Hamlet & Me (Part II)

Promotional Mailing
Great Lakes Theater Festival, 1989

My third year at Ohio University was Our Shakespeare Year. We hadn’t touched the Bard my previous two years, at all. But the school was producing Romeo & Juliet that spring, so it was necessary to bring us all up to speed. We rehearsed soliloquies for performance, the school purchased a complete set of John Barton’s “Playing Shakespeare” series on VHS.

Side note on the “Playing Shakespeare” tapes. They were expensive and Mother Martha V., our beloved school secretary, kept a close eye on them. They were for classroom use only, they were not to be borrowed, but they could be stolen which we promptly did, dubbing them off and then returning them. Eventually one went missing (not our fault, I swear) and I have ever after lived in fear.

Also that spring, a certain classical theater company* based in Cleveland was producing Hamlet. Directed by Gerald Freedman, the style was very modern, it was promoted as an “angry young man” version of Hamlet. A number of us drove up from Athens to catch a Saturday matinee, but a water main break in the Ohio Theatre meant the performance was canceled, so my friends and I went to see the just-opened-that-weekend Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade that afternoon.

We did get seats for that evening’s performance, which were way up in the vert last row of the thousand seat house. This would be the very first time I would see a live performance of Hamlet. I hated it.

No doubt I had a chip on my shoulder. I was twenty years old. I had spent an entire semester devoted to the works of Shakespeare. I had memorized an entire soliloquy (two, actually) from the great Dane. I knew a thing or two about Hamlet, and about being an angry young man.

Looking back, I am sure I would have enjoyed this production, if it hadn’t been my first. At the time, I found its touches of modernity far too clever. Claudius had a nasal twang meant to evoke that of sitting President George H.W. Bush (folks hate politics in their Shakespeare), the mad Ophelia went topless, and then there was the man himself whose main objective was, as I recall, to be angry.

One of my mentors gave me a very good piece of advice, to wit; Anger is boring. My own rendition of “O, that this too solid flesh,” was peevish, this Hamlet was literally shaking with rage.

At one point he walks on stage, fires up a spliff, takes a mean drag, and begins, “To be …” It brought the house down. I thought, at the time, that that was entirely inappropriate, turning the most famous speech in the English language into a pot-fueled rant.

Hamlet and the Ghost
(Anthony Powell & Peter Aylward)
Great Lakes Theater Festival, 1989
Photo: Roger Mastroianni

I have different opinions today, about cannabis and more importantly, about that speech, which I still haven’t figured out. Opinions differed among audiences, too. Letters to the company in response to the production ranged from the outraged to praise like the following:

“Your exciting, riveting production of Hamlet is just about the most creative and wonderful production I have seen in years. The attention and shock which you elicited from the audience was palpable. No one moved, no one coughed, no one spoke throughout the performance.

No wonder. This modern interpretation of the classic was … so meaningful. Freedman did more than change the costumes and setting; he interpreted Hamlet in light of modern times for a contemporary audience.

Yours is the kind of production that young people must see. Then they will understand that Shakespeare was meant to be seen and heard – not read” - Norman W., Cleveland

I agree with all of that. They received some negative letters, too, though most I read were of the “why do you have to mess with Shakespeare?” variety, criticism lobbed at all modern adaptations of Shakespeare for more than a century, and a point of view I find tiresome. The director himself put it very well, in his Director's Note:

"There is no perfect' Hamlet, or a Hamlet for all seasons and all people. One of the difficulties in producing the play is that each person sees Hamlet in himself or herself. Critics have for centuries encrusted the role with ideas and theories that have biased readers to various interpretations. The theater is the place to experience him."  - Gerald Freedman

And at least I finally saw it. The entire play, beginning to end, performed by a professional company. Only ten years later I would attempt to direct it myself, and my intention would also be to create an exciting, riveting -- and modern -- production of Hamlet.

To be continued.

Source: GLTF Spotlight, August 1989, Vol. 4, No. 3

*Full disclosure, my employer is Great Lakes Theater.

Improv High

Questionable promotional graphic (1994)

Annually I am in the position of auditioning young adults for a position in arts education. They are generally actors who aspire to the position, and volunteer the desire - sometimes without even being asked - to teach children.

"I have a lot to teach children," they will say. It is not necessary for me to ask from where they acquired this ability with a Bachelor's Degree in Acting. I can look at their resume and see where they have taught, if they have ever taught at all, and that is what I will ask them about.

There are those of us, myself strongly included, who felt at a young age that we have something to share, to teach, wisdom to impart. Our arrogance is in believing that the desire to teach makes one a teacher, that having done something right once means you have the talent and skill to instruct others.

I know many teachers. They went to school to learn how to do that.

Perhaps many actors believe they can teach for the same reason they believe they can act, because they like to stand in front of people and to be the center of attention. My own desire to show how smart I am led my younger self into many embarrassing situations for which I was entirely unprepared.

I signed up to teach improv at the regional Thespian conference my freshman year in college. There I was, standing in front of students who were basically the same age as I, and they did not view me with any special kind of respect or awe. They were there to learn something. And I was whimsically unprepared. I had taken, maybe, one improv class, once, when I was a sophomore in high school. We'd played improv games in high school, and I thought I'd jump up and we'd play some but pretty much all of these students had already played them.

