A Night at the Thee-Ah-Tra

By this positive life • October 21, 2011 • Print-Friendly

 One good thing about being a smart-ass snob like me is this: when you have no or low expectations, things tend to be better than what you thought.  Each day I am back home in Indiana (serving my sentence I like to call it), I come to realize just how much better a place it really is vs. what I give it credit, well, Evansville at least…

Tonight was no exception….

I present you with :

A Night at the Thee-Ah-Tra

Wednesday, October 19, 2011
Mallette Studio Theatre: University of Southern Indiana

John Leguizamo as Tybalt: Prince of Cats. HOT!

I was lucky enough to be invited to see  the University of Southern Indiana’s Theater Department production of  Shakespeare’s R + J.  Now don’t think for a minute I ever completed reading the entire play of Romeo and Juliet  in Mrs Cardinal’s 9th grade Honors English class or was able to sit through any of the movie versions either. (Romeo + Juliet, the 1996 version directed by Baz Luhrman and starring Claire Danes, Leonardo DiCaprio and (the hottest not really but kinda ugly guy comedian  John Leguizamo, yes I have a little crush, almost kept my attention long enough to finish; it was so damn sexy!)  Seeing how each line was explained in class, I have a pretty good understanding of the story: it’s meaning, it’s impact on our day to day language via figures of speech.  (What ’s in a name?  - That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.  - Good night, good night! parting is such sweet sorrow,that I shall say good night till it be morrow - The strength of twenty men.  -  I tell thee what: get thee to church o’ Thursday just to list a few) and never really had to read the play.  None-the-less, once we were through I regretted not reading Romeo & Juliet and vowed to officially read it later (that has yet to happen) based purely on the language, its beauty, rhyme, color and out-and-out bawdiness.

Loretto Hall, Webster University, St Louis MO

I was not sure if this USI version would meet my requirements of (say this is the most stuffy East-Coast accent you can muster; it helps to practice by saying Mumsy and I are springing in Nantucket this year a few times until you get it right) fine theatre (pronounce: thee-ah-tra), but in the end I wasn’t turning down a freebie.  Remember, I am Broke-Ass.  So it is with the great snobbery, you know what I referred to earlier, that I walked into the Mallette Studio Theatre, located on the bottom floor of the Liberal Arts Building of USI.  And with some trepidation too; I am amazingly annoyed by the average theater student.  I cannot say what it is like today, but if you went to Webster University in St Louis during the late 80′s and early 90′s, like me (1990-1991), then you have experienced the annoying behaviors of the theater (no thee-ah-traa) students who are members conservatory (these students had to audition for ; let’s just say I only now can listen to the Into the Woods soundtrack after the constant singing of the score and acting out the scenes in the halls, the cafeteria and anywhere else they may go… annoying!  (These students must audition to take part in the Conservatory of Theater Arts, about 500 people audition a year, less than 10% are accepted,  take only theater-arts related courses and must survive what are affectionately called Sophomore Cuts at the end of the second year to maintain their enrollment in the program, so all of them are very fond of themselves and their talents and have no issues displaying their skills to anyone who might be in ear or eye-shot.  They are destined for The Great White Wayand Hollywood after all…)

After walking into the small theater-in-the-round space I knew this had the potential to be a top-notch production.

R + J set at the Mallette Studio Theater. Sorry it's so dark; the show was pretty dark as well.

The Mallette Studio Theater is a very intimate place.  The front row seats are about 5 feet from the stage and if you are sitting in the back row, I believe there are a total four rows, places you about 20 feet away.  The set for Shakespeare’s R + J  was minimal and sparse.  Essentially it was wooden planks with 1/3 of the stage raised and miscellaneous antique looking paraphernalia: old suit cases, books stacked in neat piles, trunks scattered about and what represented the exposed support beams of a roof/ceiling dangling from the rafters and an amazingly old and beautiful looking banister connecting the floor to the lower stage. It was sparse.  It proved effective.  (Why didn’t I just make a fool of myself and take more pictures?  Hmmmph! If I’m gonna take this blogging thing seriously I need to think more and become more aggressive.)

We found seats and I began reading the play-bill.  Inside was a note from the director.  It read as follows:

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Director’s Notes
Shakespeare’s R & J

