Spotlight! E-news from Theatrefolk
Issue 6 - Shake Up Your ShakespeareWelcome!
Welcome to our sixth newsletter, focusing on Shakespeare.In this issue:
- THE SCRIPT BANK- Our innovative new licensing program is now on-line!
- ADAPTING SHAKESPEARE- A conversation with playwright John Minigan.
- STARTING FROM SHAKESPEARE - USING THE TEXT TO FIND CHOICES
Allison Williams offers some useful tools for working on a Shakespeare scene. - SHAKESPEARE WORKSHEETS- Excellent for classroom use.
- BOOK REPORT - Lindsay reviews Antony Sher's Year of the King
- LINKS - Links to some great Shakespeare Resources.
- DOWNLOAD OF THE MONTH- Free sample pages from John Minigan's upcoming adaptation ofTwelfth Night.
- CONFERENCE ALERT - Meet us in person.
- IN THE NEXT ISSUE - What you can expect next.
- STAY IN TOUCH - Contact info/Read our blog.
The Script Bank
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Adapting Shakespeare
John Minigan , a playwright and teacher in Boston, has adapted Much Ado About Nothing for us for our Shakespeare in an Hour series. This year we'll see two more from him:Twelfth Night andAs You Like It. I interviewed him about his process.Why do you like adapting Shakespeare?
First and foremost, I love Shakespeare, and adapting/cutting and annotating is a rewarding way to really dig into great texts. Much Ado was the first Shakespeare play I edited for a performance and I found the experience invaluable as a director. Making a choice to keep or cut a speech, a line, a phrase, a word made me more aware of the ways in which Shakespeare's language works. And that is a strong start to directing the play. I've even forced myself to do "minor edits" when I've directed full-length Shakespeare plays in order to gain that extra familiarity with the language.
Is there anything frustrating about it?
It can be very frustrating. Inevitably, aiming for a specific time length means cutting elements I love from the play I love. The texts are so much greater than my ability to adapt them, there is always a lot of guilt and a lot of wistfulness as great verse or images disappear. I hope the Bard isn't spinning in his grave.
How do you approach an adaptation like this?
I read the play very carefully first and think about three questions: what's the dramatic action, what will students most respond or connect with and what is the central theme? I also think about gender issues and which characters might switch gender to allow a more effective balance for a school production. And then I go through the text and highlight what I want to keep in, rather than what I want to cut.
How long does it take you?
I try to work a little bit every day when I'm doing a cut, and the first pass takes a couple of weeks. Redrafting and writing annotations usually takes two to three more weeks.
How do you know what to cut and what to keep?
That's the tough one, but it really does help to think of it as building the play from nothing rather than cutting it from full-length. I start with dramatic action, then aim to add important images and miraculously poetic lines.
When cutting do you worry about Iambic Pentameter?
I worry about it a lot, and try to preserve it when I can, but I often end up breaking the Pentameter. Sometimes a cut in a few lines will yield a new pentameter line, and that's a happy moment, though I very much doubt the "new" pentameter line is nearly as good as the old.
I'm a complete word-o-phile. One of my favourite elements is the vocabulary work in these adaptations! InTwelfth Night, my favourite word definition is consanguineous, which means related by blood. What's yours?
I'm with you on consanguineous! And I love that Shakespeare so often defines those unexpected words for us. In Twelfth Night, he follows the line "Am not I consanguineous" immediately with "Am I not of her blood?" He does the same in "The Scottish Play," following "I will...the multitudinous seas incarnadine," with "making the green one red." And I love good, subtle puns. In Twelfth Nightwhen Viola says "My legs do better understand me ... than I understand what you mean," she's punning on the fact that legs "stand under" you to hold you up.
For any teacher out there thinking of doing their own cutting, what would be your most important piece of advice?
Read the play, love the play, and then start building it from nothing with the elements of dramatic action first. And don't let guilt overwhelm you. Some scholars say the plays weren't always performed in their entirety by Shakespeare's casts. And having students encounter the language in a forty-five minute or one-hour version can be ideal. They may not get the breadth of the full text, but they can get depth by using class or rehearsal time to really work intensely with the shorter version. Every great "teacher of teaching Shakespeare" I've had has emphasized that you can do Shakespeare without doing every word.
