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PlayShakespeare.com: The Ultimate Free Shakespeare Resource
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Second Show

Last weekend the Festival opened its second show-- Woody Guthrie's American Song-- and it's a knockout. I'd seen the show more than a decade ago at Berkeley Rep-- its adapter/director, Peter Glazer, is a Berkeley resident-- and I had looked forward to the opening with some anticipation. It's done with a cast of five and a four-person band, and apart from a couple of dozen great songs, tells a story that resonates with any American with a sense of the country's history, and with Californians in particular, since a good-sized section deals with the "Okie" Dust Bowl refugees who flooded into the Golden State in the 1930s, and the hardships and outright hostility they encountered. I've become very good friends with Sam Misner and Megan Smith in particular, the two cast members who are also in Henry, and who have Bay Area roots-- we share many mutual friends in California, though we'd never personally met before. But the other three actor/singers-- Lisa , Matt and Daver-- are all terrific performers too, and they constitute a tight and upbeat ensemble. It's taking some time for me to get used to the idea of the Festival producing non-Shakespeare plays-- Three Musketeers is even being performed on the Mary Rippon stage, which seemed strange at first-- but I may need to adjust to the thought that the season's most complete and satisfying show may turn out to be performed indoors, and not Shakespeare at all.

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Further thoughts

Something I've been meaning to write about is a phenomenon that was particularly powerful in the first week or so, though it's losing some of its novelty now. Those who know me well will be aware that I've spent much of my professional life acting and directing Shakespeare; one of the results has been, after doing all of the plays and some five or six times over, that I know the canon almost too well. That is to say, ever since directing Timon of Athens twenty years ago-- the last time that I engaged with a Shakespeare play I hadn't done before-- the thirty or more Shakespeare productions I've been involved in have all been familiar territory to a greater or lesser degree. My perceptions and interpretations of each of those plays are set to some extent-- not set in stone, because I try to keep my mind open to fresh perspectives on the texts; but my mind is made up to a point on what a play is about, who the characters are, and how to make it all work in performance. It was a revelation, then, in the first few rehearsals of Henry, to hear lines spoken for the first time and to know that they were Shakespeare-- yet to have them fall on my ear fresh, with no "baggage" of remembered interpretations from ten or thirty years ago, and no preconceptions as to where the action of the play was taking us. It's difficult to describe the excitement that this generated in me. I was suddenly on the same footing with nearly everyone else in the cast (alone among the actors, I think, Anne Sandoe has done the play before, having appeared in the 1971 production here), and the feeling was strangely exhilarating. I didn't feel that I had a head start on the rest of the cast, as I so often do, and thus we all seem to be on the same voyage of discovery together.

We did another full runthrough of the show two days ago, and everyone is feeling more comfortable; there's momentum and "flow" starting to happen, and the scenes are beginning to have that feeling of give-and-take that promises to make them dramatically compelling. (This is a normal part of the process, as actors' concentration, which has been inward and focused on the words as they struggle to master their text, opens out to include their scene partners as they become more confident with the lines.) A curious thing happened in III, 2, the scene of Wolsey's great fall. It's actually a sequence of four or five mini-scenes, confrontations with different characters separated by a couple of soliloquies. With the confidence of being solid on the lines, I indulged myself in some exploration of alternative ways of playing the moments-- playing against the surface meaning of the lines in places, taking pauses to enrich the subtextual action, playing some moments with a sense of their theatricality instead of only focusing on what emotional truth I felt secure with-- and the results were interesting. Several actors approached me after the runthrough to express how moved and impressed they were with how the scene had been played. It's difficult to write about this without sounding conceited, and I really believe that what success I've enjoyed as an actor has been grounded in a transcendence of self, an immersion of the actor's ego into the task of playing the language and the character. But the feeling that arose from playing Wolsey's fall with the scope and audacity of what we think of as a "star turn" was-- for lack of a better word-- masterful, and made me think twice about the whole question of artistic modesty. Looking back on times that I've experienced this feeling before-- in playing Macbeth, Lear, Prospero-- I realize that I associate that freedom to cut loose and try anything with great roles like these-- roles for which you don't just use some part of your personality and cut off others (as is so often the actor's task) because they are so demanding, so comprehensive, that they demand everything that the actor has to give. You just bundle up everything that you have learned as an artist and a human being and throw it at the character, hoping that all you have to offer will be, even barely, sufficient to fill the outlines of so great a dramatic creation. And the perception that Wolsey may be such a character, if I have the courage to take it in both hands and run with it as far as I can go-- without worrying whether I may be taking it too far, without limiting myself to what feels safe-- is exciting and liberating.

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Season opens

Our summer season opened over the weekend with Macbeth-- a show I'm not involved with, and which actually started rehearsals two weeks before those of us only in Henry and Three Musketeers even arrived in town. The season is set up (with an incredibly complex, overlapping, intercut rehearsal schedule, which I thank my lucky stars I don't have to be the one to organize) so that the five shows tech and dress and then open on five consecutive weekends.

