Fifth Biennial Blackfriars Conference Comes to StauntonBy Tony Tambasco and Brian Falbo, with additional reporting by Katie Crandol, Sarah Keyes, and Glenn Schudel

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Master of Letters/Master of Fine Arts in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performancein partnership with american shakespeare center

WINTER 2010MLitt /MFA

A BI-ANNUAL PUBLICATION OF MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE’S

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Catharine O’Connell, MBC vice president of academic affairs and dean of the college, hoods AndrewGurr, who received his honorary doctoral degree at the Blackfriars Conference Welcome Banquet in HuntDining Hall October 21. Looking on are American Shakespeare Center co-founder and director of missionand MBC professor Ralph Alan Cohen and Paul Menzer, director of the MLitt/MFA program.

Staunton residents noticed a prolifera-tion of red, orange, and yellownametags around the necks of peopleon Beverley Street October 20–25, as250 early modern scholars from acrossthe world congregated for the fifthbiennial Blackfriars Conference.

The event featured keynoteaddresses from some of the mostprominent names in Renaissance dramaand performance theory, as well aspaper sessions packed with the schol-arly work of actors, directors, and aca-demics. The evenings were filled withparties, banquets, and performances,allowing the presenters to discuss theirwork with each other and givingMLitt/MFA students the unique oppor-tunity to mingle with the very people

GARY TAYLOR:

“Lyrical Middleton”In his second visit to MBC and theBlackfriars Playhouse in as many years,Gary Taylor, George Matthew EdgarProfessor and head of the History ofTextual Technologies program at FloridaState University, delivered the first keynoteaddress of the Blackfriars Conference. Hisappearance followed last year’s well-received staged reading of his recon-structed text of Shakespeare andFletcher’s lost Cardenio.

His talk, “Lyrical Middleton,” focusedon the lyric poetry, songs, and dancesfound in Thomas Middleton’s play texts,pointing out that the plays contain far moresongs than Shakespeare’s did, and that hissongs were more admired by early modern

audiences. Taylor noted that Middleton’ssongs and choreography were often takenout of the context of his plays and repur-posed for other entertainments of the era.

Taylor, general editor of the OxfordComplete Works of Shakespeare and theCollected Works of Thomas Middleton andauthor of Reinventing Shakespeare andCultural Selection, also discussed the differ-ences between poetry meant to be per-formed and poetry meant to be read. He

asked a series of questions: How can werecover the musicality of lyrics for which themusic no longer exists? Why should we?And what do we mean by lyricist, anyway?With Taylor’s assertion that moments of lyri-cism form islands of heightened intensity inthe text of a play, the answers to thesequestions could and should affect ourapproaches to criticism, performance, andeducation in the 21st century.

Taylor’s presentation featured musicalperformances by ASC company membersBen Curns and Daniel Kennedy (also anMLitt student); MLitt/MFA studentsJeremiah Davis, Amanda Devlin, and SarahKeyes; actress and scholar Terri Bourus ofIndiana University of Kokomo; and, elec-tronically, Hollywood legends Fred Astaireand Peter Boyle.

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CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

More highlights on p 3, 5, and 7DR. GARY TAYLOR

You’ll note that most of thewords in this issue of theFolio devote themselves tothe diverse scholars andartists who visit Staunton towork with our students.Indeed, their contribution isworthy of comment andvital to the life of our great enterprise. But it’s worthspending some words here on just what attracts theseaugust visitors to our community, worth spending somewords not in self-praise but in recognition of thequesting commitment to creative and scholarly excel-lence that draws students, scholars, teachers, and practitioners alike to draw on our resources.

A brief accounting of those resources starts, ofcourse, with the Blackfriars Playhouse, a building nowburnished by eight years of rehearsals, plays, classes,conferences, lectures, seminars, forums, and work-shops. Opened in 2001, the darling wonder of RalphAlan Cohen, Jim Warren, and American ShakespeareCenter (ASC), the Playhouse now wears a lacquer ofmemories that mellows the raw oak in which it firstwas dressed. But while the Blackfriars provides thephysical site of our labors, a playhouse without peopleis simply an empty room. For it is the students of theMLitt/MFA program and the actors and staff of ASCwho provide the spirit that makes the playhouse pulse.

Wander in from South Market Street on aWednesday afternoon and you’ll find our students onstage, pounding out iambic tattoos, limning the versefor meaning and meter; the ASC touring company inthe downstairs rehearsal room, brushing up a scenefrom All’s Well that Ends Well; and Jenny McNee, ASC costumer, stitching hanks of used fabrics intospectacular costumes on a budget of elbow grease andimagination; and the actors of the ASC company, coffeecups in hand, arriving for an early call for that evening’sperformance of Titus Andronicus or The Alchemist.

