Teaching artist Justin Pesce looked over his cast of A Comedy of Errors through the window of his Zoom meeting. Before him, on the screen, 13 students from Mauro Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School were ready, in their Renaissance clothing, to perform.
“Show me what you got today,” Pesce said, both goad and encouragement. “Yesterday I challenged you and you stepped up to the challenge. I know each and every one of you can do it. Everybody get into your space. Have a great run through. We’re going to have fun.”
With that, the students ran through A Comedy of Errors, showing as much facility with the complications of doing live theater isolated over Zoom as they did with the language and meaning of the play. As Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse, Rehab Rajoui and Luna Candelario brought a sparkle and quickness that set the pace for the rest of the cast. The play is a classic Shakespearean scenario of mixed up identities, doubles, and counterparts, and Antipholus and Dromio of Ephesus, Marquez Savage and Adrian Guzman used slyness to play the melodrama for laughs. Sarah Nakhi served the comedy as the hilarious and perpetually weepy Adriana. Nehimah Bell and Harmoni Thomas deftly moved scenes along as Angelo and Luciana. Money and slaps were transferred across the platform. They all fed off one another’s enthusiasm, even over Zoom.
“Awesome job so far!” Pesce said. “It’s looking really good — I love the energy.” At the end of the run he had notes for next rehearsal, ways to tighten up the performance further, but all in all, everything was falling into place. It came time for the students to offer reinforcements to one another, the chat box on Zoom filled with comments: “I reinforce my whole group”; “I reinforce Nehimah”; “I reinforce Harmoni and Rehab”; “I reinforce everyone. Everyone did good.”
A Comedy of Errors — which will have its official watch parties over Zoom on Monday, May 10 and Tuesday, May 11 at 6 p.m. — is this year’s production of Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School’s after-school Shakespeare program and its second virtual one during the Covid-19 pandemic. For last year’s production of Cymbeline, the program — a collaboration with Elm Shakespeare Company — pivoted hard from rehearsing after school for a live, staged production to preparing for a version filmed and edited over Zoom. This year Jodi Schneider, the progam’s producer and coordinator, and Sarah Bowles, Elm Shakespare’s education program manager, decided to try something different — again — with the idea of giving the students in the program a sense of what it was to put on a staged production while still creating a Zoom production so everyone could see the production virtually.
“Last year they didn’t have the experience of doing a play from start to finish, and one scene flying into another,” Bowles said of the students, who had been in the middle of rehearsals when the shutdown began in March 2020. Instead, they recorded the production scene by scene over Zoom. This year, she said, “we really wanted it to feel more like being in a play” and “we rehearsed it as a play.”
The students were ready for the challenge. “We were pretty concerned in the beginning about what the level of engagement would be, especially with virtual schooling,” Bowles said. Did students want to do a virtual after-school program after a full day of virtual school? It turned out the answer was yes, with 26 students signing up.
“There was a lot of camaraderie, people encouraging each other,” Schneider said. “For the new kids to start this way was really unusual, and I think it was a little abstract for them. They didn’t have the tactile experience of being on a stage.”
But the students involved in the program are a tight-knit group; in a year of isolation, it was a chance to see one another. “Once we get them in the meeting, they can’t stop talking,” Bowles said. “And they want to stay. We have to kick them out of the Zoom room,” Schneider said. It was a “unifying experience for them.”
With so many students, “we are doing two plays instead of one, and the reason for that is to give kids bigger parts,” Bowles said. That also means two different directors — teaching artists Michael Hinton and Justin Pesce — with two different directorial styles, leading to two different interpretations of the play. “The kids have really different takes on their characters. Sometimes we do show and tell,” Bowles said, so one group can see what the other are doing. On one level, Schneider said, “I think it’s turned into an unwitting competition,” in the sense that “they get very motivated to up their performance.”
But Bowles is quick to impart a broader lesson. “I really believe that theater should not be a competition ever. Your success does not depend on someone else’s failure. That’s a lesson that isn’t taught to young people — if anything it’s the opposite. Theater and art are among the few places where we can present an entirely different mindset.”
Whatever competition there is, is friendly; cooperation and coming together are the themes of the year, and figuring out how to make theater even in a year like this one. “Last week one of our kids was driving to Florida, and his parents pulled over at a rest stop so he could come to rehearsal,” Schneider said. “We’ve had a few kids doing their parts in Costco, or in cars.”
One parent — Nancy Todd, who is a professor of biology and enviromental studies at Manhattanville College — volunteered to make costumes. “They all have these beautiful Renaissance costumes, with a doublet and a cape and hat and golden feathers,” Bowles said. The program usually borrows costumes from the theater department at Southern Connecticut State University, but this year, Schneider said that Todd wanted the students to keep their garb. “These kids have been through so much, I want them to have costumes they can keep after the show,” Schneider recalled Todd saying.
“This woman was up all night making these costumes,” Schneider said. “She really put her heart and soul into making these for the kids.”
Todd’s contribution has helped the students do better acting, getting further into their characters. “They all look so good,” Bowles said. And the students “know one another’s costumes so well,” Schneider said, to the point where they help each other maintain their looks from scene to scene. “They’re really taking care of one another.”
This year represents a couple of transitions for the program beyond pandemic difficulties as well. A cohort of eighth graders, set to graduate this year, have been with the program for all four years that they could participate. Students who started with small roles as fairies or soldiers now have leading roles with lots of lines. At the same time, a group of new fifth graders have joined the group, and are already getting used to the Bard’s language.
For Bowles, the students’ success in this year’s production is “one step in the process.” Whether the students continue with acting or not, “it’s going to help them speak up in class in high school, or talk to someone at a job interview.”
“It’s just doing wonders for kids,” said Schneider, who Bowles said has been meeting with students virtually by request to run lines. “Here they are performing Shakespeare in the original language. To achieve this is really big, just from a language standpoint.”
Bowles agreed. “Having had the experience of being in a Shakepeare play, with the status that Shakespeare has, it gives kids that sense of ‘I did the best thing, the hardest language.’ When they get into high school and get assigned Shakespeare, they can say, ‘I know that, and I’m good at that, because I’ve done it before.”
And rendering Shakespeare accessible is perhaps the most in keeping with the playwright’s intentions. Today Shakespeare is venerated as a titan of literature, but “it was theater meant for mass appeal,” Bowles said. “It’s meant to be seen and heard and experienced.”
Zoom into the watch parties on May 10 and May 11 at 6 p.m. to see Mauro Sheridan’s production of A Comedy of Errors.
Awesome! Great job, kids!