ASC: Tempt(ing) Me Further

For the last two weeks, I have been attending rehearsals at the American Shakespeare Center. I have spent most of this time with the Tempt Me Further troupe as they prepare Love's Labour’s Lost and The Duchess of Malfi. As a high school senior hoping to pursue theatrical performance, the experience of these rehearsals has been incredible. It is invaluable to observe the methods, attitudes, and interactions of these professionals. One method I find particularly interesting is the paraphrase. For those who may not know how the ASC rehearsal process works, for most shows (excluding Renaissance Season, that’s a whole different animal), the actors receive the script for the play months before rehearsals begin. They are expected to come into rehearsals with their lines committed to memory, and in this case, with a paraphrased version of their role or roles, ready to show. The actors interpret every line from the original language to more clearly reflect what the actor believes that particular line to mean on its own, as well as in the context of the piece. This practice is especially useful for plays like Duchess that were written in the same time period as Shakespeare’s plays, as the language is often figurative and usually very dense with meanings.

The first day I was at rehearsal, I heard the actors' versions of all of their lines in The Duchess of Malfi. The differences between each of the actors' interpretations were intriguing. Each actor came into the room with a slightly different idea of what their characters stood for and how they would interact with one another. On several occasions, I heard a line from one character to another, and the reply had an entirely different meaning than the first. As the reading continued, Artistic Director Jim Warren’s vision for the show became clear. Jim corrected paraphrases that did not match his view of the text, and he occasionally gave suggestions for ambiguous sections. The paraphrased read-through helped me to be able to understand almost completely the intricacies of the play, with no foreknowledge and certainly no great scholastic background of my own in Elizabethan theatrical language. Far from only being applicable in this context, I have been able to apply this method to my school studies, especially in literature with poetry and older texts.

Another part of rehearsals that I have particularly enjoyed is the rehearsal of violence. Having some basic stage combat experience, this aspect of the process is intriguing for me. The training the actors have is evident when they practice; they move slowly through warm-ups and transition into working with props and stage weapons. The care with which they treat all their tools and props makes it clear the respect they have for these items and for the damage they can cause if treated improperly. In Duchess, for instance, there is a scene which requires a specialized apparatus to create a specific illusion of intense violence (I’m being intentionally vague in the hopes that anyone who reads this will come see The Duchess of Malfi either on the road or when it returns to the Blackfriars Playhouse stage in December and in the spring.) The apparatus is completely safe when used properly, but the effect is startling; aided by the sounds and movements of the characters involved, the illusion becomes a powerful reality which leaves the audience breathless.

Throughout the Tempt Me Further rehearsal process, I have learned a great number of techniques, theatrical and otherwise, that I have been able to apply both in and out of the theatre. The atmosphere surrounding rehearsals is one that I have enjoyed; it is light and purposeful at once, leading to a comfortable productivity that achieves wonders. Seeing the ASC actors work is and continues to be an incredible experience, and it encourages me even more that the theatre is the place where I want to be.

Piecing Together a Jigsaw: Love’s Labour’s Lost in Rehearsal

Two weeks ago I had the privilege of assisting with the Love’s Labour’s Lost rehearsal process. Love’s Labour’s is the first of three productions—the second is Twelfth Night and the third The Duchess of Malfi—which the 2012/13 Tempt Me Further touring troupe will put on the road from this fall through the spring. Their tour, like all tours at the ASC, culminates in a period of residency at the Blackfriars Playhouse from mid-April to mid-June next year.

Working with the touring troupe was an inspiring experience. From Rick Blunt’s Armado to Patrick Earl’s Berowne, these elven actors are skilled at making bold character choices, discovering the strength and clarity of those choices in rehearsal, and listening to their creative instinct to strengthen and clarify those choices even further. The troupe, therefore, possesses the free-flowing ingenuity necessary to bring Shakespeare’s colorful characters to life, and counterbalances those impulses with two clear, editorial eyes. The first of these eyes is the inner eye of the actor—his or her natural instinct to adjust a moment to improve its effectiveness. But the second, larger eye watching over the production is that of director Jim Warren.

