Open Air Circus in the Boston Globe

The Boston Globe sent photographer Erik Jacobs to cover this past weekend's performances of the Open Air Circus, the Somerville, MA based youth circus where I have been teaching mime and commedia dell'arte for the last four-and-a-half years. Somehow, the The Globe chose to feature two photographs of me in the gallery:


Photo by Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe click here for full size.

Jacobs caught me back in clown alley before the show, warming up while also making sure my commedia players were in costume and mask. As this year's theme at the circus was "Broadway musicals," we seized upon the standard plot of "let's put on a show" for the scenario. Circumstances allowed me to try my hand at playing Il Capitano for the first time which amounted to barging in about halfway through the skit, bullying my way into being the star of the show. My guitar chops were rusty, but by the final show of the weekend, I had developed a lazzo of singing the bloody Captain's lines from Macbeth to the tune of "La Bamba" as well as swinging the Capitano's sword around erratically and warning audience and fellow troupe members to be "careful of Capitano's sword, it is very dangerous." The kids did a good job of making up their own lazzi or creating their own variants based on my suggestions. I shall be experimenting more with this character in the future.


Photo by Erik Jacobs for The Boston Globe click here for full size.

Jacobs later caught another one of my personae during the intermission, palm spinning out in Nunziato field. This year's mime piece was based on "Seventy-Six Trombones" from Meredith Wilson's The Music Man so again the theme was "let's put on a show." The choreography mostly involved teaching the kids how to mime the musical instruments from the song along with whatever I could remember about marching from when I was in Safety Patrol in elementary school. I am not sure if the choreography we performed on stage was what I taught in rehearsals though!

That other Macbeth

As mentioned previously, the Macbeth production I had been in was cancelled, so when I attended previews for the Actors' Shakespeare Project's production of the "Scottish Play" as an usher, I could not help but compare the two productions in my mind.

First of all, ASP's Macbeth is excellent. Much of the scuttlebutt about the Boston scene was about the decision to use an all female cast. However, rather than creating some campy Macbeth in drag, they delivered a striking production that involved some first rate actors in roles that they normally would not be allowed to play. After all, if a director can choose to cast (in my case) an male Ashkenazi Jew as a multitude of Scotsmen, why not women (of any ethnicity) as Scotsmen?

As an audience member, I was particularly excited by Marya Lowry's powerful Macbeth, and Bobbie Steinbach's strength and versatility as Duncan, the Porter, Warlike Siward, and one of the witches (this trio of witches, in their second appearance, use some physical comedy to make a vulgar pun that gives some credence to Alan K. Farrar's intuition that in the original production the witches were performed by the comedians in the troupe.) There was one actor (whom I will leave unnamed because the performance was a preview and I have confidence that subsequent performances will be improved upon) who has shown great comedic skills in other plays, but seemed to introduce a sarcastic or ironic tone of voice into what was supposed to be a tragic scene-- but that was the only false note of the show-- and it was a mistake that only someone of talent could make.

As said earlier, I was curious to see how other actors were going to attack roles for which I had rehearsed this past summer. Denise Cormier's version of the Bloody Captain was a fine version, but simply not how I imagined the role-- the joy of a classical repertoire is that roles are constantly being reinterpreted. As I developed the role, my Captain had become more stylized and inspired more by Odissi dancer Sonali Mishra's interpretation of Devi Mahakali (better known in the Anglophone world as the goddess Kālī) and a Samurai puppet piece I had seen twice performed by Paul Vincent Davis; hers was more naturalistic. She was clearly in a situation where she had to put more imaginative work into her more central role as a witch.

To my disappointment, the role of the Old Man, Ross' father, was dropped from this production but did not injure the story. The practice of cutting or rearranging lines, scenes, or characters is actually not uncommon when performing Shakespeare, either due to the length of the play, or due to the logistics of casting. I miss the character and his lines, but I must admit, he is not essential to the plot. The scene between Lennox and the unnamed Lord, from Act III was a joy and I savoured the reading of the Lord's lines even more so because it had been shifted to Act IV, which meant that during intermission I had fretted that the scene had been dropped entirely. In Act V, Cormier now had the role of Seyton, and performed much as I had during rehearsals with the Lollygagging Players which only made me more envious of her costume.

