Inside a rehearsal of Brattleboro's Theatre Adventure Program

Shakespeare’s crazy, violent, bloody world
NEYT’s Senior Shakespeare Summer Camp presents the bard’s first tragedy

According to Jessica Callahan of New England Youth Theatre, Saturday’s matinee performance of Titus Andronicus is cancelled “because we can’t get all the blood cleaned up between the end of that show and the start of our evening show.”

Originally published in The Commons issue #164 (Wednesday, August 8, 2012).
By Richard Henke/The Commons

BRATTLEBORO—Is Shakespeare breaking bad? That’s what Keely Eastley, who compares one of Shakespeare’s earliest plays with the popular cable crime drama, contends.
This weekend, Aug. 10-12, New England Youth Theater (NEYT) presents Titus Andronicus in a production directed by David Vann from the Birmingham School of Acting in England, with the vocal coaching of Eastley, from the Yale School of Acting, who now teaches in Boston.
The play stars 17 youths who are participating in NEYT’s Senior Shakespeare Summer Camp. Evening performances on Friday and Saturday are at 7 p.m., with a matinee on Sunday matinees on Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m.
“Like the television series Breaking Bad, Titus Andronicus is a dark violent show but with humor in it,” Eastley said. “It was Shakespeare’s first tragedy, and in some ways a lot more melodramatic than his later work. For those expecting a sophisticated drama with great internal analysis of character and motivation, Titus may come as a shock.”
Jessica Callahan, one of the founders of the NEYT Alumni Association, says that Titus “is all about revenge and is so incredibly bloody, the director is asking the design team to come up with a way to use buckets of gore for the show.”
She describes the plot to prove her point.
“Titus conquers a neighboring country, brings that country’s Queen and princes to Rome, and sacrifices one of her princes in cold blood to appease those souls on the Roman side who have died in battle. The Queen marries Rome’s new Caesar, sends her sons to murder Caesar’s opposition, and rape and maim his betrothed (Titus’s daughter). She captures and beheads Titus’s two sons, has Titus behead himself, and has her husband exile another of Titus’s sons. Titus is then ingloriously revenged upon her, and almost everyone in the play dies. End of play.”
Emma Bliss, who, in a gender switch, stars as Titus, said she found the play to be “very intense and gruesome, with lots of death and sexuality.” But she was quick to add that she and her fellow teenagers in Shakespeare Camp are “having a lot of fun becoming bloody people.”
According to the director, Vann, Titus was “the most successful [play] of Shakespeare’s early career. It is particularly bloodthirsty.”
And if Shakespeare’s audiences are anything like today’s — and, in many ways, it is safe to assume all audiences are fundamentally alike — the very histrionic violence of the play may be why it gained such favor with Elizabethans.
“As Titus Andronicus moves from one catastrophe to another,” said Vann, “events are so sensational and shocking that everything becomes quite unreal.”
He added, “I made the directorial decision in approaching such a piece to overdo the gore until the audience gets to the point that they begin saying to themselves, ‘This is ridiculous.’”
Eastley said she and Vann are presenting the show in a somewhat “tongue in cheek” manner.
“It all is rather absurd,” she said. “Our audience’s belief in realism must be suspended. Shakespeare’s drama is a crazy, violent world where four people die in the space of three lines.”
Like Eastley, Vann sees Titus as very similar to popular dramas of our time. Last week, the director took the cast to see a showing the new Batman movie Dark Knight Rising at the Latchis Theatre, and cast members found the similarities between the movie and their play phenomenal.
“Like in Titus, the events in the movie move from high drama to high drama without giving the audience a breath in between,” said Vann. “It was all fabulously unbelievable. Bruce Wayne must get out of a foreign prison from which escape is virtually impossible to save Gotham City, which is expected to blow up within 24 hours. In our production of Titus, we are consciously playing on the parallels between these two works of popular entertainment.”
“On the other hand,” he added, “I must say that Titus is also quite reflective too much of what is happening today in our violent world, like what occurred in Colorado at The Dark Knight premiere [last month]. Strangely, the play is ridiculous but also true-to-life.”
Sandy Klein, mentor and faculty advisor at NEYT, continued this line of thought.
“It really seems with how we communicate — Facebook, Twitter, comments on news stories and blogs — hate comes out of people so fast, ” she said. “It’s shocking, it’s really shocking, and sometimes I’m just not sure we see what we’re doing — how we’re putting that hate out there."
Callahan said Titus “is such an interesting play because it allows the audience to get excited about both parties’ horrible revenge, but as they walk out of the theater, we hope they will ask themselves, “Was bloody revenge the right answer? Was there another way?"
Eastley said she believes that however “over-the-top” Titus might seem, it still pursues many of the themes that run throughout Shakespeare’s more mature plays. In particular, she sees this early tragedy as a conflict between the concepts of “revenge” and “avenge.”
“Revenge is about retribution, but avenge is about re-establishing some moral order in a disturbed world. Interestingly, in Titus all the revengers die; it is the avengers who survive to build the new world.”
Vann summed up the play by saying that Titus is concerned with “the length to which people will go to protect their own. Now, doesn’t that sound like so many of the international and domestic issues we face daily?”

