Ian, Capocomico!

I am spending another summer teaching mime and commedia dell'arte to the children at Open Air Circus. Slowly, over the years, my classes have been attracting more and more students as kids from previous years keep returning to me, and bring new students with them, so this summer, I'm teaching two mime classes and one commedia class. The commedia class has gone from five students last year...

...to eight this year, thus necessitating that I sculpt at least three more masks in time for or final show. In the mean time, feast your eyes upon the masks I made last summer worn by the students who inhabited these characters.

This is Arlecchino-- and this is the same mask I've come to wear this past year when I play the character with i Sebastiani. The motley on her head was made by my father as a gift and are the school colors of Boston College, which I was attending at the time.

This is Pantalone. I thought a formal brimmed hat might befit a more modern version of the character. My students often see him as the archetype for Montgomery Burns on The Simpsons.

Il Dottore is a parody of all learned professionals. The hat has been part of my collection since 1994. Once while wearing it at a coffeehouse, studying for exams, a woman called me "Il Dottore" and proceeded to introduce me to some of the characters of the commedia dell'arte. The girl playing Il Dottore is the sister of the girl playing Arlecchino.

Il Capitano is parody of every blustering, lying, narcissistic bully who ever walked the earth. He is often the villain and he is often from out of town. The pin that ties the cape was a wonderful borrowing from the player's mother since it features the faces of a number of commedia characters.

Franchescina is sometimes known as Columbina. Like most female characters, she is not traditionally masked in the commedia but I did not want anyone left out of the fun of wearing a mask so I invented something.

The story about the making of these masks can be found in this earlier post. Right now though I'm at work on three more masks: Pulcinella, Brighella, and Flaminia.

Formaggio di Amore

I'm currently in rehearsals with i Sebastiani in a show entitled Il Formaggio di Amore ("The Cheese of Love"). This time, as well as playing Arlecchino, I've found myself in the additional role of choreographer.


Ultimately, in a troupe where improvisation on a scenario is the norm, choreography is a collaborative effort, but it's given me a chance to craft some complex physical gags, be more involved in the blocking of scenes, and even help my fellow cast members develop the physicality of their characters as well as trying to solve problems suggested by the director. In the process, I've even choreographed my first (albeit brief) fight scene.


In playing Arlecchino, I find myself continuing with the character I developed in my interpretation of "The Starving Zanni" with healthy dose of inspiration from Harpo Marx and Animal from The Muppet Show thrown into the mix.


The first performance of Il Formaggio di Amore will be at the Barony of Carolingia' s annual May Day celebrations at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts on Sunday, May 4th at about 5:30pm. The event is free and open to the public, but as the Barony is affiliated with the Society for Creative Anachronism, an attempt at pre-1600 clothing is requested.


In the meantime, enjoy these photographs from i Sebastiani's April 1st, 2007 first performance at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington D.C. I blogged last year about our second performance in the museum's auditorium. This first performance was in the museum rotunda. Photographs are by my father, Jay Thal. Catherine Crow was Isabella, Alex Lehman was Oratio, Michael McAfee was Pedrolino, Kristin Page was Mother Superior Olivia, Carl West was Arlecchino and Sophie, whose last name escapes me, and I had only met that weekend, played Flaminia.


A comparison between the photographs of each performance will reveal that I began the day with a beard and that later, I was clean shaven, though in actuality I was always clean shaven as the beard was prosthetic. The problem being that as a very physical performer, my sweat has a tendency to dissolve spirit gum, the adhesive used for theatrical make-up. At some point during a tumble, my beard went flying into the audience, so I decided to do without the beard for my second performance as Pantalone.



Click here for the full set of photographs.

Teaching Commedia at the Open Air Circus

Click here for the full photo set

As I was preparing to teach another summer at Open Air Circus I thought back the past year's experience performing with i Sebastiani I lobbied to teach a class in commedia dell'arte as well as mime.

This quickly led to a problem, most of the children who gravitate to my classes have been girls, and traditionally, the masked characters of commedia have been male with actresses playing unmasked (and thus, less grotesque) female characters. I puzzled over how to give my girls the opportunity to play masks. I thought back to this past November when I saw Plunket & Tremolo, featuring Mark Jaster and Sabrina Mandell, perform commedia. In their show, Mandell took on a mask to play Smeraldina, a cook. portraying her as something of an older, craftier version of the Franchescina character we often use in i Sebastiani, I realized that there was nothing wrong with creating a mask for a female character if the mask was appropriate to the character. In addition, since we are all taught that the theatre of the English renaissance featured boy-actors playing women, there was no reason not to cast girl-actors as men. Once I solved those two problems, I was left only with the girls' willingness to play male masks.

So I began work on sculpting the masks from papier-mâché-- I was fortunate to discover that my skills had developed significantly since I last worked in that medium, and by the first day of class, I had masks for Arlecchino, Il Capitano, Il Dottore, and Pantalone. My class comprised of five girls and while I got a great deal of laughs from my depiction of Isabella as I introduced the characters, I decided, that owing to the age group, to dispense with the romance subplots. The girls all had an immediate sense of the vecchi, Dottore and Pantalone, and quickly came up with a lot of good verbal lazzi. The girls seemed to have a great deal of fun lampooning foolish men.

