difficult task.

I attended the sessions and seminars that were somehow related to performance, but even with the scholars participating in those discussions, there was a sense of here are scholars and there are theatre artists and never the twain shall meet. In fact, the performance aspect of Shakespeare has been sadly neglected by most Shakespearean scholarship. I felt hope however, as this appears to be something that is changing. First, with the rising interest in original practices that has occurred in the last decade. Second, with the younger generation of Shakespearean scholars. The wonderful women my age that I met at the conference have a great love of performance, to the point where all of them at some point have staged readings of obscure early modern dramas.

But it is not just in the realm of scholarship where performance has been ignored. In the realm of performance, scholarship has been ignored. One scholar noted in her panel in 2009 that she will go to Q and A's and ask the actors if they read scholarly articles or academic reviews and she always gets the answer no. I spoke to her after to let her know that I do. She said, "Well, you are the first one I've met." And I had to be honest with her, I didn’t know anyone else who did either. And at that conference I only ran into two other full time practitioners, and actually one of them I only knew of as an actor, but in speaking with him it turned out he was actually an English professor who had just recently gotten back onstage. The other was a director, and indeed the scholars who also work in performance tended to be directors as opposed to actors. (This is not to downplay any of these people, their work, or their contributions, merely to point out that the task of being an actor/scholar was overwhelming when faced with the reality that there didn’t seem to be anyone else with my identical perspective or situation.)

So I came home from the 2009 conference with a determination to be a part of the new conversation of performance and scholarship, but not really sure how to go about that. I did know that one step I could take was to attend the 2010 conference as a participant instead of merely an observer. I’ll continue this later, but just to let you know 2010 was even better than 2009 and I left even more hopeful at the progress of the conversation between performance and scholarship.

So that was how the journey began. And it's a journey that is frustrating in regards to grad school. Because there isn't one program that will give me Actor/Scholar. I basically have to chose one for now and hit the other one later. There are two MFA programs that are really appealing to the scholar side of me: the MFA in Staging Shakespeare at the University of Exeter and the Master of Letters/Master of Fine Arts in Shakespeare and Performance at Mary Baldwin. I start think I should apply there (especially given how much I love the ASC), but then I remember that I really do want to get strong actor training in voice, movement, and all that jazz. Sure the two programs have acting components, but something has to go. So I'm trying to look at acting MFAs that seem interested in analysis and Shakespeare, and preferably with an abroad component. It's all very overwhelming.

The Fourth Wall

2010-10-13T11:36:00.001-04:00

I’ve had several topics that I’ve been meaning to blog about. For instance I still have yet to write about my experience playing Beatrice. But that and other such topics must be put aside, for I find I have to respond to a disturbing trend. Last year I posted links on my facebook page to a couple blog postings from theatre critics bemoaning performers breaking the fourth wall. One came from Christine Dolen of the Miami Herald. This opinions in her post were seconded by Elizabeth Maupin of the Orlando Sentinel. Dolen says that interactive theatre makes her “uncomfortable.” Maupin agrees that she wants to stay on the “safe” side of the fourth wall. Both of them write as though this whole audience interaction is a new, scary idea rising up against the established convention of a fourth wall.

My pretentious side wanted to dismiss these opinions as merely coming from unenlightened arts writers in Florida, but just today Peter Marks posted a blog in the Washington Post putting forth the exact same opinion.

Marks says that breaking the fourth wall is “one of the most annoying trends in modern theater.” Sigh. Audience interaction is not a modern theatre trend. The fourth wall is a modern theatre trend coming from the advent of realism, spreading during the 19th and 20th centuries. Prior to that were centuries of theatre without the fourth wall. And you don’t have to know very much about theatre history to know this – the most famous playwright of all time wrote for a theatre that interacted directly with its audience. (That would be Shakespeare, if you hadn’t figured it out).