 Jim Warren has the ability both to deepen and to simplify each individual moment rehearsed before him on the stage. His attention to detail—from choreographing the movement of the four ladies’ parasols to match the mood of the scene, to carefully choosing each moment that the Forester should hock a loogie into his spit cup—made one of Shakespeare’s wordiest plays an effective and hilarious production. While in less capable hands, the sheer verbosity of Love’s Labour’s Lost could have been whitewashed into triviality, Jim Warren directs Shakespeare as one would assemble a jigsaw puzzle, discovering each individual piece, however minute rotating it, moving it, and finally slotting it into the exact necessary place. This process repeated meticulously with each new piece until the jigsaw was complete, creating a beautiful picture. 

In the midst of this creativity, I held book for the actors to call “Prithee” (the ASC’s equivalent of calling “Line”). Despite my small contribution to the process, however, I always felt a part of this beautiful picture. I will never forget what Jim told the whole group on the first day of rehearsal: “We all have different jobs to do for this show,” he said, “but we are all important. Never before has this group of people been brought together to put on this production, and it will never happen again. Each person is essential for the group to exist. So let us always respect one another’s work and be grateful of this opportunity ahead of us.” Truer words to live and work by I have rarely heard.

Lee Ann Hoover, Education and Dramaturgy Intern 

Six Lessons from the Fathers of the American Shakespeare Center's Spring Season

As opposed to mothers, fathers are quite easy to find in early modern drama. There are six father figures in our Spring Season plays and only four mothers (one of whom never appears on stage). The dads are a plot-driving mix of tyrannical authority figures, loving parents, and down right madmen. No matter their temperament, each has some lessons to offer, so here are six dos and don’ts of being a parent in early modern drama.

1) Do not kill, nor threaten to kill, your child. This mandate seems obvious, but three fathers in this season mess it up. In The Winter’s Tale, Leontes orders the death by abandonment of his newborn daughter, Perdita; he also indirectly leads to his son Mamillius’s death from a broken heart by separating him from his mother. Fortunately, Perdita survives and is instrumental in the play’s happy ending. Things resolve less neatly in John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore, where Giovanni commits filicide by driving a dagger into his pregnant sister/lover’s womb. Finally, Egeus of A Midsummer Night’s Dream threatens his daughter, Hermia, with execution if she does not consent to marry Demetrius. Despite its popularity amongst father characters, the “impending death” tactic never works. Leontes realizes his error and suffers sixteen years in mourning, Giovanni meets his end less than 150 lines after his son, and Theseus, the Duke of Athens, eventually overrules Egeus.

2) Do not forbid your child’s romance out of hand. Another popular father-tactic of the renaissance stage is to forbid a son or daughter to marry their obvious love interest. This trope is so common that Prospero consciously invokes it in The Tempest to give his daughter Miranda and her love Ferdinand a more exciting romance. As with murder, it rarely works to the parent’s advantage. I have already mentioned Egeus, but Polixenes, the King of Bohemia in The Winter’s Tale, must also learn this lesson. Upon hearing that his son Florizel is courting Perdita, the shepherd’s daughter, Polixenes forbids the couple to see each other and threatens to disfigure Perdita. Fortunately, everyone learns that Perdita is a princess rather than a shepherdess and the lost daughter of Leontes, King of Sicilia and Polixenes’s former best friend. In other words, she is the perfect match for Florizel.

3) Pay attention to who your child is falling in love with. Unlike the aforementioned Egeus and Polixenes, ‘Tis Pity’s Florio insists upon his Daughter’s free agreement to any marriage. Though his “care is how to match her to her liking” (1.3), he is oblivious to his daughter’s affections for her brother. Freedom of choice is excellent, but some rules of conduct are necessary.

