Mauro-Sheridan Zooms Shakespeare

Jason Calogine was tired and prepared. Rehab Rajou was energized and excited. Isabella Fletcher-Violante was happy to be there. They and several other fellow Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet students were on a Zoom chat with Michael Hinton, a teaching artist at Elm Shakespeare, recording a final few scenes for the school’s production of Cymbeline — which pivoted from theater to Zoom film project to keep the program going during the Covid-19 pandemic.

In the scene they were filming, a father and sons are observing a battle from a short distance. The sons want to join the battle to prove their bravery. The father doesn’t want them to go; he doesn’t want to lose his sons. They read quickly through the scene ​“so we know we’re all on the same page,” Hinton said. Then he encouraged the actors to dig a little deeper. ​“What’s the main course of action in this scene?” he asked.

“I agree to them going to war,” said Charles Jeffery, who plays Belarius, the father.

“Are you happy about it?” Hinton asked.

“No,” Jeffrey said.

“When are you going to see them again?” Hinton asked. ​“You don’t know when.” He turned his attention to the sons. ​“You guys are going off to war because your honor demands it, but you don’t know if you’re going to see your father again. All this stuff”— the sons’ lines about wanting to join the fight — ​“is you feeling ashamed that you didn’t go off to war sooner. Charlie, you don’t want your kids to go off to war. You’re trying to encourage them and talk them into doing the less exciting things, the things that will keep them alive. They want to go fight in the war. You want to keep them safe and healthy.”

The Mauro-Sheridan actors — Jeffrey, Luna Candelerio, Reuben Gitelman, and Marquez Savage — nodded. He hit record.

Making It Work

“They really figured it out,” said Sarah Bowles, Elm Shakespare’s education program manager. ​“We’re way faster than we were at the beginning.”

They had come a long way from March, when Mauro-Sheridan closed along with the city’s entire school system. For a few days, that seemed to mean that Mauro Sheridan’s Shakespeare program — overseen by Jodi Schneider, the progam’s producer and coordinator, and Elm Shakespeare staff — would be put on hold, too. But that meant a lot of work lost. Auditions for the show had been in January, and the students had been memorizing lines for weeks. They considered, and at first balked at, the possibility of continuing to do this year’s play, Cymbeline, over Zoom.

“It’s impossible,” Bowles recalled thinking. ​“How are we going to get everyone on Zoom?”

But a few days later, Bowles said, she and Schneider talked again. ​“The families want something,” they recalled thinking — something to ​“stay enriched. We had a long philosophical conversation about it” and thought: ​“Maybe we should double down and see if it’s possible.”

Schneider contacted all the families, gauging interest and making sure they had the technology. Parents responded, ​“we want this to continue.”

“We have to find a way,” Bowles said.

“As a theatre group, we just wanted them to have the continuity of the camaraderie that they’d developed,” Schneider said.

“The idea of getting together with them every week — we held onto how important that was. That might even be a reason enough for them to do it,” Bowles said. The students were enthusiastic; 28 of the 30 students who had been involved, remained involved. ​“The continuity of the adult group was really important too,” Schneider said. ​“I’m so grateful everybody from Elm Shakespeare could participate…. It just felt like it would be so sad to let it go.”

For students and mentors alike, however, transitioning from rehearsing for a live stage production to recording for a film project meant learning new skills. ​“This is completely a new skill set for me,” Bowles said. ​“I’m not a film editor, but I had to learn quickly. This is one of three projects I’m working on that are now film projects.” Of those three projects, Bowles is editing two — the Mauro-Sheridan project and another project for Common Ground. Elm Shakespeare is also moving online in other ways. Its Teen Troupe production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream will be livestreamed on May 23.

““It’s been really fun. It’s incredibly time-consuming,” Bowles said with a laugh. ​“I’ve learned how to put pictures in, sound, a voice-over,” she said. The need for a voice-over came about due to Bowles’s edits to shorten the play, ​“which you do every time,” she said. In moving from theater to film, she made even more edits ​“because I know people won’t want to watch a two-hour cut on Zoom.” She got it down to an hour and a quarter, plus a blooper reel. The narration between the scenes is provided by H. Jon Benjamin, an actor who plays Bob on Bob’s Burgers and appears on Archer. He also happens to be Schneider’s brother. Benjamin appears as William Shakespeare himself, and enjoys a few ad-libs along the way.

As they dug into recording a Zoom version of Cymbeline, they discovered certain advantages. With an edited version, ​“we can rehearse with the kids. It’s teaching them what the words mean, working them through the script and the story. It’s the same thing as rehearsing a play,” Bowles said, though the ability to do multiple takes meant that they could make a version of ​“their best work.”

“We’ve been able to do almost more one-on-one coaching because of the breakout rooms,” Schneider said. ​“And the kids don’t have distractions like they do at school.”

“We’ve been experimenting with tricks,” Bowles said, ​“handing off a prop” from one Zoom window to the next, or battles, or hugs. ​“It has made us schedule things down to a T. But I guess that’s what making a film is like — we’ve had to get really specific with who’s doing what when.”

There was also a broader question hanging over the production: Why do Cymbeline? It’s a lesser-known play that came late in Shakespeare’s career. With its many characters and convoluted plot, it can seem like Shakespeare took some of his previous plays and put them in a blender. But done well, it can be sublime.