First of all, I am troubled that these critics, who are set up as experts on the theatre, only seem interested in one very specific type of theatrical experience (and clearly a middle-class, western one at that). How can we trust theatre critics who deny the great majority of theatre history? But it troubles me much, much more that these critics seem to be against the very quality that makes theatre special. Isn’t the very reason we go to theatre for that live human connection? If we aren’t looking for that very alive and present exchange between an actor and an audience, why see a play? Dolin says, “Just sitting there in the dark, listening and reacting and thinking, is fine by me.” Marks writes about wanting to be "left alone." If that’s all you want, sit in a movie theatre, or in front of your television.

What is the point of theatre that is “safe”? Don’t we want our theatre to be alive? To challenge and surprise us?

Sure, there is a right way and a wrong way to interact with an audience. And it is a fine line that not every actor can figure out. Or every director. I had a director who told the cast that if an audience member seemed uncomfortable or wasn’t responding when we talked to them, to keep going back to that same person and force them to respond. I really don't think that's the way to go about it.

I am well aware that there are plays where audience interaction is entirely inappropriate. I understand that different productions have different styles. I once for a Shakespeare play and was not cast and had another cast member ask me how I would have dealt with doing the show since I would have disagreed with the decision not to talk to the audience. I told him I would do exactly what I did in the last play we did together (which was fully of the school of naturalism) and ignored the director’s wishes and talked to the audience anyway. He was confused and said, “I don’t remember you doing that,” clearly not being able to pick up on my sarcasm.

Not every play needs the actors to look into an audience member’s eyes and speak directly to them. But even without that element, a play is still interactive. It has to be. The audience is there, the actors are there, and each group affects the other. Therefore ALL theatre is interactive. That’s what makes it theatre. If theatre doesn’t make a connection, it’s either badly written or badly performed, or both.

I can absolutely accept that some people do not like audience interaction, especially the more extreme versions of it. But these people probably shouldn’t be the ones writing about theatre. Sure, there are audience members that just want to sit back, laugh at a show, then go home and forget all about it. Fine - there are certainly plays that will allow those audience members to do so. But it’s not the kind of theatre I want to see. It’s not the kind of theatre I want to do. And it’s not the kind of theatre that matters. It’s not the kind of theatre that lasts. And theatre that matters, theatre that lasts, theatre that makes an impact – isn’t that the type of theatre that should interest our critics?

Fringe - Not Quite Over

2010-07-22T08:15:00.002-04:00

This is the final week of Fringe, but it's still not too late to see BOTH of my shows.

A Thing for Redheads has two final performances:
Friday July 23 @ 10:30pm
Saturday July 24 @ 3:30pm

DC Theatre Scene just posted a four star review of this show. Reviewer Caitlin DeMerlis calls the play "witty, quirky, entertaining." Demerlis praises all four actors, and writes, "With a touch of Miley Cyrus and a dash of Britney Spears, Charlene V. Smith as pop star Jessie Morgan is poppin’ and lockin’ it ... Smith adds a terrifyingly realistic embodiment of the vapid stars that currently grace the covers of entertainment rags."

Macbeth sold out four of our five performances at the Capital Fringe Festival. Many people had to be turned away. Bummed because you missed this awesome production? Never fear, we are remounting it for two weekends in August at 1st Stage in Tyson's Corner.

The remount will run on the following dates:
Friday, August 6, at 8pm
Saturday, August 7, at 8pm
Sunday, August 8, at 7pm
Friday, August 13, at 8pm
Saturday, August 14, at 8pm
Sunday, August 15, at 7pm

Don't miss out, get your tickets now at Brown Paper Tickets.

Good Press for Macbeth

2010-07-15T11:26:00.003-04:00

Macbeth is getting lots of buzz at the Capital Fringe Festival:

--We received a five-star "Pick of the Fringe" rating from DC Theatre Scene. Reviewer Kate Mattingly singled out the three witches, calling us "creepy and conniving."

--We are an Editor's Pick on the Washington Post's Going Out Guide. Critic Rebecca J. Ritzel described the production as "clever, lightning-quick and all about taking risks."

--Finally, the Washington City Paper reports on what happened opening night. A patron was so determined to see our show, he ripped the door off of its hinges.

