'Greatness Thrust Upon Them'

by Kirk Woodward

[James F. Broderick (b. 1963), who lives in Glen Ridge, New Jersey. is a writer and a professor of English. (Glen Ridge, in Essex County in northern New Jersey, is a little over 15 miles east of New York City and two miles south of Montclair, in the environs of which much of the theater work of Kirk Woodward, the author of this report, is staged.  Kirk lives in Little Falls, 3½ miles north of Montclair in neighboring Passaic County.) 

[A former journalist and editor, Broderick has performed in a few Shakespeare plays (and has directed twice) with The Saint James Players of the Saint James Episcopal Church in Upper Montclair, a troupe with which Kirk has also worked.  (At least once, Kirk and Broderick worked together at SJP—on a production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, which Kirk directed in September 2017, and which I saw.)

[Broderick has published a few books, but his first play, The Hamlet Experience, was staged Off-Off-Broadway at the New York Theater Festival in November 2021.  The play was described in NYTF publicity as “a 75-minute contortion of Shakespeare’s masterpiece treated as a comedy that doesn’t know it’s a tragedy. . . .  [W]hat’s it all mean?  The director has no idea, the actors have lost their place, the writer expects the plot to be clear.”

[According to a post by the Jersey City-based Hudson Shakespeare Company, Greatness Thrust Upon Them had its origins eleven years ago:

In 2012, James Broderick . . . encountered a new experience for him but not new to many parents – driving his daughter to participate in a community theater production.

 

James’ daughter was playing Miranda in a production of “The Tempest” at the St. James Players in [Upper] Montclair and one day the director of the production asked James if he would be interested in playing a part. . . .  While he taught English and Journalism for years and spoke in front of crowds of students all the time, James had no acting experience and even less experience with Shakespeare’s language.  Swallowing his fear, he proceeded to learn the small, but pivotal role of Gonzalo.  Fear soon turned to sheer enjoyment as he discovered the play and the Bard with his daughter.

 

As James learned his part, he got to speak with the other adults in the cast and to his amazement found that many were like him, day professionals who also took time for a side career in theater.  An author of several books, he thought about exploring the subject of people with day jobs doing Shakespeare in their spare time.  What he found was a different animal.

 

These people didn’t just do this in their spare time but was at times a lifelong vocation supplemented by day jobs.  Very often, the same “community theater” actors were doing small roles in local film and television.  A community of often unsung, non-union professionals who were more than willing to share what theater and what Shakespeare meant to them. 

[Broderick took the opportunity to speak with actors about their experiences on stage with William Shakespeare.  “The result,” concluded the HSC post, “was the basis for ‘Greatness Thrust Upon Them: Non-professional Actors and Directors Discuss Their Encounters With Shakespeare,’ a new book that interviews . . . several actors from around the country about their insights, sacrifices, and delights in performing the Bard.” 

[A note about the book’s title—a popular and seemingly ubiquitous quotation from Act II, Scene 5 of the Shakespearean comedy Twelfth Night.  The fuller quotation is: “In my stars I am above thee, but be not afraid of greatness.  Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.”

[The lines are part of a letter supposedly written by Countess Olivia to Malvolio, her steward.  The pompous, egotistical, and self-important Malvolio reads the letter thinking that it suggests Olivia’s in love with him and is encouraging him to better himself.  What the duped steward doesn’t know is that the letter was, in fact, written by his fellow servants in an effort to play a cruel joke on him by advising him to do things that actually annoy the countess.

[While today, those who use Shakespeare’s famous lines, especially the last clause, do so in all seriousness, the poet’s original sense is to make Malvolio, the target of the words, a figure of ridicule as he’s mocked for his very pomposity, egotism, and self-importance.

[Broderick’s Greatness is available on Amazon in Kindle and Paperback versions and appeals not only to the Shakespeare or theater enthusiast, but presents inspirational accounts of everyday people pursing their dreams even if a full-time day job pays the bills.]

My friend David Semonin (1941-2010), about whom I’ve written in this blog (see “Saints of the Theater” on Rick On Theater, 30 December 2011), had a way of asking questions that stick in the mind. One day, probably after he had seen one too many local theater productions, he asked, “What’s the justification for community theater?”

