Venice

In the summer of 1991 (or was it 1992), I had an opportunity to go to Cedar City, Utah, for a 10-day acting program associated with the Utah Shakespearean Festival.  We arrived on a Friday and left on a Monday.  During the course of the week we got to see each of the six plays presented at the festival, one a night from the first Monday through the following Saturday.  We each also got to perform a monologue and a scene from Shakespeare (coached by two different festival actors) on the outdoor "Globe"-style theatre.

My monologue character was Volumnia, mother of the title character from Coriolanus.  Not a play that gets presented a lot, and not a character many would pick, but the whole imposing female thing had worked for me before...at least on the stage.  My scene was from As you Like It, playing Audrey (a very, v-e-r-y simple country girl to my scene partner's Touchstone).  Again, at my second entrance, the audience erupted in laughter.  Something my monologue coach said has stuck with me ever since, "To be great, you have to give up being good."  That is something I struggle with - attaining a certain level of proficiency and then settling into a comfort zone and hibernating.

Anyway, what does all this have to do with Venice?  Well, one of the plays presented that year was "The Merchant of Venice".   For those unfamiliar with the play, Portia has many suitors, in part owing to her father's enormous wealth, which became hers when her father passed away.  But in order to win her hand, each suitor must pick from amongst a gold, a silver and an iron box.  One of the boxes has a picture of Portia, and if the suitor picks that box, he gets the girl.  Bassanio wants Portia, and Portia is partial to Bassanio, but they are bound by the deceased father's edicts.  

In the meantime, two other suitors, Princes of Morocco and Arragon, make their choices, to former choosing the gold box and the latter choosing the silver.  The provisions of the test stipulate that they may never again choose and they may not tell anyone else their choice.

Well, the director of this production included a device where it was actually Bassanio in costume as both of the princes, in turn.  Aside from the obvious problems in ethics, it was one of the more inventive things I've seen done with a Shakespeare play in a long time, so I liked it.  Not so my associates.  After each play we had a discussion (late at night).  Some of the comments were downright vitriolic (oooh, there's another good "v" word for today).

It put me in mind of another production of Shakespeare I saw at the Pioneer Memorial Theatre on the University of Utah campus, where the setting was in the 1940's era.  At one point, the main character breaks the fourth wall and says, "What, you don' like this?  You prefer the traditional  style of Shakespeare play like they do in Cedar City?"  At which point, he dropped his mobster-trousers, showing that he had on the tights and pantaloons of a more expected Shakespearean performance.  If I had had a drink in my mouth, I would have spewed.  Seriously, it was that funny.

One day I would like to see the real city of Venice, but until then I have my memories of the merchant.

Taming Thurber's Top Girls

I have been involved with at least three plays starting with the letter "T", or at least having one of the main words in the title starting with that letter.

The first was "Top Girls", a play by Caryl Churchill, is about a woman who chooses to pursue career success instead of family life.  Due to being produced at Westminster College of SLC, which is a relatively small institution in Utah, and the abundance of characters in this play, most of the actresses portrayed multiple characters, including me.  I played Dull Gret, a character actually from a painting by Pieter Breughil, of a woman dressed in armor and wielding household weapons.  At a 'dinner' featuring the main character and several from throughout some revisionist history, Dull Gret speaks coarsely and steals from other people's plates.  My mother called the actress that played the female Pope "the Pope" each time she saw her afterwards.  The second character I played was Joyce, the main character's sister and the one who raised her sister's illegitimate daughter.  The young woman who played the daughter (who also had played the Pope), took to calling me "Auntie-Mum".  And the last character I played was "Louise", a middle-aged woman returning to the workforce, interviewing for a job with the main character, a woman much younger than she.

My second "T" play was "A Thurber Carnival", by James Thurber.  The play was directed by David Dean, who had also directed the production of Beckett's "Happy Days" in which I played Winnie.  I remember dancing across the stage from stage left to right, running around through the shop to dance across the stage again in the same direction as before.  I got an extra line from another in the ensemble cast because the actor would not alter his "gosh darn" to the other phrase that was actually in the script;  I had no such compunctions those twenty years ago.  The two scenes I actually remember was playing someone's aging mother, who comically misunderstood practically everything her son wrote her in a letter.  The bonus was that you got to see the son's increasingly exasperated reactions in the background.  After leaving the stage in that scene, I was in the next one as well, playing a woman whose husband was trying to get rid of her because he wanted to make some time with a sweet young thing.  My costume change consisted of taking off a cardigan and rolling my shirt sleeves up.  (Suspension of disbelief is a wonderful thing, isn't it?)  All I had to do was step on stage and  the crowd erupted in laughter.  I like to think it is because the persona was so different from the previous character.  What was faltering physical and mental health became physical strength and strength of purpose - with a shovel.

The last "T" play was Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew".  But given the overwhelming ratio of female to male actors at a small college, the director (who was the professor who replaced the original professor who had one too many lapses in her battle with drugs) had an interesting idea:  have women play the male roles and the men play the female roles.  There was also a little "pre-play" added where the men were all drunk, hence the necessity of reversing the gender roles.  So I played Gremio, the older suitor of Kate's younger sister, Bianca.