​The shocked actors begged Shakespeare to explain the “right way” to perform his plays.

The ouija board somehow managed to shrug.

"Meh. What do I care? I'm dead." The Bard of all bards disclosed.

“I’ll tell you one thing, though…” Shakespeare intoned in a mystical voice, without bothering to spell on the board’s alphabet anymore.

“Tell us! TELL US!!!” the actors demanded.

“It cracks me up that teachers make kids perform Romeo and Juliet. Do you know how many sodomy jokes I put in that play for my friend Anthony?”

The Bard's choice of wearing an earring, in the left ear no less, has been much commented upon. Note how the eye is drawn to the earring, the one object in the painting shinier than The Bard's distinguished forehead.

Motto on Shakespeare's Coat of Arms reads "Non Sans Droict," or "No Comment At This Time" in English

This is Artistic Director Julia Nelson writing this week on her experiences rehearsing Flowers of Ilium. Show dates are 2/12/16-2/28/16 at The Core Theatre in Richardson, TX. Tickets are available for purchase here.

As an actor in BBS’s upcoming production of Flowers of Ilium, I’m getting to do a lot of exciting, terrifying, and challenging things in collaboration with the other actors and Brandon Whitlock, our director.  It’s hard to pick a favorite element of this show, but the one I want to talk about today that of the Displaced Monologue.  

I love seeing Shakespearean monologues out of context, or, more specifically, put in a different context from their appearance in the plays from whence they come.  The vibrant, adaptable nature of the language lends itself to vibrant, adaptable performances. I’ve spoken to members of several prominent Shakespeare companies who use their lines, instead of ad libs, to respond when something goes awry onstage or when audience members react and interact in ways  unplanned.  If there are limits to the versatility of the language, I haven’t found them yet. 

I first discovered my fascination with Shakespearean monologues out of context when I took Doreen Bechtol’s class The Body in Performance at Mary Baldwin College.  She had us each memorize a monologue from Twelfth Night, and then did a number of Viewpoints and Viewpoints-inspired exercises with us incorporating the text in non-linear ways. My favorite then, and still my favorite now, was The Chair.

Students partnered off and each pair received a folding chair. The partners were instructed to discover a series of stationary poses together and cycle through them, then Doreen told us to add our text.  The seemingly random poses suddenly came to life as our monologues became dialogues, tumbling over one another in a wide range of tempos and inflections. The meanings of words and phrases changed when juxtaposed with those of another character. The poses, too, suddenly developed painful or hilarious significance when used as the context of the burgeoning scenes. Relationships began, progressed, and fizzled out, or characters circled each other like tigers and fought savagely for the upper hand. It was easy to make meaning, to instantly discover “story” in these small, intense character vignettes. Some partners had monologues from characters who were never even onstage at the same time. It didn’t matter. Wherever there is context, there is relationship. Wherever there is relationship, there is story.

As a director and a teacher I’ve done a number of similar exercises since then, encouraging actors and students to embrace the displaced monologue.  I find that it helps stage actors hone the skills I value most highly: reacting in real time to what the other actor gives them, and suiting the action to the word AND the word to the action. But I’ve been missing something all this time, and that was the experience of getting to play in the sandbox of displaced text, myself, as an actor.  

Enter Brandon Whitlock and his interest in devising plays based on Greek tragedies. He suggested Trojan Women, and I suggested that we use displaced monologues from Shakespeare’s displaced ladies to get around the problem of poor public domain translations and prohibitively expensive (for us, for now) works under copyright. He agreed, and set out to gather texts and exercises to lead us in creating the work we now call Flowers of Ilium. 

Everything that I love about displaced monologues is in this show (we’ve even found occasions for a folding chair or two).  There are moments when the words themselves are of heightened importance, but there are also many others in which the words are vehicles for sound, for invented codes of communication, to underscore movement, to facilitate change, to express pain, sorrow, and fear, but also comfort, camaraderie, and love. The same monologue can be used to seduce or assassinate, to comfort or to shame, to isolate or include. In all of these scenes, we play with our texts and our objectives in real time — we’re defining certain elements of the shape of each scene in rehearsal, but each performance of each scene is unique and fundamentally unrepeatable.  You can’t fake discovery as an ensemble. 