A bull market for lessons in non-violence and Spanish at NEYT

By JON POTTER / Reformer Staff
Posted:   02/14/2013 03:00:00 AM EST

Thursday February 14, 2013
BRATTLEBORO -- The folks at New England Youth Theatre are especially bullish on non-violence these days.
On the stage Monday afternoon, Peter Gould and two dozen young actors are working with high spirits on NEYT’s latest production -- a bilingual original adaptation of "Ferdinand the Bull," written by Gould and based on Munro Leaf’s beloved children’s book about the Spanish bull who refuses to fight and just wants to sit quietly and smell the flowers.
"Ferdinand the Bull" opens Friday at NEYT, 100 Flat St., and runs through Feb. 23.
Like its main character, the story of how the play came to be produced is a study in patient but firm determination to hold true one’s dreams to smell the flowers.
Deciding "Ferdinand" would be a good story to adapt, Gould set out to contact Munro Leaf’s estate through the publisher to obtain permission. For months, no word came, and Gould was afraid the project would have to be scrapped.
"Then I got this wonderful e-mail from (Munro Leaf’s son) Andy. He said ‘Munro would have loved this,’" recalled Gould.
Although loved for its sweetness and innocence, "Ferdinand the Bull " has a more complicated and controversial history. Its themes of non-conformity in the name of non-violence did not sit well, especially in context of its times. Published in 1936, it came at a time when the Spanish Civil War was being fought and when fears were stirring that Europe was once again about to be plunged into war. "Ferdinand" was branded by various groups as fascist or communist propaganda. Its pacifism did not sit well with militarists. Hitler ordered the book burned.
But "Ferdinand’s" message appealed to better angels, including generations of children. Within two years of publication, Ferdinand had become a balloon in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, an Academy Award-winning Disney cartoon film, and the book which bumped "Gone with the Wind" off the top of best-seller lists.
Why has it endured?
"It’s the non-violence," said Gould. "It’s not only that he won’t fight. It’s that he prefers to sit by himself and smell the flowers. ... He wants to be true to his nature. I think that’s probably why the story has such staying power."
In the NEYT production, Gould and his Junior Company actors bring Ferdinand to life, without shying away from the harder truths and rough historical lessons.
The play opens in the classroom of a modern-day progressive school, where teachers are carefully introducing the students to brutal realities of Munro Leaf’s time -- the brutality of the Spanish Civil War, the rise of Hitler, the consequences of repression, the price paid for cleaving to pacifism. The lesson segues to a report on Spain ... and the story of Ferdinand begins.
The lessons, for actors and audience, don’t end there. The play is divided into two parts -- the second being a complete run-through of what audiences just heard -- but in Spanish.
A long-time Spanish teacher, Gould felt "Ferdinand" presented a good opportunity for bilingual theater.
"There is a growing prejudice in the U.S. against learning foreign languages. We’re teaching our actors to be completely comfortable in another language," said Gould, who said his young charges have tackled that challenge "with aplomb."
NEYT’s version is a rollicking, high-energy, adaptation with singing and dancing.
"Ferdinand the Bull" will be presented on Friday at 7 p.m., Saturday at 2 and 7 p.m., Sunday at 2 p.m., Friday, Feb. 22, at 4 and 7 p.m., and Saturday, Feb. 23, at 2 and 7 p.m. Tickets are $8 for students, $10 for seniors, and $12 for adults.

