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.