Playing Pretend and the Spanish Armada

Earlier this week Christine Schmidle, graduate of the MBC MLitt/MFA program and director of Session 2's A Midsummer Night's Dream, led a workshop of the ideas and techniques of Michael Chekov. His views on acting include the idea that feelings cannot be commanded, but qualities can. Although it may not be possible to make yourself feel tender, you can behave in a manner indicating tenderness, and you will, therefore, appear tender. First handing out selections from “On the Technique of Acting,” Christine had the campers study the descriptions of different terms and techniques -- such as Focal point, Radiating and Receiving, Improvisation, Entirety, Form, Psychological Gesture, Characterization, and Imagination -- and then explain these terms to the group. These exercises are like lightbulbs. You don’t need them all, but they’re there for you to use to illuminate your acting.

The campers then put these ideas into action as Christine had them do an improvisation exercise where they were exploring an imagined atmosphere. What if all around you instead of air was Jello? “Try moving in it. Does it get in your mouth? Do you like that? Now you are in the atmosphere of fire.” Followed by water, mud, happiness, stone, tension, awe and clouds. It was fascinating to see which atmospheres resembled each other, and how each affected the way the campers moved in their space.

Next was a more elaborate imagination exercise in which Christine led them all through a complicated sequence of locations and attributes, including the beach, the woods, and climbing Mt. Olympus, then becoming a fairy or a classical deity or a soldier all in turn. The campers put themselves into the world Christine described with incredible specificity which was a delight to watch. They fell to the ground when they lost their fairy wings, shivered and laughed with delight when they had run right up to the shoreline and had the waves of the sea crash around their feet, and sat in perfect stillness as Diana or Jupiter, contemplating their own imagined immortality.

By this time everyone was ready for a break, but you know you’re at Shakespeare camp when at a break in the workshop everyone begins working on their lines.

After the break, they started applying these techniques to the characters they play in the productions for this camp, considering questions like: How does your character move her hands? Which leg would he move first? Haircolor? Earrings? Maybe just one? The camper imagined all the particulars of their characters, then stepped into them, and began walking and talking in that persona. For a final exercise, the campers each took about ten lines of the text they are working on in their plays and put concrete actions to motion of the speech. Maybe your character cradles his first line and punches the second. Drawing in a character with the third line? It was two and a quarter hours constructive work, while it all came across with the discovery and delight of playing pretend like a four year old.

On Tuesday, Dr. Mary Hill Cole, a professor at Mary Baldwin College, gave a lecture on the stories of history and what we store in our memories. Beginning with some questions for the campers she circled around what we know or remember about the history of the last 100 years. Next she let us extrapolate what we imagine Shakespeare and Marlowe might have known about the last 100 years in the history of England and its connections with the rest of Europe. Who are the big names? What are the big events?

The rest of the lecture went through some of the events and persons most important in the history of England and the world from 1484 (100 years before the birth of Shakespeare and Marlowe) till well into their lifetimes. We talked about the Wars of the Roses, what was at stake, and how that affected the kings who followed. We talked about Henry VIII, his wives, and their fates. How did Elizabeth became queen, and who was in the way of her coming to the throne? What was the importance of the shift from Catholicism to the Protestant Church of England, and how were the regular English citizens affected by it? We talked about the Spanish Armada, and the Gunpowder Plot, as well as the various plans and purposes of her time as queen. We also talked a bit about James I, and how the country was different under his rule. Dr. Cole ended her lecture by answering any questions from the group. Who was the "dark lady" of the sonnets? Was Marlowe gay? What about Shakespeare writing sonnets to a man; do we know who this man was? Inquiring minds want to know.

First week in pictures!

Rather than telling about every detail of this camp, I thought I’d show a bit of the work and the fun that goes on at ASCTC.


Here are some of the campers waking up the space in the Blackfriars Playhouse, the first evening of camp.