4) Leave your children out of spousal arguments. Act Two of A Midsummer Night’s Dream introduces Oberon and Titania’s supernaturally violent marital troubles. The couple’s dissension causes unseasonable weather, storms, floods, and plagues. Though each accuses the other of infidelity, the true crux of their argument is Titania’s newly adopted changeling boy. Oberon gains custody of the child by anointing Titania’s eyes with a love flower causing her to be enamored of the ass-headed Bottom. As soon as he has the boy, however, these antics, initially humorous, lose their savor for the fairy king, “And now I have the Boy, I will undo / This hateful imperfection of her eyes.” (4.1) The play ends with Titania and Oberon once again at peace and, I like to think, raising the changeling together.

5) Be prepared to learn something from your child. This advice is especially important if you are a character in one of Shakespeare’s Late Romance plays—The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, and Pericles especially. All of those plays follow the emotional journeys of two generations, parents and their children. In each the conflict of the older generation are resolved by the younger. In The Winter’s Tale the love between Florizel and Perdita heals schism between their fathers Leontes and Polixenes. The reunion teaches them all that love and forgiveness are much preferable to hate and revenge.

6) Family is what you want it to be. My personal favorite father of the season is the Old Shepherd. He appears on the sea coast of Bohemia at the end of Act 3, just in time to save an infant Perdita from dying of exposure. He believes the child is a changeling and takes her into his home both in hopes of supernatural rewards and in fear of the fairies’ wrath. His motives for adoption are far from ideal, and the play seems to be setting Perdita up to be the wretched stepchild. Three scenes later, however, we see the now fully-grown and quite happy Perdita, her father, and her brother celebrating the sheep shearing festival. King Polixenes’s rather spoils the event with his death threats, but both Perdita’s adoptive and birth families partake in the play’s climatic reunions, proving that, in Sicilia and Bohemia at least, all a family needs is love.

—Jane Jongeward

A Real Life Conversion Experience

Recently, I made some new Staunton friends: young artists who asked me about my work at the American Shakespeare Center. They started by asking the standard "Do you think Shakespeare was a real person who actually wrote all those plays?" questions, to which I gave the standard "Yes, we know he was a real person who wrote those plays, and though he collaborated occasionally, the theory that somebody else wrote them is just an elitist mockery of everything I hold dear." (I love the authorship controversy because regardless of how ill-informed it is, people who don't care about Shakespeare find it interesting, so it's a gateway into a deeper conversation.) They were fascinated and polite, but confessed that they had no real knowledge, background, or specific interest in Shakespeare or his plays, despite living two blocks away from the world's only re-creation of the Blackfriars Playhouse. That's fine - it's not like I'm some sort of Shakespeare evangelist, determined to turn every social gathering into a treatise on why he's so amazing.

The conversation meandered away into discussions of art, literature, and then philosophy. One of my new friends started to expound on the ideas of fate, free will, and determinism. "None of these things matter, you know," he said. "The future doesn't matter because it hasn't happened yet, and you can't predict it anyway. The past doesn't matter because it's already over and can't be changed. All that really matters is this moment… and now this moment… and now this moment."

"I'm sorry," I interjected, "but I just have tell you about this moment in one of Shakespeare's plays, Hamlet." 

I ran down the basic plot ("It's kind of The Lion King") and then jumped into an explanation of my favorite quote from my favorite scene. "In 5.2, which is almost the end of the play, Hamlet is asked to fight a duel. He agrees, even though he knows it's a trap and that he'll die. His best friend Horatio tells him not to do it, and he says, 'Not a whit. We defy augury. There is special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, 'tis not to come. If it be to come, 'twill not be now. If it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man knows of aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be.'" I stopped to "translate" since Shakespeare's language can be tricky at first blush, but my new friends waved me on - no translation needed.