I had no commentary, no notes to offer them. I was unaware of technique, why one thing worked and another did not. It was a long forty-five minutes.

I did take improv classes in college, we all took a basic improv course freshman year and a year or so later one of the most important acting classes I received at school, taught by George Sherman, Head of the MFA Directing program at O.U. (Read my 1988 interview with George.) There we learned more than games, we learned theory, a philosophy and also a certain amount of history. I was compelled to read books on the subject.

Rupture, Improv Comedy (1988)

We performed club improv in bars and coffee houses at school, but played the same old games, for laughs. The kind of improv George taught us was long-form improv, and though it was very successful in the classroom, creating actual drama from premise and character, there was never any thought of performing that stuff in front of an audience. We just never considered it.

The one year I worked for Karamu's Drama/Theatre for Youth project, we were each assigned a Saturday morning children's theater class, for which I neither received nor thought to request any kind of lesson plans. These were extremely unhappy Saturday mornings in which I worked for forty-five minutes to get thirty ten year olds (okay, there were only eight of them) to sit in a circle to play a concentration exercise, which was akin to drop a handful of marbles on the floor and then yelling at them as they scatter under the furniture.

I made mid-class hallway trips for the kids to drink water and go to the bathroom last for twenty minutes.

As I bounced from youth education project to youth education project two things were becoming abundantly clear. First, you need a lesson plan. Like, you need to plan ahead. That was a hard lesson for me.

Second and a bit more disheartening, I was never going to be the cool teacher. I am many things, but being someone that teenagers or even small children want to be around, that would never be me. I could instruct, but I would not be loved. I learned to be content with merely getting it right.

By our second year producing as Guerrilla Theater Company, we began discussing additional projects to be produced under the GTC banner. The Guerrilla Youth Theater project was launched in late 1993 in Bay Village (why not?) in which Torque and I taught classes for elementary-to-middle school aged kids. We had lesson plans. Mine were lifted entirely from Viola Spolin's Improvisation for the Theater. The class was arranged through the city recreation department.

We believed we had produced a decent eight-week curriculum and even staged an event at the end of the session in which we shared the exercises and games we had been working on with the kids parents. We promised to build on the work we had done in the winter session and were absolutely flummoxed when absolutely no one signed up for the winter session.

That spring we developed a concept in which I would teach high school students how to do perform long-form improv. The project was called IMPROV HIGH (see graphic above) and the promise was to create an inter-district high school improv troupe. Announcements were made, flyers were distributed.

We had two high school aged colleagues, both students at Cleveland School of the Arts. Bud was our most devoted audience member and Digit ran the sound for our late night show, Mind Your Own Business. They each did their part to sell their classmates on the project but the day of the first class they were the only two who showed up.

So I cancelled the whole thing. How could I create an improv troupe with two actors? This would not be the first time I would just walk away from something, even when there were dedicated participants ready to follow my lead, nor would it be the last. I regret that decision. They were there, you can do improv with two people. I could have joined in, we'd have three. I was afraid. I made a mistake.

The following summer GTC was done and I had a tentative agreement with Dobama Theatre to create a late night project there. My girlfriend and I were taking our first road trip together through the upper Midwest, twenty years ago this summer, in fact. I was yearning for an education in styles of theater which I might incorporate into this new project. In Chicago we saw the Neo-Futurists, yes, but also my first evil clown show (Die Hanswurst Klown), Danny Hoch's Some People and my first trip to Improv Olympic to see a Harold.

In Minneapolis we visited the Bryant Lake Bowl and saw an improvised, musical science fiction comedy titled The Young and the Weightless. It was a pretty educational theatrical exposition and it was my intention to attempt to approximate technique I had witnessed but had never really been schooled in. Dobama's Night Kitchen would be an education for me, as well.

The Realistic World (1996)

Some day I may take the time to cover that grand, flawed experiment which was The Realistic World. It may have been the world's first long-form improv based on the world's first reality show, but I can't prove that. It was the first time I had trained, coached and directed actors to perform any kind of improvisation onstage for a paying audience that was not an entire disaster.

Since that time, from time to time in my role as part of the School Residency Program I have led workshops in improvisation for middle and high school aged students, but these are brief and are usually only game-based improvs. You know, for fun. There isn't time to develop character or to dig very deep.

There's another problem, too, and that is my responsibility to the students and also to their teachers. Improv means trust and I can't encourage them to take risks but also be in the position of having to censor their behavior.

Actually, I can. I should. It's a skill, and it has been the hardest lesson to learn - how to say no. Improv has rules, of course it does, just because you do not have a script does not mean you do not have a structure. You cannot violate the reality of the scene. There is also the acceptance rule, that you take what is offered you and you agree to work with it and build on it.

For the uneducated:

WOMAN: I brought home a rhinoceros.

MAN: No, you didn't. (invalidation, bad choice)

MAN: Yes, and where are we going to keep this one? (good choice!)

The director, however, can say no. It's a director's job to say no. Rehearsal is not performance and when an actor breaks a rule, or does something unnatural - something intended to entertain or be funny - it is the director's job to call them on it. Not to humiliate them, just to stop the scene, address the issue, and either start a different scene or simply ask them to make a different choice.

As many times as possible. As many times as necessary.