Monday morning, Doreen (one of our camp co-directors) opens the auditions at Stuart Hall's King Theatre, encouraging the campers to make the space their own.


Campers work together in the auditions, planning their wordless storytelling.


One of the most popular workshops is Clown Class…


…taught by ASC actor, Daniel Kennedy.


Let the clowning begin!


Rehearsals are now in full swing. Lysander and Hermia get lost in the woods of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.


Riley Steiner directs her cast in Dido, Queen of Carthage.


“I, one snout by name, present a wall.” In the play within A Midsummer Night’s Dream.


When not working on a scene with the director, campers spend rehearsal working on their lines.


Or running bits of scenes.


Sometimes with a counselor coaching their work.


Every weekend, the campers go see two shows at Blackfriars, and often dress up for the occasion.


This weekend, Doreen led an acro-balance workshop with help from Tom.


It takes great teamwork.


And a lot of trust.

More traditional blog posts coming soon!

Text and Storytelling

The directors cast their shows on Monday afternoon, and that night, the directors led a script party in which they talked about some basics of language as the whole camp plunged into the text. Even basics like questions such as “What is verse?” and “What is prose?” turned into discussions of Christopher Marlowe’s “Mighty Line” and how his style of verse is different from Shakespeare’s “heart-robbing line.” The campers also got some basics of script preparation and how best to use the physical script. What should they write in it? What are some good ways of marking scripts? What should you do with notes from the director you get in rehearsal? One of the directors did a little activity about intention from Othello, the scene in which Iago tries to get the handkerchief from Emilia, and everyone learned about the excitement of investing each line with a clear direction and a motive.

Starting Tuesday, the camp began its regular routine. Workshops or lectures in the mornings, rehearsals in the afternoons, more workshops in the evenings. Our first lecture was with Bob Jones, ASC actor, Mary Baldwin MFA graduate, and this session’s director of Troilus and Cressida.

Bob talked about the rise of English theater, pointing out that when Shakespeare was born, theater as we think of it did not exist. There were mystery pageants, traveling acrobats, musicians, skits, jokes, dancing acts, but no theatrical industry. All that changed with the growth of London, and by the time Shakespeare was working, there was a thriving professional theatrical community. The campers all examined sketches and woodcuts of early modern playing spaces, and what these playhouses might have looked like, keeping in mind the knowledge they now all have of the Blackfriars Playhouse reconstruction we have here in Staunton.

At the end of this workshop, we looked at all of the original quarto title pages of the plays for this session and talked about the process of printing and bookshops and what sort of information worked as advertisement on the title pages. To solidify all of this information, the lecture ended with the campers breaking into groups to write and design their own title pages for the plays. The title pages sported printer’s marks, highlights from the plays, and elaborate names for the imaginary printing houses they came up with to publish their quarto texts.

Workshops so far have included clown, mask, unarmed stage combat, and music. Today there were not a few red clown noses seen among the campers. On Wednesday morning, half the camp went to a stage combat workshop with Jeremy West, fight captain for the ASC Summer and Fall seasons. Besides teaching the campers a wide variety of slaps, punches, hairpulls, drags, falls and rolls, Jeremy taught them all a great deal about learning and storytelling. A common misconception in learning a physical skill -- be it a sport, a musical instrument, or combat move -- is that speed equals quality. In any skill, the important thing is to learn specificity in technique and pattern, not to try and go at a fast pace too quickly, because fast and sloppy gets dangerous. When the campers learned to “fall” onstage, we rolled out safety mats for practicing. Really it is not “falling” so much as “controlled sitting.” If you can learn the proper technique on a mat and get all your mistakes fixed with protective cushioning, you can learn to perform the falls, rolls, and combat without a mat very safely. Jeremy challenged the campers to always think about what story they’re telling onstage. As an actor you might think falling to the ground all sleek and fast would be the most impressive thing, but perhaps a more interesting story would be a character loosing a battle to stay vertical. Which choice is best for the character? For the play?