At the time and place he asked that question (decades ago in Louisville, Kentucky), admittedly there wasn’t a lot of outstanding non-professional theater (or professional for that matter – Actors Theater of Louisville was barely on the horizon at that time). Theater has its skilled professionals. What do amateurs bring to the table?

There’s an historical answer to David’s question, or rather several connected answers. Theater in the United States in the nineteenth century was dominated by European dramatic models and by melodrama (not necessarily bad in itself, but at that time presented in heavily stereotyped ways). Few American plays from that period hold much interest today.

As the twentieth century began, another negative factor presented itself: powerful theatrical producers created what basically were cartels, severely limiting what could be presented on the professional stage and by whom. One response was the Little Theatre movement, usually said to have begun around 1910 (with antecedents), in which local non-professional groups created theaters of their own, outside the reach of the producers’ control.

Meanwhile playwriting began to stir, and in the early twentieth century the plays of Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953), among others, led to an increase of interest in theatrical experimentation and to a wider exposure of significant drama to the public. Some independent theaters spearheaded innovations; others replicated them.

Community theater, as many of these efforts were called, served as a sort of “declaration of independence” from economic and artistic restrictions. Theater was not to be produced just by an elite; anyone could do it.

Nowadays the picture is more complex and we can visualize it as a sort of sliding scale between completely amateur productions at one end and Broadway products at the other. “Community theater” today usually refers to the most amateur end of the scale, and that’s what David was talking about.

The word “amateur” unquestionably provides the basis for one answer to David. It doesn’t mean second-rate (or worse), it doesn’t mean less good than something else, it doesn’t mean naïve or shoddy. It comes from the Latin word “amator” or “lover,” from the verb “amare” meaning “to love” – a strong, passionate word.

An amateur, then, is a person who’s fallen in love with an activity, and that’s what so often happens in theater – one is “stage struck,” overwhelmed by a powerful attraction. This was certainly the case for me. I was fifteen when my friend Perry Baer invited me to a Saturday morning work call at Louisville Children’s Theatre (now Stage One, a very fine professional operation).

I found everything there that I needed in order to survive high school and find a direction for my life, and I couldn’t be happier about it. That same feeling – that passionate love for theater – finds expression in a book called Greatness Thrust Upon Them (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2014; available on Amazon) by a friend of mine, James F. (Jim) Broderick, with whom I’ve recently worked on a directing project.

Jim had the idea of talking to non-professionals (27 of them) across the country about their experiences acting in plays by William Shakespeare (1564-1616). (I know two of the people interviewed, John Bylancik and Lisa Stoeffel.) Although Shakespeare’s plays are performed at all levels of theater, they are by no means simple to produce and perform for anyone, so they provide plenty of material for discussion.

Jim’s book suggests a kind of answer to David’s question above. Basically, David was looking at the result of the process of producing plays, the productions themselves, which are of variable quality (as is all theater, as a matter of fact) and can on occasion be awful – and, of course, sometimes not.

Jim’s book, on the other hand, emphasizes more the values of the process itself. Community theater, his book suggests, enriches and sometimes even transforms the people involved in it. (If the result is worthwhile productions, of course, that is a welcome plus.)

One factor David may not have considered when he challenged the value of community theater is the range of experience one can find in a given cast. When he asked his question, decades ago, I suspect there were not many people in the local theater scene with formal training in drama.

I have no numbers to prove that the situation is different today, but I suspect it would be a rare community theater production today that doesn’t have one or more persons in the cast or the theater staff who has had formal theater training, or at least substantial experience in professional-quality shows.

There are gems throughout Jim’s book which leave me with an expanded understanding of what acting at the local level can be like, and what people there can achieve. The interviewees in Greatness are thoughtful, committed, and perceptive, with a generosity of spirit that is heartening – exactly the kind of people we need in our world. Here are a few observations the book suggests.

Obviously, everyone interviewed had a first encounter with Shakespeare; no one is born knowing his plays. The stories in Greatness tend to follow a generally shared trajectory. There’s an introduction to Shakespeare, maybe from parents, maybe at school. At that point what we might call “the Shakespeare experience” “takes” or it doesn’t.