"'The readiness is all.' That's my motto," I continued (and it is - I have "the readiness is all" tattooed on my back). "After that, Hamlet goes out to fight the duel and (spoiler!) dies. It's complete acceptance of fate or lack thereof: we don't know what's going to happen or not happen or maybe happen. You could get hit by a bus or win the lottery or die in a duel or spontaneously combust. Worrying and worrying and worrying, like Hamlet does throughout the play, won't do you any good. All you can do is be ready. You've heard the phrase 'to be or not to be,' right?"

They all nodded.

"Well that's the answer. Let be."

The friend who started this conversation blinked and said, "That's such an… obvious way to put it. A perfect way. That's amazing. I've thought about that exact thing, the exact idea of "the readiness is all," but never phrased so well. Tell me more."
We kept talking about Hamlet, but 10 minutes later, the conversation had veered away (as conversations tend to do) and my new friend started talking about the concept of "nothing." "Everything in this room is something," he said. "How can you have nothing? What is a thing that is no thing?"

"I'm sorry to do this again," I said, "but do you have any idea how obsessed Shakespeare is with that?"

Everyone laughed at my 500th repetition of the word "Shakespeare," but they let me continue anyway. "The word 'nothing' appears 580 times in the canon," I said. I ran through King Lear and Macbeth and parts of Much Ado about Nothing, telling them how the idea of "no thing" appears over and over again in ways that are baffling, tremendous, sorrowful, and amusing all at once. "I still don't know what, if anything, Shakespeare's trying to tell us about 'nothing'," I said. "I don't think anybody does. But it's a question that I love to ask and think and talk about."

"This is nuts," said my new friend. "I never knew about any of that. I always thought of Shakespeare like… well, no offense, but in a 'what's the big deal?' sort of way, you know? It was boring in school, and I didn't get it, and I didn't care. But I had no idea."

I live my life and work my job in order to hear those exact words from as many people as possible. I mentally fist-pumped the air. "Well, you do have a world-class Shakespeare theater right down the street," I said.

"That we do," he replied. "Looks like I'll be going to a show."

--Lia Razak

An Unlikely Pairing

Mathematics and Shakespeare a combination liable to make members of both academic factions run in fear.  They are, however, surprisingly compatible.  Statistics, probability, and logic pair nicely with verse analysis, staging, and doubling.  For the past two weeks this bizarre intersection has been the focus of my work in the education department. Using Internet Shakespeare Editions, (http://internetshakespeare.uvic.ca/Foyer/plays.html). Minitab 16 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minitab), and a TI-84 plus (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TI-84_Plus_series) I have determined the probability of randomly generating verse lines, and I have also discovered why twelve is the ideal maximum number of actors on the Blackfriars stage.  For those with the guts to face irrational numbers and irregular lines, here are my findings.

Is Iambic Pentameter a Coincidence?

Coin flips are a favorite probability simulator of math teachers everywhere.  Each flip has two outcomes—heads or tails—both of 0.5 probability.  From there the textbook, teacher, or worksheet can set up various scenarios to test: what is the probability of  ten flips yielding eight heads and two tails, six heads in a row, etc?  If we replace the coin with a syllable, we can calculate the likelihood of accidentally writing a regular line of iambic pentameter.  Each of the ten syllables represents a coin flip and stressed and unstressed syllables represent heads and tails. This problem assumes there is a 50/50 chance of stressing a syllable.  In order to determine the probability of randomly generating an unstressed-stressed-unstressed-stressed pattern for ten syllables in a row, we must multiply the probabilities of each outcome in the desired order.  Since both unstressed and stressed have the same probability of occurrence—0.5—the problem looks something like this: 

0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5*0.5 = 0.000977 or 0.5^10 = 0.000977

In other words, under these conditions, there is a 0.0977% chance of randomly generating a single line of iambic pentameter.  What is the probability of generating a full sonnet’s worth of pentameter?  In that case we want one-hundred-forty alternating unstressed-stressed syllables, fourteen lines of ten syllables.  The equation is 0.5^140 = 7.175*10^-43.  For readers unfamiliar with scientific notation that is 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000007175, essentially zero.  Iambic pentameter is not coincidental. 