Each and every day the Blackfriars resounds withpoetry and prose, wit and wisdom, laughter andlearning. The various guest scholars and artists chroni-cled in these pages come to speak their piece as well,but they depart refreshed by the wealth of resourcesthat Staunton boasts. It is, finally, testament to thetalent and labor of the students and actors that wecount the Blackfriars Playhouse itself as our secondmost important resource, a distant second indeed tothe people who play and work there.

— Dr. Paul Menzer

FROMTHEDIRECTOR

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On the final evening of theBlackfriars conference, thePlayhouse hosted a performance of Shakespeareon Ice, written by Director ofthe MLitt/MFA program,Paul Menzer.

December 1603 was thefirst Christmas season at courtfor King James, and hisplayers were naturallyexpected to perform. The playprovided a backstage view ofthe King’s Men as they try todevise entertainment for thenew king, all the whilefreezing in the tiring-house ofthe Globe.

In the play, King Jamesdecides to relocate the per-formance to the more private— and much warmer —Blackfriars, in which theKing’s Men had been for-bidden to play. If they impressthe new ruler, they might evenbe allowed to play therethroughout the winter, which

would mean that Mr. Shaxperand his fellow company members would no longer beon ice.

But how to impress thenew king? A masque? Womenon stage? Italian stagemachinery and special effects?

Ben Curns directed theproduction. The cast of ASCmembers, MLitt/MFA studentsand alums, and local actors,included Nolan Carey, Curns,Emily Gibson, Danielle Guy,Daniel Kennedy, Sarah Keyes,Thadd McQuade, SolomonRomney, Brett Sullivan Santry,J.P. Scheidler, ChristineSchmidle, and Tommy Ryan.Jeremy Lopez, professor ofEnglish at University ofToronto and Theatre ReviewEditor for the ShakespeareBulletin, played Ben Jonson ina cameo, and Ralph AlanCohen lit up the Lord’s Roomwith his silent, but memorable,performance as James I.

Shakespeare on Ice

Taking Part in the Discussion

• Peter McCurdy, of McCurdy & Co., responsible forrebuilding Shakespeare’s Globe in London and the world’sleading authority on the construction of historically authentictimber-frame buildings

• Tiffany Stern, theatre historian, professor of early modern drama at OxfordUniversity, and author of Shakespeare in Parts (with Simon Palfrey), Rehearsal fromShakespeare to Sheridan, and Documents of Performance in Early Modern England

• Tim Fitzpatrick, professor of performance studies and Elizabethan theatre architec-ture, and head of the School of Languages and Cultures at University of Sydney

• Franklin J. Hildy, professor of theatre at University of Maryland, editor of NewIssues in the Construction of Shakespeare’s Theatre and author of History of theTheatre (with Oscar Brockett).

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GAIL KERN PASTER:

“Thinking with Skulls:Hamlet, Holbein, Vesalius,and Fuller”Introduced by Ralph Alan Cohen as “theU.S. Secretary of Shakespeare,” Gail KernPaster, editor of Shakespeare Quarterly,questioned in her keynote address theimportance of skulls in the work of fourintellectual giants of the 16th and 17thcenturies: William Shakespeare, HansHolbein the Younger, Andreas Vesalius, andIsaac Fuller.

Paster, director of the FolgerShakespeare Library, suggests that thepresence of the skull in early modern cul-ture goes beyond the traditional symbols ofdeath and absence. The four skulls cited in

the title suggest a transformation of the skullfrom a memento mori to an embodied mind.

“The skull distracts us from its cogni-tive role” with its significance of mortality,Paster said, but it remains “an artifact ofthe extended mind,” and is not merely“the empty container of what was orwhat is to come.”

In cognitive terms, Yorick’s skull is anextension of Hamlet’s mind in Shakespeare’stragedy. And the same prop would have

likely been used to represent an extensionof Vindice’s wife’s physical being inMiddleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy.Rather than a mere symbol of mortality,Paster asked if the skewed image of theskull in Holbein’s The Ambassadors is “asign of the mind pouring itself into sym-bolic containers and doing its own charac-teristic works of extension.”

The illustrations in anatomistVesalius’ groundbreaking De humani cor-poris fabrica — principally one in which askeleton seems to pensively study a skull— further this connection between thehuman skull and the representation ofcognition. The skull in Fuller’s portrait ofWilliam Pettey, mirrored by an illustrationin the book the subject also holds, fullytransfers the symbol of death into one of“scientific objectivity,” Paster said.

