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Adolescent Actors Taming Hamlet By Jillian Hanson Despite the area's thriving arts community, not many theatre groups from the Pioneer Valley are invited to tour their work internationally. It may come as a surprise, then, to hear that Northampton's Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, a company of adolescent actors (some as young as 16), has been asked to take its production of Hamlet-Assault on Innocence/Asalto a la Inocencia to Athens, Greece this fall. Thanks to Smith alumna and Serious Play! founder Sheryl Stoodley M.A.'89, the ensemble has been producing innovative, professional-quality theatre in the area for more than five years, even though the group seems to be the area's best-kept performing arts secret. 
A company of adolescent actors,
some as young as 16 years old, makes up the cast of Hamlet-Assault
on Innocence. They have been invited to perform the contemporary
adaptation of Shakespeare's play in Athens, Greece this fall.
Photo by Ellen Augarten. The company's contemporary adaptation of one of Shakespeare's greatest plays is designed to raise questions about what it means to be alive in our times, especially as young adults, and also deals with race and biculturalism in today's society. Co-directors Stoodley and Shakespeare and Company's Jonathan Croy have adapted the script themselves, adding original writing from award-winning playwright Migdalia Cruz, a New Dramatist alumna and writer-in-residence at Latino Chicago Theater Company. Although excited about the invitation to perform abroad, Stoodley, Croy and the young cast are well aware that their trip is not a sure thing. In order to participate in the Fifth Annual Conference of Women Playwrights International in Athens, they need to raise $15,000 in the next few months to cover the cost of airfare, food and shipping their set. Members of the Athens Smith Club have offered to put the actors up: Evangelia Agapalidou-Panagopoulou '70 and Margaret Stathopoulos '70, both faculty in the English department at Athens College, are enthusiastically arranging lodging for the group in homes of Smith alumnae. The ensemble is hoping to receive enough grant funding and private contributions to cover the cost of the trip. As the driving force behind Serious Play!, Stoodley has proved, over the course of her career, that she believes in bringing the creative process to underserved populations. While applying for the master's program in theatre at Smith in 1986, Stoodley also wrote a grant to the Massachusetts Foundation for Humanity and Public Policy to do an extensive writing and theatre workshop with women in prison. She was accepted on both counts and was able, with the help of Smith theatre faculty, to make the three-year project an integral part of her graduate work. "I was really fortunate," says Stoodley. "Smith allowed me to use it as an independent study, and the department rallied around my project." Her work with inmates culminated in the play Ain't No Man Dragged That Moon Down Yet, which Stoodley toured to various venues in New England with inmate actors. In the summer of 1992, Stoodley led a two-week summer theatre intensive at Smith for actors between the ages of 16 and 23. Other workshops for adolescents followed, and Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble was formed in 1995. That same year, they took up residence in a prominent location in downtown Northampton, where they have been performing ever since. Five years later, on a Sunday afternoon in early March, the ensemble is hard at work. Actors sit or sprawl across the bare stage, while Stoodley and Croy work out a bit of blocking with three life-size Japanese-style puppets being manipulated by company members. As they move through the scene, the actors' physical presence onstage-as well as their comfort with the dense Shakespearean text-is striking. While Croy works closely with each actor to make the text real to him or her, Stoodley trains her company in physical expressiveness. She uses movement exercises developed by Tadashi Suzuki and improvisational techniques created by avant-garde director Anne Bogart to ground her students in their bodies and help them realize their characters. "I'm really interested in this because I don't think the future of theatre lies in trying to compete with the realism of film," Stoodley asserts. "I think we have to ignite audiences and attract them in new ways. And I think total expressiveness of the actor, everything he or she can give to that live moment, is going to bring audiences in." Stoodley's enthusiasm for process is infectious, not only to her actors, but to members of the Smith community as well. Smith's own Leonard Berkman, Anne Hesseltine Hoyt Professor of Theatre, sits on the company's board of directors, and Ada Comstock scholar and theatre major Tama Chambers '02 is currently serving as assistant to the director for Hamlet. "I was just blown away when I saw the work that Serious Play! was doing," Chambers says. "These are kids from all different walks of life and facing the challenges of adolescence, and they are so devoted to this theatre." Chambers, who first met Stoodley while a student at Holyoke Community College, says she considers her to be an important mentor in her theatre training. "The ensemble process and the creative process of the director are what I'm most interested in right now," she says. "I'm learning so much from watching this group work." Company members, who are required to make a one-year commitment to the ensemble, are effusive about their experiences as part of the group, which they say bears no resemblance to high school drama clubs. "The best thing about this group is that we use our own personal experiences, we don't have to hide that as actors," says Ann-Marie Wayne, 18, who is playing Ophelia in the current production. "We use what people bring to the group, and everyone is really respectful of that work." Candy Santiago, 20, is a six-year veteran of the company. "This training helps me in every other area of life," she says. "It has made me more open-minded. Sheryl has a passion for theatre, and she brings it out in you. That keeps pulling me in here." "They may be adolescents, but they're actors," Stoodley says. "They are artists." She and her co-director trust and respect their actors so much that they give them a generous hand in creating the play. "Adolescence is the most furiously creative time in our lives," says Croy. "We are all generating the play together here. It's an honest-to-god collaboration." From the beginning, Serious Play! has received rave reviews from critics and playwrights. Perhaps, with the help of international audiences, Hamlet-Assault on Innocence/Asalto a la Inocencia will catapult this unique, hard-working group of artists into the local -- and international -- limelight. For more information about Serious Play! Theatre Ensemble, call (413) 586-1438; or write them at P.O. Box 148, Northampton, MA 01061. |
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