Only three performances left!
Redrum @ Fort Fringe, 612 L Street, NW

Thursday July 15 @ 10:30pm
Saturday July 17 @ 7pm
Sunday July 18 @ 9:30pm

Macbeth Opens Tonight!

2010-07-10T13:39:00.001-04:00

Macbeth opens tonight at the Capital Fringe Festival. The show is at 8pm.

The Redrum at Fort Fringe: 612 L Street NW, Washington, DC 20001

Closest metro stations: Mt. Vernon Square - Convention Center (Green/Yellow) or Chinatown - Gallery Place (Red).

Here's a sneak peak:

photos by Lee Liebeskind

The Actor's Ego

2010-07-06T13:31:00.000-04:00

I was thrilled to see that the RSC had posted a link on their facebook page to an interview on the Guardian with Michael Boyd. Frankly, I'll read anything and everything about Michael Boyd. That man reached theatre god status when I saw the Histories cycle in 2008 which he directed. Plus he's brought the ensemble back to the RSC.

The interview is short, but telling. My favorite moment?

What is the biggest myth about theatre?
That it is more populated by egotists than any other profession.

Thank you Mr. Boyd! This has been a thought that's been rattling around in my head recently for a couple reasons. Mostly because I've recently watched the second season of Canadian TV show Slings and Arrows. The second season is the season in which the New Burbage Festival is performing Macbeth. So I could watch in the name of research. ;-) Anyway theatre people are dictated to love this show because it is about theatre people. Every theatre person has told another theatre person, "Oh, you must see Slings and Arrows!" But I began to feel a little annoyed with the show and its over-reliance on negative actor stereotypes. According to this show, people in the arts are all flaky, pleasure-driven egotists with no understanding of the real world. The second season is when Ellen finds herself undergoing a tax audit. Her constant insistence that "I'm just a poor actor! How can you expect me to understand taxes?!" gets a little grating.

If we are being fair, who really understands taxes anyway? And they are increasingly difficult and convoluted when you are an independent contractor. But the actors I know don't whine about them anymore than anyone else in the world, and we have to work harder to understand all the rules and regulations and how they apply to us. (On this note, I have a few friends that insist we can deduct makeup and costumes. We can't. One even says her tax preparer told her she could. He's wrong.)

But Slings and Arrows does get it right when they take on the magic of theatre, the wonder, what draws us all to it. “The theater is an empty box, and it is our task to fill it with fury, and ecstasy, and with revolution."

Are there egos in theatre? Absolutely. Divas? Yes. Difficult actors? Sure. But actors are also practical, selfless, hardworking, courageous, brave, generous, empathetic, smart, and curious. I had a guy on Facebook tell me that being an actor was my choice and since I chose that profession I didn't deserve health insurance. He was clearly under the false impression, as so many are, that actors are lazy leeches. I would challenge him to find a single day in his life where he has worked as hard as all my fellow actors in Macbeth have for the last month. This cast has thrown themselves into the challenges of this production, learning a bevy of new, demanding skills, without complaint. Capoeira, acrobatics, stage combat, physical theatre, etc. Wait until you see what we do with bamboo!

Uta Hagen wanted us to have respect for acting, and America certainly needs more of that. But how about a little respect for actors while we're at it?

Fringe Marketing

2010-06-30T09:37:00.001-04:00

We are a week and a half away from the opening of the 2010 Capital Fringe Festival. So posters and postcards have appeared for my two shows. I thought I would share the images with you.

And here are some publicity photos from A Thing For Redheads, photographer Paul Oberle.

Buy tickets at capfringe.com.

Macbeth

2010-06-06T19:33:00.003-04:00

This past week we've delved into rehearsals for my second Fringe project, a production of Macbeth. It is the inaugural production of PushPull Theatre Company and directed by Jessica Aimone. I cannot express how excited I am to be working on this project. First of all the director is bright, open, and has an infectious enthusiasm about the project. And what a project. This isn't your granddaddy's Macbeth! Though Macbeth is a short text (Shakespeare's shortest tragedy), our production is still substantially cut in order to fit into the time confines of a Fringe production. Furthermore this isn't just Macbeth -- it's Capoeira Macbeth!

