WIL Festival 6.1: “Twelfe Night”

 Twelfth night refers to the last day of the Christmas holiday season, a time for playing practical jokes, such as hiding birds in pies, and going to plays. Like most of the plays being done as part of the Original Practice Shakespeare Festival’s WIL Fest this month, twelfth night only comes once a year. It is special, occasional. I was reminded of this context when listening to Beth Yocam’s pre-show pitch: “this is the first time this group of actors has done this play together.” While Performance Studies teaches us that, because of its liveness, no two performances are alike, for OPS Fest this is doubly so: there is no chance to rehearse before the show or get another crack at it with this group of actors. What is more, this is true of every OPS Fest show. This is the only chance they get to play in this part with this group of people. If they do it again, the ensemble will be different in some—usually many—ways. For an OPS Fest actor, the stakes are high at every performance, so there is no room to phone it in or get bored.

This occasional context also had me thinking about the other acts of courage that playing with OPS Fest requires…and not all kinds of actors are necessarily up for. If you’ve been to a show in the parks this year, you’ll notice that the actors play not only all the way up to the edge of the audience, but in the audience. When the London Globe theatre opened, backers were nervous and assumed no one would pay for the standing “groundling” tickets. These are now the first things that sell-out, and recordings demonstrate people love to lean in on the lip of the stage. Audiences want nearness. In the WIL Fest “Twelfe Night,” it felt like a third of the play was performed in and amongst the lawn chairs and blankets. Intimacy like this takes courage, a willingness to be close to an audience member you don’t know and not drop a line—let alone step on someone. This isn’t instinctual. The other kind of courage is that of trusting the other actors, often some of which you haven’t worked with before or in a long time. Will they say their lines correctly? This matters, as a well-timed entrance depends on a correctly delivered cue-line. With the three months of rehearsal that contemporary theatre companies use, it’d be silly if you hadn’t developed a rapport with your fellow players. There is also the added variable of apprentices being worked in to every show to consider. There is little way around giving yourself over to the process if you want to be protected by it.

A play about disguised twins and forged letters, in what ways was this “Twelfe Night” affected by the dynamics of performer courage?

From left: Emma Whiteside (Fabian) and Kaia Maarja Hillier (Viola/Casario).

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WIL Festival 5.2: “The Comedie of Errors”

 The Original Practice Shakespeare Festival performance of “The Comedie of Errors” was an all-female cast. I wrote a few weeks ago, in response to a Globe and Mail article, about the importance of gender parity in Shakespeare-oriented companies. I have also discussed in two recent WIL Fest posts (here and here) about the ways in which women playing male roles as either male or female characters is in keeping with the spirit of repertory system as well as the gender theory of the period from whence they come. One might say, an all-female cast is as accurate as the all-male casts of the Renaissance.

A benefit of working in repertory is that the plays placed side-by-side can speak to each other. Put in close proximity, they can suggest themes and ideas that might be otherwise subsumed by other aspects of the plays. An all-female “Errors” is a smart move to follow “The Taming of the Shrew”: it gave actual women agency to make performance choices within their peer group immediately after a play nearly impossible to find female empowerment. While actors routinely play against a character’s assigned gender, here nearly half of this cast chose to play their role as men, including Kelsea Ashenbrenner (as the officer), Isabella Buckner, Amy Driesler, Lissie Lewis, Sullivan Mackintosh, and Shandi Muff. What this implies to me is that cross-gender casting and cross-gender performances have become commonplace for the company: it is simply part of the system in which they work. What did it do for William Shakespeare’s shortest play?

From left: Isabella Buckner (Dromio of Syracuse), Shandi Muff (Antipholus of Syracuse), Sarah Jane Fridlich (Luciana), Shani Harris-Bagwell (Adriana), and Emilie Landmann (Angelo the Goldsmith).

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