It’s been over a month since we wrapped Shakespeare MD at the Toronto Fringe Festival and over the past six weeks we have been fortunate to have visited Mount Sinai Hospital, Sunnybrook Hospital, and Mackenzie Health Centre with the Shakespeare in Hospitals program. I’ve been a performer with the Spur-of-the-Moment Shakespeare Collective for the past three years now. My first stint with the collective being the Shakespeare-on-the-Subway project, and since then I have worked with Victoria as a performer for Shakespeare In Hospital and as a performer and dramaturg for the Midsummer-in-the-Library show.
As an emerging artist the Spur-Of-The-Moment Shakespeare Collective has always given me the chance to grow and take on new roles (in performance and in production) that I never had explored in theatre school. For this session I worked with Victoria as a collaborator which means I worked as a director on the project. This was my first time directing, ever. And that was pretty scary. But Victoria believed in me and gave me this opportunity with nothing but encouragement and support. We have an incredible ensemble of actors and collaborators.
So this is how it works: we have an ensemble of five actors, each actor has two to three scenes and two monologues all from the Shakespearean canon (it wouldn’t be Shakespeare-In-Hospitals if we threw some Marlow in there now would it). We have all of the pieces arranged in a sequence in which one piece will flow into the next one for performances in which we work in a proscenium (or stage) setting. Sometimes we will do performances in the patient’s room, and for this set up we will perform only one or two pieces per room. Sometimes a patient may want to see more which is always fun! Our other format we work in is open space where we might be performing in a cafeteria or foyer.
If you had the chance to see us at the Fringe Festival, all the material we used in Shakespeare MD is what we use for Shakespeare in Hospitals! Fringe was definitely the perfect warm up for our actors, those guys know their material so well now! Fringe was also really useful to us because our performance spaces are always changing so our actors need to be able to quickly adapt themselves since no two spaces are the same. Unlike most theatre shows, we don’t always have a stage to work with since we actually perform in the hospitals. If you did not catch us during Fringe we performed in the shed as a part of the Alley Play series. We had an eight foot by eight foot shed in which we had one audience member at a time go in and they would get a scene or monologue depending on which one of the classical humours they were diagnosed under. The classical humours are sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric. For example if someone was sanguine that meant that they were pleasure seeking and extroverted so we might have given them Romeo and Juliet as their prescribed scene. We could never determine where our audience member was going to sit or stand in the shed so the actors got really comfortable with working around them. This is great training for going into hospitals because sometimes we might have a tiny space to work with and sometimes we have a larger space.
Along with being able to adapt to new spaces, our actors need to be able to adapt the material as well. We perform for a lot of mental health units across the GTA. Depending on the facility we need to make adjustments to the text. Sometimes we don’t get these cuts until the night of, but our actors have the flexibility to be able to make these changes to the text with ease. All of our material we chose under the theme of “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie” which is a line from Alls Well That Ends Well Act One Scene One. The idea behind this is that we find the cure for ourselves within ourselves. Our material is all about people trying to take action to better themselves. Romeo and Juliet find their cure in the love they have for each other. Bassanio from Merchant of Venice finds his through risking a test in order to win the hand of Portia. These characters are all active in finding their “cures” and we find that applicable to us in our everyday lives.
Up next for us in September are performances at Princess Margaret Lodge and at the Adelaide Women’s Shelter. Also in the middle of the month we invite the public to come check out our Cabaret at the Winchester Bar where we will share our material and stories of our adventures so far!
To learn more about the Shakespeare-In-Hospitals Project, visit our indiegogo page at:
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/shakespeare-in-hospitals-project/x/405748
To learn more about the Showcase, visit:
https://www.facebook.com/events/186930051488329/