Pods and distance: Shakespeare Theatre opens up
"pods" painted on the ground. GWEN OREL/Stave
"Crazy Love!"
Thursday, Aug. 6, 7 p.m.: "Verily, Madly Thine"
Saturday, Aug. 8, 7 p.m.: "Aria da Capo/The Love Doctor"
Sunday, Aug. 9, 4:30 p.m.: "Verily, Madly Thine"
Sunday, Aug. 9, 7 p.m.: "Aria da Capo/The Love Doctor"
The great lawn of STNJ's Thomas H. Kean Theatre Factory
3 Vreeland Road, Florham Park
ShakespeareNj.org
boxoffice@ShakespeareNJ.org, 973-408-5600
By GWEN OREL
orel@montclairlocal.word
I was not entirely kidding when I posted to Facebook last calendar week that I was going to the theater that night, and hoped I would not die.
Like many masses, I have been very dilatory since the lockdown began.
Groceries are delivered. I laundry my workforce when I bring the food waste cans out. I have rarely gone anywhere (though last week I ventured out to the bakeshop, and saw a friend). I'm a little frightened of the chain mail.
But when the Shakespeare Theatre of Sunrise T-shirt announced it was going to be presenting outdoor theater over the course of two weekends, it was prodigious news — and their plans seemed sound.
They are presenting alternating paired one-acts and a compiling of Shakespeare scenes, under the umbrella entitle "Crazy Dearest!"
The company's non-equity performers, the Shrewd Mechanicals, play in both.
Audience members would embody seated in individual eight-foot-diam "pods" in self-created parties of no than five. Each of the pods would be six feet from the side by side. All staff, audience and volunteers would wear masks, except when eating.
There are 35 pods, so the capacity could comprise as soprano as 175, but, marketing manager Joe Guerin told me, most pods were reserved for smaller parties. And this was true the night I went; most pods held ii or three.
The Madison-founded company is one of the first in Garden State to venture to produce theater this summer, and their situation might be a tricky one to replicate: The non-Equity company of eight has been isolated in company housing since the epidemic began.
(Arsenic of this authorship, the actors union, Actors Fairness Association, has given permission to sporty two theaters to prevail performances. Some theaters are in Massachusetts: Barrington Degree Company and Berkshire Theatre Group. Barrington Stage is presenting a one-man show inside, with strictly limited and distanced seating, patc Berkshire Dramatics Group is presenting an outdoor run of the musical "Godspell." Atomic number 102 New Jersey professional companies sustain been cleared for performance yet. AEA has listed testing guidelines for producers on its website.)
The James Madison company had been regular to tour "Shakespeare Live!" to schools in the spring, but the tours were canceled. Artistic Director Bonnie J. Monte allowed the actors to stay in company housing, and they were provided with opportunities to work on the House Factory (the offices of the company) to help support themselves, in add-on to being conferred a stipend for food.
The production would take grade not in Shakespeare Theater of operations's Greek Theater on the grounds of the College of St. Elizabeth II in Convent Station, but in the backyard of its offices in Florham Park, known as the Thomas H. Kean Theatre Factory.
The shows themselves are likewise short, minimizing the time whatsoever audience member might be exposed to anything.
They alternate betwixt a pair of one-Acts of the Apostles consisting of "The Love Doctor" by Molière and "Aria da Capo" away Edna Saint Vincent Millay, and a compilation of Shakespeare's love scenes titled "Verily, Madly, Thine."
Performances continue through Sunday, Aug. 9.
I Leave SURVIVE
…so will you, apologies to Gloria Gaynor. I felt safer bringing my chair and setting myself up at STNJ than I have close down a town street.
You are asked to bring a throaty-backed chair, rather than a diarrhetic lawn chair, permanently reason: Capitol Hill fanny STNJ offices is identical low. I'm pleased to report that everyone in the pods had either a low-backed chair or a blanket.
Every bit you leave the parking lot, masked staff direct you to the line, which is scarred with dilute Xs so that populate maintain social length as they enter.
The just the ticket you se is actually your program, which is asterisked with the number of your pod.
You are then shown to your pod, where you set yourself up. It is rattling similar beingness shown to your tabular array at a restaurant.
At no point are you really interacting with anyone you did not come with, demur for laughing and clapping with them during the show.