This morning Ralph Alan Cohen, co-founder and Director of Mission for the ASC, lectured about the plays and about verse. Asking the campers for a line or two of the plays they are working on memorizing, he helped them to think about their stressed and unstressed beats, and he encouraged them all to use all the tools that Shakespeare and Marlowe give them to speak with clarity and grace. When he got onto talking about the plays, he used the same sort of material he uses in his graduate courses on Shakespeare’s plays. The campers left the lecture all buzzing with renewed enthusiasm for the plays.

Session Two Begins

Camp begins with passion and determination. From the first introductions in the late afternoon on Sunday, these campers show their eagerness to be a part of something larger than themselves. We all sat in a circle and introduced ourselves, said where we were from and why we came to this camp, or if we were returning, what brought us back. One camper said he kept coming back because each new session, each new lecture or workshop was “a quest in excellence.” Another said, “I am here because I absolutely love to learn, I absolutely love Shakespeare, and I absolutely love people pursuing their passion.”

Many campers are interested in not only performing language but in forming it, with an abundance of writers in the camp, one voicing herself, “I do poetry, or it does me.” One camper came because she is “attracted to the humanity of Shakespeare’s characters.” Many want to learn “the craft of performing,” and how best to express themselves.

Among the fleet, we have campers experienced in swing dance, tap dance, Irish dance, clogging, waltzing, modern, jazz and ballet, contra dance, square dance and belly dance, to say nothing of lacrosse, wrestling, fencing, soccer, ice-skating, gymnastics, rollerblading, hula hooping, and pogo-stick-jumping. One camper mentioned she didn’t do much, "only" juggling. When Emily, our fire-breathing-and-juggling counselor mentioned her latest item on her list of skills was blacksmithing, one of the campers called out, “Oh! Me too!” This group seems not only to profess an outstanding number of skills, but also an overwhelming aptitude and eagerness to learn. Even those regretting their lack of skills in a certain area don’t close off their options, saying not “I don’t play any instruments” but “I don’t play any instruments... yet.”

Doreen Bechtol, the camp co-director, mentioned that when we think about putting up plays in only three weeks, with so many other lectures and workshops and plans and ideas and activities, it seems impossible. But she went on to say that that shouldn’t worry us, because doing what’s impossible is what we are all about.

Sunday evening, the whole camp trouped over to the Blackfriars Playhouse to take a tour of the building and to get a feel for the space of the playhouse. When they began exploring the space, filling it with their presence, their voices, we learned that these campers bring much more than a long list of special skills. They bring an ability to listen, to give each other focus, and to share and take the stage in turn. Even the few lines they spoke were a teaser for yesterday morning's auditions where we saw even more of their generosity in performance.

The auditions in ASCTC always hold an active place in my heart, as in them I see so much potential. Auditions are a blend of workshop activities and the traditional recitation of 10 lines of text. Beginning with running up, taking the space in turn, and sharing their names once again, the campers then learned a short round sung to them by the counselors. Once they learned the music, they broke into groups of three (or in one case, five) and schemed up and rehearsed their own performance of that song. These performances are riveting: some musically striking, some with clever staging or strong character choices, some performed in dance.
After all these short performances, the counselors break the campers into three large groups and give them ten lines of text from one of the three plays they'll be performing: A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Troilus and Cressida, or Christopher Marlowe’s Dido Queen of Carthage. The groups then tell the story of these plays entirely without words, guided by the ten lines of text to create stunning stage pictures and beautiful movement work. I won’t spill too many of the secrets, as many of the images and gestures will be used in the final performances as they develop. The motto of the day remains, “Less talk, more monkey!” as the campers figure out their performance pieces with fewer words and more physical trial and error by working together.

Listening in to the directors, I could hear them asking each other, “In love with anyone yet?” “Um, yes, all of them.” “Give me any twelve of them and I’ll be happy.” And although I am uncertain how they can choose among such strong young actors, the plays are full of so many wonderful characters that I know they cannot help but choose well.