No bull! Using ‘Ferdinand’ to teach larger lessons about living in peace

Originally published in The Commons issue #191 (Wednesday, February 20, 2013).
By Richard Henke/The Commons
BRATTLEBORO—Is teaching peace through a classic short story a lot of bull?
That’s what New England Youth Theatre’s junior company asks as it presents Ferdinand the Bull, directed and adapted by Peter Gould, on Friday, Feb. 22, at 4 and 7 p.m., and Saturday. Feb. 23, at 2 and 7 p.m.
With blessings from American author Munro Leaf’s estate, Gould and NEYT have created a new adaptation of the classic short story The Story of Ferdinand, about that beloved Spanish bull who refuses to fight, and would much rather just sit quietly and smell the flowers.
When he is led into the ring, Ferdinand resolutely ignores the matador and others’ provocations to fight.
Leaf wrote The Story of Ferdinand on a whim in an afternoon in 1935 largely to provide his friend, illustrator Robert Lawson (then relatively unknown), a forum in which to showcase his talents. It was published in 1936, and by the end of 1938, Gould claims that it had knocked Gone with the Wind from its New York Times perch as the best-selling book of all time.
The story was adapted in 1938 by Walt Disney as the beloved short animated film of the same name, and won the 1938 Academy Award for Best Short Subject (cartoon). Ferdinand has been translated into more than 60 languages.
The Story of Ferdinand was released nine months before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, but was still seen by many supporters of Francisco Franco as a pacifist book. American artist Michael Rakowitz claims Ferdinand “caused an international controversy” due to its perceived pacifist tone, and was banned in Spain (then ruled by Franco), and “burned in Nazi Germany.”
In advertising the show, NEYT proclaims, “Before Gandhi, King, Mandela, and the Dalai Lama, there was Ferdinand the Bull.”
“What a role model for our students!” says Gould. “Ferdinand, a bull apart; Ferdinand, big, strong and muscular; Ferdinand, refusing to join his brothers in banging heads and bellowing; Ferdinand, unwilling to perform for an audience hungering for blood!"
Gould said he believes that Ferdinand is more than a bull who says no.
“He knows himself,” he says. “He’s active, proactive, and decisive. He wants to seek the peace in a loud, bullying, jackbooted world where books about him are piled up and burned.”
Gould, who teaches a course in peace, conflict, and coexistence studies at Brandeis University, the same program where he was awarded his Ph.D. in 2002, has adopted the story as a lesson in civility.
“Ferdinand is someone who knows his nature,” says Gould. “He stands up to power and is willing to risk his life for his beliefs.”
Gould has written his version with an eye on social and political issues that the story tacitly address.
“I am a quirky kind of guy. I always prefer to make my own adaptations of classic works. I find other adaptors talk down to the students and even things out. As a writer and thinker with an eye on what is happening in the world today, I see what I do as a re-vision of classic works like Ferdinand or A Christmas Carol, which I adapted several years ago for NEYT. People don’t realize how much work goes into the adaptations I do for NEYT.”
With its re-imagining the idea of masculinity, Gould believes The Story of Ferdinand has a special message for gay people.
“Our version takes place in an alternative classroom where the teacher is clearly gay. Using the story of Ferdinand, he is trying to rethink the traditional ideal of masculinity as knee-jerk warriors. In the production at NEYT, shortly after the story begins to be told, the classroom is suddenly transformed, and we get a fully staged version of the story of Ferdinand, which last 35 minutes. There the first act ends.
“Then we try something amazing in the second act: The story is told over again, now completely in Spanish. And because we are dealing with a different language and culture, this time we revisit our show in an emotional and over-the-top fashion appropriate to Spanish culture.”
Gould claims that the production was a “deep winter, complete art experience” for the 25 NEYT junior company actors, aged 9 to 12.
“The kids have learned to speak some Spanish, how to dance the cha cha, and explored art and history of Spain. One day, we had art supplies all over the stage at NEYT as all the students drew pictures of a bull which we used as backgrounds for the set of our staged production.”