But it is not easy. Invalidating an actor is not an action I take lightly. George was skilled in ending a scene when a rule has been broken. He was also good at letting an actor hang himself with his own rope if he made an asinine choice which did not actually break a rule.

Scene: A hardware store.

1. First actor establishes the store. They are organizing shelves.

2. Second actor establishes relationship by entering as a customer with a complaint above a defective purchase.

3. But then a third actor decides to burst in as a rather exaggerated example of a “robber” and holds the place up. 

However, we had been working with the rule that once you enter an improv, you cannot leave. So, having held the place up, he needed to come up with a reason to stay and the others had to deal with him. The decision to provide a character to the scene who was not actually a character but only a gag was clearly and painfully exhibited for the entire class to cringe at as the scene limped along.

For several years GLT has produced a summer theater arts camp at Berea-Midpark High School - Camp Theater. We teach those as young as four up through high school ages in a variety of games, exercises, scenes and disciplines such as combat choreography and stage make-up.

I was initially self-resistant to include much improv, apart from the very basic kinds of games, due to the constraints of time. The camp consists of two, week-long sessions. Some kids are only there for one week and for a few years our time with them were half-day sessions, perhaps two and a half hours. Improvisation, valid and valuable improvisation is not possible if you give it sixty minutes a day for five days.

We expanded to day long sessions last summer, continuing this year, and so I had the opportunity to work with the middle and high school aged campers in one group for two and a half hours each morning. They would split into two groups, one for middle school and one for high school in the afternoon to concentrate on scene work. But I would be working with them on my own all morning, and believed that with this time we might actually be able to create something wonderful right away.

Last summer was an experiment, one in which I was too limiting in the kinds of exercises we would perform, each performance based, skill based, character building. Not for performance. You see, each class would be presenting the scenes they had been working on at the end of the day Friday for their families. I had no intention for them to perform improv for an audience after such a brief period of work. It was technique-based work, and the students responded accordingly.
It was no fun.

Camp Improv (2015)

After all, these are kids – smart kids, to be sure, but not already skilled actors. They do not know how to “make choices” because they have never been asked to, they do not yet know how.

This summer, I flipped it. We would work towards sketch based improv. Very clear conflicts were assigned, characters were described and provided. Definite parameters were set, scene games which have a prescribed beginning and ending. They brought their own personalities to set scenarios and played them successfully and instead of having some vague sense of accomplishment from improving their skill set, they had the immediate satisfaction of making their peers laugh and successfully navigating a story.

And I said no. A lot.

Scene: You are lost in the city, and need money for bus fare.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Give me a dollar!”

Hold please. Take that again, make a different decision this time.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Please, give me a dollar!”

Hold please. If you were asking a stranger to give you a dollar, you would run up to them screaming, they’d run away. Try that again.

Camper runs up to other actor screaming, “Hey, can you help me!”

Hold please. No seriously, your goal is to get the dollar, not to frighten the person. Do something different to successfully get them to pay you.

Camper walks up to other actor and says, “Excuse me, I know you don’t know me –"

Other actor says, “Who are you, stay away, I have pepper spray!”

Camper says, “That’s cool, really, I’m just a guy, the thing is –“

And the scene started to click.

For our final morning together, I asked them to bring drinks and snacks and we created a bar. We closed the stage curtains creating a narrow space which we crammed with mismatched chairs found around the school. A stage was clearly marked to one side of the stage with tape. Colored stage lights were turned on giving the space a clubby vibe and I had brought Christmas lights which the students draped behind the stage.

Camp Improv (2019)

The kids performed about an hour of club improv, scenarios they had worked on and also games. I acted as MC as they sat around eating chips and drinking pop and performing their bits. In between set-ups many of them volunteered to sing their favorite songs a capella and I was surprised by how good their voices were. Even the boys sang.

It was a performance no one else had the honor of experiencing, it was private where they could tell the same jokes we’d been telling all week and not be judged by the other campers or anyone else. They were confident and did confident work. Just before lunch I had the unhappy task of closing the show and asking them to break down the show.

They were called into a circle and I was just going to make some brief remarks about keeping their energy up to prepare for their afternoon performance when one of the older students, one who had attended for several years now, she rose her hand demanding to speak. She said, “I just have to say! This has been the best week of camp ever!”

Oh.

Uh, I said. Uh. That’s good, uh ... that wasn't –

Another blurted out, “Come on, man -- we love you, David!”

I was just trying to get it right.

Station Eleven (book)

Reminiscent of The World Without Us

It is well-understood that watching emergency room dramas can be very frustrating for actual medical professionals. Lawyers are the first people who can tell you how unrealistic courtroom dramas are, and nobody has ever talked the way they do on The West Wing.

Writers have not only to write compelling stories, but they have the burden of accuracy. Even when writing a piece of historical fiction like The Great Globe Itself, I needed to know the facts before I could satirize them. Even when we are making things up there can be a desire to fact-check, but fact-checking only goes so far.

When writing The Vampyres I invited an actual goth rock band to a table reading, and they were entirely dismissive of the characters I had created. On the night in question, a certain local professional cartoonist and non-professional social critic also happened to be in attendance, and he thought their reaction was hilarious. He said, “No, actually, guys like you are exactly like that.”

So, uh. So there.

