"Fetch Forth Penna!" Making Connections with
Performance
By Rosalie Genova
“Yes! The first use of cargo pockets I’ve ever seen in Lear.
That was great!” My classmate Fred, playing the wicked Edmund in
our impromptu in-class staging of scene I-2 of King Lear, was being congratulated
for creativity in stashing his “letter” just a moment after
Gloucester walked in—perfectly timed to incite the old man’s
curiosity. This was one of many instances in the classroom when the value
of using performance in teaching (and learning) Shakespeare wassymbolically
illustrated. Cargo pants, a fashion of the turn of the millennium, had
become not only acceptable garb for a character who would have lived and
died long before Shakespeare himself, but were actually made relevant
and necessary to the scene. The class laughed,
but a link between our world and that of the play had been established.
This important development in the plot—Edmund’s cunning maneuver
to turnGloucester and his son Edgar against each other—was understood.
Fred, the angst-ridden young man as he might look today, made great show
of frantically peeling the Velcro pocket open, to hide in it the malicious
letter that Edgar had supposedly written.
Each play studied in Ted Tibbetts’ Shakespeare class at Portland
High School culminated in scene performances, for which lines were dutifully
memorized. In King Lear, I had the privilege of playing Kent in scene
II-2, wherein he profusely insults and viciously threatens Oswald, later
to face the stocks in consequence. The day we performed, our school auditorium
was filled with students who were happy to be missing class. I was dressed
head to toe in navy blue and white, our school colors, and wearing a PHS
wrestling jacket. When the scene began, I was opening an invisible locker
as my classmate Libby, playing Oswald, entered in an athletic jacket from
a rival high school in Portland. As the scene escalated, “teachers”—playing
Cornwall, Gloucester and Regan—came into the “hallway”
to investigate the yelling and scuffling. In the end, I was physically
restrained, and promised that I would face our school’s assistant
principal, a former police officer and known to all as the enforcer of
discipline in cases of fighting on school grounds.
There is no doubt that we had catered to the groundlings. The scene was
deliberately acted and costumed to appeal to the brashest of high school
students—kids who loved to watch hallway fights. We had gone so
far as to change a few words in the scene, such as trading “stocks”
for our equivalent “Penna”—the name of the assistant
principal with whom Kent would have to reckon. Our method was unorthodox,
but the scene’s meaning was conveyed—in the same way that
of Fred’s had been when he crammed the piece of notebook paper into
his cargo pocket. The groundlings, here, are high school students who
aren’t immediately interested in iambic pentameter or the early
British monarchy; students who are not enthusiastic about learning Shakespeare.
In my years of studying Shakespeare in the classroom and performing it
extra-curricularly, I have seen a gang handshake used among Roman rabble-rousers
in Julius Caesar, a fight over a box of cereal in Titus Andronicus, an
air-guitaring servant at the Capulet’s ball in Romeo and Juliet,
Polonius hiding his head under a lampshade before meeting his death in
Hamlet, Iago reprimanding Cassio for leaving his fly open on his fateful
drunken night in Othello, and many other innovative stage
interpretations. Such choices, all of which were made by the students
or actors, indicated that they (we) understood the text’s meaning
well enough play with it. This is no substitute for an appreciation of
the bard’s poetry and historical significance, but those often follow
once an interest has been sparked. And in the meantime, establishing links
between the seemingly obscure Renaissance England and American adolescence
and pop culture is not only intellectually enlightening, but a great deal
of
fun—and fun is one thing most high school students don’t mind.
Rosalie Genova graduated from Portland High
School in 2000. A significant force in the creation of the
PHS Shakespeare Club, Rosalie played many roles including
Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing, Hugh Evans in The Merry
Wives of Windsor, Gertrude in "15-Minute Hamlet,"
and also adapted and directed "The 15 Minute Othello."
Having played Beatrice and Gertrude, the two roles she most
coveted, she feels her career as a Shakespearean actress peaked
by her 18th birthday.
With fond memories, she now majors in American
Studies at Smith College in Massachusetts. |
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