Session 1, Oct 9

In attendance

• Dale

• David

• Rachel

I asked David and Rachel to sign in so that I had contact info; for “interest,” we defined

• AUDIENCE: interested in learning more about the play itself/Shakespeare

• DESIGN: interested in designing sets/costumes/lights/sound

• ACTING: interested in learning how to “do” Shakespeare; auditioning

I began by explaining that As You Like It (AYLI) is structured like the Hero’s Journey.

(from Lichtenbergianism: procrastination as a creative strategy)

In State A1, the Court (the domains of Oliver and Frederick) is dark and treacherous. Brothers usurp and plot against brothers. Everyone must be on their guard. Wrestling matches end in death. Faithful servants and loving nieces are banished.

It’s a mess.

Our heroes (Rosalind, Celia, Orlando) are “called to adventure,” to leave the Court and flee to the Forest of Arden—State B— where we meet the local inhabitants and the court-in-exile of Duke Senior (Rosalind’s father).

After moseying through comic/romantic episodes, we all end up in State A2, where everyone is either married off or otherwise happily situated. All is forgiven, and evil flees the land.

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I then explained the concept of the Temporary Autonomous Zone: a temporary space that eludes formal structures of control (Wikipedia). In the Forest of Arden, Duke Senior and his court, along with Rosalind and Celia, escape the terror of the Court. The text of the play indicates that life is just a bowl of cherries out in the woods; the rules do not apply; Rosalind and Celia can disguise themselves and no one can see through those disguises, not even Rosalind’s father.

The implication of TAZs is that by doing away with the “rules,” at least temporarily, we can figure out which rules are harmful to us and which are best to keep around. This is one of the bases of Burning Man/regional burns and Carnival/Mardi Gras, and in AYLI at least it seems to work.

We will be doing more work with TAZs, especially in rehearsal.

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We began to learn how to tackle Shakespeare’s language, using one of Katharine’s speeches from Taming of the Shrew:

I must, forsooth, be forced
To give my hand, opposed against my heart,
Unto a mad-brain rudesby, full of spleen,
Who wooed in haste and means to wed at leisure.

The first thing to do when faced with a sentence like this is to find the simple sentence, i.e., the simple subject and predicate. (If you’re reading this at home, I advise you to say these reconstructed sentences out loud.)

That’s easy enough to do, right?
Then we played with that sentence, exploring the sounds—notice all the st sounds, which allow Kate to hiss her anger at her father; Rachel found that the d-b combination in mad-brain and rudesby were hard to say, a clue that you might want to slow down.

(Technically, mad-brain is a spondee, two stressed syllables in an otherwise iambic pentameter line.)

Having determined the arc of the sentence and how we might speak it, we then set about inserting the parentheticals.

Forsooth is easy; it’s an oath, a cuss.

Next we took opposed against my heart and noted how Shakespeare does the whole “this-against that” thing: my hand literally against my heart.

At each step, we kept in mind the arc of the sentence as we swung away from it for the parenthetical, then back.

Full of spleen was next; a subtle pun for modern ears, connecting heart and spleen. (We didn’t go into it, but spleen was more than an organ; also known as “yellow bile,” it was one of the four humors thought to make up the human constitution. We still have the word splenetic to describe an angry or spiteful person.)

The point of this bit-by-bit deconstruction of the speech was to show that “doing” Shakespeare is a matter of taking the time to understand the construction of each sentence and how each piece adds to the character’s persona.

Finally, we looked at the last line and noted that once again Shakespeare has joined wooed and wed to echo each other, along with the balance of the two phrases joined by and.

And after that we called it a short night.

David/Rachel: Anything I forgot that you remember as being insightful or helpful? That’s what comments are for. (Also: questions!)

Next session: Wed, Oct 16, 7:30–9:00

ASSIGNMENT:

1. Begin reading the play. We will discuss I.1–3.

2. Create a character distribution chart. You can do it in a spreadsheet, but it’s better if you do it by hand. Here’s how:

   1. The first column is character names, so it will need to be wide.

   2. The first row is scenes.

   3. Start with Act I, scene 1. Write down the first character who appears (ORLANDO), and put an X to show he’s in that scene. Repeat with each character who appears.

   4. Continue to scene 2 and repeat.

   5. It’s OK to put Lords, Courtiers, etc., at the bottom of the list.

   6. For characters who just pop in to announce the next character, you can put that X in parentheses (X).

The point of this is to give you a bird’s-eye view of the show: who’s onstage when, and how many. You can see things like which characters could be doubled, which ones disappear (watch ADAM vanish), and which roles which seem important are actually onstage very little (like DUKE SENIOR). For designers, this can help too with color groupings and traffic control and anything else that requires you to keep up with the actors.