I went home and began work on a Franchescina mask-- reasoning that I wanted it to cover less of the face than most commedia masks and to have both the furrowed brow of a hard working zannia as well as some seemingly delicate features one would attribute to a young commedia heroine.

Over the next few weeks, I led them through exercises in projecting their voices, walking like the different characters, basic slapstick, and playing out brief character scenes in which they would all take turns playing the different masks. I encouraged them to borrow each other's jokes (including mine.) During this time, I began wondering what character I would play and if I could come up with a brief scenario that could use all of the characters and stay within the allotted time.

Eventually, I settled upon the character of Zanni, one of the very oldest of commedia characters-- whose name, a diminitive of "Giovanni", has become the generic label for all the servant characters as well as the origin of the word "zany". Zanni is a porter, and so, because of the relative size of the actors, Zanni could carry any of the other characters on his back. I described him as Arlecchino's uncle, and one of the girls, very intuitively corrected me with "No, Zanni is like Arlecchino's great-great-grandfather!"

I came up with the scenario during the final week of rehearsals, borrowing two elements from the scenario Michael McAfee dreamed up for the i Sebastiani anti-Masque we performed for Vision of the Twelve Goddesses: that Pantalone is staging a theatrical event in the hope of raking in the ducats and that Il Capitano wants to be the star of the show.

In this scenario, however, Pantalone is the producer for the circus. We have a series of lazzi in which Zanni is misidentified as a steed (by Pantalone as a horse, Il Dottore as an elephant, and Il Capitano as a giraffe, and Arlecchino as whatever anyone else says) and repeatedly ridden around, as Il Dottore lobbies for a more gourmet menu at the concession stand (more work for Franchescina, and more confusion for Arlecchino,) Il Dottore misdiagnosing Il Capitano as a corpse, Capitano swearing vengeance on Il Dottore and Pantalone, Franchescina standing up to Il Capitano, and Arlecchino and Franchescina riding off stage on Zanni's back.

One rather funny mistake: on the last performance, the performers playing Franchescina and Arlecchino, instead of climbing onto my back at the end, somehow both leapfrogged right over me, but there are no mistakes: incorporate it into the next show!

Now: to dream up a scenario for next year.

See more photographs on my flickr account.

i Sebastiani in Washington, D.C.

However much belated, I have finally posted photographs of i Sebastiani's April 1st performance in Washington, D.C. at the National Museum for Women in the Arts. We did two shows that day, once in a beautiful marble rotunda on the ground floor and a second time in a fifth floor auditorium which apparently was once a porn theatre. Our performance conincided with the exhibition, Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque

This was particularly convenient for me as Washington, D.C. is my home town and it just happened to be my father's birthday.



In this performance of "Dressed for Love", I played the role of Pantalone, the father of Isabella (Catherine Crow), for which I had to borrow the costume from Michael Bergman, who is a much taller actor, which meant that I was constantly having to lift my cloak. Like many commedia dell'arte scenarios, the storyline revolved around young people not being able to marry their true loves because of the plans of vecchi such as Pantalone.

Interestingly enough, Only a week before, when we performed this play I had been cast as Flaminia, a lusty inmate of the convent, who was played by Sophie this go around while in December's productions of Dressed for Love I had played the role of Pedrolino, which come March and April was being played by Michael McAfee. However, this being commedia, it is never the same play.



Being that we were performing in the museum, I was able to slip in a line about "this convent's art collection must be worth a fortune!" and complaints that "Saint Margaret's father must have spent many ducats for that dress, and she still refused to marry! How ungrateful!"

You can look at the full set of photographs from the second show here. I hope to post photographs from the first show later.

Pictured: Kristine Page as Reverend Mother Olivia, Carl West as Arlecchino, and Ian Thal as Pantalone. Photography by Jay Thal.

Upcoming Performances with i Sebastiani

Buon Giorno, you lucky people!

Over the next three weekends I will be performing with i Sebastiani, the commedia dell'arte troupe I joined this past November. In what amounts to "theatrical hazing" the capocomica and the artistic director have decided to have me play a different character every week. So without further ado, here is the schedule:

Saturday, March 17th, 10am to 6pm:

The Barony of Carolingia presents:

Vision of the Twelve Goddesses Performed by the Carolingian Dancers.

Vision of the Twelve Goddesses was a court masque authored by Samuel Daniel in honor of James I's ascension to the throne of England in 1604.

With an original Anti-Masque by i Sebastiani. (I will be in the role of Arlecchino.)

Music by The Renaissonics.

RSVP and period dress recommended



March 23-25, Framingham, MA: i Sebastiani in Dressed for Love:

Friday, March 23rd, 7:30pm
Saturday, March 24th,7:30pm
Sunday, March 25th, 3:00pm

(I will be playing the role of Flaminia )

Framingham Community Theater
Turenne Auditorium
214 Concord Street,
Framingham, MA 01702
(508) 875-5218

$12 at the door, $10 in advance

Sunday, April 1st, Noon- 4pm, Washington, D.C.: i Sebastiani in Dressed for Love (The shortened version):

(I'll be in the role of Pantalone.)

An opening reception for:

Italian Women Artists from Renaissance to Baroque

National Museum of Women in the Arts
1250 New York Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20005
202-783-5000, 1-800-222-7270

FREE!