Bloglander

Jeff Sanders, who’s directing Romeo and Juliet at EWU’s University Theater (March 5-7, 11-13), is married to assistant professor of theater Sara Goff. For more than four years, he acted with the Cincinnati Shakespeare Company, an Equity acting company in which, in addition to roles in King Lear and other Shakespeare plays, he also performed in three separate productions of Romeo and Juliet (as Mercutio, as Prince Escalus, and then — tripling roles in a daily educational outreach touring show that had only half a dozen actors in all — as the Prince, Paris and even the Nurse). He has worked his way up from adjunct professor to full-time lecturer in Eastern’s theater department.

The following is an edited mashup of interviews by phone and e-mail.

Bobo: So why return to Romeo and Juliet? Aren’t you sick of it by now?

Jeff Sanders: It’s such a humbling bear of a play. It’s kind of like Our Town — everyone thinks that they know it, but it’s so difficult to pull off.

He’s not excessively demanding on the actors who are playing the roles he played, mostly because he didn’t specify which roles he had taken, just that he’d been in the show professionally.

“I’ve been most sensitive about Juliet, just because I think she’s one of the finest creations in Shakespeare,” he says. “If the ensemble were polled, they’d say, ‘He’s really big into that Juliet role.’ But that’s because, for an act and a half, Romeo goes off to Mantua and has pina coladas.”---

And then there’s that great irony in the play, when she takes the potion and goes under like death [at the end of 4.3], he enters and relates his beautiful dream, in which he dreams "my lady came and found me dead — ... / And breath'd such life with kisses on my lips/ That I reviv'd and was an emperor" (5.1.6-9).

Bobo: How much of the text have you cut? rephrased? rearranged?

Sanders: Quite a bit. I have no idea how a full text version of this play could be “two hours traffic." However, we have it down to two and a half hours with intermission. The are some surprises to the cutting and rearrangement of the script that I think will be provocative to audience members no matter what their level of familiarity is with the play. But it would be buzz-kill to ruin the surprise, so you must come to the theater.

Bobo: What's the chief way in which this R&J is distinct from all the many other R&J's that have ever been performed?

Sanders: It’s dark, hip, and provocative. We use classic Italian Renaissance silhouettes blended with contemporary gothic fashion to create a world that is both classic and contemporary. The show charts the distance between Shakespeare’s time and our own.

Bobo: What's the set design like, and what ideas are you trying to convey with the set?

Sanders: First, I needed it to be functional for Shakespeare’s play. I wanted lots of open space with areas that could be defined in many different ways. I didn’t want scene changes — you can hear in the text how each scene springboards into the next — so I wanted a space that could help drive the play.

Also, I was attracted to having something that was once beautiful but is now decaying because the “ancient grudge” has taken its toll. Also, I see R & J as a corrupted world filled with hate and violence — and in the midst of this darkness, something incorruptible is born. The reason Shakespeare says “There never was a story of more woe” is because something perfect dies.

Shakespeare would be pretty surprised that we sit around and read plays silently. The Elizabethans said that they were going to hear a play, not see a play.

Tybalt will be very striking-looking. The Capulet side will be more goth, with more makeup and crazier hair. The Montagues will show more skin and be earthier.

Without billboarding the Capulet-vs.-Montague thing — I don’t want this to become black vs. white or Israel vs. Islam — I wanted to create a world that is dark and decaying and corrupted — and out of that, something incorruptible is born.

The image that I shared with our designers was two torches in the darkness.

Sanders acknowledges the influence of Sofia Coppola in Marie Antoinette — “how she mixes classical with contemporary in both music and clothes.”

Bobo: We don't have arranged marriages anymore. So isn't R&J more of a cautionary tale against teen suicide than it is any kind of statement about parent/child relationships?

Sanders: I think we like to make this play about teen suicide because it’s a hot-button topic of today. For me, I think Juliet looks at suicide like a Roman falling on his sword — it’s an honorable testimony to her Romeo. I like this idea because it gives her strength and doesn’t victimize her.

Parent/child relationships have a great influence on this play but in a surprising way. Friar Laurence is really Romeo’s father and the Nurse is really Juliet’s mother. Romeo and Juliet's parents are always confused and left in the dark when it comes to the children because they have no idea what’s going on. And due to this distance, they react emotionally, irrationally.

Bobo: What's the Queen Mab speech about? And how are you staging it?

Sanders: For the Elizabethans, "queen" (or "quean") meant "a degraded woman, a harlot." Mab is the fairies' midwife and helps give birth to dreams. Mercutio is a hard-core sexual realist and characterizes love as nothing but fantasy brought about by an evil hag fairy who comes to men and women in their sleep and plants these vain fantasies.

