Iphigenia: The Chorus

As promised last time, I will drag myself away from the Greek Legendarium and any sort of comparative literature speculation in this final blog about our Iphigenia, closing this Saturday. Instead I want to discuss the Chorus, a foundational element of the Greek Tragedy, and the role our interpretation of it serves in grounding our play in reality.

This is not the first show we have done featuring a Chorus; Henry V has a Chorus introducing each act, a role that is often played by one person but is specifically named as Chorus in the script (Shakespeare would play with this idea again during his Greatest Hits Era with Pericles, in which the Chorus is represented by the story’s author Gower). And our Tempest from Jesus Christ a decade ago 2013 turned Ariel into a truly omnipresent force on the island by making every actor but Prospero, whenever they were not playing someone else, function as a choral interpretation of the spirit. But the Greek relationship with the Chorus was…shall we say, Original, and this production afforded us another opportunity to play around with this ancient and tricky stagecraft.

L-R: Josh Adams, Andrew Keller, Scott Gaines, Britt Duff. From We Happy Few’s 2013 The Tempest. Photo by Jon Harvey.

The Chorus was a feature of 100% of Greek tragedies. The very idea of staged theatrical production at all grew out of choral recitations; when, apocryphally, Thespis stepped out from the Chorus at a Festival Dionysia and spoke as an individual character in a story. The concept of ‘actors’ or ‘a play’ were new technologies for the Tragedians; it is claimed that Sophocles came up with the idea that there could be three actors in a scene at a time, and before his innovation there were only two, which holds up in what little Aeschylus we have. And it is further claimed that Aeschylus innovated having TWO actors on stage, and that before him one character at a time spoke with the Chorus, which does not to me sound like the most riveting entertainment [no offense to the one-man and one-woman shows out there, you are free to change my mind when I decide to watch one of you. But don’t hold your breath -KH]

The Greek Chorus represents a crowd of people observing the action of the protagonists: often soldiers or sailors, women, slaves, or elders of the city. They are on stage for the entirety of the show and generally have little to no power over the situation at hand. Characters may speak with them, and they will express their approval or, more likely, condemnation of what is happening on stage, but with very few exceptions they are powerless to do anything other than observe with dread and dismay the protagonist’s downfall [find a ‘D’ word for “protagonist” here -ed.] And a key element of the Greek Chorus is that they speak with one, or occasionally two, voices. When they speak to another character they are as one, expressing the impotent thoughts or desires of the crowd of people they represent. But in their choral interludes they will occasionally split in two, the strophe and antistrophe, and speak to each other, indicated in the original and in verse translations with different lyrical meters that I could not with a gun to my head explain, much to the dismay of every Literature teacher I’ve ever had as well as, I’m sure, Benji Djain, John McGowan, and all the other Literature Professor Friends of the Company that are shaking their heads as they read this. The only metrical form I could ever really wrap my head around was the caesura-heavy alliterative poetry of the Vikings and Anglo-Saxons. But I digress. The Chorus’ primary function is to exposit, explain, and contextualize the story, much like myself, though I think they were a little less pedantic about it than I.

Our Chorus, composed, like in our Tempest, of everybody in the cast who isn’t playing a named character in a scene, functions as both actors and audience. A combination of bored Greek soldiers and the Players of Pippin or Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, they step in and out of roles as the circumstances call for, and otherwise observe the action as it unfolds around them. Our choral interludes are also both the same and different from the Classical mode; instead of singing in unison about Many-Towered Ilium or splitting in half for a back-and-forth discussion about which god Ajax had angered, our Chorus debates and analyzes the story as it is being told, with at least as many viewpoints as there are actors to express them. In this way they allow us to fill out that essential contextualization that the Chorus traditionally handles and that Greek Tragedies really require for a modern audience, without becoming overly florid or didactic by expounding 20-30 lines of poetry, as their ancient predecessors would have.

L-R: Debora Crabbe, Robert Pike, Matt Sparacino, Mary Myers, Bri Houtman. From We Happy Few’s 2023 Iphigenia. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher.

