The Nexus

Sierra Perry (12) is a veteran on the stage. She knows how to work the crowd, and she knows what to expect when the curtains open.

But during rehearsals for the Westview’s fall play, The Tempest, it was different. Perry struggled between portraying her character and clearly speaking her lines.

For Perry this continued to happen in the first couple rehearsals due to difficulty of the Shakespearian dialogue.

“The [Tempest] was very challenging for me at first,” Perry said. “The language is so different from what I’m used to and with so many things going on in the play, it was hard to connect to my character and to my lines.”

This year the Westview Theatre Co. decided to undertake the goal of performing The Tempest. Like Perry, the rest of the cast faced the daunting task of understanding and recreating one of Shakespeare’s most well-known plays.

Actress Cat Crowley (12) also said that the unfamiliarity of the language and sentence structure presented the cast with an obstacle by making it difficult to comprehend and memorize the dialogue.

“Shakespeare does a backwards Yoda thing in some of his lines, so it’s been difficult to memorize words,” Crowley said. “That can be frustrating when you’re on stage trying to be your character and act out all the emotions, but you just can’t remember the lines.”

However, the language is not the only challenge when working with Shakespeare. Crowley said that interpreting and connecting with Shakespeare’s characters also adds complexity to each role.

“It’s really difficult getting into your character because Shakespeare’s characters are really three-dimensional,” Crowley said. “There are layers to them so it’s hard to get into their heads. I think it’s important for the actors to get past the cliché of their character and really delve deep into their underlying meanings.”

In order to help the cast overcome these difficulties, Director Doug Smith invited Jonathan McMurtry, a seasoned actor from the Old Globe Theater, to visit his cast.

Last week, McMurtry lectured the cast on Shakespeare’s life and his plays. He also watched and critiqued some of their scenes from various parts of the play.

Maddie Des Jardins (12,) assistant director of The Tempest, said that McMurtry helped the cast immerse themselves in Shakespeare and prepare for the play.

“McMurtry talked about the magic of Shakespeare and how Shakespeare can relate to all generations because his plays are timeless,” Des Jardins said. “It is something that has been around for hundreds of years, yet it is still applicable to today’s society. He also gave us many different ideas on what we could do [in our scenes] to improve.”

Smith said that he and his cast felt privileged to listen to such an experienced actor discuss Shakespeare in depth.

“I think the greatest help for the cast was listening to him recite so many Shakespeare scenes from memory,” Smith said. “I think that really impressed them. He spoke with a tremendous amount of eloquence and passion about Shakespeare’s life, art and plays. I think it was very illuminating for the cast.”

With advice from McMurtry, Smith and other students working on the play, the cast is uncovering the secret of portraying Shakespeare’s characters. Perry said that the actors have found the connection between Shakespeare and their own emotions and life, which helps them understand the play on a deeper level.

“If you believe what you’re saying, that’s the most important part,” Perry said. “Once we were able to make those connections with our characters and build connections with other characters it was easier to get into the mind-set. The story is not that hard to get once you find that there are familiar concepts like romance, tragedy, and comedy.”

Smith said that it is necessary for the actors to understand what they are portraying in order for the audience to understand too.

“The audience will understand what it means, even if some of the vocabulary and sentence structure isn’t familiar,” Smith said. “The humanity will nevertheless be familiar. The characterizations, the actions, the voice inflections, all the internal processes of the character will be there through the acting.”

As the opening night approaches and the cast continues to prepare, Crowley said that she has witnessed the play evolve into a something amazing.

Every time she passes through the theater she said she finds the backdrops becoming more elaborate, the costumes becoming more ornate and the actors becoming more convincing as the embodiment of their characters.

“The fact that we are dealing with Shakespeare gives us the opportunity to be more creative with all different aspects of theater that you usually don’t get in a fall play,” Crowley said. “We’ve been able to expand our creativity with the student-made costumes, set, music and choreography. We are able to create our own vision, and it’s really coming together.”

But the cast said that the most rewarding part of this whole process will be the audience’s reaction to the end result that lights up the stage on opening night.

“The students involved have been working so hard and I hope that it is rewarded by students coming and seeing it,” Crowley said. “I think it’s important to give Shakespeare a shot. We want to prove that students are capable of understanding, performing and appreciating Shakespeare. It’s beautiful, and I’m excited to see the how the crowd responds to it.”