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The fifth Blackfriars Conference closed(appropriately enough on St. Crispin’sDay) with a series of discussions onthe feasibility of building a recreationof the Globe Theatre in Staunton.

Using resources as varied asElizabethan architectural documents,the recently excavated foundations ofthe Theatre and the Rose Playhouse,Wenceslas Hollar’s sketches, and thetexts of early modern plays, experts onearly modern theatre and architecture

are searching for ways to improve theaccuracy of modern playhouse recon-structions. Already, it was pointed out,today’s reconstructions are far moreaccurate than those built even 30 yearsago. While these authorities on thepanel did not agree on everything, theyall indicated that through a close studyof early modern sources, and bylearning from the inaccuracies of themodern Shakespeare’s Globe, theASC’s hope of making Staunton theonly city in the United States withrecreations of both the Globe and theBlackfriars may soon become a reality.

The Globe SessionsMBC guest professor Roslyn Knutsonjoined guest lecturer Holger Syme, assis-tant professor of English and Drama atUniversity of Toronto, on the Blackfriarsstage September 18 for a seminar entitled“(Un)Popular Fables of the 1590s.” Whilethe presentations covered different topics,both took aim at the need for modernscholars to “construct narratives” con-cerning the early modern theatre and,more specifically, the life of WilliamShakespeare, despite a dearth of contem-porary documentary evidence.

Introducing the speakers, PaulMenzer summarized this tendency,

De-ConstructingNarrativesBy Glenn Schudel

Knutson and Syme

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CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

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GAIL KERN PASTER

Guest Professors Give New OpportunitiesBy Glenn Schudel

Rob Clare, artistic director of Kestrel Theatre Company (KTC), is probably best known to current MLitt/MFA students as director of last year’s joyous production of Twelfth Night at ASC and as the leader of intensive acting work-shops. This semester, he joined us as teacher of the advanced acting class. With a doctoral degree from Oxford University and a varied resumé that includesacting at Royal Shakespeare Company and text work at Chicago’s SteppenwolfTheatre Company, students were lucky to have his expertise. Clare’s more recentwork with KTC — a registered charitable organization committed to creativelyusing drama within the British criminal justice system — was featured in thedocumentary Act of Faith and the short film Bullfrog.

Roslyn Knutson, professor emerita of English at University of Arkansas atLittle Rock, brought her deep knowledge of theatre history and early moderndramatic literature to a month-long intensive Shakespeare’s Theatre course,exposing students to topics and plays (“Who were the Queen’s Men? And whatthe heck is a Mucedorus anyway?”) often overlooked in the study of earlymodern drama. Knutson has published several articles and the books TheRepertory of Shakespeare’s Company and Playing Companies and Commerce inShakespeare’s Time. She is currently indulging her interest in lost plays by co-editing (with David McInnis of the University of Melbourne) a wiki-style LostPlays Database, which can be found at http://lostplays.org/index.php/Main_Page.

James Loehlin, Shakespeare at Winedale Regents Professor of English anddirector of the Shakespeare at Winedale Program, University of Texas, Austin,has directed, acted in, or supervised productions of 25 of Shakespeare’s plays,and all four of Chekhov’s major plays. He was an invaluable asset to the pro-gram in his role as guest professor of Directing I and Dramaturgy. For two yearsnow, Loehlin’s Shakespeare at Winedale students have performed fully stagedproductions at the Blackfriars as part of MLitt/MFA new student orientation.Loehlin is author of four studies of plays as performance texts, including bothparts of Henry IV, Henry V, Romeo and Juliet, and The Cherry Orchard.

reminding the audience that, “Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly, and humansgotta narrate.”

Knutson started the evening with herpresentation, “What’s So Special About1594?” which challenged the popularnotion that the year in which the LordChamberlain’s Men and the LordAdmiral’s Men were formed was awatershed year for London professionaltheatre. Knutson studied sources as variedas Philip Henslowe’s diary, recentlyrecovered financial records of touringcompanies, and figures for contemporaryplague deaths. Using this information,she argued that despite the long-termramifications of Shakespeare andChristopher Marlowe finding permanenthomes for their dramas, there is no evi-dence that the average early modernLondoner would have noticed anythingstrange and wonderful happening in histheatrical entertainments.