Do you have a favourite Shakespeare play? Why?
I go back and forth a lot. I recently saw Alvin Epstein play King Lear in Boston and was reminded that a play from 400 years ago can more accurately describe our world than most of what is written today. The play hits me very hard, even when I read it—maybe particularly when I read it. But I have a special fondness forAs You Like It--maybe because I saw a great production of it on my wedding night! Then I watch or read the final scene in The Winter's Tale and think there can be nothing in the world more human or more hopeful. So, yes, I waffle back and forth!
What's next for you?
This winter, the Orlando Shakespeare Festival will produce my full-length play, Breaking theShakespeare Code, about an actor and an acting teacher through sixteen years of rehearsing Shakespeare together. The company did a staged reading of the play last winter and I'm excited to work again with the cast of that reading. And I'm also looking forward to the two weeks that I'll be away from Boston in mid-winter for the project. Currently, I'm writing a new play with my students--our last original, inspired by Euripides' play Alcestis, won the Massachusetts High School Drama Guild Festival, so, while we aren't aiming to "repeat" this year, we do feel some pressure to make it good.
Don't forget to download your sample pages from John's forthcoming adaptation of Twelfth Night. The link is below.
Starting from Shakespeare - Using the Text to Find Choices
by Allison Williams ( Hamlette , Mmmbeth )As an actor or director, it can be difficult to figure out where to begin with Shakespeare’s plays. Especially when directing younger actors, it’s hard to ask them to do the personal rehearsal and thinking time needed when they are intimidated by the language or unclear on what to do during a long speech. When I write spoof adaptations of Shakespeare, one of my biggest intentions is to preserve and clarify some of the beautiful original text, while opening up the story with modern language and ideas. Often, I begin by looking at the plays as an actor, trying to figure out the logic and ideas in each scene. Here are some of the tools I use that can be a place to begin with an unfamiliar scene.
1)The power of the notebook
It’s important to have a notebook to record research and observations. You may want to make a copy of just your scenes, enlarged to make room for word pronunciations and other notes; or paste script pages into a notebook, with wide margins available to write in.
2)Visceral response
First read the scene aloud without stopping, commenting, or discussing. Hard words should be sounded out as much as possible, but it’s not about ‘getting it right’ at this point (No-one can prove how Shakespeare actually said the words, anyway). Everyone should look at the actor who is speaking—it’s better to have a moment of silence and realize ‘it’s my line!’ than to be focused on waiting for a turn to speak. Do this two or three times in a row, responding in your notebook each time. Starting questions could be:
- Were there lines or words that made you feel a certain way?
- Were there times when you felt connected to your partner, or when you felt that they understood you?
- When did you feel disconnected, or like they didn’t understand?
- Did you start to feel any emotions?
3)Basic research Find a summary of the play that the scene is from. It’s best to read the whole play if you have time, but a summary can get you started, and give you a story to latch onto as you start learning the language. Discuss where in the play the scene falls, what’s already happened, and what’s going to happen. Remind the actors that they know the end of the play, but the character does not, and their knowledge of the end can’t color the scene they are in now. For example, in the balcony scene, Romeo doesn’t know that Juliet is going to be dead at the end of the play—he’s still happy and excited!
4)Word Research Ask the actors to go through the scenes with their partner(s) and mark in the margin of the script or list in their notebooks any words whose meaning they don’t know or are guessing. Then look up the words, writing a definition or synonym for each one.
- First, try a regular dictionary.
- Then try an unabridged dictionary.
- Then use Shakespeare’s Lexicon , a book which lists every word Shakespeare uses in his plays.
- What similes and metaphors does your character use? Why did they choose each of them?
- What literal meanings do they have?
- What characteristics of the compared item is the character using to exemplify their own behavior or feelings?
After figuring out the words, it can be fun to write aparaphrase of the whole scene in modern language, with each actor doing their own lines (or actors with shorter parts helping the longer ones). What modern slang would the characters use? Read this out loud and see if everyone now understands what they’re talking about. Then go back to the original language, and after reading the scene, talk about anything new that happened now that the language is clearer.
