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Photo by Greg Helfand UCLA Today Actors in the UCLA Shakespeare Reading and Performing Group brought “King John,” one of the Bard’s least-known works, to Kerckhoff Hall last year. Their philosophy: Theater is fun, so everyone who wants a role gets one.

WESTWOOD-UPON-AVON

All the campus is a stage for the Bard

BY CLARA STURAK
UCLA Today

It is standing-room-only in the Charles E. Young Grand Salon of Kerckhoff Hall, packed with students in shorts and sandals, men in suits, families with children and ladies outfitted for an evening of serious thea-ta.

As Arthur, the young Duke of Brittany, beseeches Hubert, an adviser to the king, to spare him a horrible fate, the audience holds its collective breath:

“Will you put out mine eyes?
These eyes that never did nor never shall
So much as frown on you?”

The play is “King John,” among William Shakespeare’s least-known works. Nevertheless, one woman has come all the way from North Carolina just to see the rarely performed history (her goal is to see every one of Shakespeare’s works performed live before her 30th birthday). For their part, the students, staff and alumni who make up the loosely organized UCLA Shakespeare Reading and Performing Group are glad their play went off without a hitch.

“It’s a damn good play, and no one ever does it,” said director Blake Middleton, who has a day job as a UCLA biomedical researcher. “It’s kind of an underdog.”

So it goes in Westwood-upon-Avon, where, nearly 390 years after the Bard’s death, his works are being widely celebrated by amateur actors, by teachers who are introducing the playwright poet to elementary school students, by leading Shakespeare scholars and, in October, by the venerable Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, coming to UCLA from its sold-out run in London to perform “Twelfth Night.”

The campus has been carrying on a long love affair with this master of the English language in lecture halls, on makeshift stages, in symposia and in its extensive research libraries. In fact, UCLA has become a mecca for top Shakespeare scholars because of the tremendous wealth of material housed in the Young Research Library and the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Also, the university’s proximity to such rare-book treasure troves as the Getty and the Huntington Library has made the campus a magnet for researchers, said A.R. Braunmuller, one of the world’s most renowned Shakespeare scholars and a professor of English.

What is it about Shakespeare that drives this continuing ardor?

The answer depends on whom you ask. In Shakespeare’s plays, Visiting Professor of Theater Milan Dragicevich finds “fantastic feasts of language” that, when combined with simple, powerful stories, “have never been re-created.” For Lecturer Stephen Dickey, “Shakespeare is the central figure in Western aesthetic culture ... the coin of the realm. Even people who don’t know Shakespeare know Shakespeare.”

But is there anything fresh or new to say about this man and his works?

Braunmuller, the co-editor of two exhaustive volumes of Shakespeare’s completed works, “The New Cambridge Shakespeare” and “The Complete Pelican Shakespeare,” is quick to point out there’s always room for new interpretation.

Photo by Greg Helfand UCLA Today UCLA students, staff and alumni from all walks of life have the chance to be Shakespearean thespians.

“The introductions and annotations in the first Pelican edition (published in 1957) came from another era, when scholars didn’t talk, for instance, about sex, politics or gender issues,” he noted. “These [editors] were fuddy-duddy white guys.” Now, half of the plays in the Pelican are edited by women. Also, Shakespeare scholarship has changed over the years to become “much more conscious of performance,” said Braunmuller. It pays more attention to “the structure, architecture and various staging possibilities of the plays — as well as the historical context of Shakespeare’s work.” In newer editions of Shakespeare’s plays, readers may find discussions of a certain actor’s performance or interpretations of a character. This makes perfect sense, since virtually all Shakespeare scholars agree that his works were meant to be seen, not read.

To illustrate this point, each year Braunmuller and fellow English Professor Jonathan Post — Braunmuller calls him his “co-agitator” — take 80 students on a monthlong sojourn to Stratford-upon-Avon through UCLA’s Summer Sessions. There, students study up to eight plays by day, attend performances by night and talk with actors of the Royal Shakespeare Company, directors, technicians and even voice coaches. A side trip to London takes them to the replica of the Old Globe Theater, where they see yet another play.

