Here follows my director's notes from my summer production of Richard III with Brave Spirits Theatre.
When re-reading this play last fall, I was struck by how Shakespeare emphasizes the movement of bodies. Most obvious, of course, is the movement of the main character. Physically disabled and with a limp, Shakespeare’s Richard moves differently than every other character in the play; his differences provoke negative comments throughout the text. Not only is Shakespeare the first author to portray the character with a limp, but Richard’s disabilities are also commented upon much less in the two other contemporary plays, The True Tragedy of Richard III and Legge’s Richardus Tertius. Shakespeare alters the tradition of Richard’s disabilities and repeatedly draws attention to them.
Second, there is the aided movement of characters, both dead and alive. The corpse of Henry VI is conveyed across the stage and begins to bleed; blood flows through “cold and empty veins.” The First Murderer has to drag Clarence’s body offstage. King Edward requires Hasting’s assistance to return to his chamber. Several characters move through the space on their way to execution, soon to become headless bodies. Hastings’ head, notably sans his body, appears on the stage.
Third is the introduction of new bodies in the fifth act: Shakespeare presents brand new characters late in the text. From the outset this seems like bad writing, but I think Shakespeare decidedly chose this approach rather than creating larger roles for fewer characters. He creates a world in which people constantly enter and exit the story.
Finally, there is the movement of the actors’ bodies. Depending on differences between the folio and quarto texts, there are up to 52 speaking roles. Shakespeare’s company of actors would probably have been slightly larger than ours, but they would have doubled (and tripled) roles, as our cast is doing. In small companies like ours and Shakespeare’s, the group is juggling a lot of roles between few people. Actors are constantly in motion, changing costumes, and entering and exiting the stage. I chose to do the play with as few actors as possible: ten, which is the greatest number of characters that appear on stage at any given time. I also cut only three small speaking roles from the play; you’ll see many characters in this production that are often removed by other directors. In keeping the cast small and thus bringing attention to the doubling, I am hoping that we will discover something about the magnitude of the world Shakespeare has created.
Heightening the doubling to this extreme also serves to support the inherent theatricality of the script. I would argue that Richard III is one of Shakespeare’s most rhetorical plays, perhaps only outdone by Richard II. The language, and its use of repetition, parallelism, antithesis, and other rhetorical devices, is incredibly self-conscious. To meet this play on its own terms, we must embrace its bold rhetoric and theatricality.
Richard III’s reliance on rhetoric and theatricality must be due in part to Shakespeare’s youth. Antony Sher quoted his director Bill Alexander describing the play thusly, “It is a young writer’s play. It is a young director’s production. It is a young Shakespearian actor’s performance. It has the crude vitality all of that implies.” Alexander’s observation is astute. After all, Richard III was only 32 when he died. Looking at the historical events, Richard is only 19 at the opening of the play. (Shakespeare conflates time a great deal in this play.) Thank you for joining me, the cast, and Travis Blumer, our young Richard, as we explore and enjoy the crude vitality of Shakespeare’s Richard III.
November was essentially the final month of the semester. (Exam week extended into the first week of December). So the final third of my semester was spent finishing assignments for my classes and rehearsing for final scenes.
The Directing 3 class was divided into three sections: History, Comedy, and Tragedy. For their final showcase on December 5 they considered all the scenes they had done and picked the ones they wanted to work on further. I was lucky enough to be in three tragedy scenes, and all three were picked for the final showcase.
The final showcase was such a rewarding experience because I got to play three very different roles under the guidance of three incredibly intelligent directors, certainly three of the best directors in the program, if not the best three: Linden Kueck, Tony Tambasco, and Zach Brown. All three challenged me as an actor, and as a result I think I learned and grew a considerable amount.
The most challenging scene at the outset was Tony’s. It was from the end of Coriolanus when Volumnia begs her son not to destroy Rome. The one where Volumnia has two massive, famous, unending monologues. As an actor under 30, I found the scene quite intimidating. And if it wasn’t intimidating enough in of itself, Tony challenged me in the rehearsal process in a way that took me completely out of my comfort zone.
Tony was interested in playing with rhetorical punctuation -- taking breaths at nearly every punctuation mark, and of a size guided by the punctuation. The smallest breath for commas, larger for colons and semi-colons, and largest of all at full stops. The full stops Tony described as, “Breathe and consider.”
