Last chance to see THE BOOKEND PROJECT!

We had an extraordinary first weekend of performances and received some very warm reviews. Do not miss this final opportunity to see The Bookend Project: Titus Andronicus and The Tempest. We have two more performances at the Manhattan Campus of St. John's University tonight and tomorrow night, and we are expecting pretty packed houses. Purchase your advance tickets here, but don't forget that St. John's students get in for FREE w/Storm Card ID.

MANHATTAN CAMPUS:
Friday, February 25 -- Titus Andronicus

Saturday, February 26 -- The Tempest

Saval Auditorium

St. John's University

101 Murray Street

New York, NY 10007

For map and directions, click here.

All performances are at 7:30 p.m.  Doors open at 7:00 p.m.

The Artistic Company of The Bookend Project:

Virginia Bartholomew

Tara Bradway

Gemma Fearn

Caroline Gombe

Ross Hamman

Shannon Harris

Melanie Arii Mah

Collin McConnell

Laura Montes

Duane Allen Robinson

Joann Sacco

Tobias Shaw

Patrick Siler

Aaron White

The Tempest - Our Second Review

I am so proud of this company of actors. Please enjoy our second online review of this past Saturday's The Tempest.

I love that Danielle picked up on the facet of the production that we have no backstage. She walked in seeing actors in the midst of their preparation for the show and wasn't sure what to make of it. I love taking down the barriers between the actors and the audience, effectively letting the audience in on the entire theatrical process. I don't like to hide behind the curtains, in the wings, or under dark lights. We all know this is a play and we should revel in it! In fact, for Danielle, it sounds like it made the whole experience that much better: "seeing the actors prepare, and get into position, and the tons of other stuff they were doing was part of drawing me into the theater experience. It became a collective experience."

Yes!

Thank you, Danielle! Read her complete review here.

Bookend Project -- Our first Review

I will be posting in the next day or so a much more detailed account on our insane rehearsal process for The Bookend Project, but I want to post a link to Steve Mentz's review of our Saturday performance of The Tempest. 

Don't forget that tickets are still available to our performances this coming weekend at the St. John's University Manhattan Campus: Titus Andronicus at 7:30 p.m. on Friday, 2/25 and The Tempest at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday 2/26. Admission is free for St. John's students w/Storm Card ID. All other students and seniors - $10. General Admission at the door - $15, or $12 advance tickets can be purchased online at http://adkshakes.ticketleap.com.

We had an absolute blast this weekend and are so excited to return for one more weekend. Don't miss it!

Verse-Speaking for the Classical Actor

In the past few days since my last post, I have been eyes-deep in ADK Shakes work. While the immersion is absolutely wonderful, the downside is that I have (almost) completely neglected my reading for class! So after this post, I will be immersing myself in Arthurian Romances and Dante. Lots of immersion happening.

Here's a peek into the muddle that is my brain ... I have been painstakingly going through our Bookend scripts of Titus and Tempest, recording errors from our read-throughs of the 23rd. These are usually small errors in memorization -- transposing two words, perhaps missing or adding a word here and there. So I'm compiling them in order to email out a written record to each actor. Yesterday morning was also our first Board Meeting of 2011 and our big project is researching venues for touring our productions this summer -- pssst, upstate NYers -- leave a comment if there's a place you're dying to see ADK Shakes tour! In the vein of the summer, I am at a snail's pace with casting but it's like a constant hum in the back of my head :: visions of headshots, flashbacks of monologues, visualizing the coming productions. The buzz will hopefully come to rest by mid-March and everything will be settled. Until then ...

What has been occupying much of my brainpower the last few days is -- at bottom -- the language itself. How it gets performed. And how I want to hear it performed. I just did a quick Google search on the percentage of verse vs. prose in Shakespeare's plays and found this book by Ulrich Busse. It has a really cool table on page 66 which indicates that 76.95% of the complete works is written in verse. 76.95%!!!!!! This is exactly why we require actors to audition with a verse monologue! This, of course, leaves only 23.05% of the entire Shakespearean canon that is written in prose. And it really, really, really gets my goat when I hear an actor speaking the verse lines of Shakespeare like they are contemporary prose -- even more so when I know they have been directed to speak it that way. Speaking verse as though it is utterly pedestrian prose muddles the meaning. It disturbs the musicality and the rhythm, which ultimately undermines one's appreciation in listening to it. And to revisit my big research question of last semester -- in the end, I think it can also destroy the authenticity of a performance.

