Jepson Shakespeare Project Production Blog

We were unable to meet with the students at St. Joseph’s Villa this past Thursday because of an off-campus field trip that would not bring them back in time for our 1:00 time slot. We were excited to delve into working with them on the script, especially since we figured out roles for most of the students, but that will have to wait until we meet this week. At this point I almost expect to receive a text from Timone, the coordinator from the Villa,  every week saying that something has come up so the class in cancelled, but I have faith in the abilities of our students to learn their parts under the time crunch.

This week was a bit more hectic than the last. Caroline was unable to join us, so Aleeza and I directed the rehearsal. We rehearsed in the band room, as we always do, and the students insisted on constantly messing with the instruments, an act that they all know that they are forbidden to do. When they all settled down, Aleeza and I thought we would try skipping the theater game because we didn’t want to rile them all up for no reason. This was our first mistake. We jumped right into assigning roles and told the students to raise their hand if a role/character sounded like something they would be interested in. They were allowed to raise their hands as many times as they wanted for as many roles/characters as they wanted. We wrote down each student’s name next to the part that he or she was interested in. On our workday in class on Wednesday, we will distribute the roles accordingly.

Explaining each character and revealing how many lines they had took up a good bit of rehearsal time, and the group lost focus. Therefore, Aleeza and I decided to end rehearsal with “Zip, Zap, Zop” because the students had been so fond of the game the week prior. Many of the boys refused to participate and, even though we threatened to tell Mr. Allen (the head director of the after-school program) they said they “didn’t care.” As we attempted to play Zip, Zap, Zop, many of the students ran across the room, chasing each other around, fighting, hitting each other. Every now and then, some student that was standing in front of the door and scream, “Mr. Allen is coming!” and everyone would run back to the game and act as if they had been participating the entire time. I felt badly for the few students that were in fact interested in playing “Zip, Zap, Zop,” because they consistently voiced their frustration with their peers that weren’t letting us go through one round smoothly without disruption.

At the end of rehearsal, Aleeza and I stayed late to speak with Mr. Allen about what tactics we could use to get everyone to focus and participate. He told us about green feathers: tokens that the students use towards raffles and other fun activities through the after-school program that result in prizes. Mr. Allen said that we could bribe the students with green feathers in order to get them to participate. He also recommended writing a visual agenda for rehearsal up on the blackboard in the band room before the start of each rehearsal. Many of the students are visual learners, and seeing what needs to get done between 6:15 to 7:15 p.m. may entice them to cooperate. Fingers crossed that Mr. Allen’s advice will work at our next rehearsal.

This week’s rehearsal was unique in a few ways. For one, this was our first rehearsal without our biggest personality, Adrian. We were also missing Khalil, another regular attendee. This allowed AJ, Dylan, and I to focus our attention on Marcus and Tamiyah as well as frequent attendee Janiyah. Our rehearsal was also unique in its productivity for the time we had our students. There were no behavioral mishaps which have interrupted our previous rehearsals. We practiced reading lines and also discussed costumes, costume changes for students playing multiple roles, and overarching plot lines and themes in the play as a whole. By the end of rehearsal Marcus asked to take on a third role. His willingness to take on multiple characters is very reassuring. He is certainly enthusiastic about the play, but shows his enthusiasm in a subdued way such as volunteering for extra parts, rather than with the extroverted exuberance of a student like Adrian. This provides a good balance within the group which I hope translates into great on-stage dynamics in the long run and another successful rehearsal next week.

I can say without doubt that this was our most productive week at youth life in regards to the Jepson Shakesphere project despite the fact that we only had three of our students present. For whatever reason it just seemed like this week everyone wanted to learn and was very enthusiastic about the performance, something that we really had not seen in weeks past. In some scenes, we were even able to move past simply reading lines and introduce some basic acting in the play. Given this success, our rehearsal time this week was limited. We didn’t get started until 5:15pm because snack had ran over the hour before and we had to end early so that we could let the kids watch the cheerleading elective perform at 5:50pm. Even given these challenges, we still managed to get a lot done. Given this week’s success, look forward to next week’s rehearsal with great enthusiasm.

Monday 10/17 was our first rehearsal in three weeks. Needless to say (especially based on my last blog post), I was very nervous. However, Maddie, Natalie and I went in with a solid plan, and that made me feel good. Hopefully, having a well-organized rehearsal with the right balance of games and play discussion would spark interest.

All in all, I couldn’t be happier with how rehearsal went.

We were back in the chapel, and when we arrived Timone only had Aisha with him. Luckily, a few minutes later more students walked in. We were taken aback by the fact that these were all brand new students: Christina, Talia, Kendra, Jacob (not to be confused with yours truly), and Rufus. But we were immediately motivated by seeing how excited a few of them were. Christina especially was very enthusiastic. She has done theatre before, and is quite familiar with Shakespeare. It will be great to have that constant enthusiasm from Christina in rehearsals. And some of the others, like Jacob and Kendra, weren’t as outspoken as Christina was, but were still smiling and seemed ready to go. Great vibe for the start of rehearsal.