The idea was hard to wrap my head around. I had been trained that in order to preserve the sense of Shakespeare’s line, I should only breathe at punctuation marks that occur at the end of the line.
But this technique isn’t just about the pause at these marks, it is about how much to breathe, specifically for the very next words. A bigger pause equals a bigger breath, which mean correlates to how much breath you use on the following phrase. Consider:
To his surname Coriolanus 'longs more pride
Than pity to our prayers. Down: an end;
This is the last: so we will home to Rome,
And die among our neighbors.
"Down: an end; this is the last." Three short phrases that are not punctuations with commas, but with larger marks. In this theory, because there is a full stop and a full breath before “down” Volumnia uses a massive amount of air on that single word, in order to need to breath at the colon, and so forth. When working this section, the rhetorical punctuation method makes it easy to find her desperation.
In the end, I was so proud of what we accomplished. I was surprised by the way my muscle memory recalled when and how to breath. The method was extremely helpful to me in another way. Thanks to the rhetorical breathing, I truly learned this scene one thought at a time. Not once did I think “Oh, boy, here comes a giant monologue.” I never felt like I was performing monologues. I felt like I was performing one thought, then another thought, then another thought. Which, really, is the way it should always feel. The rhetorical breathing also slowed. me. down. I have a tendency to rush through verse and verse moments, because I am so anti-dragging-Shakespeare. Untrained performers by and large perform Shakespeare at a deadly slow pace. For fear of that, I sometimes overcompensate by going to fast. The rhetorical punctuation approach forced me to give each bit of the language its full due.
Tony has also blogged about his thoughts on the process.
directed by Tony Tambasco, with James Bobby Byers, Cyndi Kimmel, and Celi Oliveto
My other two directors somewhat overlapped in their approaches. Linden and Zach have a similar approach in the sense that they are both interested in messing with gender, in questioning our assumptions of gender in performance, in providing opportunities to women, and in exploring the relationships of women. They both trust the audience to be able to figure it out, and those are the kind of directors I like.
Linden’s tragedy scene was from Thomas Middleton’s The Changeling. It’s the most famous scene in the play, where the creepy servant De Flores confronts the noble Beatrice Joanna about the murder he just committed for her. I don’t think it was Linden’s goal to say anything about gender with this specific scene, but she did cast a female actor as De Flores simply because she gave the best audition. But one way Linden’s point of view influenced the way the piece was performed was that I, as the female Beatrice Joanna, had my hair in an updo, and Mel, as the male De Flores, left her hair down. It worked, and even added to De Flores’ creepiness factor.
For this rehearsal process, we did a lot of character and relationship work. We did a past sharing exercise where Mel and I had to create a story of something De Flores and Beatrice Joanna went through together. We also had a day of rehearsal where Linden gave us each secretly various moments before or different scene objectives to play. In other words a lot of Stanislavsky-based exercises. This program is so heavily focused on text and early modern practices that it is lovely to get to do some emotional connection work along side that.
directed by Linden Kueck, with Mel Johnson
Zach’s scene was 1.2 from King Lear. Also well known. I got to play Edmund which meant I got to work on both the “Thou Nature” speech and the “This is the excellent foppery of the world” speech. See, best semester ever. Another fellow first year, Celi, was playing both Gloucester and Edgar. We are both women, and Zach wanted all three characters to be played as women.
We had an interesting experience with this. We had assumed that being women, simply walking onstage as ourselves would make our characters women. This was not the case. Zach’s classmates assumed that we were playing men because the characters were originally conceived as men and because in this program women often play men. So the students here are conditioned to see a woman onstage as a man. So we stepping onstage simply as women was not enough to make the characters be read as female. So we had to essentially play at femininity, to put on the accoutrements of femaleness.
This took the scene in a completely different direction. Basically, I wondered what the most obnoxious display of femaleness was that I could pull off. And I was also thinking in terms of what it would mean for the mother-daughter relationship between Gloucester and Edmund, and a sisters relationship between Edmund and Edgar. In this, I was inspired by Zach’s MFA directing production of Hamlet, which had occurred about a month before. In this production he cast Polonius and Laertes as women. Polonius wore a beautiful long red coat, which she gave to Laertes as she prepared to leave for school. It was a simple detail, yet instantly recognizable as something that would happen between a mother and a daughter. Celi and I looked for a similar way to create a mother-daughter relationship between Gloucester and Edmund.
So I grabbed an old pair of tights, my scissors, and went to it!
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.
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.
