Tag Archives: Romeo and Juliet

The Weekend in Reviews

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This weekend past, I had the good fortune to see three shows over the course of four nights.

Since I’m currently in conference-prep mode, I don’t have the time or sanity to do a full review of each of them, but I would like to say a little something about all of them.  So here’s the weekend in reviews!

Macbeth
Performed by Theater906 at Emerson Umbrella Center for the Arts
Directed by Emily C.A. Snyder

For all intents and purposes, this was community theatre Shakespeare.  Now I’ve had some bad experiences with CTS, and some good ones… and I’m sorry to say that this show simply did not deliver.  It had potential; its primary focus was upon the idea of “castles built on sand”.  It was set on the seaside at some point between the world wars, and the title character’s hands (once steeped in blood) never washed clean.

There were a few major flaws with the production: 1) it treated its audience like idiots.  I don’t have a problem with “new” and “different” readings of these plays if they are firmly

The set for MacB. Pretty nice as sets go!

grounded in text and well dramaturged, I don’t even have a problem with a bit of textual manipulation, but if you’re going to do it trust your audience to follow along with you.  The conceit of “sand castles” was written into the program, presented in all the advertising material, and shown out in front of the theatre.  You don’t need to beat us over the head with it in an artsier-than-thou montage during the curtain call.  Have a little faith in the people who see your show.  2) There were some big, bold ideas that were presented in the performance (i.e. Duncan as an angel of death figure who came and retrieved the corpses of the dead, Lady M’s obsession with children, violence violence violence intersecting innocence), but they simply weren’t played ENOUGH.  If you’re going to do something big, go big or go home.  If you do it too small, your audience simply won’t follow you.  Because the director refused to commit to her grand choices, they simply read as half-hearted attempts to connect with a concept that wasn’t fully fleshed out.  3) Macbeth should never be played as Hamlet.  Yes, he runs mad.  Yes, his wife goes bonkers.  But Macbeth’s madness is a different madness than Hamlet’s.  It’s not as weak and bumbling, it has an innate strength and danger to it.  I don’t want to see the King of Scotland writhing on the floor because he killed one man.  Remember: MacB is a SOLDIER.  He’s killed before.  It’s not the act of murder that takes his sanity from him, but rather the sense of divine wrongness in the act of defying natural order.

On the whole, give this one a miss… unless you really feel like you need to get some wear out of your black beret and sunglasses.

Twelfth Night
Performed by the Rhode Island Shakespeare Theatre at Roots Café in Providence
Directed by Bob Colonna

My love for TRIST and Bob Colonna is no secret.  THIS is the kind of Community Theatre Shakespeare that gives me hope for humanity.

Colonna is masterful at taking a cast of amateur and quasi-professional actors and building them into an unstoppable force of Bardery.  In his Twelfth Night, he cut the text down to two hours, pumped up the volume, and created a rip-roaring evening of vaudevillian hilarity which had us grinning ear to ear.  Colonna’s actors don’t miss a beat, and are simply unstoppable in their boundless amounts of energy and enthusiasm.

Malvolio (front) reads the letter egged on by Sir Andrew, Fabiana, Sir Toby, and Maria

Moreover, Colonna’s textual coaching is unbeatable.  His actors punch the punches with enough force to leave you reeling.  They hit every note (in the case of his Feste with an astounding amount of beauty and power) and aren’t afraid to do things a little differently (doubtless this is a result of Colonna’s creativity with the text and direction).

Side-note: you can always tell when an actor is rehearsing for Sir Andrew Aguecheek because he runs around trying to figure out how to do the “backtrick”.  Someday I want to see someone out with a full back tuck handspring combination…

Unfortunately, I got to this show late in its run so you won’t be able to catch it.  However.  Colonna has promised me that he’s directing As you Like it to perform in June at Roger Williams memorial park.  I will post further details as soon as I know them… but when I do take my word on this: GO.  If you have to steal your neighbor’s donkey and abscond with the rent money to get to Providence, find a way to make it work.  Trust me; it will be worth it.

Romeo and Juliet
Performed by the Stoneham Theatre Company at the Stoneham Theatre
Directed by Weylin Symes

Yea, I know.  How many Romeo and Juliets can one person see in her lifetime?  This one was new and different because Stomeham coupled their adult company with their teen company so the adults played adults and the teens played teens.

As you can imagine, this presents a bit of a problem in terms of sheer experience.  Shakespeare is notoriously complex textually and, while I have seen transcendent teen Shakespeare, it is extremely rare.  To pull it off you need a creative director, a kick-ass text coach, and more than a little bit of luck.

Unfortunately, this production fell short on a few of those items.  While the teens did okay, there was an obvious discrepancy between their ability to speak and that of their older colleagues.  Moreover, the text was poorly cut.  Many bits of this play simply don’t read to a modern audience – the nurse’s long monologues at the beginning, the Queen Mab speech (unless you’re Michael Pennington, but really, who is?)… it needs some careful handling to really plow forward in a way that doesn’t lose its audience.  Unfortunately, whomever handled the text for Stoneham didn’t have a very deft hand with this.  The long bits were long and plodding, and important plot points (i.e. the friar’s letter going astray due to plague) were cut completely.

