Imagine you're a student actor interested in trying out for a play. You see the Department of Theater Studies is producing Macbeth, and think, "Cool! Shakespeare!" Then you look closer: Not only were the first round of auditions last April, but the actors have been rehearsing and meeting as an actual class since August. Ordinary Duke productions usually go up and down within seven weeks, and sometimes as little as three.
This weekend, Duke's Department of Theater Studies will present Shakespeare's Macbeth in Sheafer Theater under the direction of faculty member David Worster. The process behind this production is a bit different from the traditional rehearsal process-as a "workshop," it is the fruition of an experiment in total collaboration. Everything from the set to the iambic pentameter is a result of class discussion and development, rather than the ideas of the director. The result? In this Macbeth, there aren't any corsets or powdered wigs, but slinky dresses and a set featuring foreboding columns, rather than a castle or a forest.
The ensemble was cast in April, with a few additions at the start of this year, but specific roles weren't assigned until September. After everyone read the play, cast members and designers created collages of different acts, which were then put together to form a physical, representative collage of the entire play. Working from themes found in the collage and in class discussions, the ensemble established their focus for the play.
In an ordinary rehearsal process, the director completes this sort of thematic sorting in pre-production, in collaboration with a few designers. Actors are among the last ingredients added to the mix. The rest of class time was devoted to tablework, as the ensemble went through the play line-by-line, before concluding the class meetings in favor of regular rehearsals.
Dana Berger, a cast member playing one of the witches and Lady Macduff, considered the extensive weeks of tablework useful, saying "the tablework was more helpful for Shakespeare because it's harder to decode some of the stuff. If this were a [Tennessee] Williams play or something like that, it wouldn't have been as useful." Another aspect of the class, besides tablework, was establishing "the world of the play," a phrase used both by Berger and the production's scenic coordinator, Carl Pearson.
Berger noted, "We weren't having a specific time period for the show, so before rehearsal we had to `build the world of the play,' and we decided that it was a world where women can be doctors and war heroes, but at the same time men are the kings."
Pearson, in discussing his duty of taking the class' ideas and turning them into a scenic design, said "my role was not to come up with a design, but to take what individuals read into the play, and what we saw in the play and the world we generated in the class, and make that into a design."
This is a very experimental form of theater-one where the director must relinquish a lot of control. It is also a bold move on the part of the Theater Studies Department, considering that their budget has been placed largely in the hands of students, most of them majoring outside the department. How will it turn out? Tonight's sold-out crowd will be the first to decide.
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