|
A penny was a lot to pay for a play in 1600, but common laborers and royalty alike jockeyed for spots in the Globe Theater to spend an afternoon reveling in the wit of Will.
Without elaborate costumes, without expensive sets, Shakespeare relied on words to craft his scenes and spin his tales, words so melodic and powerful theater troupes are still bringing them to the stage 400 years later.
But if the secret to Shakespeare’s greatness is in his words, the secret to greatness performing Shakespeare today is understanding in painstaking detail what exactly he was trying to say.
GRSF veteran actors Jonathan Gillard Daly and Chris Mixon can recite Shakespeare as well as anyone. But these men and their fellow actors at GRSF are doing something more, something special, something few theater companies go to the trouble of: They are getting inside his head.
It’s called a “text-based” approach to Shakespeare, and it means as many hours are spent deciphering the language as are spent memorizing the words.
For two weeks, eight hours a day, company members sit around a table and take apart each word, each phrase, each character. “It’s almost like an archeological dig going at that language and looking for clues,” said Daly. “It’s tricky, sometimes a word meant one thing, but in another play it meant something different.”
Understanding those nuances of use and context is essential, the men said, if one is to truly present Shakespeare rather than just their interpretation of his story.
There are 400 years of annotated scripts available from scholars who offer their interpretation of what it all means, but this company often goes back to The First Folio, a 900-page collection of scripts compiled by Shakespeare’s peers after his death.
The end result is Great River Shakespeare Festival, one of the most loyal presentations of Shakespeare available anywhere in this country, Mixon said.
Loyalty to Shakespeare’s stories is important, Daly said, because he was a masterful storyteller whose plays, told correctly, are timeless. “If you are listening you hear things about the nature of power, revenge, the loss of innocence, struggles,” Daly said. “If you tell the story accurately and loyally he pays you back. If you just follow the blueprint and give yourself over to it, that’s when audiences come out loving the play, and that’s really what you want.”
Truly understanding Shakespeare is one component of performing his work, Mixon said, but also essential, as an actor, is connecting with something inside that deeply understands the role being portrayed.
In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Mixon plays Berowne, a man swept off his feet by love and his inability to control it. “That’s a big lesson. All of us know what it feels like to fail or not be able to control our feelings,” said Mixon. “What he learns in the celebration of this language is that he is nothing in the shadow of this love. To achieve that vulnerability on stage is what actors live for. That journey to vulnerability is not Chris’ interpretation, it’s Shakespeare’s.”
“You have to use yourself,” Daly agreed. “Some parts are noble and good, some are dark and petty. As an actor you get to tap into all those things. You get to know yourself better as an actor.”
When an actor reaches down deep enough to find the character within him, something magical happens, Daly said, that is hard to quantify but impossible to miss on the stage.
But to get to the stage, actors take their understanding of Shakespeare, the story and the character and begin the meticulous work of preparing the play so they can share that understanding with an audience.
A gesture. A facial expression. An inflection. Words become infused with life on stage, presented in a way that invites the audience into the story, even those with limited exposure to Shakespeare or some of the language common in his day.
The reputation that Shakespeare is too academic for the common man is an unfortunate myth, the men said. Shakespeare did not talk down to the people of his day through plays, Mixon explained, he connected with them, even the so-called “groundlings,” — those too poor to pay for a seat in the Globe Theater and who were relegated to standing in the “pit” during the whole show — through stories everyone understood. “They loved it. They couldn’t get enough of it,” he said.
Four hundred or so years later, crowds still adore the bard thanks to documents like The First Folio preserved by his friends, and theater companies like the Great River Shakespeare Festival that tell the stories the way they believe Shakespeare himself would have wanted.
|