During my years in public school, certain boys were singled out for ridicule simply because they displayed qualities stereotypically defined as gay or effeminate.  A boy who lisped and couldn’t show a chipped tooth or braces as the cause was guilty.  Any boy who cried whose injury was not clearly as visible to the observer as is a broken limb or squashed and profusely bleeding nose was guilty.  A high-pitched voice (such as I had as a boy) or hand that hung from a suspiciously limp wrist could convict you as “wrong.”  Any sign of physical delicacy marked you as queer.  Once, without knowing it, I  received a “test” from another boy who asked me if my nails were clean.  I held my hand out in front of me and looked at my straightened fingers, arched slightly back under the tension of inspection. I was immediately cautioned by the boy not to do it that way.  He explained that a man would turn his hand over and examine his nails with his fingers curled in toward the palm.  A “homo” would hold out his hands like fans, as I had.  Was I a “homo?”  The “test” was a way of cautioning me not make such a simple mistake.I took note that girls could carry their books against their chest or canted out from their waist but boys had to sling them under their arms in the less comfortable manner.  I learned that wearing a shirt with a “fruit loop” on the back was a bad sign and if you did wear one, another boy might cut it off with a scissors for you own food or just rip it off, leaving you with a torn garment.  Otherwise you were a “fruit.”  It was ridiculous.  We were acting silly.  We were all scared.We were also scared because the grown-ups, the teachers, knew that certain boys were selected for ridicule and often provided tactic approval.  A physical education teacher who chuckled at a boy’s weak and unnatural throwing motion during a softball practice could, by his subtle smirk, feed that boy to the wolves; and those boys knew they could not appeal for protection to most teachers, not from a little “hazing.”  That was meant to correct their behavior, to toughen them up.  Learn to stand up for yourself, we were told; be a man.  If the lessons recited in this play’s boarding school seem extreme, we must see in them some of the origins of our own.Some in society believe it is helpful to define in order to judge sexual preference, as if they were articulating a list of existential choices.  But gender definition that so constrains serves only those who seek to constrain , for it does not countenance the longing of others.  In truth, people need no help “feeling” sexual preference anymore than i needed to learn the proper way to carry my books or examine my fingernails.  In our most passive state, inhaling, exhaling, we desire something.  We don’t chose to desire it.

Four boys in this play are inhaling and exhaling Romeo and Juliet.  The are breathing the most beautiful, lyrical poetry in our language and finding in it the pure truth of what the deeply feel.  Shakespeare does not teach them to feel that truth, but provides them the means to express it.  I’m not surprised.  Where better to discover our humanity?  Who could give it greater voice or more proper definition?

Elliot Wasserman

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I won’t go into great detail about the play but will say these things:

1. There are only 4 male actors in the entire show (I did some research and it has also been done with all women)  and they each play various characters found in the original Romeo and Juliet.
2. Once an actor has played a character they play that character throughout the show.  (ie the same actor who played Romeo in one scene maintained playing him.)
3. 

   The 5th character, the Red Cloth. photo courtesy of http://www.examiner.com/ .

   The play is spoken in, well, Shakespearean, the exact language of the original except in a few cases where the actors  are simply playing the students they are meant to be and not actually reciting the play.

4. The boys are in a boarding school.
5. There is a Dead Poet’s Society feel to it, by this I am referring to  the scene where all the guys sneak out and drink, smoke and read
   

   Inaugural meeting of The Dead Poet's Society.

   poetry off campus late at night for the inaugural meeting of The Dead Poets Society?  Well, it was kind of like that, as if Neil, Todd, Knox and all the rest decided they were so moved by the play they would act it out in a dorm room.

6.  There is a 5th character, the red cloth is used in almost every scene to either adorn, transform the actor or convey the actors emotions.  The symbolism of the color and its use a prop was nothing short of exquisite and moving.
7. There were some pseudo-homoerotic undertones.  I was not sure if the boys who played Romeo and Juliet actually had secret attractions they were able to be expressed through their characters or not.  Juliet,or the actor playing her, well that had to be the case (didn’t it?), the actor played his/her part so amazingly well.
   

   Neil Perry (played by my future husband Robert Sean Leonard) as Puck ending the play A Midsummer Night's Dream

8. When you read the Director’s Notes from the program you would expect to see a much more of the homoerotic undertones; maybe I am needing more blatant and obviousness.  Sometimes I think as gay men we see what we want to see and I struggle with making sure I do read more into things than what is actually there.
9. The production has a sexuality to it that, if it had been cast by, shall we say more attractive actors (they were not what I would call hot), could have verged on scandalous.  Of course I liked and disliked that.
10. Parts of A Midsummer’s Night Dream… If we shadows have offended, Think but this, and all is mended… for example,  were used throughout the play (noticeable primarily at the end), I believe, as away to convey to the audience the characters love and passion for The Bard.  And of course it worked seamlessly into the story line.

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Here is the official USI Theater Department’s News Release

News Release:
Shakespeare’s R&J

USI Theatre fall productions bring new schedule and edginess

University of Southern Indiana Theatre opens the 2011-12 season with Joe Calarco‘s Shakespeare′s R&J on Friday, October 14. The play, directed by Elliot Wasserman, gives a glimpse of the world of Romeo and Juliet acted out as an escape for four boys looking to break away from the rigidity and routine of life far from home. “The boys are breathing the most beautiful, lyrical poetry in our language and finding in it the pure truth of what they deeply feel,” said Wasserman. “Shakespeare does not teach them to feel that truth, but he provides them the means to express it.”

“It′s a passionately energetic, thoroughly absorbing show that is as much about the forbidden love between men as about the taboo love between young people from enemy families,” says New York Newsday.

The cast includes four boarding school boys played by USI students Patrick Litteken, Craig Patterson, Kaleb Sullivan, and Julian Velasquez.