Then there’s some kind of opportunity actually to perform one of the plays, reading it aloud or even being recruited into performing it. Then the person, typically, is hooked. As Michael Callahan, who actually didn’t have his first experience with Shakespeare until he was retired, says, “People often get sort of drafted into the theater.”

Then, frequently (and fortunately), there’s often some reinforcing experience, typically at the hands of an inspiring teacher or an understanding director. Seth Meriweather gives one example:

I remember the director said “Let’s be professional about this [production of Richard III] and help these people watching this play” – that stuck with me, the value of performing, and what you can bring to an audience, how important it was to perform as well as you can for the audience.

Greatness demonstrates how strong the impulse can be to create theater. Dennis Brestensky, a teacher, tells how in 1997

half a dozen students came into my office, closed the door, and said rather forcefully, “We want to do a Shakespeare play. We want to form a Shakespeare club called the Lion Players. We want to do a full-length play every spring, and we want you to be behind us. Not as director, but as advisor, supporter, and cheerleader.”

In Greatness there’s plenty of evidence that the right director can make an enormous difference. For me stories of this kind are interesting and suggestive. Jay Tilley for example says that “The way Bob [Smith] liked to direct, when one scene was ending, another was already beginning – a very brisk pace.”

Noelle Fair, working on a speech from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “got so overwhelmed with it that I think I broke down during one of our final rehearsals. . . . My director came to me and said ‘I know why you’re having problems with it. It was written to be bad. Play it like a bad actor.’” The advice was exactly appropriate for the speech.

Meredith Zahn says, “I remembered one thing my acting coach told me – just pick an objective and stick to it.” Whole acting classes boil down to exactly that.

Sometimes it’s not a person but a film or video that helps someone persevere in their efforts to perform Shakespeare’s plays. The name that comes up frequently in this regard in Greatness is Kenneth Branagh (b. 1960), who has made six movies from Shakespeare’s plays, as well as one film about a troupe performing Hamlet, the marvelous A Midwinter’s Tale (1995), which by itself might be enough to convince anyone to try their hand with the Bard.

Seeing films of the play you’re in, actually, is a fraught subject. Several actors in the book mention how helpful it was for them to see videos of other performances of the plays they were doing. As a director I urge actors not to do this, so their performances can be their own rather than a copy of someone else’s.

Is Shakespeare a special case? I still don’t think so, but I’m giving the question thought. I will add that David Neal, in the book, vehemently agrees with me, and Tony Pisculli says:

I think it’s a distraction. If you are playing Richard II, and you go see Ian McKellen’s production, you’re not going to be doing yourself any favors. It’s an impossible measuring stick. Plus, that was that production, and this is our production.

Sometimes it’s other actors who provide needed support, through their encouragement or through observation, and sometimes through the advice they give. Many interviewees cited as an asset something that as a director I always resist in a show, which is for actors to coach each other. John Bylancik says:

I actually sought out a lot of help from anybody in the cast who had done any other show before. I cornered anybody, backstage and in-between rehearsals. Every line I think I ran by somebody who clearly knew a lot more than I do.

I’m not about to abandon my policy that actors should never coach each other, but I might need to be more sensitive to the amount of help actors might need, either from me or from other (hopefully authorized) people.

Inspiration from others doesn’t have to come in the form of advice. Susan Nelle says:

You know what I love? I didn’t understand this until recently. I really love the rehearsal process – even more than performing. That’s the creative process, that’s where the learning comes in. . . . Learning to play with those people, working out the things you need to tell the story, that’s the hard work of rehearsal. In a good rehearsal process, you’re exploring what makes it come alive, what moves it. If it’s not alive, it’s just someone standing up there reading from a textbook.

Help can come from many other sources, some unlikely, as Michael Callahan illustrates:

One of the other things that helped was, we were rehearsing in a local high school, and the drama teacher had a comic book of [Twelfth Night] . . . . [S]he said “This might help you,” and she handed me a comic book of the play. They have the lines, and then they have an explanation of what they mean. She said “Here’s what I give my students. This might help.” And it did.