How Many Staging Permutations are there for the Blackfriars Playhouse?

            The answer to that question changes according to how many actors are involved.  Fortunately, after establishing the number of positions available to one actor we can create a formula applicable to any number of people.  The stage is twenty-nine feet wide by twenty-two feet deep.  For the purposes of this problem we ignore the presence of the gallant stools.  The groups of four X’s represents the space occupied by an actor, for the purposes of this equation four square feet.

X

X

X

X

Under these assumptions, there are 588 different positions for a single actor.  21*28 = 588.  We multiply by one less than the actual dimensions because that is how many different positions two feet (one side of a four foot square) can occupy within 22 or 29 feet.  The numbers one through twenty-two represent to depth of the stage.  We are trying to figure out how many ways there are to place two consecutive feet within that range, feet one and two, feet two and three, etc.  We end up with twenty-one combinations.  Doing the same with twenty-nine feet yields twenty-eight combinations.

1.        1 2

2.        2 3

3.        3 4

4.        4 5

5.        5 6

6.        6 7

7.        7 8

8.        8 9

9.        9 10

10.    10 11

11.    11 12

12.    12 13

13.    13 14

14.    14 15

15.    15 16

16.    16 17

17.    17 18

18.    18 19

19.    19 20

20.    20 21

21.    21 22

Things get more complicated for the second actor.  Actor One occupies a four square foot space somewhere on the stage which Actor Two cannot also occupy.  The 588 possibly positions assumed the actor could be anywhere on stage, which means several of those options overlap by one or more units.  This means that we must take out the spot occupied by Actor One and all overlapping positions when calculating the number of possibilities for Actor Two. 

The diagram below illustrates the need to account for overlap.  Each cell is a square foot.  The center Xs represent the occupied space.  The surrounding Ys indicate parts of other four foot units that overlap with the occupied square.

	Y	Y	Y	Y
	Y	X	X	Y
	Y	X	X	Y
	Y	Y	Y	Y

Including the central square there are nine positions in and around the Xs which Actor Two cannot occupy.  588 – 9 = 579 spaces available to Actor Two.  We find the total number of possible stage pictures by adding Actor One’s possibilities (588) and Actor Two’s possibilities (579).  588+579 = 11,667.  Please note that this equation assumes the first actor’s position was not on the edge of the stage, as such a position would reduce the number of positions eliminated after placing Actor One.

If the number of positions available goes down by nine with each actor added to a scene, we can generate a formula to calculate the number of staging possibilities.  588+Σ(588-(n*9)), where n = the number of actors on stage previous to the actor being placed.  The Σ symbol means “sum of.”

Stage configuration has a huge affect on ideal blocking.  The Blackfriars Playhouse features a thrust stage, meaning it has audience on three sides (four if you count the balcony).  Angles are the rule for thrust stages.  As long as actors form diagonal lines, triangles, etc., then every audience member is able to see at least one of them. 

            In order to figure out how many angled combinations there are we follow a similar formula as the one above but with more positions removed.  After removing the occupied position and the eight surrounding squares from the pool we also remove the column and row containing the selected position. 

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As previously stated, there are twenty-one and twenty-eight different positions in each row/column.  Placing an actor removes three of those, leaving eighteen and twenty-five.  18+25+9 = 52.  Under these conditions the formula becomes 588+Σ(588-(n*52)).

            Up to a certain number of actors, the number of staging possibilities grows with each additional actor on stage as we add some number less than 588 to 588.  At and beyond twelve actors, however, the number of permutations shrinks with each addition.  The eleventh actor adds sixteen possible configurations because 588-(52*11) = 16.  The twelfth actor removes thirty-six configurations, 588-(52*12) = -36.  Scholars debate the exact size of early modern acting companies; however, the general consensus is that the troupes were between eleven and fifteen actors.  These calculations support the lower end of that range, at least for indoor stages like the Blackfriars Playhouse.  The larger outdoor stages such as the Globe may have allowed for larger casts.