On the Campus: October 11, 1995


SHAKESPEARE ON THE GREEN
Outdoor student theater company puts faculty member "on stage"
BY LIZ VEDERMAN '96

Just when I start to feel comfortably jaded about Princeton's conservatism, something happens to make me realize it's a pretty great place after all. Recently, I talked with Professor Thomas P. Roche *58 of the English department. He has joined an undergraduate theater group, the Princeton Shakespeare Company (PSC), and will be playing the dual roles of Duncan and the Porter in its production of Macbeth. His story embodies Princeton's philosophy that professors and undergraduates can and should enrich each other's lives in and out of the classroom.
In mid-October, Roche's voice will boom from East Pyne courtyard as well as from the lecture hall. The PSC is unusual not only in having a member of the faculty among its cast, but also for its practice of staging performances outdoors. Once each semester, the rhythms of iambic pentameter ring from the walls and arches of Princeton's architecture, as PSC performs a work by the Bard; last year it produced A Midsummer Night's Dream and Love's Labours Lost.
Davis McCallum '97 and Stephanie Brancaforte '97 conceived this addition to the Princeton theater community in the spring term of their freshman year. As McCallum explains, "In its original conception, the company would be made up of a core of 20 actors who would perform two plays per academic year-outside, in the natural surroundings of the university's gothic campus." Although the actors are not the same from performance to performance, as originally intended, the company remains unified by its mission "to present intelligent, fast-paced, muscular, engaging Shakespeare to Princeton University and the surrounding community."
Since the company aims to reach the Princeton community as well as university students, inviting a professor to participate in one of its plays seemed only natural. Roche first heard about the PSC when McCallum was a student in his English 201 class and announced it would be staging A Midsummer Night's Dream. Roche decided to attend the performance, and has been in awe of the company ever since. He describes the work of the PSC as "a renaissance of theater at Princeton," and says the talent involved recalls the presence of Jimmy Stewart '32, José Ferrer '33, and Josh Logan '31, when the trio worked together on Triangle Club shows in the early 1930s.
Roche is quick to laud PSC's professionalism and dedication, saying, "If I could get people to work as hard for precept as for this play, I'd be a happy man."
But what impresses me the most is PSC's vision. Macbeth director Leo Kittay '96 says, "PSC plays are put up on a shoestring budget, but the company doesn't try to hide that-instead it uses the simplicity to free up the production. Our performances are not driven by costume, not driven by set, but instead by Princeton's resources: the people and the buildings. The fact that we can have our actors wearing Chuck Taylor sneakers keeps it in the audience's mind that we're just Princeton students putting on a play-which points to the strength of the play itself."
McCallum's sense of the PSC is right in tune with Kittay's. "The PSC," he says, "makes Shakespeare contemporary not by dressing the play up in a modern style or modern dress, but by stripping it down. And that's essentially what Shakespeare did in the Globe Theater."
So when Kittay asked Roche to audition, and then to be in the play, he readily accepted. "I've made it clear to Leo that I'm just one of the cast," Roche says. "I even offered for everyone to call me Tom, but they couldn't do it." Despite vestiges of formality, the rehearsals for Macbeth are a creative process for all involved, as Roche demonstrates by modeling a floppy hat that he and Kittay agreed would suit the Porter, and a carved cane for his role as Duncan.
"Duncan is usually portrayed as a kind old guy who gets murdered early in the play, but in this production he waves around a cane because we view him as much more of an operator," explains Roche. As for directing a professor (an English professor in a play by Shakespeare, at that) Kittay says, "It's hard to call him a typical professor. He gives me more respect than I could ask for. And his being an English professor makes him a wonderful resource."
The cast has been on campus rehearsing since three weeks before classes began, sleeping on borrowed floors of borrowed rooms, eating on the run, and rehearsing from 10 in the morning to 10 at night, in one- or two-hour segments. Despite the commitment of its members, the future of this fledgling theater company is unclear, according to Kittay. The company has no home theater, and holds most of its rehearsals in 185 Nassau Street, Princeton's performing-arts building.
If you're in town on the weekends of October 12-14 or 19-21, check out PSC's production of Macbeth and see what Princeton theater can do. Kittay says of the upcoming performance, "I hope we will show the university that with a little effort, this kind of thing could go on forever."
Liz Vederman, an English major from Turnersville, New Jersey, interned at Princeton University Press this summer.


paw@princeton.edu