Elizabethans thought of fairies as evil little creatures who could do you grave harm — when it came to fairies, they didn't think of Tinker Bell.

Bobo: You’ve had a lot of experience with the play. Did anything surprise you during rehearsals?

Sanders: Yeah, the importance of hope in the piece, especially in the second half. With all young actors, the temptation is to play it tragic, because we all know how it turns out. But I keep saying, ‘Don’t play the tragedy before it turns tragic.’

Shakespeare is a master at sprinkling in hope. At any moment, this train wreck may not wreck. So in Act Three, scene two — the “Gallop apace” speech, Juliet is waiting for news of the massacre, and she’s ready to kill herself. And the Nurse says, I know where Romeo is. And it’s a light bulb moment of hope. I want to have the actors really believe in that.

Or when the Friar is breaking down this building that is Romeo, and he’s a mess — and he adds, “Hello, my comfort is revived by that.’

It’s one thing to say that aloud. It’s another thing to feel it down to your feet.

Bobo: We all have an over-idealized view of the star-crossed lovers — impossibly attractive, incredibly articulate, hopelessly in love, tear-jerkingly tragic. It's an ideal that no production, not really, can attain. So why even attempt it? Isn't R&J, as one of his early, very poetic tragedies, better when read and studied than performed?

Sanders: In my estimation, nothing can touch a theatrical event. Shakespeare was meant to be performed. These plays were never written for a desk but for a theatre. Seeing an actress take on Juliet’s poison speech is a thrilling event that can’t be touched in a classroom. I want to hear her breathe — I want to see tears well up in her eyes. Nothing can touch the immediacy of theater.

Sanders also points out that while colleges may strain to cast middle-aged and older parts, that Prince Escalus can be almost any age, and that Lady Capulet, Juliet's mother is only 28.

Sanders and EWU are also working hard to sprinkle some Shakespeare magic on the younger, non-graybeard crowd: An Intro to Lit course with 300 students this quarter is coordinated with the production, and a morning performance on March 12 for high school students is already sold out.

[ photo: Olivia Hussey, 15, and Leonard Whiting, 18, in Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film — still the most commercially successful Shakespeare film of all time. Hussey was not allowed to attend the London premiere, because the film contained glimpses of nudity. That would have been, by the way, her own nudity. ]

At West Central Community Center, tonight and next Saturday, March 6, at 3 pm and 7:30 pm. Tickets: $10.

Director Sandy Hosking's Blackbird, both in the fact of its production and in the quality of its performances, is the kind of show that Spokane ought to see more often.

In an intense drama about sexual abuse and its tragic results, Jamie Flanery gives a nervous-fingers, eyes-welling-with-anguish portrait of vulnerability and shame, while Emily Hiller brings on the flirtation, resentment and manipulation. David Harrower's poetic-but-colloquial dialogue and Pinteresque situations, combined with Hosking's direction, add up to believability that's significant and thought-provoking.

The premise involves the meeting of a middle-aged man and late-20s woman, 15 years after he was convicted of sexually abusing her. It takes place in an actual meeting area with kitchen facilities, and the actors are up close and personal, lending the proceedings verisimilitude. It takes place, in other words, in exactly the kind of sterile, fluorescent-lit, unloved room in which Harrower set his play -- maybe not an employee break room exactly, but close.

Both actors delivered some speeches literally within arm's reach of the front row. (There were only two rows. They only set out a couple of dozen chairs. Theater-lovers ought to flock to this show and make them put out twice as many seats, if not more.

It's gripping, it's only 70 mins. long, and it involves two actors doing exceptional work that ought to be rewarded with attention from their fellow actors and theater folks.)

It's not for kids. Not only are there sexual situations, there's some simulated sex. It's disturbing, even perplexing material, and words like "fuck" and "cum" are uttered. Perhaps some will let it pass for just those reasons.

But consider what the script accomplishes: Making the creep human, making the victim more than merely victimized.

Having sex with a 12-year-old girl is wrong, period. I think the play makes that point — then goes on to make the situation more complex than a moralistic, legalistic approach would assume. What if she were mature beyond her years? What if both were attracted to one another? And why exactly has she sought him out, 15 years later, when both of them have very different and (until now) very separate lives?

Flanery is a revelation: Overwrought, nervous, ashamed, angry. Hiller prods and cajoles him; she has pounced on him out of the past, and we see glimpses of how seductive she can be, and what a lost soul she is.

There are flaws, of course. Hiller, directed by Hosking into flirtatious, come-hither poses, isn't entirely convincing in her anger. An outburst of violence was pretty darn good for a confined space but still stagey. The Portland production I saw created more menace just outside the room, and left much more ambiguity about Ray's and Una's future choices. (There's a major plot point near the end, and we ought to be left wondering more what decisions Ray and Una will make, and why, and how we feel about those.)

