{"id":4157,"date":"2015-10-21T15:56:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-21T19:56:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/groups.etown.edu\/news\/?p=4157"},"modified":"2015-11-23T11:41:49","modified_gmt":"2015-11-23T16:41:49","slug":"behind-the-scenes-at-twelfth-night-creating-theater-production-requires-time-dedication","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/2015\/10\/21\/behind-the-scenes-at-twelfth-night-creating-theater-production-requires-time-dedication\/","title":{"rendered":"Behind the scenes at ‘Twelfth Night’: Creating theatre production requires time, dedication"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Sign<\/a> Before the curtain rises, before the audience is seated, before the tickets are sold, costumes must be tailored; lines must be learned; a script must be amended; and the play must be chosen.<\/p>\n

To the audience, a theatrical show could appear as though it has always been complete, but to the actors and designers, and to Michael Swanson, director of theatre and dance and associate professor of theatre at Elizabethtown College, it is a complex process, involving many steps and even more hands. Swanson has been through this process more than 60 times, just as a director.<\/p>\n

The College\u2019s theatre and dance division of the Department of Fine and Performing Arts has a practiced and honed process for accomplishing the steps leading to opening night. It all starts months before the production opens.<\/p>\n

Choosing the show is the first step. A committee of three faculty members and two students pick which productions are performed in the coming season.<\/p>\n

\n

Analysis is a form of murder.”<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The plays are selected based on a three-category system\u2014a crowd-pleaser, a classic and a cutting-edge, contemporary work– said Michael Swanson. Every other year, the crowd-pleasing show is a musical, and the classics alternate between pre-modern (written before 1875) and modern (written after 1875).<\/p>\n

\u201cWe choose plays based on how we think we need to educate our own theatre students, how we can educate the community and the larger community, not just the College, but the area,\u201d Swanson said. Chosen, this year, is \u201cTwelfth Night or What You Will\u201d by William Shakespeare.<\/p>\n

Step two in the process might seem redundant to someone unfamiliar with theatre, but the director must choose the version<\/em> of the script to use on stage. Differing editions of the same play can include minor variances that would alter the production. Before the casting begins, the director must know the intricacies of the script and explain his vision to the designers and students.<\/p>\n

\u201c(The) director is someone who has to read the script over and over and over again,\u201d Swanson said. \u201cEvery time, you must read it with a specific goal in mind.\u201d<\/p>\n

Choosing the lighting, costume and set designers is often the next step. For \u201cTwelfth Night,\u201d Barry Fritz, technical operations director, is the lighting designer, and Richard Wolf-Spencer, associate professor of theatre, is set designer. This show\u2019s costume designer is Mercedes Mercado, who worked on a production with Wolf-Spencer and Swanson at Ephrata Performing Arts Center this summer.<\/p>\n

The designers and director determine the style of the show. For Shakespeare, the options are nearly endless.<\/p>\n

\u201cLast time it was done at E-town, 10 years ago, it was an Elizabethan production,\u201d a fairly typical way to perform it, Swanson said. \u201cWe thought we might learn something a bit more if we didn\u2019t do it that way.\u201d This time around, he chose an alternate style–held secret until opening night.<\/p>\n

John C Rohrkemper, associate professor of English at Elizabethtown, is composer of the music for this version of the production. The show, said Swanson, was adapted to match the style of music.<\/p>\n

With the pre-show business out of the way, auditions are held, a cast is chosen and a series of rehearsals begin. Though every theatre organizes rehearsals differently, Swanson said most follow a familiar pattern. In the case of Tempest Theatre, that means nine levels of rehearsal for each show.<\/p>\n

Actors begin practicing shortly after auditions and finish between the weekend showings, when there\u2019s a pick-up rehearsal to refresh the actors after three days off.<\/p>\n

Rehearsals include a \u201cgetting-acquainted period,\u201d in which actors become familiar with fellow actors, the script, the set and costumes. Then comes \u201ctable work\u201d in which the actors read through the script together, or Swanson instructs individuals about specific portions of the text. Though six nights is uncharacteristically long, Swanson believed — because of the complexity of Shakespeare — it was necessary to spend a week reviewing the script.<\/p>\n

Next, the director and actors block the show \u2013how and when actors move around the stage. They analyze the meaning of the text and decide the best way to showcase that meaning.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnalysis is a form of murder,\u201d Swanson said. \u201cYou are taking it and tearing it down into little bits. And that\u2019s what we are doing with this play.\u201d<\/p>\n

Memorization, working rehearsals — Swanson calls them \u201cstop-and-go\u201d rehearsals — and rhythm-and-flow rehearsals follow blocking. In these steps, the actors focus on the lines, each individual scene and the flow of the piece, respectively.<\/p>\n

This all leads up to tech and dress, in which all of the elements are pulled together. Lighting, full costumes, makeup and stage effects are present, sometimes for the first timed.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is two-fold,\u201d said Stephen Hajcak \u201917, an actor in “Twelfth Night.” \u201cIt is not only us rehearsing, getting our lines down, getting the right emotion in the lines, it is also the technical side.” Working in concert at those who created the set, those in charge of lighting and sound pull it all together so all is timed correctly.<\/p>\n

Right before the first show, the cast and crew run a preview, which usually lines up with the final dress rehearsal. In front of an invited audience, the actors rehearse and gauge how each line is received.<\/p>\n

From start to finish, the process of putting on an Elizabethtown College Theatre production is about four to five months, and opening night is the first test of that work. The audience is unaware of the months of rehearsals and preparation that have led to this moment.<\/p>\n

The play is chosen; the script is amended; the lines are learned; the costumes are tailored; the tickets are sold; the audience is seated; the curtain goes up …<\/p>\n

Tickets for “Twelfth Night” are $7. The show runs from Oct. 29 to Nov. 8<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before the curtain rises, before the audience is seated, before the tickets are sold, costumes must be tailored; lines must be learned; a script must be amended; and the play must be chosen. To the audience, a theatrical show could appear as though it has always been complete, but to the actors and designers, and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":87,"featured_media":4159,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[774],"tags":[171,197,1058,1063,1062,369,522,1059,130,1054,1060,1061],"class_list":["post-4157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-and-culture","tag-barry-fritz","tag-elizabethtown-college","tag-elizabethtown-college-theatre","tag-john-rohrkemper","tag-mercedes-mercado","tag-michael-swanson","tag-richard-wolf-spencer","tag-stephen-hajcak","tag-tempest-theatre","tag-theatre-department","tag-twelfth-night","tag-william-shakespeare","et-has-post-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/87"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4157"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4229,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4157\/revisions\/4229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4159"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news.etown.edu\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}