Dramaturging for ASCTC

Here is a post from one of our beloved dramaturgs, Paul Rycik, sharing what it means to be a dramaturg and some of his experiences in the Timon rehearsals

In some ways, a dramaturg is like the twine of the theatre world- at first people don’t know what to do with it, but it always comes in handy. The job itself is often not very well defined, which means that a dramaturg’s responsibilities change on a daily basis. Therefore, when I came to work at ASCTC, I knew that the best policy was to expect the unexpected and sure enough, I found myself doing a huge variety of tasks before and after rehearsals began, from creating annotated notes in the script, to writing character descriptions, to creating a dramaturgy website (https://sites.google.com/site/timonofathensdramaturgy/home).

I view a dramaturg primarily as a resource for the actors. When rehearsals began, I made myself useful by giving workshops and lectures on the play and providing packets and other information to the actors. I also served as a text coach; each actor came to me and we would discuss the meaning in the text, and talk about how to apply those ideas in their performances The campers listened very carefully to everything I had to say and brought a great deal of creativity. One particular area I feel we had great collaboration on was implied, or embedded, stage directions, an instance in which subtle cues in the text direct an actor to gesture or laugh or move in some way.

Together, the director, the two counselors, the actors, and I have mined this play’s text and discovered a treasure trove of rich humor, social commentary, and incredibly complex characters. We spent a great deal of time figuring out what each character is saying and why he or she talks the way they do. Some characters in this play speak in a very long-winded manner, using hyperbolical text, noting these tendencies gives the actor clues about their character’s personality. Other characters like Timon and Apemantus frequently speak antithetically, juxtaposing words like “dark” and “light,” possibly because the characters wish to see chaos in Athens. All of the actors are working to find the richness in the text and use it to create and costume their characters in very imaginative ways.

One of my favorite moments of the rehearsal process was the day the actors created a framing device for the play. The director wanted to create the market place of Athens for the first scene and gave the actors free reign to interpret how to represent it onstage. The actors found a perfect iconic device to represent many of the play’s themes of poverty and wealth: cardboard boxes. They strew the stage with boxes to represent shops, stands, goods, even the shields of the peacekeeping soldiers. Characters ran in and out, pressing their wares, and it became apparent that the Athens of this play is a place where most residents are profoundly poor. Likewise, the boxes became Timon’s banqueting table and the cave he retreats to in the second half of the play, which showed the cast members’ great imagination and ingenuity. It was at this moment that I knew I was involved with a great production and that this group of actors was well suited to taking on this challenging and difficult play.

Dramaturgs don’t usually get thanks for their work, since everything they do is invisible to critics and audience members, but I feel my reward is seeing these talented young performers take some of my ideas and use them to make their own performances richer to create a wonderful piece of theatre. The talent and enthusiasm of these wonderful performers and the chance to work alongside Jeremy, Caroline, and Francis on this production of Timon is certainly a reward in itself. I truly hope that when you see this production, you see its value is worth its weight in gold.

Saudate, Ephemerality, and What You Will

What You Will is the talent night at ASCTC held last Wednesday, where the actors perform whatever they would like to perform. Barbara and Scottie (two returning campers) hosted the event with energy and charm, announcing every song or dance, every scene or jokes and combination of silliness. There were murders and songs about friendship. Scenes from Shakespeare, songs from Disney princesses, unrequited love, human furniture, and three beautiful pieces of original work. Katie (one of the first year campers), wrote a play exploring Shakespeare and nursery rhymes and growing to adulthood, Jocelyn (at our camp for the first time, and off to college in the fall) shared her haunting poem on the inefficacy of communication and Zach, one of our counselors, shared a piece he’d written for guitar.