We started off by playing some Zip Zap Zop. It took a couple tries for them all to get the hang of it, but eventually we were going very smoothly, and most everyone was clearly having a good time. Then, we played one-word story. Though the story we ended up with certainly won’t be hitting any bookstore shelves any time soon, everyone was doing a good job when it came to building off of each other. Between Zip Zap Zop and one-word story, there was one student I wasn’t sure of, however. Rufus didn’t seem to be too expressive, and wasn’t smiling much. I took that as a potential unwillingness to participate fully. (Spoiler alert: I was waaaay wrong)

Then, we handed out scripts to the students, and decided that we were going to try reading some lines. We split the students up into two groups, and had one group read the beginning of Act IV, Scene II while the others listened. In the first group, Christina played Feste, Aisha played Malvolio, and Rufus played Toby (I whispered to Maddie, “give him Toby,” thinking back to my earlier concern). We knew from previous rehearsals that Aisha was great with the lines, and this was no different — we plan to give her Malvolio, and she will be great. Christina was very committed to reading and performing the lines, and even though she was a slow reader and had trouble with some of the longer words, she persevered through it. It seems pretty clear to us that as soon as she knows the lines a little better, she will perform with ease. Now, remember that spoiler alert? Here it is. The biggest surprise was Rufus. Though Toby only had about 10 lines, Rufus read them with ease. There were long sentences with long words, and he read excellently. And while earlier in the rehearsal Rufus was very hard to understand, here the clarity with which he spoke was incredible. I think he could be our Sebastian.

Before the next group went, we explained the scene in modern language (using the translation we did in class). It worked really well, and I’m so glad we did that translation.

The next group went: Talia as Feste, Kendra as Malvolio, and Jacob as Toby. Kendra is very shy and quiet, but she was reading well. We will have to work with bringing her energy up, but I think we can! Jacob didn’t seem too enthusiastic about reading at first, but he got through it just fine. The star of this group was Talia. She is very hard to understand (due to speech impediments), but that certainly did not stop her from giving 110%. It was really cool to see her perform it that well. I think this whole rehearsal reaffirmed for me that you simply cannot judge a book by its cover.

We finished off with a game of Bus Stop – highlight’s included Christina’s Taylor Swift and Jacob’s Donald Trump (Jacob has great energy and presence on stage, so we will just need to work with bringing that to the Shakespeare!)

I’m so excited for next rehearsal. We will need to see who comes and who doesn’t. But right now, even if we have too many students, it’s clear to me that we have the makings of a fantastic Act IV cast!

“I am sure care’s an enemy to life” – Sir Toby Belch (Act I, Scene 3, Lines 2-3)

So here’s the thing about bragging about nothing bad happening in your rehearsal group.

It’s basically a signal to the universe to have something bad happen.

Of course, what ended up happening wasn’t actually a bad thing – it just felt like it at the time.

In short, we had four to five new people just get randomly assigned to our group.

Most of which just seemed to have been placed there as a means of giving them something, read anything, to do.

You can imagine how this may have come off as tad stress-inducing when we’d already casted and explained the play to our regulars.

We also, to be perfectly honest, went in less prepared than we should have in general, ranging from not having a solidly prepared game for them to start the session with, to not thinking about breaking up the group into smaller parts when the final scene we were reading really only had two of our actors in it.

So while you can argue that many a small lesson was learned at this session, I think the main one, for me at least, was that I forgot the point of the Project to begin with.

We’re not there to put on a Tony-worthy performance. And while as instigators we have to at least try to make the production something that the troupe cares about, ultimately we should just focus on making sure they have a fun time.

So in the future if we have more or less people in the room than we thought, we’ll just make a quick casting adjustment and go with it.

We’ll definitely do a better job of breaking the group up as well – if we keep having new people, creating a separate “and here’s what happens in the story” group may be worth making while the more constant attendees work on lines.

Ultimately though, it doesn’t matter if we have three Olivia’s or none at the final performance, and although the very thought of either option is making my inner perfectionist twitch, this will be a motto I will keep at the forefront of my mind as we continue with our project.

Besides, despite the numbers shock, we still managed to create a pretty fun list of props and costumes we’re excited to flesh out in more detail during this Wednesday’s work day.

So even if it just ends up being me, Sarah, and Page on the stage for the final show, at least we’re going to look pretty cool!

