by Kyle Smith
In addition to the two second year shows, directing scenes, and the regular productions from Compass Shakespeare Ensemble, this semester also saw two ambitious practice as research projects come to life.
Presented together as a “PAR Festival,” the works focused on presenting scenes from Shakespeare in order to explore ideas being proposed by two MLitt theses. “I decided to do a series of scenes instead of a full length play because I wanted to have more space to play and explore,” said Sophia Beratta, whose portion of the festival, “Coin Flippery,” featured five scenes in which the actors used a variety of chance-based actions, such as the toss of a coin, to determine which roles they played.
“I felt I could best do that with scenes as opposed to the full length play,” Beratta said. “I sought to explore a variety of things: innocence vs villainy, male vs female, and romantic couple vs romantic couple, all while operating in the realm of foils.”
Beratta also filmed a second performance of “Coin Flippery” in order to have an additional resource to turn to for her thesis work.
MLitt students Jack Sharkey and Allison Jones were featured in a scene from The Taming of the Shrew, with the chance of either of them playing either Petruchio or Kate being present. Other examples more ambitiously changed the entire meaning of the scene, such as the coin toss determining whether Prince Hal or Hotspur of Henry IV Part 1 survived their fated encounter.
After viewing Beratta’s part, the audience moved from the Kettle to the Masonic Building, where they were shown a piece of performance art, not unlike the devised show from Compass early in the semester. The second part of the festival, MLitt student Kim Greenawalt’s “Say Nothing, I’ll Speak All,” explored silence in Measure for Measure’s final scene. This device imitated jail procedures, with some of the participants directed to sit on a bench reserved for those with grievances to the Duke. A bumbling Lucio (Lia Wallace) led the “guests” through the prison, where bound and gagged prisoners uncomfortably shared the space with small groups of the audience.
“I was hoping to use the performance art to bring the audience up to speed on the given circumstances surrounding the scene, and I wanted to see how an audience interacted with very silent or very vocal actors,” said Kim Greenawalt, the scene’s director. “By giving each actor a bit to perform, I gave every actor a chance to connect with the audience. In the full play, characters like Julietta, Barnardine, and even Claudio get little stage time. I wanted an audience to be able to have a look behind the scenes.”
This even extended to after the staging of the scene itself ended: participants were tasked with performing tasks around a still and silent Isabelle (Layla Ophelia) before being led out and greeted by an apologetic Provost (Kristen Dunstan). For this, Greenawalt was inspired by Frantic Assembly’s practices of using space, and their experiments with creating theatre from the entry into the building, rather than the raising of a curtain.