Fortunately for theater artists, no one really writes about our craft for popular media very much so there is little to be nitpick. One of the reasons the Canadian TV program Slings and Arrows is so popular among theater people is not for its accurate portrayal of “The Life” but more because we’re all squeally like – “OMG, they’re talking about us!!!!!!’

Shortly after college my father recommended that I might be interested in Light Thickens by Ngaio Marsh, a mystery where the murder takes place during a production of Macbeth. At that point my professional experience was not very deep, but I was immediately put-off by the director, whose opening comments about each character, delivered to each actor sitting around for the first read-through, were, I felt, horribly prescriptive. Add to that several actors expressed their strong difference of opinion, right off the bat, and engaged in a heated debate with the director, who insisted on the correctness of his opinion.

Of course, there are directors who come forcefully at their company like this, right at the start, though I am hard pressed to imagine the kind of counter-argument emerging from the acting company in response, at least not at the first blinking read-through. It just struck me as terribly false.

Let's read this corpse.

When in the first season of Slings and Arrows the avante-garde Darren Nichols begins his first rehearsal of Hamlet by pronouncing, “This play is dead,” it is hilarious because this is a comedy, and his is an extreme character. An extreme character much like directors we have known or worked with, perhaps, but still. Suspension of belief works differently for comedy than drama.

Recently, my wife checked out Emily St. John Mandel’s recent novel Station Eleven from the library, for us each to read. I had actually taken the book to North Carolina and back but was absorbed in other reading and actually didn’t get to it until our final night on the road, the night of the women’s final against Japan.

Looking into a vast, bright and shimmering television screen, transmitting images of a game of football being played entirely by women nearly three thousand miles away – the actual game itself attended by over fifty thousand people, an unimaginable number to be all in one place – myself lying between clean sheets in a hotel buzzing with people resting in safety and comfort, without weapons, twinkling ice in my plastic cup, drinking impossibly sweet and cool soda pop, the room alive with electricity and light after nightfall, the internet magically passing around us and through us, well-fed with warm pizza and fresh, green salads brought right to our room first by way of a gasoline powered vehicle and then the elevator. After a long day driving in a car, one cooled by air that just poured out a vent in spite of the eighty plus degrees outside, with clean water in a bottle, still cool, recently filled from a tap, available to all, and watching an exciting game, I read one page of this new work and promptly fell into a comfortable sleep, without care.

Read the book? You get it. Anyway.

This tale follows a caravan of actors and musicians, The Traveling Symphony, who roam a post-apocalyptic wasteland, making their living by playing and performing the works of Shakespeare.

They’re talking about us!!!!!!

I was most tickled by the different philosophies expressed by company members of the troupe, and how even after the end of everything actors and artists will be having the exact same debates about Shakespeare.

One player is confident in the idea that Shakespeare transcends time, and that more recent scripts are ground deep in a past that make them no longer comprehensible - let alone relevant - and that their decision to perform only his works, to the exclusion of all other texts, is the best artistic decision to make.

Another artist privately believes quite the opposite, that the works of Shakespeare are far too limited in their scope of human experience and besides she hates Shakespeare but will keep her opinion to herself because (ta-da) she works for a Shakespearean theater company.

There is also that age-old debate regarding costumes. Shouldn't the actors dress as their audiences do, in the decades-old, well-worn everyday wear of the past century? The thinking goes that if you perform Shakespeare’s text in contemporary dress, you bring the work closer to your audience. I have heard this argument. I have made this argument.

Other characters believe theater is a unique occasion, an opportunity to be transported to a different time and place, to see something special. As such, when the opportunity presents itself to ransack a long-abandoned home or school, to forage for any useful supplies, a useless dress or a disregarded men’s suit – unnecessary for survival –  is to them a valuable treasure.

John Wood, Alex Kingston
RSC 1990

One note, however, near the very beginning of the book struck me as entirely wrong. Departing a rather eventful performance of King Lear, just prior to that thing which makes the rest of the book happen, our narrator makes note of the poster, high above the Toronto streets. An image not unfamiliar to those who have ever seen this play; the bereft, ageing king, cradling his dead, grown daughter Cordelia.

I was shocked just to read it. I mean, uh, spoiler alert, Cordelia dies at the end of King Lear. Most know this and if you didn’t, well, so does Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Timon of Athens, Hamlet (and practically everyone he touches) as well as Julius Caesar, they all die.  Caesar doesn't even wait to the end, he dies in the third act.

But which fictional marketing director gave the green light to putting that image on the poster? Your main promotional image is the great tragedy at the very end of the play?

As our marketing department at Great Lakes has been conceiving of the season image for our Fall 2015 production, I have had the opportunity to take in dozens of other images from professional productions dating back a few decades.

Most are a dark, static depiction of an old man. I saw John Wood play Lear in 1990, the graphic was of the king prancing in madness, with a laurel of flowers on his head. A few include the Fool. Others are abstract; when we saw Ian Holm play the role in 1997 the image was of an eclipse of the sun.

The GLT season image for King Lear will not be released for a month or so, but they did principal photography last week. Here is an intriguing preview:

Via Facebook. What will happen?

UPDATE: "Station Eleven" is now a series on HBO Max.

The Belief Circle Exercise

"I will hear Brutus speak."