Capoeira is a Brazilian art form that seems to be very "in" right now. It mixes dance, martial arts, and music. We are using it as our stage combat and also to inform a musical score. The idea is that we are doing theatre and we are being up front about it so why not use the more theatrical kind of fighting, capoeira, which is much more of a dance, or a game, than a fight. I've been taking classes for a couple of weeks now, and I love it. Don't get me wrong, I'm terrible at it. It's probably the hardest physical activity I've ever done. It's exhausting and it works every muscle you can think of. But it's great. And watching people who know what they are doing, well, stunning is the only word for it.

I described Jessica as being an open director. She truly is interested in what the actor thinks and wants us to be as involved as possible. She has many moments where she wants some sort of musicalization or a certain effect but has nothing set in stone. So those of us not working a scene she sends off into another room to figure it out on our own. We've only just started this process, but working this way gives us all, even those of us in smaller roles, a true sense of community and ownership of the piece. I am personally very thankful for this. I am playing the first witch, but haven't done any scene work yet because our third witch is out of town until the middle of the week. But because of Jessica's method, I still get to feel like I am contributing and doing things as rehearsal.

The cast of Macbeth includes Jeremy Brown, Courtney Weber, Sallie Willows, David Winkler, Anna Brungardt, Ryan Tumulty, Katy Carkuff, Lee Liebeskind, Tony Strowd, Austin Johnson, Carl Long, Ty Hallmark, Vince Eisenson, JB Tadena, Charlene V. Smith, Kristen Garaffo, Alex Mandell, Christina Frank, Michelle Polera. Tickets go on sale June 21.

Macbeth will be performed at Fort Fringe, 612 L Street NW, on the following dates:
Saturday July 10 @ 8pm
Sunday July 11 @ 4pm
Thursday July 15 @ 10:30pm
Saturday July 17 @ 7pm
Sunday July 18 @ 9:30pm

A Thing For Redheads

2010-05-29T10:28:00.003-04:00

I will be quite busy this summer, performing in two shows at the Capital Fringe Festival. The first one is a dark, brooding comedy called A Thing for Redheads (how did I get cast, right?). It is by local playwright John Morogiello, author of last year's fringe hits Jack the Ticket Ripper and Irish Authors Held Hostage. John also recently enjoyed great success with his off-Broadway debut of Engaging Shaw at the Abingdon Theatre. The New York Times called Shaw "a charming romantic comedy featuring four razor-sharp tongues."

Last summer I was part of the cast of Jack the Ticket Ripper and had a wonderful experience with cast, script, and director. It's a thrill to be able to work on another Morogiello script, especially since this cast reunites many of us from Jack the Ticket Ripper. In A Thing for Redheads are Jim Gagne, who was the eponymous Jack, and Ian Blackwell Rogers, who played the Playwright. The cast is rounded out by Lori Boyd, who is no stranger to Morogiello, having been in Irish Authors Held Hostage last summer, and also wrote the tune for the song I sang in Jack.

We've been rehearsing for a couple weeks now, led by our director Juliana Avery, who also happens to be a redhead. Since we have all worked together before or at least know each other, it's been a lot of fun so far, and I am looking forward to continuing the work.

I'm also enjoying the process because the part is not within my comfort zone. I'm playing a 19-year-old pop star sensation. I love being able to play someone so different from me, but it can also be a challenge. I'm doing my best to do lots of research, but there are only so many Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift music videos I can watch before my head threatens to explode. My lack of pop culture knowledge has become a running joke with the cast already, which is even funnier because Jim Gagne, though he doesn't look it, is a pop culture guru. Someone will mention a song, and I will have no idea what it is, and he will be able to sing it on the spot. With dance moves and everything.

