“Twelfth Night” Sings A Swan Song With Swings, Breakaway Bottles

One is a ​“violence designer,” concerned with the safety of both actors and audience. The other knows how to purchase pronto a genuine 19th-century violin case on eBay, for only $30

Fight director Ted Hewlett and Properties Master Kate Begley Baker, respectively, exercise these two indispensable backstage talents for the Elm Shakespeare Company​‘s upcoming production of Twelfth Night at Edgerton Park.

The show — which marks the company’s 20th season and the last production for founding artistic director Jim Andreassi, who directs — launches on Thursday night. It has shows Aug. 20 to 23, Aug. 25 to 30, and then Sept. 1 to 6. All performances are at 8:00 p.m.

On a humid Tuesday morning the company was deep in tech rehearsal in the park, transformed into a Moorish-looking castle estate. Why, this reporter asked, did Andreassi choose the riotous, cross-dressing, mistaken identity-filled, gender-bending Twelfth Night as his final play to direct?

“Because the 13th was taken,” he shouted back, and then went to working on a swing seat and hoist with Hewlett.

Margie Andreassi — Jim’s wife and the company’s managing director — clarified. The choice was made because the 1601 comedy, which the ESC previous staged in 1995, has Shakespeare at the effortless height of his powers to charm, entertain, and make you think and rethink gender in the era of Caitlyn Jenner. It’s one of Andreassi’s favorites to go out on.

“It’s not just raucous fun. There’s also a melancholy sweetness,” she said, appropriate for the Andreassis’ swan song.

The reins are going to be taken by Rebecca Goodheart (pictured), the new producing director, who was on hand literally learning the ropes alongside Andreassi and Hewlett.

Fight Song

Violence designer, violence coordinator, fight director: Those are among the names that Hewlett goes by. As an actor and fight director, he’s been in at least eight ESC production, including the 2012 ESC production of Macbeth.

Hewlett (pictured) teaches acting at Emerson College in Boston, but ​“stage combat is my specialty,” he said during a break in the effort to hoist and swing actor Jacob Heimer, playing Feste, one of the play’s several fools, above the room where he is taunting the imprisoned and love-crazed Malvolio.

“If we put the rope under his leg, this is the hand hold that will work,” Hewlett explained.

Although rapier handling is his forte, attending to all the play’s physically demanding scenes, such as this one, is part of Hewlett’s assignment. Tuesday morning he was teaching Heimer to use his abdominal muscles to cut down on the swinging, to get more control, so that when he says his lines he can be facing the audience and really land the words, instead of crashing into the castle, which is only a flat and might topple down. Productions literally rise and fall by such things.

Hewlett, however, was most eloquent on the evolution of fight sequences in plays. ​“A hundred years ago there were set violence routines” in plays like Macbeth, he said. Directors just added unique twists and turns at the end.

“Now fight scenes are unique to the play and to the actor. They’re no longer generic,” he said. ​“We reach to illuminate story, but keeping the actors safe is primary.”

With Twelfth Night Hewlett said he has 12 people involved in a fight in the third act. Some have experience in sword fighting and some don’t. The fight sequences feature swords and bottles, including one bottle that must be cracked over a head — it’s called a breakaway bottle — while another actor cleans up the shards and dropped swords before the next actors sweep in.

There are real swords involved, but they are not sharp. Several are from Hewlett’s personal collection of 16 rapiers, 12 broadswords, and six knives, which he uses for his teaching.

An actor and fight choreographer with martial arts training, Hewlett is committed to the fight being continuous with the characters’ evolution. He praised, by way of an example from cinema, the action sequences in the Bourne spy film franchise, where Jason Bourne (played by Matt Damon) is revealed in the crisp, efficient way he handles the physical action.

“The tension in fight choreography is that you must be fresh and exciting every night, but also hit specific marks,” he said. ​“We don’t want to stop the play to have a spectacle of a fight, but have the characters revealed through the fight.”

Jeremy Funke, who plays Sir Andrew Aguecheek to Andreassi’s Sir Toby Belch in one of the fight sequences, agrees. ​“There’s no one better than this guy in fight choreography. His attention to character expression through fighting is unparalleled,” he said. In Twelfth Night the fighting is minimal and almost incidental — unlike the fighting in, say, Macbeth. Nevertheless, Funke said, Hewlett makes it ​“instrumental.”

Wooden Pail, Lantern, Flower, Rosary, Sword, Quiver, Taper

Behind the stage, in the rental pod holding some 75 props, props master Kate Begley Baker was readying swords, boxing gloves, and bottles.

Baker, who has been props master at ESC for eight years, was busy taking the paper labels off some wine bottles before painting on labels more appropriate to the mid-1800s Spanish setting that Andreassi has chosen for the play.

On the shelf in her little work area in the back of the pod were a stuffed bunny, snow shoes, a croquet mallet, and various other items that Andreassi came up with for the scene where silly Sir Andrew throws a lover’s fit and threatens to run away, taking his personal stuff huffily with him.

Many of the items are borrowed from Yale Rep. Others, like the violin case that Andreassi insisted be period-specific, Baker bought and then repaired.

“I’ve got a touch of OCD perfectionist when it comes to this,” she said, putting herself on the same wavelength as Andreassi.

When money puts the breaks on such perfectionism, creativity enters. There is a fountain on stage with genuine running water. Andreassi instructed Baker to have period-specific wooden buckets. Yet the only wooden buckets on the cheap that Baker could locate were from Home Depot, and they had holes in the bottom, since they are planters.

She cleverly inserted a plastic bowl or liner (pictured). Presto, the bucket now holds water, and with the little rope handle she added, it passes the 19th-century test.

With fountains, sword fights, and the touching hilarity of a play that will be the last for the Andreassis at ESC, the performances are sure to be especially thronged this year.

No reservations ever are required for the first-come-first-choose-your-spot-on-the-grass seats. You just show up, and bring a picnic before the curtain if you like. Here are ESC’s suggestions. Like Duke Orsino says in the opening of the play, ​“If music be the food of love, play on!”