Recently I had the privilege of meeting Jay Indik, one of the original architects of the school residency program in the 1980s. As GLT Education Director, he collaborated with other educators and theater artists not only to craft that program but also the outreach tour and Christmas Carol writing program. Basically, he put into motion the educational outreach programming which has been the major focus of my life.

He had the opportunity to visit the program in action at Hudson Middle School and was very happy to see how the lesson plan still functions successfully, and in his estimation, has improved. During our brief meeting we compared notes about the structure of the program, and also the rehearsal process. The Romeo & Juliet lesson plan, for example, remains largely unchanged in the past twenty-five years, though Lisa remarked how students in the past ten years have had shifting attitudes about the text.

No matter how sweetly our performers play the Balcony Scene, everyone – boys and girls – think Romeo is a total stalker. Not that that is a bad thing to think.

The residency Jay thought was always such a challenge to connect with students was Julius Caesar. He said it was sometimes very difficult for the students to appreciate or get the politics involved. Now, I am not sure what form that lesson took a quarter-century ago, but I do know that parts of it have changed significantly in the past ten years.

I mentioned the fact that recently we have entered into an arrangement with Hawken Lower School to teach Caesar to their fourth graders, which surprised him. However, as far back as my years as an actor-teacher myself I had the opportunity to conduct this residency for a middle school and was surprised to learn Julius Caesar isn’t about politics at all.

It’s about friendship. Think about it.

One of my favorite exercises is the Belief Circle. It’s on the second day, we have barely gotten to know the students, but we establish a safe space and everyone is asked to express something they believe in. It is never a debate, as to the validity of their beliefs, but rather and exploration of where they originate, how deeply they are held, and by design the conversation moves to how far one would go to defend their belief.

This is a delicate balance, as the comparison is drawn to Brutus, his core belief (in Rome) and his faithfulness to his friend Caesar, and we all know how that turns out. But virtually every student we meet has never had to stand up for what they believe is right. Sometimes what they believe stands in stark contrast to what I believe but we do not debate our beliefs, the discussion is the same. What would you do if your beliefs were challenged, by family, by friends, by the authorities.

In the version of the lesson plan which I received in the summer of 2001, one of the end-of-day discussions involve how a community (as in a school) reacts in time of crisis. The example set out in my notes had dust on it – it asked if I remembered the Challenger Disaster, which of course I did because I was the one in high school at that time. I wasn’t sure how that was going to resonate with students who had been infants.

You can see where this is going. By the time I even entered a classroom in my new job, we all had a fresh point of reference, and one with terrifying relevance. The Challenger was an accident. 9/11 was not.

Other issues have changed astonishingly in the decade plus I have been engaged in this work. Ten years ago, it was the better part of discretion for actor-teachers not to express controversial opinions as part of the Belief Circle.

As recently as last year, when substituting for an actor at an area high school, the entire discussion was about marriage equality, because the students themselves chose to discuss it. I was in the position of playing devil’s advocate, playing my part in the discussion to suggest obstacles to achieving or expressing the expressed belief.

For example, let’s say you were to create a Friends of LBTG group, and it were banned by the school authorities – such things happen. What would you do? Their answers might be tepid, and we press them, what would you do? What would you do? What would Marcus Brutus do?

Memorial Day weekend, as the Brelo decision was announced, I was disappointed but by no means surprised by the chorus of voices on social media not content merely to urge peace, but to qualify what is or is not an appropriate form of protest.

Merely shutting down traffic for fifteen minutes – an act coordinated between protestors and police – brought calls to “hang them all” from persons on Facebook, and not anonymously, either. Several tutted more gently, condescendingly reminding protestors to emulate Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. It was as though they were intentionally ignorant of the fact that mildly inconveniencing Saturday afternoon traffic on the Shoreway was nothing to the kind of non-violent protests staged by the good Doctor.

What do you believe? Have you ever had your beliefs challenged? What would you do to defend your beliefs?

Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest (2015)

The Sisters Mourn

This evening, two award-winning Lorain County Community College student playwrights, their peers and members of their family gathered in the Cirigliano Stocker Arts Center Studio Theatre for a script-in-hand performance of their ten-minute plays.

Actors from the Great Lakes Theater school residency program and outreach tour performed The Party Guest by Billy Hopp and The Sisters Mourn by KHR Capizzi, which were the Second and First Place winners (respectively) for the 2015 Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest.

The Party Guest

This event was the culmination of Dr. Daniel Cleary’s ENGL/THTR 168: Playwriting for Stage and Screen Course, incorporating themes from William Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

In The Party Guest, several close friends reveal deeply held secrets and celebrate new freedom after the arrival of an unannounced stranger. The Sisters Mourn details the effect their mother's death has on three sisters, and how their sorrow affects each differently. Each piece reflected themes of deception and loss present in Shakespeare’s timeless work.

Acting company with playwrights KHR Capizzi and Billy Hopp (seated in chairs)

GLT performers included Luke Brett, Chelsea Cannon, Roderick Cardwell, Katelyn Cornelius, Chenelle Bryant-Harris, Tim Keo, Shaun O'Neill, and Michael Silverstein. Special thanks to Jeremy K. Benjamin, LCCC Director of Theatre.

