“How should we kill you?” a student asks Bill Finlay.
“Do you want to shoot me?” asks the professor of theater. “I have a gun in my office.”
Bizarre, even alarming, talk perhaps. But the exchange is de rigueur for a special topics class that Finlay is teaching this term on stage fighting.
Finlay circulates among the dozen student-combatants who are rehearsing their final projects, prodding them with questions and offering advice.
“Be careful, that's a dangerous hit,” the theater professor tells seniors Emily Kattef and Becky Rubin. With a small realignment, Finlay ensures that Rubin's fist is a safe distance from Kattef's nose.
Moments later, Rubin sends Kattef headlong into the door of the theater department's red pickup truck. A loud thud leaves a visitor convinced that Kattef has met certain injury. But her hand _ not her face _ makes contact with the truck. “OK,” says Rubin, “Let's write it down.” The fight comes to an abrupt halt as the two scurry over to a pad of paper to notate their moves.
The students are to give a public presentation of their final fight projects during the last week of classes.
In another brawl, seniors Adam Shebitz and Derrick Herrington are going at it with mops and brooms. They are staging a fight between janitors, a combat that will incorporate all the tools of the trade (dust pans, spray cleaners and feather dusters) and some that are not (plastic forks and swords).
Two other senior theater majors, Spencer Christie and Ali Struzziero, are rehearsing a Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers dance that turns into a fight complete with swordplay.
Each of the dozen students has taken the pre-requisite “Movement for Actors” class, and Finlay goes to great lengths to ensure that all their moves are safe.
While the course may be unusual at most colleges, it is a standard offering at all major theater programs, according to Finlay, a specialist in combat choreography who previously taught the art at Boston University. Finlay also has choreographed fights for a number of plays and films.
“It is an absolute necessity that actors know how to fight and to fight safely,” Finlay says. “It is one of the requirements of the craft. It makes them more castable.”
Students – most dressed for comfort in sweats and t-shirts and all wearing protective gloves – began a recent class by warming up through a series of advances, retreats and evasive moves used in sword fighting. Finlay then pairs them up to practice a series of combat moves. “Listen to the rhythm of the swords hitting,” he says.
“Now remember,” Finlay says to his students, “I want your fight to include swordplay and at least one other form of combat that we've practiced in the class. And your fight does not have to end in a death.”