Jack the Ticket Ripper and Irish Authors Held Hostage both sold out quickly, so I have to encourage you to buy tickets ahead of time for A Thing for Redheads. Tickets will go on sale June 21.

A Thing for Redheads will be playing at the Warehouse Theatre, 1019 7th Street NW, on the following dates:
Sunday July 11 @ 11am
Sunday July 18 @ 4:15pm
Wednesday July 21 @ 8pm
Friday July 23 @ 10:30pm
Saturday July 24 @ 3:30pm

Gregory Doran's Hamlet

2010-05-04T10:36:00.001-04:00

This weekend I got around to watching the new movie of Hamlet, starring David Tennant. (Thank goodness for pbs.org's video player. Love!) I watched it in two sittings, since it was three hours long. It was a very good version. Probably one of the best Hamlets I've ever seen. Why? So often Hamlet is done for the lead actor, and often he'll be quite good and the rest of the cast doesn't live up to him. Not so with this production. Without a doubt it's the finest supporting cast I've even seen in a Hamlet.

Here are my thoughts that I jotted down as I was watching:

In general I'm a fan of modern Shakespeare, and I like how this one has done that but without losing the flavor of the world of Shakespeare. They haven’t tried to make it straight realism, because Shakespeare wasn’t. So I appreciate the fact that we’ve got soliloquies to the camera.

Ophelia pulling condoms out of Laertes luggage – finally! I’m sure this is not a new choice, but I’ve never seen a production do it, and I’ve always wanted to. I saw one once where she pulled a porno mag out, but condoms fits so much better with the text.

I like how Ophelia and Laertes speak part of the borrower and lender speech, as though this is a lesson Polonius has often drilled into them. Speaking of Polonius, I really liked his performance. I hate when Polonius is played as the bumbling comic relief (I mean, he is this, but the actor shouldn't play that). This Polonius (Oliver Ford Davies) was a man past his prime, painfully aware of the fact that others did not need him, and trying to hold to where he was needed - as a father to his children.

What's great about Shakespeare in general is how every time you see a play, some new line will strike you. Patrick Stewart as the Ghost of Old Hamlet:

But that I am forbid
To tell the secrets of my prison-house,
I could a tale unfold whose lightest word
Would harrow up thy soul, freeze thy young blood,
Make thy two eyes, like stars, start from their spheres,
Thy knotted and combined locks to part,
And each particular hair to stand an end,
Like quills upon the fretful porpentine:
But this eternal blazon must not be
To ears of flesh and blood.

Tennant is visibly shaken right after encountering the ghost – mentally shaken. His manner is noticeably changed, and I think this choice works very well. He is frantic, mind whirling, and it’s beautifully contrasting with the control of the final moment of the scene, when clarity comes and he sadly realizes what this all entails “O cursed spite / That ever I was born to set it right.”

Cameras – I was wondering how they were going to make use of these – are they Claudius’s eye, watchful on his kingdom and castle? But that wouldn’t work because then he would have seen the craziness that happened when the ghost appeared. So at first I wasn’t sure what the point of showing the scenes through the security cameras were. But then I realized that it was to establish a norm – because when Claudius was watching, the cameras would move. This was used during Hamlet’s encounter with Ophelia, and his scene with the players. It worked really well to have Hamlet to the camera moving, disconnect it and then say “Now I am alone.” The security cameras also worked really well with Claudius’s line “Madness in great ones must not unwatched go.” But then the conceit sort of dropped out. It seemed to be an idea that work great in a couple places, but wasn't as all-encompassing of the play as it might have been.

Text changes. The most frequently used text is the Second Quarto text from 1604. Doran moves the "To be or not to be" speech early, the location where it is in the Q1 Hamlet and the Folio. Tennant chooses to use the version of the line "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in our philosophy" rather than "your philosophy." This follows the Folio reading. They've also changed the line "He's fat and scant of breath" to "He's hot and scant of breath" which is what most scholars agree it means anyway.

The Gertrude/Hamlet scene was awesome. I think Penny Downie is a fantastic Gertrude. But as much as I like Patrick Stewart as an actor, I’m not feeling his Claudius. I’m just not getting a grip on what he’s trying to do with the character.