The LCCC Playwriting Contest is part of GLT’s Surround series of free events presented across Northeast Ohio. On Thursday, April 16, six ten-minute plays were read by student actors from Professor Dave Cotton’s Acting for Theater classes, and evaluated by Northeast Ohio playwrights Christopher Johnston, Margaret Lynch, Eric Schmiedl, Michael Oatman and myself, GLT Educational Outreach Associate David Hansen.

Lorain County Community College Playwriting Contest (2014)

The Great Globe Itself: Middle School

Three Globes (Hudson Middle School)

We pushed the tour schedule back a few weeks this year, from a mid-February start to one at the beginning of March. Afforded an additional week of performances, we searched for additional high schools and soon discovered March is a terrible, terrible time to add special events to a high school calendar. It's all testing, all the time, or preparation for same.

So we turned to middle schools. Most of our tours are suitable for all audiences. Double Heart was a romance, and spoke frankly about some very personal issues (see Time Out review for details) so it stands out as an example that may have been inappropriate for adolescents. However, some material may not interest a vast audience of 11-to-13 year olds. Our Agatha Christie tour was very popular, but would it have held their attention for an hour?

We will never get to find out. But the decision was made months ago to bring two middle schools, in Cleveland Heights and in Hudson, onto the tour schedule. It just so happened they followed one day after another this week.

Monticello Middle School

Monday afternoon's performance at my own daughter's school, Monticello Middle School was very lively. The entire school was invited - over five hundred kids - and when the characters of Clement (2005) and Sam (1936) made their entrance through the house, it was as though every kid popped out of their seat. In their post-show comments, numerous students remarked on how funny they found the play, and many asked us to return some time in the future.

Hudson Middle School

The entire eighth grade at Hudson Middle School joined us on Tuesday, and our contact teacher there, Mrs. Lawler, had used our Teacher Preparation Guide to bring her kids up to speed on the history and issues related to The Great Globe Itself. After the performance, she gave me a tour of her classroom and all the different projects they had created, related to the production.

Romeo & Juliet Globe (Hudson Middle School)

Students have been very generous with their praise in their written evaluations:

"I liked the mixture of humor and seriousness."
"The actors were very good!"
"Overall I enjoyed this play and I would totally come to another play."
"This play was fun to see instead of being in class."

 Our performance at Monticello concluded just as the school day concluded, so there was no opportunity for a a Q&A, except for  few students who didn't need to catch a us and stayed behind to chat with us.

Hudson Middle School

At Hudson we had the opportunity for a nice long talkback. I asked a few warm-up questions related to the production before letting the students as whatever they want from me and from the acting company. One questions I asked on Tuesday was, "If you had to describe this play to someone who has not seen it, what would you tell them?"

There was an awkward silence, with a few giggles, before a student in the balcony raised his hand. He spoke in a thoughtful, cultured, if put-on voice ...

"The play ... (he took a considered pause, more giggling from the audience) ... was about the magnificent Globe Theatre ... (another measured pause, more outright laughter from the audience) ... a place where men ... dance together ..."

And then we all just lost it.

The Great Globe Itself: Week Two

Full house at University of Akron!

The first, full six-day week of performances is almost at an end. Our gentlemen have performed The Globe across all counties, from Oberlin to Cah-hoga Falls, with stops at libraries and retirement communities, for one audience of nine earlier this week to a packed room at the University of Akron Student Union Thursday afternoon.

Every couple of years Great Lakes has had the opportunity to present the outreach tour as part of the university's annual Shakespeare In The Spring programming, and were all delighted to learn there would be cake.

During the performance, one of our hosts was inspired to create an impromptu sign, reassuring students that the meatballs were harmless:

Get it? If not, you haven't seen the show yet.

We had a great discussion afterwards, debating whether the show does or does not include ghosts, and James contributed to the eternal humiliation of John Fletcher. 

Down at The Globe.

Response to this new work has been very positive, and there were dudes at the show yesterday who were virtually crying during the dance scenes. Here are some random comments from the U of A:

Q: What did you enjoy most about today's performance:
"The entire performance was outstanding."
"The actors are just funny guys."
"The jokes about (Cardinal) Wolsey."

The Wolsey bits? They're the best part of the show!

Many thanks to Dr. Hillary Nunn who coordinated our tour stop, and all those who organized the event, it was a beautiful Spring-like day in so many ways. The van is loaded up, and today we wrap up this second week of the tour at the Cleveland Sight Center at 1 PM. Join us!

Say cheese.

The Great Globe Itself continues through March 31.

The Great Globe Itself: Opening Week

Art is never finished, only abandoned.
- Leonardo Da Vinci

The tour has opened, The Great Globe Itself is on the road. We have had warm and receptive audiences at Talespinner Children's Theatre in Cleveland, Workshop Players, Inc. in Amherst, and Berea-Midpark High School. There have been many laughs, some surprising, but all received with great enthusiasm from the acting company.

This was evident from the final dress rehearsal, for which we crammed about a dozen close friends into the rehearsal room. It was surprising to me how much of the written work was actually funny (nothing can be proved to be funny until a human being actually laughs at it) but also how successfully our performers are selling it.

From the first, the strongest reaction we have received are for the accents, especially the Original Pronunciation. However, OP is not the sticking point I was afraid it might be. The opening moment, when characters from all time periods represented in the work enter, introduce themselves, and their words overlap, hopefully give the audience an indication that OP will not be the lingua franca of the entire show.