We don’t use words in the identical way that people did in, say, 1600. Add to that the fact that Shakespeare is a supreme poet, both lyric and dramatic, and then add the problems involved in getting an audience both to hear the words and to understand them, and we have quite a mix.

John Kuhn says that

it was hard as heck to figure out what was being discussed, given the use of a lot of different poetic elements that I was unfamiliar with. It was extremely challenging figuring out the meaning. On the other side, there were those pearls of expression that have become well known, and which are almost too poetic to be expressed. So I went back and forth between thinking “Oh my gosh, what does that mean?” to “Oh my gosh, that’s beautiful!” I remember just being daunted. I was intimidated by the language even as I was being overwhelmed by the power and beauty of language. Both extremes.

Susan Nelle says:

One of the first things you have to do if you want to honor the language is to break it down, really try to understand it. In the language, Shakespeare gives you the emotions. You don’t have to manufacture the emotions, the language will tell you the state of mind that the speaker is in, as well as the facts of the story. It made me appreciate even more good writing – even good American writing. . . . That’s the thing about Shakespeare’s language – you have to learn to trust it. It is everything. Everything will fit in and around it if you are true to the language.

John Bylancik recounts:

I felt really compelled to try to get the language right. The memorization, the learning of the lines was something I never had to do before. My daughter actually helped me out the most, giving me mnemonic help in terms of memorizing, chunking the text, tying it to emotion, tying it to reaction – just real acting skills.

Many stress how important it is to understand what a line means – something I find has to be the first step in rehearsals for a Shakespeare play. Nate Pain says he learned that

the biggest thing is getting an understanding of what you’re saying. The language he was writing in is so far removed from the language we use today. It’s not so much the words you are speaking, it’s how you are saying it, your actions, your body language. That’s what can make or kill a Shakespeare production, in my opinion – creating an understanding, an understanding for the audience so they can know what’s happening.

The results is well worth the effort. Interviewees attested that acting in a Shakespeare play can bring about a level of understanding the plays that just reading them can’t. Meredith Zahn says,

I went to that first rehearsal and we did a cold read – Shakespeare plays are meant to be performed. As soon as I read with the other actors, it all made sense to me. And I was like, “I get what I’m saying now! Oh my gosh, it makes sense!

Participating in productions can pay off, of course, in insight about specific plays. John Bylancik says of The Tempest:

I think for me there’s a definite forgiveness and a “second chance” theme that kind of runs through it. Everything from Ariel being released from the tree to the young lovers at the end being discovered, the play moves from worst-case to best-case.

That’s solid observation. Dennis Brestensky says,

The thing I really liked about Shakespeare – he had a rounded view of life. Some of the literature we were reading [at his school] was negative, but even though Shakespeare wrote tragedies, he had a great vision of the world, of the comedy and joy of life. You’d cry when you read his works, but you’d also laugh.

Angela Laio, whose ethnicity is Asian, pointed out a surprising benefit of doing Shakespeare plays – that it’s easier to achieve non-traditional casting in them:

I think my ethnicity hasn’t been a barrier when it comes to being cast in Shakespeare plays. Since his work has been around for so long, there have been countless examples of directors taking risks with his work, and casting non-traditionally in terms of race and gender. People are not as surprised when they see “ethnic” actors playing traditionally “Caucasian” roles in Shakespeare’s plays.

Actors cite the freedom Shakespeare gives actors to explore ways of doing their roles since he gives relatively few stage directions. As Angela Liao says, “You say to yourself, why not try it this way?”

One major answer to David Semonin’s question, “Why community theater at all?” may be the way theater enriches the lives of the people who participate it. Many interviewees in Greatness saw benefits in their lives outside theater as a result of performing Shakespeare.

Sometimes the results are surprising. Meredith Zahn sees performing Shakespeare as strengthening her religious faith; Lisa Stoeffel sees it as a part of her church’s outreach. Colin Goode, an Anglican priest, says:

When I played Friar Lawrence [in Romeo and Juliet], a friend of mine came to me after the show and said “That was really good – you missed your vocation!” My head began to swell. I thought he was going to say “You should have been an actor.” Instead, he said “You should have been a Franciscan friar!”