Another major advantage of this structure is that we keep many of our actors on the stage for most of the time, which forces us to reckon with, account for, and recognize costuming quick changes, often happening on stage and in view of the audience. If you’ve been a regular reader you will know how much significance I place on quick changes and multi casting [if you’re new to the blog or the company, it’s a lot -KH] Many of We Happy Few’s plays are on some level about artifice and staging, but this one is explicitly and textually about the creation of stories, how and why stories come into being. The actors know they’re in a play; they talk with regularity about what did happen, or should happen, or will happen next on the stage. The audience knows they’re watching a play; you’re the ones who gave me their hard-earned money for a ticket, stepped into a small square room with black walls and lights hanging from the ceiling, and sat in a chair to watch us pretend to be Greek. And we as a company have neither the budget nor the inclination to attempt to create true verisimilitude of a three millennia old story, especially when the core conceit of our retelling is that stories are changed by the context in which they are told and by the people doing the telling. There is little advantage to us breaking our necks attempting to maintain the illusion that we are standing on a becalmed beach in Greece when we are openly discussing the craft of storytelling in this piece. By contrast, there are MAJOR advantages to keeping fresh in the audience’s mind that it is ordinary people telling this story now, just as it was ordinary people telling this story hundreds or thousands of years ago. Euripides and Racine had the same discussions with their actors and directors and whatever designers and technical artists they had at the Festival Dionysia or the stages of Versailles and Paris as we did through our rehearsal process. The only differences were what language the discussions were in, and what the play looked like at the end of them.

I hope you were able to follow the meander of this blog from the historical function of the Chorus to the significance of knowing that human beings create the art that you enjoy. If you want to see what in the world I am talking about, we still have a handful of performances so you can come and see for yourself! Tickets are available here for tonight through Saturday June 17th!

Pericles, Prince of Tyre: Driven Before The Winds

Hi again, everybody! We’re about halfway through the run of Pericles and I wanted to check back in with you all, see how you were doing, brag about our amazing reviews and talk about our play for a while, to edify some of you and shame the rest into buying tickets and coming to see the show, like you know you should have already. And now that we’ve opened I can actually talk about specific, as opposed to structural, elements. We get to delve into what makes OUR production work, not just the building blocks and context of the play itself. And nothing makes our production work quite so much as the breakneck pace of the action.

Given what I’ve told you in my previous blog posts you probably know by now that a lot of stuff happens in this play, in a lot of different places, usually in very quick succession (or, in one notable place, after a 14-year time jump). Set in castles and palaces and temples and fishermen’s huts and beaches and tourney yards and gardens and whorehouses on at least six different islands and several ships, not to mention the storms and assassins and pirates and dream sequences and narrative interludes that dog our heroes, Pericles runs the risk of being disjointed, bogged down, and poorly structured [Much like this sentence! -KH]. Too much happens too quickly in too many places and it is easy to get lost. On a metatheatrical level there is something very interesting about that, the play running out of control like a ship tossed about in a storm. But just because something is intellectually interesting does not make it good theatre, as I have repeatedly been told at pitch meetings.

From We Happy Few’s 2018 production of Pericles. L-R: Dave Gamble, Jenna Berk, Grant Cloyd, Charlie Retzlaff, Jon Reynolds, Kerry McGee, Jennifer J. Hopkins. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher.

Fortunately for us, our particular 90-minute small-cast stripped-down aesthetic works extremely well in this sort of situation. To continue the ship metaphor, our technical flexibility allows us to stay ahead of the storm. Instead of potentially stalling and losing momentum in lengthy scene transitions or costume changes, as a straight production might do, we can lean into it (which you might remember is my favorite device) and let the play rush us along. We trust in new lighting looks, our signature rapid costume changes, some quick box movements, and above all the intelligence of our audience, to understand that this new scene is happening in a new place. Instead of letting the settings and scene changes overwhelm and slow down the action we can use the breakneck action to speed ourselves up, keep the play moving too fast for anyone to get lost.

It helps, too, that we have more control over our pacing than a traditional companies. We are not beholden to each and every word of the text. We hold ourselves to a higher standard: a 90-minute show. Because we do so much cutting and rebalancing of the text to find the absolute bare bones of the story, we control more or less how long we spend in any given location. If we followed the flow of the play itself the audience would often spend just enough time somewhere to get used to it, and then be disoriented and lost again at the next scene transition. For us, though, movement becomes the norm instead of the exception. We can once again use the momentum of the play to our advantage, to keep the audience on their toes and ready for whatever comes next.

 

From We Happy Few’s 2018 production of Pericles. Foreground L-R: Jenna Berk, Jon Reynolds. Background L-R: Kerry McGee, Charlie Retzlaff, Jennifer J. Hopkins, Grant Cloyd, Dave Gamble. Photo by Mark Williams Hoelschler.