There are several moments in which the actors use, move into or move out of the audience space. This has been a unique challenge in every venue, and one I was looking forward to seeing. At Workshop, a tiny space with audiences on three sides, it is almost as though we were in the Globe itself, and as I have experienced in tours past, the actors had great fun throwing the blocking out the window, to use the entire playing area.

High school audiences can be a little logy when the performance is first thing in the morning. They folks are Berea-Midpark were polite and receptive, laughing more quietly to themselves than out loud, until Mark Antony's oration, when they seemed to wake up and buzz and feed James's performance with response and applause.

Marion L. Steele High School Thespian Troupe #1422 (2015)

Since we began attending Workshop Players as a stop on the tour, Valerie Farschman has brought her drama club to see the show, every year since 2010. This year, however, we were also happy to see students from Garfield Middle School (Lakewood) in attendance. Each group of students came prepared with great questions about the production and our acting company.

One sixth grader, a girl my daughter's age, was very curious about the conclusion of the performance. Why does the retiring artistic director say he is "surrendering his power"? We discussed how (spoiler alert) the character of Prospero surrenders his power to leave the island at the close of The Tempest, so too an artist must eventually abandon their work. I was struggling to remember who said that bit about how art is never finished, merely abandoned but I couldn't remember who that was, he probably wasn't very important.

In the play, during the 2005 section, we make reference to a certain British science fiction program that was "rebooted" that year. Why? Because time and space are themes of the production, and as every scene is about what happens before the house opens, I was trying to think of small talk that night pass between to modern, professional actors.

I knew this brief conversation might get a few chuckles from our younger audience members, but I wasn't prepared to see them practically bouncing in their seats with giddy disbelief and excitement. It's as though they were watching this play about all of these things they may have never seen before, and suddenly the characters were talking about them.

Great Lakes Theater 2015 outreach tour The Great Globe Itself continues through March 31.

The Great Globe Itself: Property Design

For those not engaged in the art of theater, any part of what appears on stage, any thing, which is manipulated or acted with, by an actor, whether it be handkerchief or vase of flowers, if it is handled or used in some fashion, it is no longer a costume or set, but a property, or "prop".

Terry Martin is Prop Master for Great Lakes Theater, and he also designed sets for all of the outreach tours I have written, including On the Dark Side of Twilight, The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Double Heart. We met when he designed the set for Bad Epitaph Theater Co's. production, State of Siege in 2003.

Terry has also designed the props for The Great Globe Itself, with tremendous assistance from Lexi and Rachel. In earlier posts I have described the concept behind the Globe Theatre set. One additional element in the set are signs which will help the audience understand which era the characters occupy, 1613, 1936 or 2005.

Terry was inspired to create these signs thanks to a photograph of the eighteen year-old Sam Wanamaker at the Old Globe Theatre in 1936. How clearer to show and convince, and the remind the audience that yes, they did seven shows a day, back to back, all week long, than to recreate this signpost?

There is also an important plot point, the show order for the day, which is represented on this sign. I wonder how many audience members will catch it before our character of Sam does during the performance?

Starting with sing concept, Terry created a lovely poster for the ill-fated 1613 performance of All Is True - or - The Famous History of the Life of Henry the Eighth (see top) and finally we needed a sign which said "21st century theatre". Anyone who has attended a performance as part of the Broadway series at Playhouse Square should be familiar with this:

The Great Globe Itself opens Tuesday.

The Great Globe Itself: Quick Changes

This is freaking awesome.

Rehearsals keeping moving forward, and as we add layer upon layer of business, our three gentlemen just soak it up and grow and grow. 

Bizarre accents? Sure, no problem. By the end of the 1613 scene you will wonder why Shakespeare isn't always spoken like this.

Big dance number? No problem. They can do that, too.

Right now we are incorporating the numerous costume changes into the production. Esther has made herself available to witness and assist, as decisions are made as to what is and is not possible in, say, a six-second costume change.

How about a little tune to cover your costume change?

Tomorrow sound designer Richard Ingraham will begin to incorporate sound cues. I LOVE sound design! It's all becoming one rich tapestry of music and noise and history and humor.

We open in six days.

The Great Globe Itself: Teacher Preparation Guide

This year we have expanded the number of schools the tour visits from five to nine. Two of these schools are middle schools, we traditionally visit high schools. Sometimes the material is a bit mature or complex for pre-teens, and we leave it to parents to decide whether to bring their children to the public performances.

The Great Globe Itself, however, is historic and humorous and should be a hit with middle school kids. At least, the middle school kids I know, and I currently know a lot of them.

Every mainstage production at Great Lakes Theater includes a series of matinee performances for students across four states, and for every production there is an original Teacher Preparation Guide. These guides are created by GLT staff, area educators and academics including relevant articles, discussion prompts and pre- and post-attendance activities.

We do not often create a guide for the outreach tour. The last time we did this (I believe) was for the Seeing Red tour in 2008. That play was a dramatization of testimony before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and so we provided a guide detailing the history of the committee and biographies of persons represented or referred to in the work, including Hallie Flanagan, Ronald Reagan, Paul Robeson and Arthur Miller.

The Globe is chockablock with historical personages and steeped in true historical fact (that I mess with) and so we have created a guide to hopefully bring our student audiences up to speed. Most of this original material was sourced and scribed by our education intern Elizabeth Finley, who is a recent graduate from Malone University. We are all very grateful for Elizabeth's great work, creating  this very useful guide, which you can access from the Great Lakes Theater website.