The experience so inspired student Liisa Spink that she and a friend began writing their own version of “Much Ado About Nothing” on the back of an air-sickness bag as they flew back from England. Back in Westwood, she founded Shakespeare UCLA, a student group that staged the play for three nights before sold-out audiences. Set on the UCLA campus, the play portrayed Hero as a Bruin cheerleader and Benedick and Claudio as Bruin football stars. Predictably, the villains, recalled Spink, a recent graduate, were USC players.

But you don’t have to travel to England to steep yourself in Shakespeare scholarship. Each year, the UCLA Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies hosts a one-day symposium that focuses on one Shakespeare play. Open to the public, the event gives Los Angeles-area high school teachers the opportunity to query scholars on how to engage their students in his works.

Others, including Dickey, have devised their own methods to accomplish this. The lecturer illuminates the plays through an “almost Brechtian alienation effect” — also known as “movie night.” Each year he produces the Shakespeare Offshoot Film Festival, showcasing five films that are based, adapted, plagiarized or otherwise connected to Shakespeare’s work. Think “Throne of Blood,” Akira Kurosawa’s reimagining of “Macbeth” set in feudal Japan, and “McLintock!,” a Wild-West version of “The Taming of the Shrew,” starring John Wayne and Maureen O’Hara. Both movies, along with “A Double Life,” in which Ronald Colman plays a bad actor playing Othello, were screened during this year’s festival.

“The films are enjoyable to watch, but [watching them] is essentially a pretext for the group to think about the plays they’re based on,” said Dickey, who swears he doesn’t even like movies.

Alumnus Rafe Esquith also engages his students in discussions about the motivations of such characters as Henry IV. But unlike Dickey’s students, Esquith’s are 10- and 11-year-olds from Hobart Boulevard Elementary.

At Hobart, 92% of the students come from families with incomes below the poverty line; 100% of them speak English as a second language. But for them, language is no barrier to performing one full-length Shakespeare play each year. This summer, when the group performs “Hamlet,” they’ll come to understand more about the beauty of the English language than many native speakers ever will.

The Hobart Shakespeareans, as they call themselves, can count among their fans Oprah Winfrey, who honored Esquith and his students in 2001 with her “Use Your Life Award,” and British actor Ian McKellen, who rearranged his shooting schedule while filming “The Lord of the Rings” — he was Gandalf — in order to fly from New Zealand to Los Angeles to see Hobart students perform “King Lear.”

Esquith credits his father with instilling a love of Shakespeare in him while he was a toddler. “My father would read the plays to me during my youngest years, and I loved them. I didn’t understand everything, but it didn’t matter. I thought they were great. I literally knew who Hamlet was before I knew who Goldilocks was.” His early zeal was only heightened when he studied Shakespeare at UCLA with Senior Lecturer David Rodes — “a wonderful teacher who showed me that Shakespeare wasn’t so serious a pastime.”

Another UCLA expert who takes a novel approach to the subject is Dragicevich of UCLA’s theater department, a teacher of acting and “the lost art of rhetoric — persuasion through the spoken word.”

“Imagine you live in a world where everyone’s agreed to say something in the most exquisite way possible,” he said. That is the world of Shakespeare.

Dragicevich and his students focus entirely on the text, “not even worrying about the meaning” of the play. Instead, “by figuring out how the phrase is said literally, verbally — what kind of cadences and rhythms are used, what is a short flurry of words, or what is drawn out — the actor will find what that might say about the character.”

The results? “Visceral, powerful, dynamic” performances and classical theater that’s “alive ... so vibrant that you’re just absorbed by it,” Dragicevich said.

Will Shakespeare continue to enlighten, enthrall and entertain people who are being bombarded by endless reality shows and action-packed films with images that flash by with the speed of a computer keystroke?

You know what they say: Where there’s a Will, there’s a way.

Want a part in “Macbeth Doth Murder!: A Noir Adaptation”? To learn more about the next campus production of the Shakespeare Reading and Performing Group, visit
www.uclashakespeare.org.

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