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They had to be two of the year's least likely performances at Smith: an abbreviated version of Ben Jonson's 1606 comedy Volpone, presented twice early in December as an Acting I class project. After all, Jonson's brand of satire--"repulsive and unamiable," William Hazlitt called it long ago--has never been known to pack in the crowds and send them home happy. And even those of us dyspeptic enough to actually like the play could wonder why Smith actors would ever want to take on so many grotesque male roles. As it turned out, however, that hurdle was eased by the fact that the production was done in mask--an inspiration realized through a collaboration between the acting class, taught by Ellen Kaplan, and a theater design course called Movements in Design, taught by Catherine (Kiki) Smith '71. The 23 actors included many first-years, plenty of returning students, some Ada Comstock Scholars, and a lone male from Hampshire College. With or without acting experience, nearly everyone had something special to offer. "I have performance artists, visual artists and people with interests in poetry, dance, music," Kaplan reported in mid-November. "They bring a wide range of skills and experiences with which they can inform the performance." The masks made the mix that much richer. "A mask is about projecting, amplifying the face," Kaplan said. "When you put one on, it's as if there's a whole other presence entering the room. It's very freeing, very releasing for young actors. The big hump for us has been in moving from our early exercises, in which we wore neutral masks and improvised responses to external stimuli, to articulating a text. That's difficult." That being the case, why tackle so daunting a text as Volpone? Kaplan offered a number of reasons. First, the theater department has tended recently to stage fewer pre-20th-century plays, and she wanted to show her students "how much the classics have to teach us in terms of craft--if we're willing to do our homework, to learn about their world, their history, their context, and to begin to make choices outside our everyday reality." She found further encouragement from a colleague: "Our theater historian, Susan Clark, speaks passionately about the need to have students who read these texts connect them to a living tradition, see them. "Beyond that, I chose Volpone because I love it," Kaplan said. "It's a really rich play, one many people aren't familiar with. It's very funny and offers itself up beautifully for character-mask work. And I wanted to show the students that it is profoundly important that we address this work as actors: unpeel it, get inside it, understand that it's not so remote. Volpone is a brilliant critique of insane greed, which remains very much a part of our world." Having chosen the play, Kaplan trimmed it into something that beginning actors could handle. She linked a series of key scenes with narrative, planning to assign each scene to a team of two or three actors so there would be no stars and all the major roles could have a number of interpretations. To better set off the masks, she opted for a spare production: "No sets except for the most moderate cubes, no lights-just masks, costume elements and very simple staging."
Ellen Kaplan works to keep the class's energy and control in dual harness. Kaplan proceeded cautiously, beginning the class with a series of exercises that had nothing to do with the text and everything to do with encouraging imagination and spontaneity. "I built up a lot of goodwill, so when the time came for the students look at the play, they more or less felt 'All right, that's weird, but OK,'" she explained. "We had a frank discussion about how difficult the play is, and their feelings about that. Then we were able to get beyond that to see why we still wanted to do it." Even so, the transition wasn't painless. Jessica Mele, a first-year from Wrentham, Massachusetts, remembered that "one minute we were in this warm, nurturing environment, and then suddenly we were all men and all evil." Alysabeth (Abe) Young, a junior from New Orleans and a seasoned performance artist, also balked at "this completely constricted, awkward male universe with this language that none of us much liked." Yet she, like many in the class, was eventually won over by the language. "I've enjoyed having to dwell on each of the words," she said. Getting her actors to that point was one of Kaplan's great challenges. "Part of what's exciting for an actor about heightened language is that it reflects complexity of thought and intensity of feeling," she said. "It's all there for a reason, but the beginning actor often tries to swallow it in one breath as if it were just lots of sounds. She needs to simplify, break it down-look at where the sentences are, then where the thoughts are, then what are the words are. We're working with small pieces of text, but each bit has to be worked with and very specifically defined--not the general thought, but the precise thought. Once we have that, we look at the scansion: where is the emphasis, and what does that mean? Knowing that is a great help because it helps you remember, it tells you what to do. It's very freeing." Melissa Laurie, a first-year from Norfolk, Virginia, and a graduate of a performing arts high school, said that "dealing with text is always hard-to go from plain theater exercises to having text and having to remind yourself that the words are not a prison. It's surprising that in an introductory-level class Ellen's making us work with text, and especially this sort of text. I think it speaks a lot about what she thinks we're capable of."
Abe Young '99 (left) and Jessica Horn '01 explore the dynamics of chicanery. No doubt it did, but Kaplan also kept pushing them to reach beyond words. "It's been so incredible how Ellen's brought all the playfulness into this, so that we can feel free to use our bodies as much as our voices," Abe Young said. The masks were a big part of that effort. Jessie McCoy, a sculptor and Ada Comstock Scholar from Lyme, Connecticut, came to the class with no acting experience. "I love to be playful, but only when I feel secure," she said. "When I first tried on my character mask, I looked in the mirror and felt nothing: I saw the mask and appreciated it and the play of shadow on it, but nothing came to me until I turned around and faced the room. Then I had this unbelievable sense of power." For Kaplan, "Seeing the way the mask takes on a life of its own teaches something fundamental about acting: there is a presence you're trying to get out of the way of. You're not trying to 'Get out there and entertain!' but to make a space so that these wonderful, playful presences can enter the room. We're working on the edge, pushing ourselves to go places you don't ordinarily go. We're not aiming for perfection; that's not what theater's about. It's about being able to risk within a structure." The final production confirmed that Volpone had provided an apt structure for the class. True to its lights, it cared less about polish than about energy, daring, taking characters that were already four-fifths caricature and driving them even further into abstraction, into a realm beyond gender and (thanks to the zip-bang pacing of the pared-down text) almost beyond time and space-and then letting the sparks fly. What Ungentle Ben might have had to say about it all is anyone's guess. But surely he would have been cheered by the sight of a roomful of new actors grappling with the fire and sinew of his language and finding some part of his dark vision they could share. |
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