Adjusting to the changed circumstances brought on by COVID 19, Shakespeare Theatre’s Academy for Classical Acting has moved its 2020 graduating class performances to online audio/radio. In this situation, telling the story primarily by vocal production and sound effects becomes the main thing.
Classical theater received only aurally takes some getting used to. It’s not like listening to “Dragnet,” “Gunsmoke” or “Amos ‘n’ Andy” over the radio. And, despite Orson Welles’s radio productions of classical theater in the early-to-mid 20th century, we have no 21st century conventions with which to approach classical theater delivered aurally.
How Academy of Classical Acting prepared for Radio Reps
Suspension of disbelief may need to be joined along with a surrender of whatever tendency you may have towards multi-tasking.
– Where to listen: The podcasts are widely available including
RadioPublic, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. –
After Tybalt kills Mercutio, ACA’s radio production of Romeo and Juliet picks up conviction and urgency. Holly Twyford directs with a steady, forthright and forceful hand. From Mercutio’s death to the end of the play the tension is tightly held and everything moves along at a bracing clip with barely time to take a breath between reversals. It’s bracing. However, until Tybalt dies, Shakespeare’s period-bound humor is hard going. The in-joke laughter that the in-your-ear characters share functions like a television laugh track for 16th century jokes that just don’t hit on a 21st century audience. In this, the production and the performers may just be honoring the play as it is structured.
Surely, you know the story. The deadly rivalry between the Capulets and the Montagues, two prominent families of Verona, wreaks havoc on the peace of the city. Juliet Capulet, having recently reached puberty, is being set up for marriage by her father. Romeo Montague and some of his relatives crash a party that is held by the Capulets. Despite the enmity between the two families, Romeo and Juliet fall in love with each other and are secretly married. When Romeo subsequently attempts to stop a fight from breaking out between the two factions, Mercutio, his beloved kinsman is killed. Romeo retaliates, killing Tybalt and then escapes before the authorities come to investigate. In absentia, Romeo is banished from the city for his retaliation. Juliet’s father decides to move forward his plans for an arranged marriage of Juliet to Paris. With the assistance of the local friar, Juliet and Romeo engage in a plan to reunite, elope and live happily ever after. Things do not go well.
Juliet’s necessary duplicity in the face of familial/social control over the lives and bodies of their female offspring is subtly and ably evoked in the performance of Libby Barnard. Romeo’s adolescent male willingness to risk death for sexual fulfillment and/or love is delivered with randy braggadaccio by Sam Parrot. The vocal production and sound effects in this show are crisp and clear and generally marvelous. The enunciation is sharp, not tortured or mannered: the vocal production not forced. The evocation of atmosphere, place and change of scene through sound design is unquestionably confident: as an aural traveler on this dramatic journey, you feel well guided and well taken care of.
On the other hand, the production is bound to solidly conventional, by-the-book academic interpretation. Culturally, the characters are annoyingly – how do I put this? – “neutral”. Only they’re not really, are they? They seem to exist in some dramaturgical limbo. They are not especially English. But they are not exactly anything else either: except – for the most part – decidedly not “ethnic.” So, we get the plot and the urgency of the characters’ situations. But we don’t get all the specificity we might want for the characters’ humanity.
Romeo and Juliet is the Shakespeare play to which most of us have been exposed in ways that appeal to our modern sensibilities and to a cultural palette that is not European in a way that is exclusionary. From West Side Story to Baz Luhrman’s Romeo and Juliet, American and other non-European audiences have been encouraged to see themselves in the play, and through these productions – to think about European engagement with the rest of the world prior to the launching of the global European colonial project. To experience productions of this play that are not informed by a more recent willingness to acknowledge that pre-colonial Italy reached into the Mediterranean and towards Africa, and that Shakespeare was aware of and affected by that knowledge (Othello is in a very cosmopolitan Venice and Desdemona’s nanny’s name, Barbary, points to her African origin) is a little disappointing.
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In Shaw’s 20th century Man and Superman, Eurocentric cultural, class and race exclusion is part of the point of the play. The story takes place in a palpably colonial England with specific historical relationships both to its former colony and offshoot, the United States of America, and to Ireland. This production immerses itself in the idiosyncratic culture and intonations forged by those economic and cultural engagements.
As in Romeo and Juliet, the lives of the characters are driven by the pursuit of money, security, prestige, marriage and control of the female body, mind and life choices.
Plot: The father of Ann Whitefield has died and has chosen as her guardians the venerable, old Roebuck Ramsden and the eloquent but revolutionary John “Jack” Tanner. Jack’s friend, Octavius (Tavy) Robinson, an artist, is in love with Ann. Tavy’s sister, Violet, is secretly married to the American Hector Malone, Jr., whose father has promised to disinherit him if he disapproves of his chosen mate. It is not at all clear who Ann is in love with. Well, actually, Ann doesn’t appear to be in love with anybody. But in the rules of romantic comedy, given her point-for-point combat with Jack Tanner, the outcome is perfectly clear from the beginning.
This production, under the direction of Aaron Posner, has all the idolatry of Britishness that you expect to experience in Jane Austen film and TV adaptations and all the brittle, Benzedrine-fueled sparkle of a 1930s American screwball comedy. I liked it.
In the role of Ann Whitefield, Petrea Whittier is spontaneously responsive, flexible and quick. As Jack Tanner, Joshua Boulden is always fervent, urgent and breathless. The entire cast leaves nothing more to be desired and much to be enjoyed.
Some favorite lines:
“Haven’t you noticed that that sort of man never marries? Men like that always live in comfortable bachelor lodgings with broken hearts and are adored by their landladies and never get married.”
“You must be a sentimental old bachelor for my sake. You won’t have a bad time. You’ll be very nice to women and you will go a good deal to the opera.”
“Beauty is all very well at first sight but whoever looks at it when it has been in the house for three days?”
“The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art… the artist’s work is to show us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men.. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman.”
– Where to listen: The podcasts are widely available including
RadioPublic, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts. –
Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare. Directed by Holly Twyford. Man and Superman by George Bernard Shaw. Directed by Aaron Posner . Performed in repertory with Hamlet by William Shakespeare.
Cast: Raghad Makhlouf (R&J), Libby Barnard (R&J), Joshua Boulden (R&J, M&S), Christie Coran (M&S), Kathryn Coppa (R&J), Shayna Freedman (M&S, R&J), Daniel Hines (R&J,), Claire Inie-Richards (M&S), J. Tyler Jones (M&S), Michael McDonald (M&S), Julie Nelson-Duac (M&S,R&J), Sam Parrott (R&J), Morgan Pavey (M&S), Samuel Richie (R&J, M&S), Derrick Utley (M&S), Petrea Whittier (M&S), Dan Wilson(M&S), Sarah Corbin Woolf (R&J). Vocal Coach, Lisa Beley. Shakespeare Theatre Company Audio team led by Gordon Nimmo Smith. Reviewed by Gregory Ford.
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