 

But all of those staging and cutting tricks wouldn’t mean a thing if we didn’t have the chops to sell it to the audience. For all of this to work we need to MOVE, and we need to have clarity and purpose. The audience is smart and they can follow our breakneck island-hopping if we trust them, but that trust has to go both ways. They have to trust US, as well, to guide them from place to place, or they’ll get hopelessly lost between who is who and where we are. As you may have guessed from the structure of this blog post, however, we have multiple advantages on this front as well. We’ve got a wonderfully trusting and energetic cast, an altogether-too-qualified movement team, and a proven history of stripping down classical stories and bringing them to a new audience. Oh, I guess our director is all right, too, seeing as he was the one who realized how to put all of these things together and shepherd this play from an inconsistent island-hopping hodge-podge to the critically acclaimed show you still have a chance to see! We’re running tonight, tomorrow, and then Wednesday through Saturday of next week, come see what I’m talking about!

The Winter’s Tale: Putting the “Few” in We Happy Few

Well, hello again, adoring fans.  Fancy seeing you here, on our blog, of all places.  It’s still me, your handsome, clever and oh-so-humble production manager Keith Hock, with another blog entry, just in time for our second weekend of shows.  After our opening night last Friday I was sat in front of a computer and told if I didn’t write another post by the next weekend I would be fired realized that this show’s aggressive double-casting gave me a wonderful opening to put together another blog post to share with you all.

Surely some of you, as you left our shows last weekend, had wondered why we would take a play with a cast of 18 named characters and innumerable Guards, Lords, Ladies, Mariners, Gaolers, Shepherdesses, Satyrs, etc., and attempt to put it on with only six people.  And doubtless you would cast your mind back to our previous shows (as I have no doubt you are all long-time fans and have seen all of our performances) and you would be struck! astounded! to realize that, why, we’ve never had more than eight actors in a show!  How can such a thing be?  Well, don’t you all worry your pretty little heads, I’d be more than happy to assuage your fears and give you all a peek behind the dramaturgical veil as to how, and, more importantly, why We Happy Few puts on plays with so few actors. (There’s some arts-management reasons that I’ll go into as well, but that’s not NEARLY as sexy as the phrase ‘dramaturgical veil’).

As you have all noticed, in the narrative I have constructed to frame this blog posting, all of our shows have been notoriously light on actors.  Our last three shows, Duchess of Malfi, Romeo and Juliet, and The Tempest, all had only eight actors, while our debut, Hamlet, tied Winter’s Tale with six!  For reference, going on their Dramatis Personae pages, those shows called for 15 (Duchess), 20 (R&J), 12 (Tempest), and an astounding 22 (Hamlet) named characters*, not to mention anywhere from a magical island to an entire vendetta-fueled city full of supernumeraries.  The Tempest made up for its relatively light 12 characters with a veritable brugh’s worth of fairies, spirits, nymphs and reapers to fill the stage.  We very cleverly sidestepped that issue by turning all of those fairies into Ariel, and then also casting everyone in the show who wasn’t Prospero as Ariel, but how do we deal with the apparent 45-person cast list that Shakespeare [or Webster] has presented us with?
*I say ‘named’ characters but I’m also counting significant characters.  In Hamlet, the gravediggers, the head player, and the priest are all nameless, but since they play substantial roles in their respective scenes (more important than some with actual names, as you’ll see below) they all got counted in my census.

From We Happy Few’s 2013 production of The Tempest. Background L-R: Josh Adams, Britt Duff, Scott Gaines. Foreground: Andrew Keller

The answer is we don’t, neither us nor pretty much any other theatre company in the world.  As cultured citizens of the world I am sure you all go to see plenty of plays that AREN’T We Happy Few-produced, and I’m equally sure that you’ve noticed that the actor bio sections of the programs aren’t 20 pages long and filled with Servants, Soldiers and Guards.  There’s a reason for that.  Did you remember that there was a character named Fortinbras in Hamlet?  What about Voltimand, or Cornelius?  Sometimes we realize that a character doesn’t need to be there, or a scene goes on a little too long, so we do some cutting and combining.  Instead of Reynaldo (Polonius’ servant, apparently) and a whole crowd of other, nameless servants jostling around in Elsinore, we just use Reynaldo, whenever a servant appears.  Or we decide that the play can survive without servants, and we ditch them altogether.  I’ve seen full-stage, big budget productions of Romeo and Juliet that just completely did away with Paris.  Our own Hamlet excised Horatio, and nobody missed him.  It’s not that these characters and scenes don’t serve a purpose in the text, Shakespeare did little needlessly (I’m ignoring Timon of Athens when I say that).  They just don’t serve a purpose in the story we’re telling, so off they go.