An old friend of mine (a fight director) held an axiom which I think is vital to dealing with a text as iconic as Romeo.  Here’s the problem: how often has your entire audience heard these things?  How can you even begin to think about putting your mouth around the words “But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?” without thinking about ALL THE OTHER FAMOUS ACTORS WHO HAVE DONE SO IN THE PAST.  It’s a Harold-Bloom-esque conundrum that plagues the modern actor about to set into any iconic role (Richard Plantagenet “now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of York…”; Hamlet “To be, or not to be?  That is the question”; The Witches “Double, double, toil and trouble, fire burn and cauldron bubble!”; etc…).  So here’s what you have to do: you have to assume that there is at least one person in that audience who has never had any contact with the text before and doesn’t know how the play ends.  You have to play to that person.  You have to craft a performance so that that person understands your story without any prior knowledge of what may be going on.

This play failed to do so.  They leaned too much upon the cultural capitol which they were mining to put butts in seats and, in doing so, did their entire production a disservice.

The fight direction, on the other hand, was downright amazing and some of the best violence I’ve seen onstage in a long time.  Bravo for that.

On the whole, it was a thought-provoking weekend.  Now here I go, back to conference prep mode; dive!  DIVE!

A Very Bardy Birthday

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On Sunday, I turn 25.

This means a lot of things… the first of which being good god I worked so hard this week so that I can spend a weekend only thinking about my papers in passing.  With the realization that due to my life choices I will, without fail, be stressed out on my birthday every single year, I also made the decision that I will strive to give myself at least a day off to celebrate on the anniversary of my introduction to the world.  I only narrowly managed to succeed this year but thank whatever agnostic deity is listening it’s all settled.

A quarter century is an interesting time.  I can’t really term it a “long” time, but it sure seems like long enough when I think about the amount of stuff I’ve achieved (and the thought that most of these things had to wait at least fifteen years before I could properly achieve anything).

 I have to admit, my actor’s brain is slightly freaking out.  For an actor, getting older is a curse as much as a blessing.  Every year one grows this much closer to completely re-defining one’s career.  As you age, your type changes with you and (since type is so important to contemporary casting practices) this in turn shifts your capabilities.  Unless you are in an extremely unique situation, as much as we like to think that theatre is an art about creativity, more often than not it’s an industry of placing butts in seats.  What that means for an actor is catering to one’s physical traits with one’s acting style.

I, for instance, had a very difficult time getting work.  I was always told to wait twenty years because then I would grow into my type.

… they also told me to lose thirty pounds and move to Europe where I would surely be seen as a castable type…. There’s a reason I’m no longer primarily an actor.

My finals are tucked cozily into a nook of my desk where they will remain until Monday.  I’m putting them out of my mind. So here’s the crisis I’m going through now.

…what about the parts I’ll never get to play?

Women, especially, are subject to the tyrannical rule of casting-by-type and age has a great deal to do with the politics of casting actresses.  When I was training at the American Globe Theatre, my mentor there (Mister John Basil) gave us a chart breaking down these types.  For women, the chart looked something like this…

Ingénue – 14-20 (Juliet, Miranda, Lavinia)

Mistress – 20’s (Rosalind, Viola, Isabella)

Leading Lady – 30’s (Portia, Lady Percy, Lady Macbeth)

Dame – 40’s and up (Paulina, Volumnia)

Again, this is my approximation of John’s chart and his point wasn’t to say that these characters MUST be played by actresses in this age range, but if you were playing these characters you had better look like you are in this age range.

The other week, I was talking about monologues with an old friend of mine.  He mentioned that he was reviving some of him stuff because he had felt the need to work on it again.  I sighed wistfully and said, “I really should… I should have one from each of the major play types at least… there aren’t many good ones in the histories though.”  To this, of course, he replied with Lady Percy (who has some KICK ASS monologues, by the by) and I replied, “I’m too young.”

He looked me up and down and said, “…you may not be.”

I thought about that for a moment.  The prospect was slightly thrilling and terrifying at the same time.  After all, the last time I had worked on monologues I was firmly within the “mistress” range edging into too young for those… the last time I worked on monologues I was playing Phoebe and Julia, La Pucelle and Marianna, young women.  Lady Percy?  A widow (albeit before her time)?  My nineteen-year-old self couldn’t do it…. But my twenty-four-soon-to-be-twenty-five-year-old self?  Can I really play Lady Percy?

And then the sorrow set in.  Will I really never play Juliet?  Will I be doomed to never play the balcony scene, except when I recite it to myself in the shower sometimes?  Am I going to pass the benchmark for ideal age for my favorite Shakespearean heroine (Rosalind, in case you were wondering) before I ever get to play her?

