Several students developed “an
appetite for eloquence” this winter, one result of a
six-week stay by William Lacey, former director of the
theater and professor at Boston University.
Lacey was guest director at the Yulman
Theater, where he directed a workshop production of Two
Gentlemen of Verona, one of Shakespeare's earliest plays.
Lacey is just one of many guest artists who have taken
residency at the College in the last several years to
share their expertise with students.
An internationally-renowned specialist
on elevated text such as Shakespeare and Moliere, Lacey
is no stranger to Union. He starred as Eliphalet Nott in
God Delivers, a historic play commissioned for the
Bicentennial celebration, and has since returned to Union
to offer a short workshop for theater students.
Union has presented Shakespearean plays
in the past, but William Finlay, director of the Yulman
Theater, says that he had put off tackling Shakespeare
again until a new curriculum incorporating voice and
speech classes took hold. With that program now three
years old, Finlay thought Union actors were ready.
“We are so lucky to have someone
of his standing in the theater-training world,”
Finlay says. “To have him at Union, especially in
his area of expertise — elevated text and voice — is
wonderful. He is one of the premier trainers in the
country.”
Lacey, who is accustomed to training
conservatory students who have had extensive training in
theater, says that he welcomed the chance to work with
students with a liberal arts background.
“I wondered how talented,
intelligent students who didn't have the conservatory
training would respond to Shakespearean text and how far
we could take it,” he says. “It has been an
interesting investigation for all of us, and I'm very
pleased at what has developed. The students have been
great to work with and everyone has engaged in the
idea.”
Lacey based his direction on the way
Shakespeare's plays were performed when they were
written. He strives to have actors approach the play
innocently, letting the language carry the play.
(Shakespearean actors in the sixteenth century did not
have the luxury of looking over the entire script before
performing. Instead, they memorized just their own lines
and cues, and hence Shakespeare's language carries his
plays.)
When dealing with elevated text,
“you let the language play through you, and that
language is palpable,” Lacey says. “The actors
begin to realize that words are not labels — that they
are experiences. That is when you start to get back to
what it would have been like in Shakespeare's day when
the audience didn't read and therefore didn't visualize
words; they experienced physical behaviors.”
Doing Gentlemen of Verona as a workshop
allowed students to struggle with and learn Shakespeare's
language, Finlay says. “I really felt that in our
first foray into Shakespeare, I wanted to concentrate
primarily on the text and the words of Shakespeare,
because this is what is so difficult for kids who are not
trained in verse as actors,” he says.
Lacey adds, “We've been trying to
do it all through language and let that guide us. It is
the actor's job to find the impulse to give rise to the
text, and Shakespeare gives you a lot of text. In modern
theater, you act in the silences.”
Lacey says that many students developed
an appetite for Shakespeare.
“When they came into this, they
weren't sure how they were supposed to approach
Shakespeare,” he says. “But as they clarified
their thoughts, they discovered that Shakespeare gives
them the rhythms and the impulses, that he provides them
with a lot more than the contemporary playwright does. He
brings to a level of awareness things that usually you do
in a sonnet. Here, an actor has an elaborate score that
plays through, but it has to be played with
sincerity.”
Ari Gottlieb '99, an actor in Two Gentlemen of Verona, says that
he was at first a bit uneasy about attempting
Shakespeare, but that working with Lacey was
“unbelievable. He is so passionate about his work
that he really breathes life into Shakespeare.”
Because Union's theater faculty is
small — three full-time professors and one full-time
technical director — it is essential that students work
with a variety of directors.
“It is vital that students get
different opinions and have the opportunity to work under
different directors and under different artistic
sensibilities,” he says. “Bringing in
professionals from the outside means that our students
not only get that glimpse into a different type of
teaching but have these great contacts when they
graduate.”
Professional guest directors are chosen
carefully because they have to be able to teach at the
same time that they direct. Gottlieb says that Lacey was
both. For the first two weeks of rehearsal the cast sat
around a table working with Lacey to learn Shakespeare's
voice. “As a result of this experience I am looking
into summer programs that deal with Shakespeare and
classical text,” he concludes, acknowledging that
he, too, has developed “an appetite for
Shakespeare.”