More generally Peter Howell says:

Well, the performing and literary arts have enriched my life immeasurably, partially by offering insights into the human condition, and partially by offering escape into other people’s stories, which are generally more interesting and more revealing of the human condition than my own. To say nothing of having given me the opportunity to have gotten friendly with a number of creative and really wonderful people.

Rick Kenney studied drama at Catholic University (Washington, D.C.), where Susan Sarandon (b. 1946) was in his class. She went on to become a fine and notable professional actor, but what Kenney says has a wider application. His teachers, he says,

took the approach that the way to become a good performer, actor, theater person, is to learn a lot about life, the world, everything that matters to human beings. The technical stuff you can learn on the job. The emphasis wasn’t on the craft, but absorbing as much as you can about life. It was the liberal arts approach – drama for its own sake, not to prepare for a career, but to enrich your life. We were told to be a true “amateur” – do it for the love of it.

In a society in which the liberal arts as a whole are being increasingly devalued as a part of education, community theater may not need more justification than that.

[Many ROTters may know this, but the British don’t use ‘amateur’ with the same negative connotation that we do in the U.S.  A case in point: when I was stationed in Berlin with the army and helped start a theater group at the air base, we sort of modeled it after a similar group the British forces had.  Their troupe was called BATS, which was an acronym for the British Amateur Theatre Society. 

[One of our founding members was the British wife of a U.S. Air Force NCO, and she wanted to name our group TAT to emulate the British group—but we went with the Tempelhof American Theatre because of the derogatory sense of ‘amateur’ in American usage. (See “Berlin Memoir,” Part 8, 13 April 2017.)

[Kirk’s etymology of the word as derived from Latin is certainly correct, but readers might note that the word itself is French and means simply “a lover of something.”  (A romantic or sexual lover, by the way, is amant/amante.)

[Now, here are some personal responses I had while reading Kirk’s report on Greatness Thrust Upon Them:

•  When Kirk raises the likelihood that some participants in a community theater today will have had some professional training or experience, I wonder if that wouldn’t be especially true in communities in or near large cities with a professional theater scene or a college with a strong arts program. 

Montclair, New Jersey—the community in which Kirk lives and in whose vibrant theater scene he participates—is an excellent example, I’d think.  It’s about a half hour from New York City by car and less than three-quarters of an hour by train.  Montclair State University has a theater and dance department and offers bachelor’s and master’s degrees in theater; Montclair High School has an active theater and performing arts program as well.  There are probably dozens of small theater groups, plus theater troupes at many local churches, all around the Montclair area.

(When Kirk and I were at college in the mid- and late 1960s, our rural college town didn’t have a community theater as far as I knew—and the university also didn’t have much of a theater program.  When I got to the State University College at Oneonta, New York, in the late ’80s—Oneonta is a similarly isolated town—where the college had a large theater department, the town had a very active community theater.)

•  Kirk asserts: “Greatness demonstrates how strong the impulse can be to create theater.”  This statement reminds me of a remark I made in my report on documentary theater (“Performing Fact: The Documentary Drama,” 9 October 2009): “The drive to perform . . .—to teach or explain events of import to the community—is as old as performance itself.  The first . . . performance, the precursor of the . . . drama, must have occurred the first time a Neanderthal hunting party danced around the campfire to replay the day’s success.” 

Leonardo Shapiro, the director on whom I’ve blogged often, frequently spoke of the theater as our descendent of the tribal campfire, around which the community gathered to tell its stories and recount its history.  “Culture is a story told around a fire,” Leo declared in a 1991 essay in the Performing Arts Journal.  “It is the conversation between the young and old.  It is the fire on your face and the cold on your back.  The link between your experience and mine”

•  When Kirk wrote about actors getting advice from other actors or members of the company, and then added that he discourages this practice, I was prompted to add “especially unsolicited advice/coaching.”  Even solicited help from someone other than the director is a problem, I think.  It’s a matter of too many cooks—and too many voices giving (potentially contradictory) notes and instruction to the actors. 

This can be an awful temptation in a college-theater setting when a cast member might find him- or herself acting with one of his or her teachers or students.  I had both experiences as an MFA student at Rutgers: I was in one production with my longtime acting teacher and one with a student of my own.  My teacher never coached me or gave me advice—she had her own role to work on, after all—and I didn’t advise my student on her work, either.