Now admittedly, in order for one to have a stage career one must be auditioning (something which I have not done in many a year) so perhaps it’s unfair of me to be upset about these things.  It’s like wishing to win the lottery when you never buy a ticket.  And I did leave the realm of professional theatre for reasons (very good ones), so my melancholy has a certain amount of rose-colored glasses-wearing to it.

That said, I can’t help but be slightly misty-eyed at the thought that I’ll never speak the words, “O God, I have an ill-divining soul…” or “you kiss by th’book” in front of an adoring crowd of sighing theatre-goers.

…but I’ll be damned if I’m going to let it ruin my weekend.

 

R & J: Street Performance Style

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Last week, when everyone else was running around waving their hands above their heads in preparation for Hurricane Irene, I was driving down to attend the New York Renaissance Faire.  Now I know what you’re thinking.  The Ren Faire is a repository for geeks and freaks unable to function in any other subset of life, why would anyone with a single cell of gray matter in her head attend?

First things first: a good Ren Faire is good fun.  Come on, they have belly dancers, jousting, flashy stage combat fights, and pretty costumes.  If it’s a good faire, they also have talented performers.  Sometimes, there’s even good food.  Now I’m not talking about your run-of-the-mill Renaissance Faire, there are only a few on the East Coast that truly count as top-rung.  If a faire has a permanent site and permanent buildings, it is worlds above a faire sans permanent site mostly run out of tents.  Secondly, I’ve been going to NYRF since I was a kid, so a trip there is more than a little nostalgic.  And last, since I was an actor out of New York for long enough to count, I do tend to know some of the performers.

Oh and my sister’s a member of the cast so now I definitely know some of the performers.

This year, NYRF has made the artistic decision to have a few famous playwrights running around (including Marlowe and good Will himself).  In addition, they’ve smattered the day with several performances of what they call “Guerilla Shakespeare”; Shakespeare scenes which erupt seemingly from nowhere and actors that spring from the streets to launch into pre-rehearsed Bardisms.

Normally, these scenes aren’t announced beforehand… but I’ve got some connections.  So I had the unique and wonderful opportunity to witness a Guerilla version of the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet.

Let me get it out of the way; I love this scene.  LOVE this scene.  What girl wouldn’t?  It’s classic, it’s romantic, it’s beautiful, it’s chock full of the mush that makes up a hopeless heart.  Since I do love this scene so much, I have extremely strong ideas about its performance.

NYRF made a bold artistic decision and, since their Juliet was a fairy who doesn’t speak in human language, had her do the scene in fairy language; a gesture-filled utterance of clicks and pops as well as crooning and chiming.  Romeo responded in regular Earth English with his lines.

The scene commenced with Juliet already at her balcony and Romeo scrounging for a ladder from the surrounding stalls.  He set up his ladder then milled about the crowd a little while Juliet played Peek-a-boo from on high.  When Romeo spoke, it was to the assembled patrons who has congregated because they were pretty sure that something was going on due to the age-old rule that if enough people stop and look at something obviously it’s interesting enough to look at.

As Romeo walked through the small quorum simply speaking to us, I couldn’t help but

Fairy Juliet and Romeo at the balcony

believe this to be truly authentic Elizabethan theatre.  The audience, in direct contact with the actor, was unconfined by the constraints of the physical theatre space.  Without a stage and seating to separate us, we were all just living – existing together and experiencing something as it unfolded before our eyes.  We were groundlings; free to emote, relate, interject, or walk away if we chose to.  Romeo wasn’t some on-high concept, he was right there with us.

Juliet’s manner of speaking, of course, denied us the privilege of listening to the infamous words which should have come tripping from her mouth.  “What’s in a name?” and “Swear not by the moon!” became a tumult of mimed motions and emotions.  For that, I think it worked.  I’m not sure if it would have worked with any other scene, but for this one it did.

This scene is so deeply embedded into the popular psyche that even most non-Bardy muggles know at least some of the lines.  They know the idea of the scene, they know the iconic imagery, and for that it is extremely difficult to perform the scene.  If everyone watching already has their own ideas regarding what’s about to happen, how can you make the scene fresh, interesting, and exciting for every single one of them?  This choice made it such that we were engaged.  We couldn’t go through the motions of theatre, we had to truly pay attention to understand what was going on.  Rather than face the age-old question of “how do you say ‘wherefore art thou Romeo’ in a new way when ten million other actors have said it ten million times before you?”, NYRF’s choice eliminated the conundrum for their Juliet.

In short, yes, I was listening rather than mouthing the words with the actors.  The only shame about this is a scheduling oversight on the part of NYRF which involved an extremely loud batch of raucous peasants making a great deal of noise directly under the performance space.  This made even the English difficult to hear as it was by and large drowned out by the sonorous sound of bagpipes.

In addition, I applaud the creativity of the company in this endeavor.  They managed to produce a unique Shakespeare which was relevant, dynamic, and didn’t step over the dangerous boundary into the land of Hamlet-on-the-moon-concept-Shakespeare.

Oh yea, and the actors were pretty talented too.  Though I’ll admit, I’m a little biased on that one.