Macbeth Cancelled

It's been a few weeks since I heard word, but I had neglected to blog about it.

The Macbeth production, for which I had been rehearsing, has now been cancelled. The actor playing Banquo had work commitments that conflicted with the rehearsal schedule and had to pull out just weeks before opening night and so the production had to be postponed. The actor playing Macbeth was from Los Angeles and so was only in Massachusetts for the summer, so both roles had to be recast, with an indefinite postponement. Eventually, with the change of schedule, there were no venues available and the show was cancelled.

Nonetheless, despite my disappointment, I must confess, my first Shakespeare production was a rewarding one, as it was my first experience of real intimacy with the Bard's writings and gotten me more involved in the community of Shakespeare bloggers like Alan K. Farrar, David Blixt and Duane Morin.

On the other hand, the Actors' Shakespeare Project are staging their own production of Macbeth which I am looking forward to seeing when I usher for them next week.

Thither Macbeth has gone to November

I arrived ten minutes late to rehearsal this evening to find the cast gathered in a circle. As I took my seat, I realized I had missed a monumentous announcement, so it was explained to me: Due to work commitments, we lost our Banquo, we still had not found our Donalbain, and since it was clear we needed to postpone the performances, we lost our Macbeth as well, since the actor was in from Los Angeles and was only in Massachusetts for the summer.

So we are recasting those roles and tentatively moving our our production to early to mid November depending on the availability of the space.

I still do not believe in the curse.

The remaining cast was invited to audition for the now open roles but I decided that I was sufficiently pleased with the ones I am already playing as they were sufficiently against the type of which I have been previously cast.

In the interim, it seems that the Lallygagging Players will be changing their name.

Lord Captain Seyton, or Three, not Five

As mentioned previously, in the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth I was initially quadruple-cast in a number of minor roles, as the Captain, the Old Man (Ross' father), an unamed Lord who is loyal to Malcolm, and finally Seyton . However, by the first day of rehearsals, I found myself quintuple-cast, adding to my roles yet another unnamed Lord who is present for the banquet scene.

While rehearsing the scenes between Macbeth (who has rejoined the cast after causing us varying degrees of anxiety) and Seyton the other night, it occurred to me (somewhat under the influence of David Blixt's notes) to suggest that something would be gained if we were to merge the characters of Seyton, Macbeth's last loyalist in Act V, with that of the bloodied Captain I play in Act I, Scene ii, after all, it is the captain who first sings Macbeth's praises as a brave and cunning warrrior and leader of men, if the surgeons are capable of treating his gashes, then he would likely attach himself to Macbeth. At this point, Brigid Battell, our producer, suggested that "Captain Seyton" may have been rewarded with a noble rank, thus making him the Lord in the Banquet scene. Given that our production is in such an intimate space, it will hopefully be less confusing to the audience that a single actor is now only playing three characters, instead of five.

On Reading the First Folio

One unusual decision that David Letendre (our director) and Brigid Battell-Letendre (our producer) have made in this production of Macbeth is to take our script directly from a facsimile of the First Folio of Shakespeare's works. For those readers who are unfamiliar with the term, "The First Folio" refers to a single volume edition of 36 of his plays prepared by the actors John Heminges and Henry Condell and published in 1623, as such, we are reading the original spellings.

Something exciting happens when one recites and rehearses Shakespeare's words as they were written by members of the King's Men. The spellings are those of the early 17th century, not those to which we are accustomed to reading in more modern editions (the better of which are incredibly valuable due to all the scholarly notes) but as David pointed out in the first rehearsal, the spellings often provide hints as to where to place emphasis. Indeed, what I have discovered is that by reading the First Folio phonetically, I do not need to think about iambic pentameter-- I hear it as I recite the lines, nor do I have to think about my accent-- the accent is there in the spellings. It may not be the accent of modern Scots-English (and perhaps not the accent of any historical Scottish king), but it is certainly not the theatrical Queen's English I heard as I watched the various Thames and BBC television productions of Shakespeare on my local PBS station (or indeed, any of the British film and television imports) as I was growing up. The long-vowels are longer than any of the mishmosh of North American English accents I speak or understand.