The Great Globe Itself: Blocking

Three nights, three scenes. Each scene between sixteen and twenty minutes in duration, and that includes the dancing. We will easily bring that down and the entire show will be under an hour.

Last year (Seven Ages) we were costume light but prop heavy, this year it is the other way around. Working through the Great Lakes Exposition Tuesday last night we discovered we would need a clipboard and a baby, and that was about it.

Tomorrow we will be stumbling through the entire piece a few times (maybe twice?) but on Sunday we need to add costumes. During the 1936 scene alone each actor will cycle through no less than four costumes, Rod himself has five. The changes are going to be kind of a big deal.

It has been five years since we have had a cast of only three, the last time was On the Dark Side of Twilight (2010). There is a special kind of attention and focus that comes with such a small ensemble, we work for three hours and there is little down time – sitting time – for any of them. Each of them just has too much to do at any given moment.

By the end of the night this evening, The Globe was a glob, meaning we have given it a basic shape. Our gentlemen should have their lines down by the beginning of next week and they can truly begin embodying their characters and telling the story.


Who can turn a glob into a globe?

The Great Globe Itself: Choreography

Rehearsals for The Great Globe Itself began in earnest last Wednesday. For three nights we met in our rehearsal room, and sat and read and talked. Actually, they did a lot of reading, and I did a lot of talking. But we all sat, looking at books and pictures, sharing stories and tackling several interesting English dialects – OP, Midwestern American, and a few modern of British.

Chuck, our dialect coach, worked one-on-one with each guy while the rest of us kept reading and studying. I threw so much stuff into this script, I have been anxious about how it would be handled by the actors, any actors. By the end of Friday night I was pretty confident that things were on track.

It’s weird, for several years now rehearsals for the outreach tour began in mid-January, with performances commencing the second full week of February. For years we have had a performance on Valentine’s Day -- we auspiciously opened Double Heart on Valentine’s Day itself. Yet we had yesterday off. If we had our traditional schedule, today we would have held our first Sunday afternoon show for an audience braving temperatures below 0° to attend this hot show. I am very glad we pushed the production back a few weeks this year.

Friday evening we took a little field trip … downstairs. I took our gentlemen into the only theater in Northeast Ohio that approximates the conditions of performance present in the Globe Theatre: the Hanna. Safety regulations prohibited our men from standing or working on the thrust stage, but they did have the chance to stand in the house and gaze up into the galleries, and to take in the stage as an Elizabethan audience member might, from all sides, from in the historic boxes.

Tonight, choreography! I have such vivid, happy memories of the dances Carli created for Double Heart. Critics in New York commented upon James’s and Emily’s dance together … sure, I wrote some good lines, but the dancing was how audiences believed they had fallen in love.

The men in Globe, they are not dancing to fall in love. They have work to do, their characters have work to do. Their characters are actors, preparing for a performance, and warming up. That is one of the pieces.

The other piece Carli has prepared is inspired by the curtain call dance, or “jig” which would have been expected from Shakespeare’s audience. If his text is to be believed (or rather, if you are to expect the opinions of certain of the Bard’s characters to be his own opinions) then Shakespeare hated concluding his performances with dancing. But what are you gonna do? The groundlings expect a jig and by gar, we're gonna give them one.

The Great Globe Itself: Set Design

Scale model: Terry Martin

This is a play about a building. The play is named after a building, the phrase The Great Globe Itself is from The Tempest, as Prospero describes how all things must eventually end, how life is merely an illusion.

"We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep."

Indeed. The entire play takes place in our around one of three Globe Theatres. In our first meeting, scenic designer Terry Martin and I discussed how literal this set should be. We agreed what we did not want was for it to look like anyone's set for The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (abridged).

Not like this.

The word "rendering" was introduced several times, and in fact shortly after our first production meeting, when Todd and I were conceptualizing the production image with the folks at TRG, they themselves chose the word "rendering" to describe the item Arthur's character would be holding in his hand. This idea of the Globe in the form of a ground plan or blueprint had definitely taken shape.

May I offer you a Globe?

We will be rehearsing in a small office downtown, per usual. This is good, because if the set fits into the rehearsal space, then we know we can manage to squeeze it into pretty much any of our locations.

See: "Complete Works" poster in the background.

This has got to be one of the simplest, most elegant, and lightest touring sets we have ever had. And it is ideal, representing the Globe artistically as architecture.

Stage right presents backstage, the Tiring House, the storage in the Heavens, costumes and all that.

Stage left, the galleries, the public area occupied by audience members. Performers in the show refer to the galleries several times, but our work will be performed largely in non-theater spaces with one level of audience, on the floor.

Here we see the foreshortened "Heavens" - the ceiling over the Globe stage. These columns suggest the thrust of the theater's platform stage, but will work in a shallow stage space like that at Lakewood, but also provide a "launching pad" into the audience which will work extremely well at Workshop Players. I am very excited to see how this simply device will work in all of the different spaces, large and small.

Terry drew these designs himself, by hand, and though it is hard to tell from these photographs (because these photographs I took aren't very good) the surface has the patina of parchment. This is his original model, life-size!