All theatre companies do it, but we have to do it more than most.  As a predominantly Fringe company, with a stated focus on creating “stripped down, small cast, ensemble productions”, our timing and manpower is intentionally limited.  We bring all of our shows down to 90 minutes by the time we open, and we do it by scrapping every beat, every moment, every character, that isn’t completely necessary to telling the story we want to tell.  Sometimes that can hurt.  Did you know there was a surprisingly prominent Duke Ferdinand/werewolf subplot in Duchess of Malfi?  I did, because I watched us gradually pare it away in rehearsal as we fought to get to 90 minutes.  In addition to being crazy badass, it was powerful character development for Ferdinand, who loses his already-tenuous connection with his humanity after the barbarism of his parricide and talks himself into the belief that he is a wolf.  We were all sad to see it go, but we knew that it was a few minutes worth of dialogue we couldn’t afford to tell the story we needed to tell.

Greater Werewolf, 5th Edition, Magic: The Gathering. Art by Dennis Detwiller

Cutting characters and scenes is all well, and it certainly helps us lower the cast requirements (which you’ll recall is the point I’m supposed to be making in this post), but it only gets us so far.  What we really do to cut that down is double-cast, have one actor play two (or more) roles.  This buys you a lot of space, as many of your actors in smaller roles can serve double duty.  Sampson done being in the play after Act I?  Stuff him in a monk’s robe and he’s Friar John!  All your sailors drowned at the beginning when Prospero brought forth the storm?  (they didn’t, re-read Act I Scene 2, but they’re never seen again so its the same thing)  Roll them in glitter and now they’re spirits!

Combining these two things, cutting and double-casting, can usually get you to somewhere around 12-15 actors.  That’s pretty good, and it works for other companies, but it’s not enough for us.  We take our double-casting a step or two further than a lot of other companies.  Earlier I mentioned that the actors that are double cast are usually the non-leading parts, because they have fewer lines and are in fewer scenes; their casting is a matter of convenience.  OUR double-casting is deliberate and ubiquitous, especially under the guidance of director/producer/founder/superhero, Hannah Todd.  In her productions the only characters we have NOT double-cast were Prospero in The Tempest and Romeo and Juliet in… Romeo and Juliet; Prospero to emphasize his control over everything that happens on the island, and the star-crossed teens to point out their solitude as the only lovers in a city full of hate (My astute readers will argue that Hamlet was single-cast as well, but our Hamlet also spoke the lines for his dead father.  Whether or not the ghost should count as a character in OUR interpretation is up for debate, but since he had two character’s worth of lines he counts as double-cast for my purposes).  Everyone else has been at least double cast, and most of those casting choices have been meaningful, not just a consequence of what scenes happened when.  It was no coincidence that Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were also Ophelia and Laertes, or that Tybalt was also the Nurse, or that, as I mentioned earlier, everyone but Prospero, even Caliban, was Ariel.  These choices serve a greater thematic purpose and say more about the show than simply what actors are available for those scenes.

From We Happy Few’s 2012 Hamlet. Left-Right: Raven Bonniwell (Ophelia), Billy Finn (Laertes).

From We Happy Few’s 2012 Hamlet. Left-Right: Billy Finn (Rosencrantz or Guildenstern), Chris Genebach (Hamlet), Raven Bonniwell (the other one).

But we have attained more saturation with our multi-casting for The Winter’s Tale than with any show before.  If you saw it already, surely you realized how significant it was that Kerry McGee embody both Mamillius and his sister Perdita, or that Kiernan McGowan play both the doomed Antigonus and the servant who relayed his demise, or that Raven Bonniwell portray both Hermione and Camillo’s mirrored punishments.  How fitting that Nathan Bennett give us both the prideful, paranoid, appearance-obsessed Leontes and the ludicrous cross-dressing confluence of Dorcas and Mopsa.  How touching that Katy Carkuff deliver the baby Perdita as Paulina, and raise it across the sea as the Shepherd.  And how truly remarkable that William Vaughan’s nameless lord (guard?) who comforts Mamillius in the beginning, turn out to be none other than Perdita’s love Florizel at the end.*  I told you last time there was magic to be had by the double handful in the Romances, you just have to know where to look.

*If you didn’t realize how all this was to be significant, or haven’t seen it yet and have no idea what I’m talking about, tickets are still available for all our upcoming shows here!