4)Up and at ‘em. OK, so you’ve read the script a bunch and you finally understand the language - how do you start putting it on its feet? Fortunately, Shakespeare meant his plays to go up with very little rehearsal time - it wasn’t unusual for actors to put up a play in about a week of rehearsals, while performing three or four other plays. So he wrote clues into the scripts to help the actors know what to do.
Look for stage directions in the text. Do you say “I weep” or “I laugh” or “I wring my hands”? Does someone tell you to “stay” or “come in” or “keep seat”? We know from reading the script that Banquo’s ghost nods his head at Macbeth, because Macbeth says, “If thou canst nod, speak too.” We can guess that Macbeth indicates that he may commit suicide before he says “Why should I play the Roman fool, and die on my own sword?”
- Do you describe your behavior?
- Does someone else in the scene describe your behavior?
- Does Shakespeare give any stage directions that describe your behavior?
Shakespeare Worksheets
We have two worksheets to offer you this newsletter.
The first is a fun way to get students comfortable with Shakespearean language - insults! Have students write a five line scene between two characters. Use the Shakespearean insult generator to create the insults, then put the insults into the scene.
Our second worksheet can be used in conjunction with the suggestions given in Allison Williams' article. When working on a scene it is important to be able to identify unfamilar words, phrases, and grammar and make them clear.
Download Shakespeare Words Worksheet
Book Report
Year of the King, An Actor's Diary and Sketch Book
By Antony Sher
Limelight editions New York
1985
“Acting is just your view of other people. It must keep changing as you do. Growing with you. Improving as you learn more.”(pg 192)
Year of the King is actor Antony Sher's diary of the year leading up to him playing Richard III. It's an excellent examination of how a professional actor prepares for a demanding role. Sher is absolutely an actor who draws on what is around him to build a character. His process is extremely detailed: from doing extensive research on how to play the deformity to cataloguing his observations of people on the street, to interviewing his psychologist on he would deal with Richard on the couch - “the mother, I would have to start with the mother.” (p129)
Sher is also a sketch artist, and there also numerous sketching of his thoughts on what Richard might look like. In deciding on whether or not to use crutches for the character, at one point Sher draws Richard as a spider.
There is some extraneous stuff to get through such as the politics of him getting the role, (will he do it, won't he, will he). The book is also set in a very specific time - 1983/1984. Sher is a South African and in the course of the book goes back to visit his family who have some pretty shocking things to say about race relations. (On that note, Sher has another book called called Woza Shakespeare where he goes to South Africa to do a multiracial version of Titus Andronicus.)
The second half of the book deals with the rehearsal process. Sher goes through scene by scene and day by day and again the descriptions are detailed and exhaustive. It's a very interesting look at how directors and actors do the communication dance in order to bring a production to life.
Sher also shares a number of techniques on how to speak Shakespeare to get it coming out as naturally as modern English. For example: The voice expert has actors doing speeching sitting on the floor rocking in order to regulate the breath.
It is fascinating to read such an in depth account of an actor at work, and if you have students who are interested in pursuing acting, definitely a must read.
Links
We have a number of Shakespeare books in our catalogue from scene and monologue collections, to Shakespeare spoofs (a great way to introduce students to Shakespeare) to our Shakespeare in an Hour series. Check them out!
http://www.theatrefolk.com/store/genre/17
If you're looking for a book on a certain Shakespeare play, check out this link. It will take you to a page called Shakespeare's Staging. Click on Performance bibliography, then on individual plays, then which ever play you wish to learn more on and you'll get a list of books (with a focus on performance) for that specific play.
There is also a gallery section with pictures and drawings. And, in their relevant websites section, they have 22 Shakespeare websites listed. A lot to choose from!
http://shakespearestaging.berkeley.edu
Download of the Month
To download a sizeable sample of John Minigan's forthcoming adaptation of Twelfth Night, click on the following link:http://www.theatrefolk.com/spotlight/download/9
Conference Alert
Here's our upcoming conference schedule. If you're attending, please drop by and say hi!
In the Next Issue
Due Out in February- PlaywritingStay in Touch
Future issues will be guided by your suggestions. Email stories, tips, suggestions, and questions to us by visiting: http://www.theatrefolk.com/contact . This newsletter belongs to you!© Theatrefolk. All Rights Reserved.