:::EDIT February 2017::: This post is about our first company-directed production, Macbeth, in October of 2015. Since then we've adjusted our process and produced five more company-directed shows. Check out information and tickets for our current season:::

When we created our Rocket Hub campaign, we decided to reward people who back the project for $10 or more with special backers-only tickets to a preview performance on 10/16.  What most people don't realize, though, is that the preview for a company-directed show is more exciting than any other performance, because it's the first time the actors get to run through the whole play.  That's because when Bare Bones Shakespeare does a company-directed production, the actors only get 4 rehearsals.  We follow Shakespeare's rehearsal practices, so not only do the actors get a REALLY short rehearsal process, but there's no director, no designer, and the actors only receive their lines and their cues.  There's good news for the actors, though.  Shakespeare's company also had a prompter to help the actors if they lose their place during the performance.  For our production of Macbeth, I'll be that prompter.  Every performance, I'll sit to one side onstage and feed actors their lines if they lose their place.  I can't fix everything though.  That's why the preview is going to be an exciting show -- the actors will be dealing with entrances and exits, the order of the scenes, costume changes, live sound cues, all for the first time, and it will be in front of an audience. 

We gleefully stole most of our ideas about the company-directed model from the American Shakespeare Center.  When I lived in Virginia, I got to see many of their company-directed productions.  One of my favorite things was to see the preview performance, and then come back after a week or two and see the production again.  Inevitably there are some flaws at the preview that the actors fix during subsequent rehearsals.  But since the actors have all of the agency in the production, they might also decide to take one of their characters in a different direction, or change a major prop or costume piece, or completely alter the character's physicality.  It's amazing how little changes like these can change the way the whole play reads.  In a lot of ways, it's like seeing two different productions.  You get to be a part of the team at the preview since you're privy to the earliest decisions and the most interesting mistakes.  And you also get to come back later, if you're so inclined, and see what changes and what doesn't.  And if you really like what you see, maybe next time
you'll want to audition and join in on this terrifying, exciting, rewarding process. 

My name is Brandon, and I am, sometimes, an actor. And I'm going to talk about acting.

In general, people who are not actors are often bad at talking about acting. There is nothing wrong with this: I know nothing about cars, so when somebody asks me about my car, I can respond with something like "it drives" or "we don't get along very well," which, while not lies, are also not accurate. Or at least, not precise. And certainly not helpful. So when people who are not actors talk about acting, I usually try to let it slide. Yes, I did memorize all those lines. No, I didn't think about dead puppies during the sad scenes. Thank you for comparing me to that famous movie actor.

But there is something that irks me tremendously, and it's usually said by people who should know better: when talking of a director (or writer) and an actor who work together frequently (usually on films), someone will say, "[specific actor] is [specific director]'s muse."

This is a lie.

The muses are Greek goddesses of the arts, who are typically credited with visiting poets and musicians and providing inspiration. Most often found in a group of nine, they inspire both things that you would expect, like dance and epic poetry, and things you wouldn't, like astronomy. Muses are beautiful, talented, and exist solely to provide artists with the inspiration they need to create great art.

The implication, then, is that an actor is not an artist who receives inspiration, but a vessel for inspiration for artists. An actor must simply exist while a work of art is created around him or her. An actor, then, is the equivalent of a person whose portrait is painted, or the girlfriend mentioned in a song. "I made this for you," they say. For you. Not with you.

The trouble is, that's not what acting is. Actors do not inspire works of art, they help create works of art. Perhaps it's because many people seem to believe that all actors do is learn their lines and do what they're told: an actor gets direction and follows direction, and has no more creative agency than a puppet.  And while there are some directors who cultivate those qualities in their actors, in general, that is not what actors are for. Perhaps it is also because our culture finds collaboration difficult, preferring to attribute even a work of art with as many varied contributors as a summer blockbuster (have you stayed for the entire end credits of one of those?) to one author, discrediting the others as mere vessels. The muse concept is especially pernicious with actresses, for sociological reasons that would take another whole article just to start talking about.

At Bare Bones Shakespeare, we reject this notion. When we act, we are not muses who express another person's artistry. We are artists of our own, creating characters and performances that combine with the efforts of other artists to create a larger, richer whole. Every BBS production is built on the idea of collaboration, the hope that a group of artists will meet together and create a work of art in harmony, not be corralled into one man or woman's inflexible unison.

Collaboration is what we do. And if that's something you're interested in, then you're exactly the kind of artist we want to collaborate with. Audition. Donate. Or talk to us. We're listening.

One of the goals of Bare Bones Shakespeare is to question stereotypes about gender in theatre.  It's no secret that women make up a large percentage of theatre degree-seekers and auditionees in the USA (in my experience between 70% and 95%).  What most audiences might not be aware of is that when it comes to roles and theatre administration hiring, that number is reversed: 5%-25% of theatre jobs go to women, and the most significant limiting factor is the cast list.  Most playwrights (and screenwriters, and authors) assume a world dominated, at least numerically, by men, and casting directors usually respond to these assumptions by only finding men to fill male roles, and only finding women to fill female roles.  (This doesn't even get into the issues and assumptions surrounding the casting of trans actors -- which, while important, will have to be a post for another day).  While Shakespeare wrote many intelligent, passionate female roles, only 15% of his characters were female.  We also often forget that since these roles were written for young men (often apprentices), the line counts pale in comparison to the roles written for adult, veteran actors in the company. 