Syme’s presentation, “The Meaning ofSuccess; or, the View from Kazakhstan,”amusingly referenced the film Borat. Wemay think we understand whatKazakhstan is like after watching themockumentary, but it is a very differentexperience than actually touring thecountry. Such is our understanding ofearly modern plays, whether in print orperformance. Certain concepts seem tomake sense, but once we actually visit theavailable evidence, we see flaws in thelogic of conventional wisdom. Scholarshave long held that the “best” or at leastthe most popular, early modern plays arethe ones that eventually found themselvesin print. Through an examination of box-office receipts from Henslowe’s diary,Syme draws two potentially controversialconclusions: many of the most well-likedplays of the era were never printed andare consequently lost to us, andMarlowe’s plays did not “form the coreof the repertory of the Admiral’s Men.”While admired when new, their popu-larity waned over time, as might beexpected of plays so frequently produced.

While the desire to build stories sur-rounding such iconic figures andmoments is strong, both scholars demon-strated through use of actual evidencehow fallible the narratives we constructcan be. These myths tend to gain popu-larity and snowball over time, eventuallyobscuring the view of our subject,whether it is Kazakhstan, or the 1590s.

Narratives, continued from p 3

Above and beyond the opportunity to attend every session at the BlackfriarsConference, MLitt/MFA students during fall 2009 had the chance to work evenmore intimately with three gifted guest professors, who teach an array of prac-tical and academic classes.

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CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTSPAUL WOODRUFF:

“The Art of Watching”Speaking from his knowledge as a classi-cist and philosopher, Paul Woodruff, MaryHelen Thompson Professor of theHumanities and dean of undergraduatestudies at University of Texas at Austin,delivered the conference’s third keynoteaddress. And in a nod to the performanceelements of the conference, the pro-fessor gave his address from papers heldby a teddy bear on the lectern.

Woodruff applied his ideas about ofthe role of the audience and conscious-ness of performance not only directly tothe work of both American ShakespeareCenter and the MLitt/MFA program, butalso to the workings of life. His ideas andtheater in general were given a well-articulated and all-embracing role in the

creation and maintenance of society andculture as a whole.

Woodruff’s address clarified the ubiq-uitous quality of theater — or performance,more generally — in the processes of socialand cultural propagation and evolution,citing it as the primary means of instructionand emphasizing its existence as a neces-sary component to formal instruction.

“If you are teaching and don’t recog-nize it as performance, you’re doing itwrong,” Woodruff said, when askedwhether he thought teaching was an actof performance.

In addition to his role as a professor,Woodruff is author of the booksReverence, First Democracy, and TheNecessity of Theater and the award-winning play Ithaca in Black and White.

In relating his work to that of theconference, the ASC, and the MLitt/MFAprogram, Woodruff described theater as “the art of making human behaviorenjoyable for a determined length oftime.” He emphasized the conscious elements of mimesis required by formaltheater and its generation of genuineresponses in its audience. He said thattheater and performance do not existwithout an audience to witness it, anddescribed a “good” audience as havingthree qualities: it must watch with imagination, with neither too little nor too much empathy, and with its own pastto contextualize the experience.

Barbara Palmer, an instrumental voicein the development of Mary Baldwin’sMLitt/MFA program, passed awaySeptember 15 after a long battle with cancer.

A native of Pittsburgh, Palmerserved as a professor of English anddepartment chair at Chatham College inPennsylvania before becoming dean offaculty at University of MaryWashington. Aside from being a promi-nent theatre historian — best known forher revolutionary work on the medievalTowneley plays and widely published ina number of scholarly journalsthroughout her career — she was a vitalpresence on the executive board of theRecords of Early English Drama(REED) at University of Toronto.

The REED program serves toclarify the way modern scholars viewperformance in medieval and earlymodern England, demonstratingthrough the study of primary sourcedocuments the volume and variety ofdrama, music, and spectacle thatoccurred outside of London.

Palmer and her husband, JohnWasson, spent countless hours combingthrough the records of provincial townhalls, libraries, and manor houses as

they co-edited the Derbyshire andYorkshire West Riding collections ofthe REED series.

In Staunton, she served as scholar-in-residence, and is credited withfounding REED-USA at Mary Baldwin.She will be best remembered, though,for her frequent appearances as a guestlecturer. Her disciplined scholarship,dry humor, and eagerness to shareknowledge served as a model foreveryone with whom she came intocontact. Her legacy will live on in thememories of the students whose lives

she touched, and in those “big red suitcases” of knowledge, which she sogenerously donated to MBC’s GraftonLibrary.

“Even greater than her impressiveknowledge of the period was her willingness to help students,” saidsecond-year student Veronica Watts.“She offered her time, her e-mail, andeven opened her home to studentswhom she had just met in an effort tofoster their burgeoning fascination forthe literature and history, which pro-vided her with so much joy.”