We did not meet with our group this Thursday (10/20) because the kids had an off campus field trip, and they would not be returning in time for our rehearsal.  Since we have encountered a few scheduling conflicts in the past, we are not surprised by this kind of news anymore.  We have learned to be very adaptable when conflicts arise, and we plan our next rehearsal accordingly.  Next week, we definitely will have the group start working with the script and getting used to reading Shakespeare.

This week we really started to work with our kids on reading through the script. We started with a few games before sitting them down to read through the script. Now that we have a small room all to ourselves, it is easy to hear the kids speak. In the session before, we casted and explained the parts to the kids while giving them out to them. This week a good amount of the kids from the week before returned, which was somewhat of a relief. When reading through the script, it was amazing to see that a lot of the kids could read through it pretty well, as if they had red Shakespeare before. We have one kid who is playing Duke Orsino who has some trouble reading through the script and forming the correct words but he doesn’t seem to be bothered by it. The kids seem extremely excited about the play. Especially one girl who was not happy to be there at all who, by the end, was asking to read more lines and potentially have a bigger part in the play. We are excited to see how many kids come back this week and we are excited to start focusing on props and costumes!

This week went way better. We started off the session with two rounds of zip zap zop. Then we were able to get them to actually sit down and actually look at the scripts. It was amazing! We talked about the different characters and the setting. The kids decided they wanted it to be set in modern day England. However, they wanted to do various accents so it will be a UN conference style where everyone will be from around the world. In terms of characters, all of the kids initially wanted to be the clown/the fool. In the end two of them said they wanted to be Viola and Duke Orsino, so there is hope and we will not have an all clown cast potentially. We didn’t get to look over the script much, I worry that we spend too much time teaching/learning new games to play, however they do enjoy them. Unfortunately next week I will not be at practice because I have to go to Charleston for my cousin’s wedding. However I do know that we plan to go over character descriptions and help them choose parts.

“If this were played upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction.” – Fabian (Act III, Scene IV, Lines 116-117)

I’m not going to lie, at this point in the rehearsal process I was expecting the Thing to have happened already.

What is the Thing you ask?

Well, the Thing is that roadblock/curve-ball that no matter how hard you try you just can’t manage to anticipate before you’re already standing in the chaos it’s left in its wake.

Dramatic? Oh for sure, but this is the theater after all, so one could argue I’m just tailoring my natural anxiety to be more thematically relevant.

That being said, our third rehearsal went by pretty much without any hitches.

We got everyone into the room and through our ice breakers without any dramatic displays of disinterest, and Sarah even managed to convince our costume mistress student to have a part as well.

While we were technically missing our Olivia, we had one student volunteer to read the lines for her, and worse case scenario, it would be easy to sub the “understudy” in as the real thing should our regular Olivia be a consistent no-show.

The biggest pre-rehearsal anxiety on my part at least was how were our students going to react to the actual script?

This was the first time they were able to look at it for an extended amount of time after-all, and I freely admit I was expecting a reaction ranging from shock to a full on troupe mutiny.

It turns out I had nothing to worry about though. While our Duke Orsino did rightfully point out how “weird” the language was, they all stuck with it, and frankly did an amazing job.

Our Orsino has the most trouble, but mostly just with unfamiliar words, and our Viola is really something.

We’re actually a little short cast-wise, even when everyone is present, so all three of us Jepson students will take a part.

As someone who’s always seen themselves as more of a director than an actress, I fully expect to be upstaged by our remarkable students, but I actually think it’s better for our troupe to see us not only directly involved with the acting, but also stumble our own way over the occasional Shakespearean turn-of-phrase.

Probably the funniest part of the read through was us realizing that middle-schoolers are still very much aware of the modern context of the word “ho.”

Although in the context of the play it wasn’t anything even remotely sexual, it still caused a pause, gasp, and giggle out of the bulk of our troupe.

If anything, it was a good reminder that even when editing through a script it’s easy to miss things you personally wouldn’t expect other people to catch or understand, and to our troupe’s credit they all voted to just cut the line completely from the show.

I think the overall lesson of this rehearsal, at least for myself, was that it’s easy to go into a new space and assume things, the troupe won’t be able to read well, they won’t catch these bits of the dialog, etc.

While in a perfect world it would be possible to walk into a new situation without assumptions, I think an equally important (and possibly more realistic) process would be to at the very least be willing to toss or alter those assumptions the moment they are challenged.

As far as tonight’s rehearsal goes, we’re going to finish up our read through and start talking prop ideas.

I’ve really enjoyed planning and running rehearsals alongside reading the “Hamilton” book since it’s comforting and pretty cool to see the similarities in rehearsals and problems that can be shared by any type of production, whether it’s destined for Broadway or for a local community stage.

Does this mean I’m going to start doing my hair in a Lin Manuel Miranda styled ponytail?

Not at all. But at the very least it’ll give me a reason to keep Hamilton songs playing on repeat in my head, even when we’re focusing on Shakespeare.