Mariah Gale was a great Ophelia. I hate this character. Shakespeare has made her terribly underwritten. She makes no sense, and so it is virtually impossible for an actress to succeed in the role, not to mention the fact, oh yeah, there's a crazy scene. But here was the best mad scene I’ve ever seen. I’m thankful that she wasn’t dippy crazy and that she didn’t hump anything. She seemed truly unbalanced, and in a dangerous way, which is something I haven’t seen before. I like that there was anger and that Ophelia got to be strong for a moment, even if it is only because she had lost her wits. I like that this Ophelia seemed to have a reason for being there rather than just off in la la land. Ophelia’s are often naked or in nightgowns, but this is the first one where, when the clothes came off, it made sense and didn’t just feel awkward.

My main complaint with this version - the shattered mirror. Obvious. Way to obvious.

Osric was great.

Okay: the ending. I'll have to watch it again and see if what I thought was going on changes; how did you all interpret it? Did Gertrude figure out that the cup was poisons and choose to drink it anyway? Wouldn’t she then try to drink it all so none was left for Hamlet, because there seemed to be a lot left for Claudius to drink. Speaking of which… yeah, that was weird. I had accidentally read a spoiler that said something about Claudius choosing to drink the poisoned cup. So I though he was going to do exactly what he had done with the character of Macbeth – he realized how terrible he was, what a monster he had become, and chose to die. But that’s not what he did with Claudius at all. Claudius shrugs and then drinks, as if it doesn’t matter. His Claudius wasn’t nefarious, but absolutely amoral. Or at least, that’s what I got from it. As weird as this choice was in the moment, it did actually help me make more sense of the entire character. ... I think...

Happy Birthday Shakespeare!

2010-04-23T08:13:00.002-04:00

WHAT needs my Shakespeare, for his honoured bones,
The labour of an age in pilèd stones?
Or that his hollowed relics should be hid
Under a stary-pointing pyramid?
Dear son of Memory, great heir of Fame,
What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name?
Thou, in our wonder and astonishment,
Hast built thyself a livelong monument.
For whilst, to the shame of slow-endeavouring art,
Thy easy numbers flow, and that each heart
Hath, from the leaves of thy unvalued book,
Those Delphic lines with deep impression took;
Then thou, our fancy of itself bereaving,
Dost make us marble, with too much conceiving;
And, so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie,
That kings for such a tomb would wish to die.

-- On Shakespeare, by John Milton

"A man may write of love, and not be in love"

2010-04-19T18:58:00.002-04:00

There have been many thoughts rattling around in my brain since SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) 2010. Some of them finally coalesced into something perhaps coherent after attending James Shapiro’s lecture at the Folger this past Friday. Shapiro was lecturing on his new book, Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? I was already part way through the book, as I was able to pick up an advanced reader copy at SAA.

Despite the second part of the title, Shapiro isn’t actually interested in who. He’s interested in why and when. Why people believe in different authorship theories, and when it came to be that people started to believe that Shakespeare didn’t write the plays ascribed to him, as this wasn’t questioned until after 1850. So it’s a more recent phenomenon.

Shapiro points out that every non-Stratfordian argument is based on an autobiographical reading of the plays and poems. So and so had this happen in his life which is just like what happens in that play, etc. This frustrates Shapiro because it a specifically modern notion of authorship – literature as self-exploration. Early modern writing was not autobiographical, and therefore it is ridiculous to try and find clues about who Shakespeare was in his plays.

Shapiro made me and the rest of the audience laugh when he said that this view always made him think about an Elizabethan School of Writing. Kit Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Thomas Kyd are sitting in a classroom. The teacher asks, “What have you got for us this week, Kit?” Marlowe responds, “Oh it’s this play called Tamburlaine about this Scythian shepherd who conquers the world.” “Hmm,” says the teacher, “Are you from Scythia? Ever been there? Know any shepherds?” Shapiro’s point is that literature does not have to be “Write What You Know.”

