Original Practices - 8/18/05

Never let a chance to go to a ballgame go by! Chris and I went to Richmond last night to see the Richmond Braves play the Buffalo Bisons in a AAA game. The Bisons lost, 5-0. I did a lot of rooting for the hometown team, but to no avail. It was "Spike TV Checkup Night," so I got a glucose check, blood pressure check, and body mass index (BMI). Come to find out my ideal weight is something like 167 lbs., with a BMI of 18. I don't think I'm getting down to that any time soon!

Daniel's chickenpox are getting better, and we think the worst is over. But he still can't get to rehearsal until all his scars crust over, and he's still a bit weak. I visited him on Tuesday night and he was going crazy with the itching a bit. At one point he got up from his bed and went screaming around the house just to let off steam. Most of the troupe was there to write a song for the opening of R3, and Daniel came down to help for awhile, but just got too distracted. He did, however, get a lot of sleep, and Wed. morning when I went to see him he looked a lot better. He has an uncle who's a dermatologist, so I went to Wal-Mart and got him some anti-itch medication, and a topical cream, so hopefully he will be better today.

Today's title: Original Practices - what does that mean? If you haven't checked out the ASC website thoroughly, I can give you a quick summary. The whole mission of the ASC is to perform Shakespeare as close to "original practices" as possible. This is mainly what sets ASC apart from other Shakespeare festivals and theatres. This concept includes the following elements:

• Natural Lighting. One of our slogans is "We do it with the Lights On." Wherever we perform, the house lights remain on, and stage lighting is nothing but a wash of natural light. We have no blackouts, not lighting effects, nothing. Lighting designers need not apply. In fact, we have very little tech work here at all. No set designs (just a collection on boxes), as few props as possible, etc. About the only tech we have are costumes.
  
• Audience Contact. We are encouraged to contact the audience directly whenever feasible. We make them a complete part of the show. The become whatever WS wanted them to be: the army, the full court, the crowd of citizens, the church assembly. Characters confide in and comment to the audience both specifically and generally. We do not ignore the audience and pretend they are not there. We can see them, they can see us, and we create the world of the play together as interactive participants. We sell beer and wine and small snacks to the audience, which we encourage them to take in the theatre with them, and they are also encouraged to get up and move around from seat to seat if they wish.
  
• Quick pace and a concentration on language. All our shows are designed to some in as close to the two-hour mark as possible, concentrating on rapid, clear delivery of language and a minimum of movement. The belief is that the scripts we have are the full text of the play, but that doesn't mean that at every performance the full script was performed. They take the "two hours' traffic of our stage" quote literally. Some shows are a bit more, but not by much. The current Hamlet runs about 2 hours 20 minutes with two five-minute intervals included. The intervals are indeed short; either one ten-minute or two five-minute ones are given, and they are strict to the time.
  
• Natural sound. All the sound effects and music used are performed with natural effects and acoustic instruments. Return to the Forbidden Planet is actually written to be performed with electric instruments, but we are doing the whole thing unplugged. Although Shakespeare's theatre had musicians, all our music is performed by company members.
  
• I'm not sure this has a name, but we do not limit ourselves to Renaissance costumes. We move from traditional to contemporary easily. This comes from the fact that Shakespeare did not worry about historically accurate costuming; his actors wore the clothing of the day. So we allow ourselves the freedom to wear "the clothes of the day" for whatever century we happen to want to play in.
  
• Role Doubling. All the troupe members usually play multiple roles at some point. Men play women, women play men, but we do not change the text to reflect gender. If a woman is play a male role, she still gets called "Sir."
  

Do I like this style of playing Shakespeare? In a word, yes! I particularly like the audience contact aspect of it all. Including the audience into the world of the play is exciting, and once you do it, you realize right away that it feels more right than anything else you've every done. Last year I played Grumio in Shakespeare in Delaware Park's production of Taming of the Shrew, and one thing I asked for immediately from the director was to be able to go out amongst the audience and break that fourth wall. I just knew it had to be done, and it was great fun. It will be hard for me to imagine doing WS any other way in the future. But I think for now I will leave it here and go into some further discussion of "original practices" next time, because I can begin to see some implications for modern theatre as well.

I have prepared my first vodcast, which is a tour of the Blackfriars Playhouse, but I still have to tweak the details of posting it. So far it tests well if you use iTunes to subscribe to the vodcast, but I am looking for a way to post it so people can directly access it through a web browser. But everyone should be warned: it's a 35MB file which should not be viewed with anything but a high-speed connection. Even through iTunes it will take maybe ten minutes to download with high-speed. Others will not be so long - this runs about 15 minutes. Pretty amateur production values, but what the hell. I'll post the location when it's ready.

Health, peace, good things. -TWL