Afternoons, Kelly and I trade off between the Upstart Crows (middle school) and Rude Mechanicals (high school). She is guiding them through a Shakespearean “Battle Royale” while I lead them through improvisation exercises.
In this way, the campers are getting a lot of specialized attention in two different aspects of performance. I don’t think we’ve ever provided as much time on stage combat before, and never with as an experienced mentor as Kelly.
As for improv club, I was inspired by someone one of our interns said during the planning sessions, comparing long-form improv to a role playing game – which is another way of looking at the work we use to do in the Night Kitchen; concentrating on creating one very specific character for the actor to create and embody. They, the established character, can enter into any scenario, handle conflict and create relationships, pushing a storyline forward without inconsistency.
The fist of Hector. (Cleveland Shakespeare Festival, 2018)
Directing Shakespeare, it is often necessary to include stage fighting. Part of the challenge in directing Hamlet is that you must end with a sword fight. If you decide to set your production in the present, that can present obvious challenges because that’s not how we do things any more.
For the Cleveland Shakespeare Festival I have been fortunate to direct Henry VIII and Timon of Athens, plays in which people just talk the whole time. Talk or sing, or do some freaky dancing.
The first time I directed Shakespeare it was Romeo & Juliet for Guerrilla Theater. I was twenty-six and come up with this brilliant concept that we weren’t going to celebrate or sensationalize violence, and so decided that just as Tybalt and Mercutio came at each other the lights would black out, and when they came back up Mercutio would be mortally wounded. Ditto when Romeo and fights Tybalt; blackout, lights up, Tybalt dead on the floor.
That was the concept, anyway. I knew that combat choreography takes time, a lot of time. Rehearsal time to learn the steps and then time every rehearsal to rehearse those steps. I was directing my first Shakespeare and though I could not spare that kind of time. Also, at that point in my life I knew actually zero fight choreographers in Cleveland. Zero was also our budget.
Since then I have met several fight choreographers, and have commissioned a few fights. When we produced a modern Hamlet on a stage the size of a postage stamp, we did a stylized knife fight, Hamlet and Laertes each holding onto the end of a strap. Yes, it was compared the rumble in the music video for "Beat It." For Sarah Morton’s Hamlet at Beck Center, which was period appropriate, she and choreographer Joshua D. Brown fought with rapier and dagger, like it says in the script.
The first and really only time I had been introduced to the play Troilus and Cressida was when we took a college trip to Stratford in 1990 to attend master classes with the RSC. Company members Ciarán Hinds (as Achilles) and David Troughton (Hector) performed for us a fight to the death. Their choreographer, inspired by Nestor’s description of Hector cutting down his opponents (“there the strawy Greeks … fall down before him, like the mower's swath") provided them with whirling, twin short blades. They made quite a clang.
Ciarán Hinds (Achilles) and David Troughton (Hector) 35mm camera, sound out of sync.
A big question for the director choosing a modern interpretation of a classic drama (e.g., one set during the Trojan War) is what to do about the fighting. People like to see fighting, it adds excitement and emotional impact. But we no longer fight with swords, we fight with machine guns. On the battlefield, we often drop bombs from pilotless drones and create improvised explosives. These are neither easily staged nor dramatically compelling. What to do?
"The American Revolution" (Bad Epitaph Theater Co., 2004)
For The American Revolution, Kirk Wood Bromley's modern verse play about the War for Independence, we presented battles in the background as they were described by messengers in the foreground, actor charging with colonial-age rifles with bayonets, and also waving the many colored battle flags of the period, and that made up for the difficulty in presenting gunfire onstage, because it's static and potentially under-dramatic.
There are a few key moments in our production of Troilus & Cressida which have been staged by Josh and his partner Kelly Elliott, including a fist fight between Hector and Ajax, some clever work with handguns, sexual assault, a brutal death by knife, and a bullet to the head. Scored briefly with the recorded sound of explosive devices, we hopefully will evoke a moment of chaos, confusion, and insurgency.
For seven of the past eight years, I have performed in the annual, free outreach tour for Great Lakes Theater. Seven Ages will be my eighth.
Traditionally, we begin rehearsal in January, open in February and close in March. And that's it. As I was invited to write a tour or two in the past several years, my process began in August, and then in April -- I wrote Double Heart in April 2012.
Our combat choreographer staged the sword fight in September of that year. We began rehearsal proper in January, and before we closed found that we would be taking the show to New York City. Over a year with this one show on my mind, it felt odd to be meeting with Emily to begin rehearsal on this new show.
A little background; Seven Ages consists of seven short tales written by seven Cleveland playwrights, based on each of Jacques "seven ages of man" from As You Like It. Mine was inspired by the schoolboy, and is rather literal. What was it like to go to school in 16th century England? One fact I learned was that the odds were very good you were going to be struck by your teacher.
Love goes toward love as schoolboys from their books, But love from love toward school with heavy looks.
- Romeo & Juliet, II.ii
Yeah, no shit Romeo. Especially when your drunken proctor is in a bad mood.
In one particularly nasty moment, the teacher (me) strikes his pupil (Emily, as a boy) from behind and without warning. December 17 our Kelly was in town to work with the actor-teachers, and we brought Emily in to stage the fight. The video here details the extent of the beating. You can see clearly from the second two angles that I am hesitant to get too close to striking her back. I think the way I am holding the stick will make a different, angled more severely it should hide the blow.
Double Heart opens February 12. However, when your favorite combat choreographer is in town, you get her and your available cast together to stage a KNIFE FIGHT.
Why knives? If you live in Amherst, you do not need to answer this question. Some sites for the tour are quite intimate, and swing rapiers about is entirely not practical. However, writing my first period, iambic pentameter verse play, I knew I wanted at least these two things -- a dance, and some kind of sword fight.
Creating this fight was not as easy as Kelly deciding what are the coolest moves and working them into the dialogue. Laws, no. She had a lot of questions about the characters I had not even answered myself, including what class status Benedick is, and Valentine and Virginia. What does Valentine (who we decided is some kind of lord, because we had determined that Virginia must be a lady) challenging Benedick to a duel mean, in the larger sense? What is at stake?
The biggest surprise of the afternoon was when we decided that, as a result of Virginia's intercession, Benedick accidentally slashes Valentine across the ass.
Maybe ten years ago, we brought Kelly Elliott on board to create new stage combat for our fight scenes. Actor-teachers fight each other as Benvolio and Tybalt, Laertes and Hamlet, Macbeth and Macduff, in classrooms, gynmasiums, school parking lots, and sometimes even on actual stages. Kelly crafted fights which do not take up a lot of space, to allow for these challenging spaces, making the fights thrilling -- but entirely safe -- for students to watch and experience.
Kelly was an actor-teacher herself from 2006-2009, and since that time has returned in the fall and winter to coach and clean up her choreography to new members of the team. While those who love her were thrilled when she was acceted into a grad program in Staunton, Virginia, Lisa and I were also understandably bitter and disappointed that she would not longer be available to us.
Lucky we! She and her husband Josh have returned to Cleveland for the holidays and she contacted us to ask if we needed her! Of course we do! Always! In addition to the aforementioned fights, women learn how to stab themselves correctly (Juliet) and men learn how to gut a student (Young Siward.) There is also careful instruction on choking.
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