The eventide I went to (the unity-acts) had no intermission, thusly there was no question of being too close to anyone A they went to bargain concessions or gifts — but there were Xs varnished on the grass to form lines away those two stands also.
Some people in the audience did not put their masks back on later picnicking, and were not directed to do so by ushers, simply that may have changed (it was the initiative night) and, in any grammatical case, the pods were far apart.
The heat was more of an offspring than COVID-19 fears — and the passion was not so bad. Do add bug spray.
THE PLAYS
Was it meriting it? Yes, utterly. It was a gladden to be outside of my personal home and hear live laughter around me. Zoom performances just are not the same. Being in an audience is non something that whole kit all but, when the sounds of the rest of the audience are muted.
While it is a delight just to be outside and in an audience, it is an added joy to constitute able to say that the plays I saw are worth information technology (and while I bequeath not embody attending the Shakespeare love scenes, since that is so firmly in the wheelhouse of the company, it is a pretty safe bet that they volition beryllium fun).
Of the two plays, for Pine Tree State the Molière was stronger: Look-alike every Molière play, it is supported on the approximation of Pres Young lovers trying to beat a controlling parental visualize.
In that case, young Lucinda has fallen for Clitandre, only her father, Sganarelle, wants her never to get hitched with. She feigns illness, Clitandre pretends to personify a doctor, and voila. As always, there is a clever servant arranging things.
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READ: 'LONG Irrecoverable PLAY' AT SHAKESPEARE THEATRE IS SMART AND SILLY
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The company plays in high comedic style, with lovely clear touches from Four-card monte's direction. As the controlling father, Sganarelle, Jeffrey Marc Alkins shows dignity with a soupcon of tyranny and a well-behaved dash of warm blindness. Billie Wyatt's sighing Lucinda is a scream, sweetly making eyes at Isaac Hickox-Four-year-old's handsome Clitandre and screening resourcefulness while depicting innocence. Skye Pagon, as saucy Lisette, the clever servant, gets the last word, and the best laugh: She is an actress to watch.
"Aria da Capo" is rather less successful. Monte describes the versify play arsenic a "masterpiece" in her syllabu notes, but patc it was hailed as one in 1919, IT has non really held up. The poet wrote it when she was just a fewer years out of college, and it has the faults of its time and her youth: The anti-war fable is to a fault symbolic, even pretentious.
But it is also pretty and not too long. Its faults are non Monte's, though her directing it in the richly style of declamation in which IT is written (it is written in verse) does it no favors.
It takes its title from a musical descriptor of the 17th century, in which a penning is divided into three sections: The second contrasts the first, and the tierce repeats the first.
Here the first part is a kind of harlequinade, a comedy settled on commedia dell'arte. Moliere's plays are also supported Ccmmedia, the 16th- to 18th-century Italian style of comedy that relies happening well-known persona types; this Crataegus laevigata atomic number 4 why Monte paired the two.
Columbine (Ellie Gossage) and Pierrot (Christian Robert Frost) sit at a banquet table and bicker, existentially:
"Is it Tuesday, Columbine? I'll osculate you if it's Tuesday."
They are interrupted by Cothurnus (Jeffrey Marc Alkins, serious and furious) who insists on theatrical production a scene active two shepherds, Thyrsis (Dino Curia) and Corydon (Isaac Hickox-Young) who sport a plot that thither is a wall between them. Yes, the actors talk about acting the play; a metatheatrical device that was fresh at the time.
Now that you take heard the intelligence "wall," to be sure you know where this is going: a parable about how walls create war and enmity.
Watching the shepherds become greedy and distrustful is too predictable to be deep affecting, although the meta-dramaturgy Millay uses when the actors seem to forget lines that celebrate the feud active is an gripping proficiency.
Trio "zanies" change the set around.
Having the actors discuss the plays every bit they blend in, and Pierrot and Columbine's circular talk, invokes high modernism, and even Beckett's little tramps (which it long predates).
It's not really plenty to keep your interest — but my goodness the poin pictures are beautiful, as are the costumes (Monte designed the costumes, set and effectual).
An image of Pierrot and Aquilege sitting on a crescent-shaped moon, while the shepherds continue their play, is particularly striking.
They worry about going rear to their comedy they had been acting, with dead shepherds low-level the table, but Cothurnus tells them right to play the tablecloth down and keep going.
And when He says "Play the travesty, the audience will forget," the message feels all also fresh.
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