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.
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Tuesday, January 3, 2012
Grad School: Shakespeare's Theatre
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.
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.
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