It's a good production, with a striking set, an eerie musical score and fine, violent fights, choreographed by Geoff Kent, who also is playing Macduff and has his hands full with the many, many fights in Three Musketeers. The two lead actors, Phil Sneed (our Artistic Director) and Karen Slack, are giving clear, intense performances, and the supporting cast is strong. The text, to my taste, is more heavily cut than it needs to be. Whole scenes have apparently been thought to be superfluous (the Bleeding Captain, the scene between Ross, the Old Man and Macduff, and the dialogue between Lennox and the unnamed Lord, as well as some of the Witches material which is generally considered spurious), and though none of those scenes actively advances the plot, I've always felt that they enhanced the general atmosphere of the play as well as clarifying the through-lines of several supporting characters. The play is short in any case; even an uncut version should come in at well under three hours. I've always felt it was one of the functions of a Shakespeare festival (given its particular emphasis on the works of a single author) to give the fullest possible account of a play, consistent with the constraints of time and its audience's capacity to stay engaged. But that's my own opinion, and I'm probably in the minority on this one. (The Denver Post's review can be read at http://www.denverpost.com/theater/ci_9693832 .)



The set for Macbeth, Mary Rippon Theatre

An interesting sidelight on my previous post (and yet another instance of the serendipity that seems to surround this whole experience for me) came yesterday when my fellow-actor Gary Wright lent me a book he'd been reading, and which I'd expressed interest in: Laurence Gonzales' Deep Survival: Who Lives, Who Dies and Why. I've always had a keen interest of stories of human survival in extremis, like Scott, Shackleton, Cabeza de Vaca and the Donner Party, but this book is something more: it talks a great deal about physiology and brain chemistry and the role they play in the decisions that may mean life or death for people caught in extreme circumstances. In the course of his analysis, Gonzales references studies into the workings of the brain that have an obvious application to what I wrote a few days ago, on my own perceptions of how memory functions. (My sister Consuelo has also posted to this blog with some personal observations in support; see comments on "First Runthrough", 6/23.) Here's what Gonzales has to say:

When you learn something complex... at first you must think through each move. That is called explicit learning, and it's stored in explicit memory, the kind that allows you to remember a recipe for lasagna. But as you gain more experience, you begin to do the task less consciously. You develop flow, touch, timing-- a feel for it. It becomes second nature, a thing of beauty. That's known as implicit learning. The two neurological systems of explicit and implicit learning are quite separate. (p.67)

Elsewhere (p. 73), he draws a distinction between limited-capacity "working memory" and long-term memory, which seems very close to the dichotomy I was describing. I recommend the book to anyone who finds this phenomenon pretty fascinating, as I do.

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First Runthrough

We did our first full runthrough of Henry, with the designers in attendance, yesterday. I was petrified that I wouldn't have all my lines for it-- I feel a responsibility to set an example, as a senior Equity actor, even though I have the largest line load except possibly for Henry himself-- so I had spent the two or three days before madly cramming lines. I was fairly well satisfied with that aspect; I only had to call for line a half-dozen or so times, which is not bad for this stage. It's not much fun learning a lot of lines fast-- it's really drudgery of a kind-- but I'm really happy to have it behind me. Now, actually running them, and huting down and eliminating inaccuracies, is much more enjoyable.

It's an interesting phenomenon with learning lines, especially under pressure. I've known for many years that I can get a lot of words memorized in a fairly short time (a gift I think I inherited from my mother), but that they remain for the first couple of days in what I think of as "shallow memory;" I can regurgitate them slowly at first, picking my way word to word and aided by the verse rhythms (if any), alliterations and such, and whatever word associations I've been able to build in. It can be a painstaking process, and always feels fragile and tenuous; there's not much momentum or "swing" to it. But then, within the next two or three days, even if I haven't gone back to look at the text again, the lines have moved into "deep memory;" they begin to flow fluidly, with my sense of them pegged not so much to individual words as to larger syntactic structures; I can think the intention of the speech and lo, the words will be there to supply the thought. It's a little mysterious to me-- I think it may have something to do with the unconscious, the source of the idea of "sleeping on it"-- and as I say, it's been a familiar phenomenon for much of my life as an actor. It was only recently, with my increasing familiarity with the world of computing, that I was furnished with a metaphor for it. It's very like the distinction (as I understand it anyway) between random-access memory and the hard drive; and it provokes in me some interesting speculation on the degree to which computer-science development has aped the structures of the human brain. Anyone have any thoughts on that?

In any case, the show is in a good place three weeks into rehearsal, and with three more to go before we open July 11. Jim, our director, seems pleased and confident, although given the scheduling vagaries of a five-show season, we only touch Henry two or three days in the week ahead. For me personally, now that I've more or less mastered the text of the long (411 lines of verse in our cutting), demanding scene of the fall of Wolsey-- Shakespeare's Act III scene 2-- I am starting to really appreciate what a wonderful role Wolsey is. The language, the complexity of the character, the range of intellect and emotion, all make it a terrific challenge and a role any actor would kill to play. How fortunate for me that, when I finally get to perform in Henry VIII after years of waiting, it's to do a role of such richness and scope!

