First-year advanced drama students will be journeying to the 1600s to produce The Winter’s Tale, one of Shakespeare’s last plays.
The play will open the week of March 18 and run for two weeks, featuring a new combination of actors each night.
Junior Abby Hanssen, stage manager for the show, said The Winter’s Tale is unique in that most of the characters are double-casted. For each main character, there are two possible actors that switch off nights, making for almost a dozen different combinations of casts.
“The feel for the show changes every night because different people are playing the roles,” Hanssen said. “It definitely makes for a different show every night.”
Jason Gorelick, who plays Prince Florizel, said he was initially skeptical of the concept of double-casting, but has recognized its benefits.
“It turns out that it’s been great because there is somebody else to work with,” Gorelick said. “It’s great to get a different perspective because they might see something you don’t.”
Gorelick said that one advantage to having different casts is that the actors won’t lose passion for their roles, as they would if they had the same show every night.
“It will be interesting to see how different the same role can be with two people,” Gorelick said. “We’ve got entirely different people in the roles.”
The play’s main characters are the kings of Bohemia and Sicilia, who have been friends since childhood. Their initially gleeful trip to Sicilia turns seemingly adulterous when the King of Bohemia begins to believe his wife is cheating on him.
“It’s all about the alleged betrayal of one character versus the other,” Hanssen said. “And [about] how one person can get so tied up in his own emotions and in what he thinks is happening when it may not actually be the case.”
The show was one of Shakespeare’s last written, which makes for a nice combination of many of his styles.
“He basically threw all of his genres together – there’s comedy, there’s singing, tragedy, and there’s romance, so you’ve got all of Shakespeare’s good stuff,” Gorelick said.
The show’s complicated set switches between scenes to match the moods of the main characters. The beginning of the play starts out as a dark and bleak winter in the land of Sicilia, and the second half showcases a more positive atmosphere in the warm springtime in the land of Bohemia.
“We’re going to have a really cool set that moves, so it’ll be clear with the colors on stage which land you’re part of,” Hanssen said. “You can clearly see the different personalities of each.”
Instead of one of the Advanced Drama teachers, the actors have had the opportunity to be directed by guest artist Anna Smith, who typically works on musical theater.
“She’s closer to our age than our teachers so it’s really cool to be working with her, and it’s really nice because she’s really available to help,” Hanssen said.
The actors have been working on making the Shakespearean language more understandable to a high school audience by clearly acting out what they are saying.
“We’re really focusing on the meaning of every line,” Gorelick said. “People watching Shakespeare usually just lose track of what’s going on. It’s not modern English.”