It's not all bad news, though.  Here at Bare Bones Shakespeare, we like to look at both modern and early-modern performance techniques for inspiration.  400 years ago, casting men to play women's roles was the norm in England.  And several modern companies have tried reverse-gender, gender-blind, and re-gendered casting in order to achieve a variety of purposes from reconciling the cast list with the percentage of auditionees to teasing out revitalized readings of the text.  These progressive casting practices aren't really prevalent yet on the largest professional stages, nor in plays written more recently, but we're gaining ground. 

As a feminist I'm pleased, but as an Artistic Director, I can't stop at celebrating the forward movement.  I also need to look carefully at the resistance that hinders that movement -- resistance that comes from all areas, from the local communities to the largest professional companies.  Rather than dismissing this resistance out-of-hand, I think it's necessary that I seriously consider the detracting arguments (such as this article from The Guardian) and respond to them thoughtfully.  In my experience, most of these arguments complain that such casting practices are merely gimmicks, or the very worst kind of Equal Opportunity Employment -- the kind that considers the race and gender of applicants as head and shoulders in importance above individual aptitude and suitability for the job.  Honestly, I think this argument is correct, to a point: There have been many productions that suffered from casting the wrong actor in the name of Equality.  I have personally witnessed and been involved in several productions that responded to gender half-heartedly by casting actresses instead of actors for some or all of the roles, but treated the actresses' characters inconsistently, resulting in a muddy, confusing production. 

However, not all productions that resist gender norms do so at the expense of artistic clarity.  The reasons for casting more actresses can be separate from how we use those actresses in performance.  When I was in grad school for Shakespeare and Performance, I joined a company-model MFA program at Mary Baldwin College.  Due to the accident of who auditioned and was accepted that year, our company consisted of eleven women and one man.  Rather than conceding this fact as a weakness, or ignoring it and hoping no one noticed, we embraced it as a strength.  We decided to treat gender differently in each of our five plays: regendering in Dr. Faustus, full drag in Fuente Ovejuna, and an all-female production of Richard II, just to name a few.  From the other artists I worked with that year, I discovered that the ways to treat gender in performance are not limited to a small number of choices.  I also learned that each production can have its own internal logic about how to treat gender, and that the more clear the directors and designers are early in the process on what that logic is, the clearer the production, and the stronger the acceptance of the audience. 

I tested these ideas in the production of The Taming of The Shrew I directed this summer.  While I didn't initially set out to create non-traditional casting choices for this production, I found myself needing to since not enough male actors auditioned, but we had more than enough female actors.  I decided to re-gender three characters: Baptista, Vincentio (Vincentia) and the Pedant.  However, there were also some characters, like Tranio, whose apparent maleness was central to the plot.  My production team and I decided to treat the female actors in lower-class male roles as women who chose to live their lives as men for their own safety and financial security.  The world of the play supported the decision to present upper-class characters such as Baptista and Vincentia as female, since these privileged women would have more power in their communities and thus could live their lives as cis-gendered without facing the same dangers as lower-class women.  This logic guided decisions that we made in production meetings and in rehearsal.  It was not something that we published in the program, nor did we try to force these gender politics into a more central role in the show's concept.  We simply examined our extant approach to the play and added this element to it, so that our approach to gender complimented but did not dominate our approach to the text as a whole.

Now Bare Bones Shakespeare gets to try a different approach, one that is new to us.  We have decided to make our upcoming production of Macbeth entirely reverse-gender.  Rather than change the pronouns or put the actors and actresses in drag, though, we thought we would simply switch which roles we cast men and women into, and then use this environment to explore what the text says to our actors and our audiences about relationships within and across gender lines.  If you're interested, you can watch a video of the Macbeths discussing Duncan's Murder or check out audition information.

Most of the staples of the modern theatre aren't the foregone conclusion that we treat them as.  

Proscenium? Nope.
Set? Nope.
Stage lighting? Nope.
Director? Nope.
Designers?  Nope.
Multi-week rehearsal process? Nope.
Table work? Nope.
Huge casts? Nope.
Actors get the whole script? Nope.

So that leaves... What? A close company of actors and their manager using cue scripts to bring the play to life in one crazy week of anything-goes ideas and no time for second guessing.  Each actor has the opportunity (or more accurately, the duty), to invent her performance on her own -- there's no time for her to wait until rehearsals to start discovery.  But even while she's preparing on her own, acting as designer and director for her part (no matter how large or small), she also has to leave space for the contributions of her castmates.  "No director" means that the acting company has to work together, taking initiative and giving in to each others' ideas by turns in order to bring the production to life. So let's take a look at what "company-directed Shakespeare" means, and where the idea comes from.