But when she kneels before him; when she bends over for him; when he towers over her; when they stand side by side, nostalgic for what they shared, fingers searching for a hand-hold, then realizing that their relationship was wrong, is doomed, and has ruined lives all around them and left their existence like the strewn garbage of their pig-sty break room environment; when he bows his head in shame as she pounds on his chest; when she stares daggers into his back during a long confessional speech ... those are the moments when being in a tiny, makeshift theater really pay off.

Blackbird highlights solid performances, and in closeup. Hiller and Flanery's performances will stick in your mind for days after. And then, after next Saturday, they'll be gone.

continues Monday, March 1, at the South Hill Library, 3324 S. Perry St. and on Wednesday, March 3, at 7:30 pm at the Barnes & Noble just east of the Spokane Valley Mall Free

(See Feb. 18 Inlander, p. 55, and the Calendar of Events)

One of the revelations of a streamlined readers theater version of To Kill a Mockingbird is its emphasis on plot and action: no time for the adult Scout’s narrative voice, ma’am -- or for a few of the characters and several episodes.

All sacrificed for the sake of intro / trial scene / aftermath.

But there were gains, too: Atticus’s appeal is directed right at us, the virtually all-white audience. Scout, Jem, Dill and the Reverend all sat in the “courtroom’s Negro balcony” in the row right in front of me inside Wolff Auditorium inside Gonzaga’s Jepson Hall.

Director Brian Russo had actors entering and exiting through all four available aisles. The impact of being in the room when a white man stands above Tom Robinson, glaring at him and repeatedly calling him “boy.”

The reminder, which you get in performance and not in reading the book, of Tom’s crippled left arm (a crucial plot point, you’ll recall) -- sitting there, stoic and silent.

Well-acted, costumed and blocked. No weaknesses in the cast at all; if I had to pick standouts, I'd select Nate Clemons' marked, younger-version resemblance to Gregory Peck as Atticus, and Kiki Wright's impassioned fear of being humiliated when on the witness stand as Mayella Ewell, the girl who accuses Tom Robinson of rape.

It was like watching the novel, all sped up, and also more visceral: Bob Ewell (Chris Wheatley, effective as a racist hillbilly, and then, in quite a contrast, remarkably articulate during the post-show discussion) spitting in Atticus' face; Atticus leaning into the faces of witnesses; seeing the final attack and rescue in the light, and not imagining it in some dark field at night; and so on.

Going through the slog of rehearsals (and all the rest of life) lately, Bobo has been reminded of the time, energy and commitment that it takes to put on a show.

(While I'm playing the Duke in The Comedy of Errors at SFCC, directed by Bill Marlowe and running March 4-14, local theater types will have plenty of chance to sneer at Mr. Critical Critic Head.)

Those of us who have theater hobbies do it because we love it. But it's salutory for Bobo to be reminded, periodically, of what it all entails. How will I do at auditions? Will I get the part I want? Are these other actors any good? Are they better than me? Will they like me? And how bad will the dressing rooms smell?

What kind of director will he be? Is he going to subject us to some outlandish interpretaion? Will I be able to memorize my lines? What am I gonna look like in my costume? Do the tech people know what they're doing? Will anybody show up to watch? Will I get along with the other actors? Are they really that young? Am I really that old? Is there an alternative to pounding my lines by reading, typing, annotating and reciting them in the car on the way to work? (No, there is not. And as for mouthing the words while riding the bus -- well, people tend to give you concerned looks.) And does it all feel, in the days just before opening, as if it's all going to crash and burn? (Of course. It always does.) And is there anything like that can't-wait-to-open, ready-for-an-audience, got-a-wonderful-story-to-tell feeling? (No, there isn't.)

We MAY crash and burn -- I'm taking a stereotyped chance with my character that some are going to hate -- but Bill has proven to be a master at directing physical comedy, and the cast is great. (They're just kids. Old enough to be their father, I don't fit in, not really. And yet, as usual, there's that don't-really-know-him, I-only-know-her-first-name nodding acquaintance, and yet when running lines or experimenting with a new bit of comic business -- and Marlowe LOVES his bits of comic business -- there's also that wonderful sense that we're all in this together, walking the tightrope, might belly-flop but also might not, we're just adults playing and creating and trusting one another, exposed to public glare and to hell with the nay-sayers.

None of which is unique or special -- there are millions of people bitten by the bug. But as a kind of corrective to the next time I might feel like savaging a show, it's useful about once a year, when scheduling permits (and even when not), just to do what the people I criticize do. And be reminded that it ain't so easy.