•  Kirk’s quoting one of the interviewees about learning to work with the other actors reminded me of the late Aaron Frankel, a teacher I studied with at HB Studio, “quoting” Martha Graham (I imagine it was really a paraphrase): “Don’t come on stage to give; come on stage to take” (i.e., from the other performers, to respond to what they “send”).

•  The anecdote about the Shakespeare comic book brought to mind my earliest encounter with The Bard.  I read one of his plays—I’m pretty sure it was Romeo and Juliet—in 8th-grade English class, but I think I must have tried to read some of the plays before that on my own.  (Around that time, my mother had given me her high school volume of collected works of Shakespeare—still with her bookplate in it bearing, of course, her maiden name.)

Sometime when I was in middle school, the mother of one of my friends was an amateur actor, and she was in a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or Twelfth Night at the Carter Barron Amphitheater in Washington, D.C.’s Rock Creek Park.  I’m pretty sure that was my first Shakespearean performance, and I took the Shakespeare volume and followed along with the performance. 

After that, I may have read other Shakespeare plays, probably the comedies, but the unfamiliar language, the complex structure, and the poetry made it hard for me to follow the stories.  Someone suggested—I can’t imagine I came upon this on my own—I read Charles and Mary Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare, and that was a lot easier to read, even in the 18th-century prose in which the Lambs wrote, and I could then read the 16th-century texts of the originals more easily because I knew the plot.  It’s not a comic book, but I think the point’s the same. 

•  The next quotation, about another actor’s difficulty following the poetry, reminded me of something from back in Kirk’s and my college days.  Our college director used to say, before every first rehearsal of a Shakespeare play—or maybe at the auditions: “Shakespeare was just a hack!”  When I mentioned this response to Kirk, he suggested that it was: “He needed to feel Shakespeare was something he could handle – maybe?”  I think he said it so that The Bard would seem something we could handle without being intimidated by his iconic stature. 

•  The comments by the Asian-American actress about her ethnicity enhancing the production harked back to comments I made on a few Shakespeare productions with racially mixed casts, such as Andre Braugher’s Iago and Franchelle Stewart Dorn’s Cleopatra—both at the Folger in D.C. (see “Othello” in “Some Out-Of-Town Plays from the Archive,” 22 December 2020, and “Antony and Cleopatra” in “Three Plays from the Shakespeare Theatre from the Archives,” 26 April 2020, respectively).

Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead isn’t Shakespeare, but it’s Shakespeare-derived and the characters are Shakespeare’s, so the black-white Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Jon Jory’s production at the Actors Theatre of Louisville in 1970 qualifies, and it said, among other things—when other characters mixed the two courtiers up—that they’re so interchangeable that even race isn’t enough to distinguish them.

•  The interviewee who said that actors should learn about all aspects of life, not just theater, echoes my advice to a high school student in Maplewood, New Jersey, who gave up a trip to Paris for a chorus role in a community theater production.  I told her that there’d always be another production—she was a pretty talented young actress and would have had no trouble getting cast in local shows—but a trip to Paris (especially her first one!) could be life-altering and would benefit her forever.  (Mine was: see “An American Teen in Germany,” Part 1, on Rick On Theater, 9 March 2013).   

I’ve also taken a stand against being an undergraduate theater major (see “Liberal Arts in the Real World,” 24 July 2010).  Many young actors with whom I studied and worked had been theater majors in college—some even as early as high school.  I invariably found these actors limited not only in their artistic abilities, but, more importantly, in their general knowledge of literature, history, philosophy, and science.

This had two repercussions in their work.  First, they had less factual knowledge on which to draw when studying a role and, second, they had a narrower basis for their experience of life—an experience that is indispensable for any artist, particularly an actor. The best actors with whom I worked had all had the most eclectic intellectual backgrounds, though not all got them from college. (Many of the actors I met, especially the older ones, were self-educated. Others had studied diverse fields in school, including chemistry, law, and history—and one or two former divinity students.)

My own work as an actor and director is riddled with incidents where I drew on the most improbable knowledge.  In the referenced post, I proceed to describe some diverse instances of this phenomenon.]