Consider one modern edition (edited by M.A. Shaaber):

...On Tuesday last
A falcon tow'ring in her pride of place,
Was by a mousing owl hawked at and killed.

With largely modern spellings, the actor is left with the option of speaking in his or her native accent or a stage accent. Pronunciation of certain words is ambiguous. Are the "-ed" suffixes pronounced as separate syllables or are they simply consonant sounds? Some of the options will read as poetry others as prose, some as awkward prose.

Compare that to the first folio:

...On Tuesday last,
A Faulcon towring in her pride of place,
Was by a Mowsing Owle hawkt at, and kill'd

Reading from the first folio edition, there is no ambiguity as to how many syllables are taken by "Hawkt" and "kill'd" nor with the ending consonant sounds. The spellings of "Faulcon" and "Mowsing Owle" also emphasize the vowel sounds and demand an accent that falls right on the stressed syllables of the iamb-- and the stresses emphasize that these are birds of prey-- something that "mousing owl" fails to do. Wonderful!

The Scottish Plague

Though I was raised to be a rationalist and tend not to indulge in superstition, I find that somewhere along life's path, I have, quite against my better judgement, become an actor and so must contend with the curse of "The Scottish Play".

My first encounter with this phenomenon was in December of 2004 when I joined a short-lived commedia dell'arte troupe (this was before I became a member of i Sebastiani.) Under the influence of several nights of too little sleep, too much coffee, and a Shakespeare pastische, I found myself compulsively mentioning Macbeth as if to test the hypothesis of "actors are a cowardly and superstitious lot." The result was being repeatedly tossed out of the practice space by the director and made to spin around and speak incantations several times that evening until I was cured of this compulsion of mine. The hypothesis was correct.

I suspect that, amongst the many sources of the curse, such as the folklore that surrounds the play, and the sheer amount of fight scenes, I suspect that the curse comes from the fact that some of the most compelling poetry of the play itself is also the most graphically violent dialogue. Speaking these wonderfully written lines over and over again is bound to have effects on the speaker.

Now that I am actually in a production of Macbeth, we have encountered just that curse, for various reasons, we have lost both the actor who were to play the tyrant whom we shall call "Mackers" and the one who was to play Donalbain. If replacements are not found in due time, we will have to move the show dates up a few weeks.

While taking five at last night's rehearsals, one of the witches suggested that that maybe it was not a curse, but an act by the theatre gods to find us the ideal Macbeth (there I go, typing the name one dare not speak but at least I am not in a theatre) and Donalbain.

Actors are a cowardly and superstitious lot.

Rehearsals begin for Macbeth

Last night a large group of actors whose heads I forgot to count met crowded into the Somerville art space, Willoughby and Baltic, a former ambulance garage converted into an art gallery and marionette theatre, and sat down along a long train of café tables. It was first time the full cast of the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth met to rehearse. Our director and producer, David Letendre and Brigid Battell (who is also playing Lady Macbeth) introduced the concept, unlike most productions of Shakespeare's plays, we are working directly from the unmodernized text of the first folio with close attention to the scansion of the original text and its eccentric spelling conventions of the early seventeenth century. That so close attention is being paid to Shakespeare's poetic language adds to my confidence in a production that is to be staged in such a non-traditional venue with a new company. (Of course both Letendre and Battell have already been active in local theatre, directing and acting in numerous plays in more traditional venues with other theatre companies.)

I am playing the characters of the Captain who recounts Macbeth's victory over MacDonwald and King Sweno, the Old Man who first speaks of such perversions of nature as horses eating one another, a number of unnamed Lords, and Seyton, Macbeth's aid in the final act. These are my first roles in a Shakespeare play-- something I had been actively working towards this past year. (I auditoned with Sonnet 28-- which I had recited at the Shakespeare Sonnet-athon his past April.)

Interestingly enough it's not my first time this year involved with some piece of theatre that originally served as political propaganda for the reign of King James I of England and Scotland as earlier this year i Sebastiani had performed an anti-masque to Samuel Daniel's court-masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses.

I play four characters because I'm such a character

I've just been cast in the Lallygagging Players' production of Macbeth which will be presented at Willoughy and Baltic on August 17, 18, 19, 24 and 25 in Somerville, Massachusetts. That is all for now.