And yes, I savaged Honky Tonk Angels. But then apparently the director of that show, Reed McColm (who I am honored to call a friend) is going to review our Comedy of Errors right on this very blog.

(And I adapted the script, too, so if you're a Shakespearean purist who's offended by the replacement of archaic insults with words like "wanker" and "douchebag," then you're also going to get all riled up about that.)

[photo: Royal Shakespeare Company actors rehearsing Henry V; from rsc.org.uk]

At last, evidence that Spokane is not the worst when it comes to prudish, holier-than-thou objections to not-all-that-racy aspects of pop culture.

There are those in Colorado Springs who object to obsessive [um, excessive — now there's a Freudian slip for you] cleavage.

On a foam-rubber puppet.

Now, depictions of homosexuals -- as long as they look like nice, clean-cut Republican boys -- well, that's just hunky-dory.

Sunday, March 14, at 2 pm, and on Monday, March 15, at 6 pm Callbacks, if needed, on Tuesday, March 16, at 6 pm at St. Aloysius School, 611 E Mission Ave.

Based on the popular children's series of books by Gertrude Chandler Warner, this dramatic play follows the adventures of four orphans determined to remain together in Depression-era America.

Director Dawn Taylor-Reinhart seeks four children (ages 8-16) and four adult actors: 2M, 2W. This show is NOT a musical. Cold readings.Performances: May 22-June 6 Visit spokanechildrenstheatre.org or call 328-4886.

Feb. 26-March 21 on the main stage at Spokane Civic Theatre directed by George Green

See the Jan. 24 post on this blog.

by Robert Harling (off-Broadway, 1987; the movie premiered in 1989) directed by George Green

Kelsey Strom as Annelle Dupuy Desoto (played by Daryl Hannah in the movie)

Bethany Hart as Shelby Eatenton Latcherie (Julia Roberts)

Melody Deatherage as M'Lynn Eatenton (Sally Field) Molly Parish as Truvy Jones (Dolly Parton)

Wendy Carroll as Clairee Belcher (Olympia Dukakis)

Kathie Doyle-Lipe as Louisa "Ouiser" Boudreaux (Shirley MacLaine)

Truvy's beauty parlor is the gathering spot for six women. M'Lynn's daughter Shelby is getting married, Annelle is the newcomer to town, Clairee and Ouiser do a fair amount of bickering, and the action extends over three years.

In a small town in Louisiana, six women frequently gather at Truvy's beauty parlor to share stories and friendship. M'Lynn's daughter Shelby is getting married, Annelle is the newcomer to town, Clairee and Ouiser do a fair amount of bickering, and the action extends over three years.

For four performances on the next two Saturdays, the Civic's co-playwright in residence, Sandra Hosking, is bringing Scottish playwright David Harrower's harrowing sexual-abuse-but-there's-more-to-it two-hander drama, Blackbird, to Spokane.

Bobo conducted an e-mail interview with Hosking. (The production is an Inlander Pick in the Feb. 25 issue.)

Bobo: Harrower's dialogue looks like free verse on the page. How has that affected rehearsals? Hosking: The story drew me to the play, and the poetic dialogue made me decide to produce the show. The lines have repetition and a certain pattern that have created a challenge for the actors. Our goal is to bring out the rhythms of the poetry, so the story is compelling to watch and beautiful to listen to.

What specifically have Harrower and you, as director, done a) to make Ray seem like less of a creep and b) to make Una seem like less of a victim? Good question. Blackbird would be an uninteresting play if the characters were so simple. The audience will hear both sides of their stories and each character will have his and her moments of grace and ugliness. I give a lot of credit to my actors: Jamie Flanery has found Ray’s vulnerabilities, making him more human and less of a monster, while Emily Hiller has tapped into Una’s strength.

Fifteen years ago, he had the power over her; now she has the power over him (she could ruin his life). What specific details of your production indicate this power reversal? Harrower has written that power struggle in his dialogue and storyline. Once the characters enter the room, they are moving along a narrow metaphoric ledge. At various moments in the play, they come dangerously close to the edge and take turns nearly falling off. At any moment, Una can decide to walk out the door and tell Ray’s co-workers about his past. He knows this, and this creates a wonderful tension. Even a seemingly insignificant action, such as one character asking the other for a drink of water, becomes a struggle between them.

Would you prefer, or not, that I write around the premise, maybe not reveal their ages? ( see 10/1/08 post on this blog ) I don’t think it’s a problem to mention their ages, but please don’t give away the twist at the end. You could say there’s a twist though. I’m telling people it’s for mature audiences only.