Renaissance Festival

Another expansion that we've done this year is a whole Greenshow--an hour of entertainment, a Renaissance Festival, before the show starts with jugglers and fire breathers--and in that there'll be the big genealogical chart that shows who everybody is. So before you even come to the show you can stand there and say "OK, now so-and-so was the king and then he got killed . . ." So when you walk into the play you feel like you have had that history. I suppose there is a thing that as a American if we were to do something about the American Revolution, we, as Americans, would bring a certain knowledge of the American Revolution to that. But I don't think if we did a movie or a play about the American Revolution and showed it to English people that they're so dumb that they can't understand it--and the same thing here. I mean, if you do a Shakespeare history in England, they've studied that history--but I don't think that Americans are so dumb that we can't understand a play.

Making the Cut

It's when you get into the really intricate, deep, sub, sub-plot, that I think people can get confused. And because our limit of time, those things are gone, so I think that's really beneficial for the audience. It's a real challenge for the Director to make sure you cut the right stuff, that you streamline the right characters. Something that we've done successfully in the past, like last year in Julius Caesar, is sometimes there's three or four small characters along the course of the play, and we'll make that one character that the audience can get to know, get to identify with and run them through the play, and we've done the same thing with Richard III: there are a number of different murderers in the play who work for Richard, and we've streamlined that into two thugs who work for Richard and murder people along the play. And we get to see how that affects them. There's one guy who has killed several people in the play, and Richard asks him to kill two children--and that's different--to smother two kids as opposed to accusing somebody else who's really just as bad as Richard.

Jodie Marion I teach Composition at UCF while also studying for my Master's degree, which should be completed--hopefully--before the turn of the century. In the meantime I write for the Central Florida Hispanic (Education section) and especially dig reading Lawrence Durrell. Other Articles I've Written