“It’s exciting. It’s a big adventure,” Bowles said. ​“Number one, it’s a female hero, and we were really interested in having that. We thought it would be really cool to do a show that’s like, ​‘she persisted.’ She keeps on fighting no matter what.” Plus, ​“its wackiness really works on Zoom. I think this medium — if you don’t embrace the fact that we’re all doing this remotely, if you try to take it too seriously, it can fall flat. The fact that we’re doing Cymbeline” — as opposed to, say,

Othello — ​“is kind of a gift.” In turning the play into a Zoom film, Elm Shakespeare finds itself in the midst of a broader conversation within the American theatre scene about how to continue performing during the pandemic. ​“There’s been a lot of talk in the theater community about doing live Zoom performances,” Bowles said.

Both Schneider and Bowles are now keen to make sure that the Elm Shakespeare Mauro-Sheridan program happens again next year, regardless of how the pandemic might continue to affect school openings and closings.

“One thing I’ve learned is not to forget the fun element,” Bowles said. ​“A couple weeks ago, we really started to have fun with the kids They showed us their pets.”

“They don’t want to get off” after rehearsal, Schneider said. ​“They want to hang out afterward.”

Bowles agreed. ​“Sometimes we just start chatting and talking with each other and it becomes a meeting place for them. I’ve actually gotten to know some of them better through this.”

Elm Shakespeare’s quick pivot from live theatre to recorded film is also in keeping with the arts community’s general sense of always making things work with the resources at hand. ​“It’s making me personally recognize the importance of theatre in general — the idea of being present and communicating with other people,” Hinton said. Even with the change in format, ​“we are still making theater,” he said. ​“The film might be a document showing the process, but the process, the discovery, the exchange of ideas — I’m finding with students there’s a hunger for that we took for granted previously.”

“A lot of people as artists are used to jumping through hoops and doing what it takes to do what we love,” Bowles said. ​“We could still do the process because we’re meeting with them every week. We could still engage them in the process of building a play together.” Among other things, the students have risen to the challenge of creating their own costumes and props they need for their scenes. ​“There are a lot of lightsabers,” Hinton said.

For the students’ parts, moving from theatre to film meant a shift in acting priorities. It felt like it was its own completely new thing,” said Jason Calogine, who plays Posthumus, one of the sons who craves battle. ​“As much as you have to put into it, unless you’re standing back, you don’t have to worry about body language. It’s about the face.”

Harmoni Thomas, who plays one of the Muses, liked the flexibility that recording allowed. ​“I’m not a shy person, but I’ve never been on stage before. I would have been a little more nervous about it. I’m in my home environment so I can be more free.” She, like most of the students, had already memorized most of their lines anyway, but with a little clever positioning, they could even have the script on display out of the corner of their eye.

“You have the script if you need it,” said Mahari Kerrison, who plays Cloten. ​“But it’s kind of hard because of all the background noise. It can get in the way.” Kerrison’s grandmother and other family members are in the house when rehearsals happen, and he reported that it could get noisy. ​“I have to ask them, ​‘can you bring it down a little bit?’”

Many of the students missed the camaraderie of putting together the play in the same physical space, the face-to-face help, ​“the structure of everything,” Zyana Campbell, who plays Iago, said. ​“You miss the intimacy,” said Luna Candelario, when ​“you’re talking to a computer.”

And on the other hand, they all learned how to make eye contact by looking directly into the camera, make sure their facial expressions counted — and make do with what they had to get the job done.

“At home we had to make up our own costumes,” Thomas said. ​“It was definitely hard to find those household items. Certain times I thought, ​‘I have no idea what I’m going to wear.’” But she figured it out.

“I put on a hoodie, I found some glasses, and I got some tinfoil and put it in my mouth so it looked like I got grills,” Kerrison said. ​“The whole time I did that, I acted like a whole other person. I pretty much changed the whole time I was wearing them,” he said. Dylan Tyrell, who plays Philario, used a quilt to transform himself into a ghost. Campbell made a makeshift body under blankets using pillows.

“I find myself constantly running around for things to get — a sword, jewelry, things like that,” Calogine said. ​“One time I had to stand back and I was trying to be in frame. I’m walking and then I’m kneeling down, so I gave a whole speech in a crouch.”

“I had to do a dancing scene and my siblings were just staring at me,” said Sarah Naphi, who plays one of the Muses. ​“Those 15 seconds felt like an hour.”

Fighting The Fight

“That was a really good first take!” Hinton said to his crew about their scene before battle. ​“Remember, Charlie, you want to run from the noise, and they want to run to it.” He reminded the actors to look into the camera, which they did. They did another take, delivering their lines with more confidence. They conveyed the father’s reluctance to send sons into battle, and the sons’ desires to go.

“I’m really happy with that. How do we feel about that, my friends?” Hinton said. The students agreed.

Hinton then proceeded to pieces of footage he needed to edit the action together. They recorded themselves looking downcast at the death of a friend. They filmed a knighting scene, in which each student was tapped on the shoulders by a person offscreen (“that’ll be 50 bucks,” a father joked; ​“Bill it to Mauro-Sheridan,” Hinton joked back).

Then Hinton needed some actual battle footage from Candelario, which involved her charging at the camera, screaming and brandishing a weapon.
​“Here’s how this battle’s going to work,” Hinton said. ​“You have your sword. What I’m looking for is 10 seconds of you battling.”

“You mean slashing at the camera?” Candelario said. Hinton demonstrated. Candelario laughed. She slashed away at the camera gamely, paused for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“Great!” Hinton said.

The Mauro-Sheridan/Elm Shakespeare Zoom film production of Cymbeline will be ready in mid-June.