A Dramaturg's Thoughts on the Production Footage

As the dramaturg for this production I mostly wrote these blog posts over the last couple months. Living on a different continent, I won’t be able to attend any of the performances, but Tony asked me if I’d like to watch some production footage and write a few thoughts on the show, so here I am! Here are some things about the performance that seemed especially strong:

• How well the actors had prepared. Each actor gave a strong, dedicated and shining performance. I kept being impressed by different actors as they gave their individual speeches, maintained separate personas for each character they played and really brought their “A game” to this endeavor.

• How quickly the actors were becoming a company. In most shows the actors have a lot of time to build up a rapport with one another. There’s a whole run of rehearsals, and maybe bonding exercises. In Shakespeare’s day the core of a particular company often stayed together for years, and produced hundreds of shows together, one can only imagine the teamwork they would display. It was something I looked for in the footage I could see of Taming, and what I saw was a group of actors vigorously accepting each other’s choices, and running together. I saw laughter as they got ready to sing together, I saw chemistry in the couples, I saw enthusiasm in the dialogue (dialogue that they’d only been able to rehearse together over one day?) This struck me as one of the most impressive parts of the show. These actors embraced their identity as a team, and together, really sold the show, and I could tell that that unity would only grow as they became more and more comfortable with each other.  

• The tricky bits of staging. There were so many pieces of the play that required special attention. The singing, the stage combat, (complete with ukulele and an over the shoulder carry!) the massive group scenes all of which take a lot of rehearsal time in normal circumstances, all looked as though the actors trusted each other and were totally in control of the situation.

• How much attention everyone paid to the text. While this was true of the actor’s delivery, it was also true of the costume choices. Ferando did have a red cap! The various servants did wear their master’s colors and insignia when described. When substitutions were made (for the various foods mentioned) the actors clearly sold the cookies or crackers as the “Beef and mustard” or whatever food it was supposed to represent.

• How well this text works as a play. Despite working on this play as a dramaturg I am still much more familiar with Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew version from the folio, and this is the first time I’ve seen the bad quarto version staged. I was totally delighted by the pair of younger sisters, and I really enjoyed how much the cast brought out the protofeminist leanings of this text as opposed to the folio.

Those are my thoughts for now! On a more personal note, I’d love to congratulations to the cast and crew on such a fun show, and thanks to Tony for asking me to work on this project with him. It’s been great being part of the team.

Early Modern Rehearsal Structures Today

With preparations in full swing for The Taming of a Shrew, I thought I’d take the opportunity to tell a bit about how Bad Quarto rehearsals fit in with a history of early modern rehearsal process. James Overton gave his enthusiastic perspective as an actor on Wednesday, and Tony wrote about the scary rehearsals a while back but just in case you missed those posts, Tony has cast this production and he is working individually with each cast member over Skype, but the whole cast will have only one rehearsal together before opening night. If you scroll through this blog you’ll see that this hasn’t been the way the process has worked for each production, but as a company, Bad Quarto has experimented with different variations on the idea of the early modern rehearsal.

So what are some of the precedents for this sort of rehearsal structure? From Henslow’s Diary and other artifacts from the time we know that a single company of actors could put on twenty different plays a month, leading to huge questions of how they could have possibly rehearsed them all. One of the companies to try out some of the hypotheses was The Queen’s Men, a well funded and heavily researched all male company performing in 2006-7 who list the steps they posit the acting companies in Shakespeare’s Day would have followed. They suggest 5-9 weeks preparation for a new play but only one day of rehearsal.

At about the same time, Tiffany Stern published her groundbreaking book Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, where she details the evidence available about rehearsal practice in Shakespeare’s day. In response to Stern’s research, the American Shakespeare Center set up the Actor’s Renaissance Season, where the first play goes up in just two days, there are no directors, do designers, and no full scripts. It’s still just one of the seasons at the ASC, but it’s one that has gained a lot of attention.  Oxford made a lovely little video about the collaboration between The ASC and Tiffany Stern’s research, which is well worth a watch.