Today, the company's day off, I took a hike up past the Chautauqua to the base of the Flatirons, a trail I last trod in 1966, when I found a climbing partner, scaled the Third Flatiron and rappelled off the back edge, a vertical drop of 100 feet or more. Lovely views of the rocks and of the city below, friendly hikers on the trails, and a proliferation of mountain bluebells. This is truly a gorgeous place. A few pictures:



The trail above the Chautauqua



The Third Flatiron



The University from high up



Bluebells

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Days off

I've just had a series of four days off--Wolsey dies at the end of Act III, and Bonacieux in Three Musketeers drops out of sight before intermission, and both shows have been concentrating on the later acts. So no rehearsal calls, no costume fittings, and as I'm one of the few guys in Musketeers who doesn't fight, no combat rehearsals either. I've taken advantage of the time to rest, try to make sure to get enough sleep, work on my lines and continue my research. I've been reading Wikipedia entries on the lives and genealogies of the various lords in Henry, as well as Holinshed's Chronicles to get a sense of how Shakespeare used his sources. I've found that when I go back to the historical source material-- whether it's Holinshed, whose 1587 second edition Shakespeare used, or North's 1579 edition of Plutarch's Lives, on which he relied heavily for the Roman plays-- I am constantly struck by how closely, even slavishly, Will adheres to his source. Queen Katherine's trial speech, for example, probably shares about 70% of its vocabulary with Holinshed's account; Shakespeare appears to have done little more than tweak the prose to make it scan as verse, and allow the drama of the true history, at least as he received it, to speak for itself. (I'd encountered the same phenomenon before, especially in Enobarbus' description of Cleopatra on the Nile, taken almost verbatim from Plutarch.) And picking my way through the thickets of the English peerage after the end of the Wars of the Roses! Everybody seems to be his or her own cousin five or six times over, such was the intensity of the intermarriages among a handful of noble families. Little tidbits keep cropping up: that Thomas Howard, Duke of Norfolk, was uncle to two of Henry's luckless queens, Anne Boleyn and Catherine Howard, and saw them both beheaded in his lifetime; that his son Henry, Earl of Surrey, was a great-great-great-great-grandson of Harry Hotspur, and the man who first published poetry in blank verse in England; that the Duke of Buckingham executed in this play, apart from being the son of the Duke of Buckingham executed in Richard III (and a prime suspect in the murders of the Princes in the Tower), was also a direct descendant of Edward III, with a claim to the crown arguably stronger than Henry Tudor's; that the Duke of Suffolk, instrumental in Wolsey's fall, probably owed his life to Wolsey's intercession on his behalf after Suffolk's secret marriage to the King's sister fifteen years before... well, it goes on and on.

I finally get back to the play this evening, when we're to run through the first half of the show for the first time. I've been cramming the lines hard for the past few days, and I feel pretty confident that I'll be able to do the whole act pretty reliably off book-- just don't want to disgrace myself in front of a roomful of very good, well-prepared actors. We'll see how it goes.

On a lighter note: One of the things I had promised myself was that, when I got some days off, I would get out into the open, both to get some exercise and to reacquaint myself with parts of Boulder that I haven't seen in decades. So Sunday evening, after spending several hours glued to the tube watching Tiger Woods' late charge in the US Open, I decided to take a walk through the cemetery a few blocks away, which eventually turned into a fairly strenuous hike up into the open space above the city, towards the Flatirons, the impressive sandstone slabs that are emblematic of Boulder. I was just wandering where my whim took me, with no particular plan. Heading back down, I passed through the grounds of the historic Boulder Chautauqua, still high above the city. There were an unusual number of picnickers, I thought, and a steady stream of people coming up from town, so I stopped someone and asked what was happening there this evening. She told me that the Indigo Girls were playing a concert at 8:00-- it was already past 7:45. The next thing I knew, along came a man trying to sell a single ticket at face value-- fifty-seven dollars. I told him I had nowhere near that kind of cash on me, and suggested he keep looking for someone who could give him the value it deserved. But a few minutes later I saw him again, having failed to unload it, turned out my wallet and offered him the $23 it contained, and he accepted. (I wish I'd been thinking-- the generous thing would have been to offer him a couple of Shakespeare tickets in trade.) So I got in cheap to see one of my favorite music acts, playing one of their favorite venues, and it was terrific. The seats turned out to be in the second row, about forty feet from the performers, and I know I'll remember it as a high point of the summer to hear Amy and Emily sing "Hammer and a Nail," "Galileo" and "Closer to Fine," big favorites of mine. It seemed to be just one more example of the serendipity that has attended this whole experience.

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