Not much blogging lately, I know. Overlapping two shows will do that to you. But we survived the closing of Richard III (not to mention the celebration after – I’m not in college anymore but I held my own); so now it’s time to focus on Much Ado, which opens a week from Thursday.
As I believe I mentioned, I just did this show a little over a year ago, in the role of Benedick; but this time will be playing Borachio, the drunken follower of the Prince’s bastard brother Don John. There’s always much to learn watching a new crew of creative people working on text this familiar, not to mention a much savvier actor handling the same role. You have to disengage yourself from so much memory of the choices you made in order to see unadorned the choices they are making. An actor named Michael Nehring is our Benedick and he has a marvelous expressive variety.
This is my second show with Shakespeare Orange County this summer, and so half the cast and crew are rollovers from Richard. So I knew going in what quality of people I would have to work with. We are under the care of a different director, and because it is a comedy and not the tragic/historic spectcale of Richard, it changes the tenor of rehearsals. The irony is, I think as actors we laugh more when rehearsing a tragedy, to relieve the tension. But comedy – we work that very seriously, and often with little laughter to guide us.
Borachio is evolving in an interesting direction for this production. We are using more of his dialogue than you often see, and with that fuller text he becomes a more than a pickled sidekick – he actually provides much of the initiative and planning for the scheme of mistaken identity designed to sabotage Claudio and Hero’s wedding. I get the opportunity, if I can, to show that under the boozy exterior is a true conniver, exploiting the petulant melancholy of Don John in order to shake money out of him. Like Margaret, the waiting-woman he plays dress-up with at that chamber window, Borachio sees the social order and aspires while refusing to consider those above him his true betters; although his subterfuge and ultimate cowardice (heaping the blame on Don John when captured) is the shadow opposite to Margaret’s unapologetic celebration of her wit, charm, and sexuality.
Whether or not the audience ever gets any of that beyond my tripping and burping I do not know, but it keeps me working hard.