Shapiro quoted the 1593 poem Licia to illustrate this point: "A man may write of love, and not be in love, as well as of husbandry, and not go to plough, or of witches and be none."

One other point I found interested was Shapiro characterizing Shakespeare as a man of “unparalleled imagination.” He said that even though he wrote his thesis on Marlowe, he got bored pretty quickly. And yet, after teaching Shakespeare for years, he doesn’t think he’ll ever get bored with Shakespeare.

I was left thinking a lot about acting. How? Well there seemed to be a question coming up in a lot of the seminars I attended at SAA this year. Sometimes this question was asked outright, but sometimes it just seemed to be underlying what was said. It seemed to have a part in three seminars. Two that I observed: "Shakespeare and Theatrical Reconstructions" (much about the Globe and the Blackfriars Playhouse) and "Emotional Realism on the Stage", and of course the one I participated in: "Shakespeare and Systems of Rehearsal". In my seminar in fact, I was actually asked this question, and I’m not sure at that point I gave a very clear answer, because I didn’t have one until now. The question was How does studying Shakespeare and the early modern theatrical conditions help an actor today? Or even, does it at all? Is there a point to learning about this history? My answer was yes it helps, but I didn’t really have a complete answer to how it helps. But now I have two thoughts about it. The first is more something to throw out there, and a thought that I wished had been fully formulated during the conference so I could have brought it up during the Emotional Realism seminar:

A lot of the criticism and talk seems to have a Shakespeare vs. Stanislavsky feel, and I don’t think the two are incompatible or diametrically opposed. In fact, I’m curious about ways they connect. Is there a link between Patrick Tucker’s work with the Original Shakespeare Company and emotional realism/emotional memory? Tucker, in his book Secrets of Acting Shakespeare, argues that Shakespeare would put the actor in the same situation as the character in order to give the actor a shorthand for performance. This was necessary due to the lack of rehearsal, and the fact that actors were not given the full script to study (just cue scripts with only their lines on it). One specific example Tucker gives is Isabella in Measure for Measure. The actor playing Isabella would have had a script that ended with her (his) last line, so the actor would not know that the Duke was going to propose marriage. So when the Duke did propose marriage this actor would have been surprised and confused, and therefore, according to Tucker, Isabella was supposed to be surprised and confused. Presumably, this would only really work the first time an actor encountered a text. So the next time, the actor would use the memory of that first time and know how to play the scene? If Tucker’s theory is correct, is this not a sort of early modern version of emotional memory? Or is Tucker’s theory flawed because he is looking at it from a modern conception of acting?

My second thought was a more specific answer to the question of How does studying Shakespeare’s theatre help a modern actor? and it came to me while listening to Shapiro speak. Just like modern writers are taught to “write what you know”, so to are modern actors taught to use themselves in performance. I remember one actor friend telling me the motto of a prominent American acting school was “you are enough.” It seems to me that for writers to learn that writing was not always a self-exploration only opens the door for more possibilities, just as it would for actors to learn that there was performance before and beyond Stanisklavsky’s (or Strasberg's) methods. Shakespeare was a writer of “unparalleled imagination” and other writers can learn from that. So to can it help actors to learn that acting wasn’t always about looking on the inside, that they can also strive to be performers of “unparalleled imagination.” If a man may write of love, and not be in love, so too should a man be able to act in love, without ever having been in love. In one of the seminars someone quoted someone else, "Acting doesn't get better, it gets different." Learning about former/other notions of acting and personality can only give a modern actor more ideas, approaches, tools.

This also ties into a paper session I attended, "Shakespeare and the Extended Mind". There were three papers and they had to do with changing notions of cognition and how that is dramatized. Today we understand cognition neurologically. In the early modern period they thought that cognition was humoral. This obviously affects the way playwright wrote then versus how they wrote now. Then emotions were felt, expressed through the whole body. Today we understand them as occurring in the brain. An actor absolutely needs to understand conditions like this in order to understand how to approach an early modern text and an early modern character.