The early modern scholar Tiffany Stern has written several valuable books about what the theatre world was like in early modern England.  The book that most concerns us right now is Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan, in which Stern distills epic amounts of research into an accessible guide to the rehearsal processes of Shakespeare and his successors.  In this book, Stern points out that many of the trappings of the modern rehearsal process simply didn't exist in Shakespeare's day.  There wasn't a clear division between actor, producer, director, and designer.  Actors didn't audition for a specific role, or even for a specific play -- they joined the company and performed in all of the productions, usually keeping dozens in repertory at a time.  Instead of getting the whole script and doing weeks of read-throughs, table work and blocking rehearsals, actors would receive only their own lines and the one-to-three word cue immediately preceding their lines.  They would then take these "cue scripts" or "parts" and work on them individually or with one other actor (especially in the case of apprentices).  When the actors did come together to rehearse the play, they would often have as few as three days to form the production.  This rehearsal structure meant that actors had to arrive memorized.  If this description sounds terrifying to the modern actor, Shakespeare's company has good news: there is also a "prompter" just offstage who has the whole script.  The prompter's job is to keep the actors on track, so that the lack of rehearsal doesn't mean that the production dissolves into chaos. 

If you're interested in taking part in such a production, we're holding auditions for our reverse-gender Macbeth at Katie Jackson Park in Dallas on Saturday, 9/19 and 9/26.  Email [email protected] for an audition appointment.

I loves me some Kickstarter.  Since 2012 (starting with Amanda Palmer's groundbreaking campaign), I've backed more than 20 Kickstarter projects of all kinds.  I love the thrill of participating in something new and exciting, and I especially love that even on a meager budget, I can help make something awesome happen.  Most of the successful campaigns use stretch goals in some way or another.  Now, for those of you new to the whole crowdfunding phenomenon, stretch goals are additional rewards, goodies, enhancements, or other opportunities added to the original project if the campaign exceeds its goal.  One of my favorite stretch goals is the kind that offers all the backers an extra reward -- like when the Girl Genius team offers extra PDFs of Girl Genius comics to everyone who backed for $10 or more.  Stretch goals encourage backers to keep pulling in friends and spreading the word even once the project has reached its goal.

But when I decided to launch my own Kickstarter campaign, I ran into a problem.  The thing is that in live theatre, I don't create an electronic product that I can easily attach in an email to hundreds of backers.  I really like Amanda Palmer's model of giving all her backers access to her work.  She made sure that everyone who backed, even for the minimum of $1, received a download of the complete album.  This means that she can have backers all around the world who can experience her work, even if she can't add their city to a tour just yet.  I decided to take a leaf from her book and give every backer (from $1 on up) a free ticket to see Bare Bones Shakespeare's first show, but I wasn't all that sure about what to do for stretch goals.  A funny gif?  A video of me saying "Friends, Romans, Motherfuckers"? What? If I diverted the necessary resources to make a quality sound file or video, that means that the live theatre, the purpose of the project, has to come second to the backer rewards.  Ultimately, I would rather do what I do, and do it well rather than do what someone else does, and do it poorly.  That means that my stretch goals shouldn't focus primarily on a digital medium, since digital media isn't the purpose of this production company.

And there's another problem.  Bare Bones Shakespeare is a brand-new company, and we don't really know yet what kind of demand there will be for our productions.  Many new theatre companies only produce one, maybe two plays in their first year.  I'd like to produce more than that, but I don't want to over-estimate or under-estimate the interest and support of my audience.

That's where the stretch goals come in.  Instead of making the stretch goals into gimmicks and gift bags, we decided to question the whole assumption of what they can and can't be used for.  By calling our project "Bare Bones Shakespeare 2015-2016 Season," we can fund the season while letting our audience decide how many productions we should have.  If the project funds but doesn't reach any stretch goals, we'll still have enough for the basic setup costs and our first educational production, the school tour of Romeo and Juliet.  If we reach any of our major stretch goals, then we'll add on more productions.  We even came up with a list of which productions would get the green light first if we make some stretch goals but not others.

The benefit of using Kickstarter in this way is that if there's insufficient interest, there's no obligation -- we don't put a strain on our friends, families, and communities by committing to more projects than our fan base is willing to support.  In fact, that's not just true of the stretch goals.  Kickstarter uses the all-or-nothing crowdfunding model, which means that backers don't get charged a single penny unless the campaign is successful.  The big, golden, sparkly plus is that if the campaign and any of the stretch goals ARE successful, we can rest assured that we have the resources we need to create the awesomeness that we're dying to bring to DFW.