The USI Theatre is changing the schedule for this fall′s productions. Opening night will begin on a Friday night and the show will run through the following Friday with Monday as the only day off for the show during the one week run. The play will be staged at 7:30 p.m. October 14-15 and 17-21 and 2 p.m. on Sunday, October 16 in the Mallette Studio Theatre on the lower level of the Liberal Arts Center on USI′s campus.

The artistic team for Shakespeare′s R&J includes USI theatre faculty Eric Altheide as fight choreographer, Robert Broadfoot as scenic designer, Eric Cope as lighting designer, Shan Jensen as costume designer and USI theatre student Daniel Kopp as sound designer.

Tickets are $7 for USI students, $12 for adults, and $10 for seniors (60+) and non-USI students. To purchase tickets or for more information, visitwww.usi.edu/theatre or call the box office at 812/465-1668.

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Here is the review from The Courier and Press

PHOTO BY JASON CLARK JASON CLARK / COURIER & PRESS http://www.courierpress.com/news/2011/oct/13/shakespeare-reinterpreted/

Review:
Shakespeare’s R&J

By Roger McBain, Evansville Courier & Press
October 15, 2011

With the world a stage, Romeo and Juliet are on the move

William Shakespeare told us four centuries ago that the world was a stage.

Since then, generations of directors have taken that challenge, transporting “Romeo and Juliet,” “A Mid-summer Night’s Dream” and more of the Bard’s works out of the theater, into the parks, onto the streets and up onto the screen in an array of adaptations and interpretations.

Joe Calarco may be the first, however, to move Shakespeare’s best-known love story into an attic and out of the closet.

Director Elliot Wasserman’s team of players, designers and technicians explore that approach with wit, invention and feeling in the University of Southern Indiana Theatre’s production of Calarco’s “Shakespeare’s R&J.”

This adaptation relies on the story and the language of Shakespeare’s original, along with excerpts from his sonnets and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and lofts them into a parochial boys school attic in the 1950s to explore another kind of forbidden love.

That’s were four blazered boys retreat after class and, in this case, after lights out. They go there to escape their rote regimen of daily lessons drilling them in everything from Latin conjugations to geometry laws to life’s prescribed roles for men and women.

In an act of rebellion and escape, the four take to the attic to read and act out their own clandestine performance of “Romeo and Juliet.” They start out in school sweaters, ties and blazers, reading from a leather-bound volume. As they get into the story, however, they drop the book, the ties and the blazers and scavenge the attic for inventive props and costume bits to portray all the men and women in the play.

Their production begins as a juvenile burlesque, with broad, bawdy, oversexed portrayals, rough-and-tumble battles and lines delivered in a hipster, beatnik patter or with a pelvis-thrusting, Elvis Presley drawl and swagger.

The drama intensifies, however, when the boys playing Romeo and Juliet embrace their roles on a level that seems too convincing for comfort for the remainder of the cast.

They play numerous roles, but Craig Patterson and Kaleb Sullivan set the stage for all the characters’ revelations with their respective performances as Romeo and Juliet. Their characters’ joint journey from nervous, uncertain yearnings to fully realized love for one another seems natural, convincing and at home in Shakespeare’s story and language.

Julian Velasquez and Patrick Litteken deliver solid support in the rest of the roles, playing with, reacting to and responding to their friends’ performances.

The cast handled the Shakespearean language fluently in this play within a play, with only a couple of flubbed lines in the opening night performance, which ran 2 hours and 10 minutes, with one intermission.

Eric Cope’s evocative lighting design plays dynamically over Robert Broadbent’s rough-hewn, raftered attic set design, but one effect, lighting up sections of the audience in direct, low angle beams, is a puzzling, blinding distraction.

Lighting plays a magical, pyrotechnical part in the closing scene, however, underscoring the ultimate moment of illumination in this timeless celebration of inextinguishable love.

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I am well aware that I should never attempt to be a critic of theater and this post was never intended as such, but simply a post to let you know what I did and how much I really enjoyed the play.  And an excuse to find pictures from Dead Poets Society, of course… it is one of my favorite movies after all…

I hope you go and see a production of Shakespeare’s R +J, should the opportunity arise; it is a unique and creative view of how The Bard has and can impact our lives and a look/reminder of the intense passions of youth.  How as young people, we can or did become so inspired by things we were exposed to that we had to incorporate them into our daily lives.

And if Shakespeare’s R +J is not available anytime soon, who cares,  hit the local theater anyway.  It’s a great way to spend an evening and support your local arts scene.  And, you will be adding value to your community and the quality of life of everyone…. plus if you don’t go it may not be there in the future.

I hope to see you at the thee-ah-tra soon!

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for more information on the USI theatre

visit:

http://www.usi.edu/libarts/arts/theatre/usitheatre/

Tagged as: A Midsummer's Night Dream, Dead Poets Society, John Leguizamo, Neil Perry, Puck, Romeo, Romeo Juliet, Shakespeare, Shakespeare's R + J, Theatre, Tri-State Alliance, Tybalt, University of Southern Indiana, Webster University, William Shakespeare

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