As a directing intern, the majority of my job is to sit tight, keep quiet, and learn – so you can imagine my excitement when it came time in rehearsal for us to go down to the Glen and learn art of archery. The hunting scene in Act IV of Love’s Labor’s Lost calls for the four ladies of the court to shoot bows and arrows, ostensibly at deer.  Deer seem hardly their main object, as Boyet quickly highlights that these “shooters” may well be more interested in shooting Cupid-arrows at their “suitors” than bloodying up some deer.  Our goal, of course, is to bloody no one at all, and stage management carefully scoured the area for stray bicycle riders before we began the first bow and arrow lesson. I didn’t think I liked sports—and was pretty certain I hated violence, but (at least when our dramaturg/archer extraordinaire Kayt Ahnberg does it) archery is so elegant – and also empowering (though still definitely scary!)

It is really a shame archery has fallen out of style.  There is really something to be said for the thrill of the hunt – and for once the women are on the hunting side.  This is actually a play in which women have remarkable control over relationship.  These men who have cloistered themselves in accordance with an absurd vow to study with no sleep, food, or female contact, are made the “Juliets” of the balcony scene – with the women pursuing their suits from below (more businesslike in nature than Romeo’s) while the men play Juliet from inside their palace walls.

Fun as all the antics are, the really incredible part of this process has been seeing all these artists, young and old, dive head first into the rich and often complex language of this play.  Veterans of the Shakespearean stage and interns alike engage in this war of wits, challenging themselves and each other to discover the tools that Shakespeare has given us to use in the text.

This afternoon our director worked with the younger actors on some of their speeches and it was amazing to see just how much Shakespeare gives you in the text when someone who’s devoted his life to performing Shakespeare helps us see it..  A seemingly ordinary line of text, “Ay me, I am forsworn,” comes alive brilliantly when you realize what can be done when you hum the mmmms and nnnnns hum and draw out all the long vowels.  As Brett (Longaville) sighed “Ay me,” I could really hear both the despair and the excitement of being “out of the way,” head over heels in love with love.

We were restaging the final performance of the “Nine Worthies” in rehearsal this evening, complete with armour, fake muscle arms, snakes, and helmets with the largest plumes I’ve ever seen.  Yet even as the men devolved from frat boys to four year olds with the most outrageous antics, we were reminded by Scott that the true humour comes from the language of this play.  Scott, half-exasperated, half-elated keeps saying “this play just won’t be pushed!  You try to make it do something it’s not meant to and fights right back.”  More and more I find that, funny as the characters are that these actors are creating, I laugh the hardest when Shakespeare wants me to laugh – at the language itself.

–Avital Rutenberg Schoenberg

Next up in The Green Room: Acting Intern Emily McKeown