Getting into character is not just about putting on a costume and painting on makeup, it’s about understanding characters from the way they talk and think down to their movements and actions.
The theater department’s winter productions of “Bury the Dead,” “Cleansed” and “Lysistrata,” directed by directing graduate students and performed by undergraduate theater students, require their actors to embody the spirits of fallen soldiers, undergo emotional and psychological pain and tackle iambic pentameter in a vaudevillian setting. “Bury the Dead” and “Lysistrata” began playing in repertory Wednesday, and “Cleansed” begins today.
“I have made a lot of discoveries about myself as an actor,” said second-year theater student Kate Bergstrom, who plays the role of Grace in “Cleansed.” “I’ve finally come to this point where what I can do is create this character and let everything be, so that in my body I can let myself go through (my acting) as this character.”
Each director chose a show that challenged its actors to either adapt to a different acting style or to confront controversial thematic issues.
“Bury the Dead” chronicles the stories of six killed soldiers from the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World War I, World War II, the Vietnam War and the Iraq war. The soldiers refuse to be buried and rise from the dead to express what they miss about life and their experiences during the war. Although the play was originally written only about World War I soldiers, its director, Rich Martinez, updated the production and adapted the show’s script to make it more relevant to modern audiences.
“Here we are in 2008 and we’re still in conflict, and we really haven’t learned a whole lot from past mistakes and past wars,” Martinez said. “We constantly keep making these judgments, these decisions that affect millions of people and thousands of soldiers, and maybe that’s something that we need to consider.”
Along with the soldiers’ stories come the perspectives of spouses or loved ones and the justifications of the war by politicians and propagandists. These other perspectives, however, serve primarily as complements to the soldiers’ thoughts.
“My main focus on the production is to tell the story from the point of view of these soldiers,” Martinez said. “Nobody knows what war is really about unless you’re one of the soldiers, and so in that sense we have a clash of two different viewpoints: the people that are directly involved with war and the people that are not.”
Martinez facilitated discussions among the 25 cast members about their thoughts on war in order to help them better understand their characters and the messages of the play.
“Those types of conversations make you think not only about the intellectual aspects of what the show means, but about all aspects of the show from how it affects you to how it affects the character,” said Joseph Flynn, a fourth-year theater student playing the role of a sergeant. “The whole rehearsal process involved a lot of doing our best to personally connect with the play itself. It definitely brought us closer together as a cast.”
Similar to “Bury the Dead,” “Lysistrata” also tackles war themes, but it takes a lighter, more comical approach. Aristophanes’ 2000-year-old antiwar comedy tells the story of a group of Grecian women who rebel against their husbands by refusing to have sex with them. In graduate student Mary Jo Duprey’s interpretation, however, the story is approached as a vaudevillian, burlesque comedy complete with an original musical score composed by musical theater Professor Jeremy Mann.
“The challenge of “˜Lysistrata’ for many productions in the past is finding the balance between the comedy and the message. A lot of times I think productions can err on one side or the other. They either get too heavy-handed and not funny, or funny and they don’t really elicit a message, so I’m hoping that we can strike that balance with our show,” Duprey said.
With a mix of musical theater and theater students, the 19-person cast faced the challenge of addressing a heavy theme while still maintaining the lightness and trying to convey the broad comic value of a 1920s burlesque show.
“This show was a little bit more of a throwback to an older comedy style, so for a lot of the actors, they had to start giving themselves permission to be that broad,” Duprey said. “The singing and dancing is not exactly power pop. These old vaudevillians weren’t really singers, per se, as we think of them today ““ they were song-and-dance people who were delivering a tune, so I was more looking for that kind of energy.”
“Cleansed,” on the other hand, weaves together the lives of seven highly disturbed individuals living in an institution that functions more as a concentration camp where characters try to understand love in abstract and often painful ways. Director Patrick Kennelly faced the challenge of potentially offensive subject matter.
“Because it’s a really intimate and intense piece of theater, it’s more along the lines of performance art,” Kennelly said. “It has a lot of that stuff involved in it, so it’s been a really interesting, exploratory process.”
For Bergstrom, attempting to embody her character proved an especially great challenge.
“I’ve prepared myself a lot by trying to enable myself with the choreography and the movement and the flow of each scene and the understanding of each scene in my body,” Bergstrom said. “Once that happens, I experience the character’s feelings so I know what it means to love that strongly, so I can love that strongly in that moment.”
Like the actors in “Bury the Dead,” the seven-person cast of “Cleansed” researched confessions of concentration-camp survivors to attempt to embody the kind of pain and suffering playwright Sarah Kane attempted to portray in her work.
For each director, their respective show captures a particular mood and sentiment to engage the audience and make the audience enjoy traditional works, like in “Lysistrata,” examine contemporary issues like war in “Bury the Dead” and expose themselves to the psychological explorations approached in “Cleansed.”
“I feel like some things in the play need to be heard and need to be acknowledged by our audience,” Martinez said. “We’re all trying to find ways to have an outlet for our thoughts and feelings.”