In 1993, The New York Times picked up on the trend writing about companies performing without directors and with minimal rehearsal time, and as these practices gained notice they became more and more prevalent. Today these projects are becoming common and more and more is being learned from experiments with this sort of process. Other companies doing this sort of rehearsal process right now include:

• Original Practice Shakespeare Festival in Portland currently performs many plays with play roles in hand, without rehearsing a particular cast together.

• Back Room Shakespeare Project- this ensemble in Chicago performs Shakespeare without directors and only rehearse one time before performing in bars.

• Oxford Shakespeare Company- Performs with three days of rehearsal-- in this instance Richard III performed at Stratford on Avon.

• A Masters’ student at The Theatre School at DePaul University wrote this lovely take on “Not Rehearsing Shakespeare” and what he learned from the process.

These companies and projects all ask many questions: What was it like in Shakespeare’s day? What kind of benefits can we gain from doing a similar rehearsal process today? Are they just financial and practical--no need to deal with multiple schedules and rent a rehearsal space? Does this sort of environment capture the energy of improv theater? What can we learn about the plays themselves, and in what way were these plays written to facilitate this sort of rehearsal structure? I hope that as these experiments continue (in Taming and beyond) theater will change dramatically and for the better. It certainly seems to be making some waves already.

Shakespeare's Staging Conditions in The SantaLand Diaries

We here at Bad Quarto like to think of our mission as two-fold:

1. Performing the rarely done play scripts of the English Renaissance, including the earliest printed quartos of the plays of Shakespeare and his contemporaries.
2. Performing modern works using the staging conditions and rehearsal practices of Shakespeare's time. 

The SantaLand Diaries falls into the latter category, but as we've gathered new friends since debuting Sedaris' Christmas comedy in Burlington, VT this past weekend, I thought I would take a moment to explain exactly which of those staging conditions we've deployed, and how we've deployed them. 

1. Universal lighting: The playhouses of Shakespeare's London were generally lit at a constant level, and with the actors and audience sharing the same pool of light. For the outdoor, public playhouses, and public performances on tour, this generally meant the sun. For the indoor, private playhouses, and private performances at the homes of the wealthy, this meant some combination of sunlight from windows and candle light. While there was probably some variation in this, a shared pool of light for actors and audience was most likely the norm for stage performances. 
2. Audience contact: The close cousin of universal lighting is audience contact. Since the actors and the audience shared the same pool of light, and since some of the audience would sit on the stage level, the audience was as much a part of the show as the actors. Evidence from several plays acknowledges, and sometimes utilizes this convention as part of the writing. Since the actors can see the audience, and the audience can see the audience, the actors can engage with the audience as they would another partner in the scene. 

For a one-man show like The SantaLand Diaries, audience contact is essential for making a great performance. Sedaris' original performance of The SantaLand Diaries was broadcast on NPR in 1992, and it has been re-broadcast frequently since then, but despite what you will hear from your local NPR affiliate during pledge season, the intimacy and personal connection of the radio pales in comparison to what we can achieve in live performance. You can hear a story on the radio, but when you come to the theatre, you can be part of that story. 

That ability to be part of the story as Joe performs it is where the real value of live performance and Shakespeare's staging conditions comes in to play for us. We can do more than tell Sedaris' story, we can make it happen in front of you, and by deploying some of Shakespeare's staging conditions, we make you a part of that story as it comes to life. We do better than re-create David Sedaris' experiences in SantaLand, we help you live them. 

There are some other staging conditions we also like to use that we didn't get a chance to this time around, but Burlington has been very good to us so far, so you can expect to see us again some time, and maybe then we can explore Shakespeare's use of cross-gender casting and live acoustic music. 

If you haven't seen The SantaLand Diaries yet, you've got three more chances this coming weekend:

• Friday, December 20th at 8 PM at the Artfull Cup Studio and Sunrise Cafe in Jeffersonville 
• Saturday, December 21 at 7 PM at the Radio Bean in Burlington
• Sunday, December 22 at 2 PM at the Soul Fire Studio in Burlington

We hope to see you there!