Romeo and Juliet, Summer 2010

When Patrick and I first set out on our journey of Shakespeare IN THE RAW, we were placing the highest emphasis on the text of the plays themselves. By extension -- emphasis on the verse! (If anyone has seen the third season of Slings & Arrows, Charles Kingman comes to mind here...) Patrick is a percussionist so the rhythm of the verse comes quite naturally to him. Not all of us are such natural musicians, of course, but I am inclined to think that musicians have a one-up on actors in this case. One example, and then I'll step down off my soap box (for now). This summer, we produced Romeo and Juliet and I gave a note to our Romeo (who, incidentally, is a wonderful musician). There's one line in the balcony scene that I consistently hear mis-read wherever I go, and I wanted to make sure he was going to hit the emphasis I wanted. The emphasis that *ahem* the verse gives us. 

With Love's light wings did I o'er perch these Walls, / For stony limits cannot hold Love out, / And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt: / Therefore thy kinsmen are no stop to me. (II.ii)

Specifically: "And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt" -- I consistently hear this line read with emphasis on the nouns and verbs, the so-called "important" words: "And what Love can do that dares Love attempt", right? No! The verse tells us otherwise! This is a complete thought, a stand-alone thought. "That" is not a linking word here -- it is the key to the meaning of the thought. "And what Love can do, that dares Love attempt." And if we ignore the verse, suddenly the thought does not make sense.

So. The point of this rant is to respect the verse. Use the verse. Iambs are our friends. Next time, maybe I will rant on the opening speech from Richard III. And to all my Bookend actors, in particular, and to our acting community in general, I hope you will take this very sincere message to heart. I love the poetry of Shakespeare's work. Let's not obscure it by trying to turn it in to prose. Let it sing. (And PS - as an added bonus, you'll also find the memorization so much easier!)

 

Thinking Ahead

In these early years of ADK Shakes's growth, it's a trial to figure out the seasonal rhythm. I feel like I need to be thinking a whole year ahead (or more) -- constantly. As soon as we closed our first summer season last August, I was already thinking ahead to Summer 2011. The Bookend Project goes up in just a few weeks, so of course I am thinking about our entire 2012 season and beyond.

What I love about being in school at the same time as being helmsman for choosing an ADK Shakes season is that I have the opportunity to delve into problems and questions both as a scholar and a theatre practitioner. The Bookend Project has been a consideration largely of violence and revenge. How do these things change over the course of Shakespeare's career as a playwright? Obviously this is a Bookend Project, so I only have the opportunity to stage the bookends of his career.  Someday I hope to consider the whole arc with more of the "middle"-- Hamlet, Othello, Much Ado, etc.

At the moment, however, I think I'm going to jump ship from the primarily revenge-oriented question. I am just not sure I want to spend the next decade with it. I am already thinking in terms of a dissertation project -- which will definitely take up (at least) the next decade of my life! What do I want to spend the next 10 years living and breathing and sleeping and eating and thinking about constantly? A revenge project would be pretty cool. But I'm not ready to commit. Sorry, revenge.

Battle of Agincourt.
Henry V = Ultimate King?

In the very broadest of terms, I am thinking about gender relations (in which cross-gender casting will figure heavily), power and politics, and the nature of kingship (which incidentally is also a big question in my Medieval Romance class -- probably more on that throughout the semester). At some point, I also want to begin looking outside the works of Shakespeare alone and possibly outside the Early Modern/Renaissance period. For this reason, I'm really excited to delve into the question of kingship in my Medieval class. I'll be reading around in a lot of Arthurian Romance and thinking about Arthur as the ultimate king.

I won't leave you without another plug for the Bookend Project. There's buzz going around the St. John's campus -- and St. John's students get in for FREE with their Storm Card. So to my theatre-going public, reserve your tickets now for $12 at adkshakes.ticketleap.com. Otherwise, it's $15 at the door! Don't miss it! And of course, come February 27, it will be full steam ahead towards Summer 2011.