He introduced this song as one he wrote for a girl he met at this camp many years ago, and said he called it Saudate, a Portuguese word without a satisfactory English translation. I’d heard of this word once before, when I was asked if I had been homesick at all in London. I had answered something along the lines of “sort of.” I was never really homesick for my hometown, but I was sometimes pre-emptively homesick for London. Aching with the knowledge that I’d have to leave before long. The woman I was talking to mentioned “saudate” as a word meaning the very thing I had been fumbling to express. This word, saudate seems to encapsulate so much of the homesick, the heartache, the loneliness, nostalgia, and the longing for something or someone which is so prevalent in theater, in a summer camp, and in our lives.

We saw the same sort of nostalgia in some of the other scenes last night. There were reprises of scenes from last year’s What You Will performances, and even throw-backs to last year’s performances. Jack Read and Caitlin Barns (counselors) with Tom Dumontier (Campus Life Coordinator & Co-Camp Director) did one of the scenes from Love’s Labour’s Lost, to everyone’s delight but to no one more than Elijah and Barbara, who played in the scene in final perfromance last year. Doreen Bechtol and Rebecca Speas both reprised roles they had played in different productions of Twelfth Night, Speas as Viola and Doreen as Olivia. Because performance is so painfully ephemeral, these reprises, these echoes of past performances strike a powerful chord in the emotions of everyone who’s shared in that experience.

Really, there’s something very sad about performance. Unlike statues, paintings or even playscripts which can outlive their creators, plays resist any attempts permanence. Videotapes, snapshots, descriptive essays, or notebooks full of journalings are nothing compared to the communion of live actors and live audience living in a moment room together. Summer camps are like this too. Part of what makes the experience of a camp so poignant is the fact that is short. Best three weeks of the year, perhaps, but it’s only three weeks, and sometimes while you’re in it, you realize how precious those moments are.

So, while Zach played his piece, those evocative chords encompassing our thoughts and emotions in music more eloquently than I can in language, this is what paced through my mind. But what happened at the end of that melancholy piece was nearly as remarkable as the artistry of the piece itself. All of us in the audience jumped to our feet and cheered. Our response to this strange thing we call performance is to applaud.

Cohen's lectures and some teasers for the shows

This past week Dr. Ralph Alan Cohen, the co-founder and director of mission at the American Shakespeare Center, gave both lectures to the campers. He spoke about the founding of the American Shakespeare Center, and its mission to the world, but also spoke about the plays the campers are producing. In an exercise, he asked each cast to come up with three shots which included every cast member, and which together told the story of the play. He also asked them to come up with three tag words to sell their particular play, if they were working in marketing. What is this play about? What’s exciting? Why should you come? He is one shot from each cast.

The Winter’s Tale - Scandal. Love. Forgiveness.



In this action packed shot, you can see nearly every plot point of the first half of The Winter’s Tale. Polixenes and Camillo flee to Bohemia, Paulina and Emilia mourn the dead Mamillius and Hermione, Antigonus runs with baby Perdita, 1st Lord, Cleomines and Dion express their grief and outrage at the torn Leontes who both commands the flight and morns his wife’s death, while a lord reads the oracle.

In The Two Noble Kinsmen, a more specific moment in the plot is staged, that of the battle between Palamon and Arcite over Emilia who cannot choose between them. Hippolyta looks on warily, Theseus is tense, The Jailer’s Daughter will not let Palamon go, and the onlookers cheer on the fight. All part of the aura of

The Two Noble Kinsmen - Friendship. Betrayal. Happiness.



Our last play here is perhaps harder to market because of its heavy and pessimistic themes, but riveting when performed by these enthusiastic souls.

Timon of Athens - Wealth. Debt. Consequences.

Here is a play in which the identification of most characters comes from their occupation rather than their names, and Timon, in the middle of them all, finds his excessive generosity has come back to bite him. He has no friends only creditors, demanding he pay his debts.



Hope these images whet your appetite for the upcoming shows.