Barbara D. Palmer

1942–2009

Memorial donations maybe made toward the endow-ment for the Barbara D.Palmer Award, a prize for thebest new essay in early dramastudies. Checks should bemade payable to University ofToronto and sent to A.F. Johnston,REED, 150 Charles St. W. No. 118,Toronto, Ontario M5S 1K9, Canada.

Program Mourns the Passing of a FriendBy Glenn Schudel

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University Wits Artistic Director EdwardSheehan continued MBC’s relatively newtradition of turning out a fully staged fallproduction, allowing incoming first-yearstudents an opportunity to jump right into performance, familiarize themselveswith the intricacies of working in theMasonic Building and the BlackfriarsPlayhouse, and form connections withveteran students.

Pericles, Prince of Tyre, emphasizedthe disorientation the seafaring protago-nist experiences on his voyages throughthe use of several musical interludes,including performances of David Bowie’s“Space Oddity,” the Talking Heads’“Once in a Lifetime,” and the RollingStones’ “Wild Horses.” It ran at the Blue Room of Staunton’s MasonicBuilding October 16–18, and its finalperformance at Blackfriars Playhouse on October 26 was enthusiasticallyreceived by students, faculty, and com-munity members.

Assisting Sheehan in the director’schair was Sarah Gusky Kemer, who also served as costume designer andproperties mistress. Zach Brown andBrian Falbo were music directors.Shannon Schultz starred in the title role,with Brown narrating as Gower. The

cast also included Amanda Noel Allen,Matt Carter, Brian Falbo, MichaelHollinger, Rachel Kohler, BonnieMorrison, Maxim Overton, LaurieRiffe, Glenn Schudel, Melissa Tolner,and Daniel Trombley.

# 10 … get into arguments over which edition of Shakespeare’s collected works is the best.

# 9 … can’t decide whether Shakespeare was the Lloyd-Webber or the Sondheim of the early modern theatre.

# 8 … have ever uttered the sentence, “Oooooh! She just thoued the Prince!”

# 7 … arrange your collection of Shakespeare action figures around a Queen Elizabeth rubber ducky.

# 6 … get really defensive about the difference between anastrophe and hyperbaton.

# 5 … fly to Wisconsin in the dead of winter for the express purpose of catching a performance of Timon of Athens.

# 4 … wonder why more people don’t stage both parts of Tamburlaine, uncut, using puppets.

# 3 … either get really amused or really offended when someone refers to Harold Bloom as “a crazy person.”

# 2 … respond to “Yo Mama” jokes with, “Villain, I have done thy mother!”

# 1 … view the Blackfriars Conference primarily as an opportunity to score autographs.

You know you're a Shakespeare geek when you ... Contributed by Rachel Kohler, Paul Rycik, David Santangelo, and Glenn Schudel

Pericles Sets Sailfor StauntonBy Jeremiah Davis

In all of history, there have been many kinds of theatrical events. One of the best wasthe second Monologue Slam held at Staunton’s Darjeeling Café this fall. TenMLitt/MFA students — Amanda Noel Allen, Matt Carter, Asae Dean, Clara Giebel,Michael Hollinger, Linden Kueck, Katy Mulvaney, Maxim Overton, Paul Rycik, andDan Trombley — went all three rounds, performing two early modern monologuesand finishing with a modern monologue.

A philosopher of aesthetics once claimed that for audiences in the Athenian the-ater, the battles between the gods over the values of life were being fought right therein the flesh. That is, for the Greeks, their performances were no mere representationof a numinous battle but the very holiest of battles itself. The Monologue Slam, withits postmodern gods gracing the stage and spinning realities off their fingertips, madea play in antiquity look like a wedding party at a karaoke bar.

In each round, performers were scored by three judges chosen randomly from theaudience. Each judge was given a stack of paper and marker, and was asked to scoreeach performance Olympics-style, with 10 being the highest possible score and 0 beingthe lowest. The top three scorers from all three rounds won cash prizes, with Overtontaking home $25, Carter claiming $15, and Mulvaney dancing away with $10.

Monologue Slam at the Darjeeling CaféBy Casey Caldwell

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ANDREW GURR:

“The Economics of the1613 Decision”Delivering the final keynote address of theconference was Andrew Gurr, English professor and co-director of theRenaissance Texts Research Centre atUniversity of Reading.

Gurr addressed the deliberations ofthe King’s Men about rebuilding the GlobeTheatre after it burned to the groundduring a 1613 performance of Henry VIII,explaining that at least two of the house-holders, including Shakespeare, decidednot to invest in a second Globe. Gurr,former director of Globe Research atShakespeare’s Globe in London andformer editor of Modern LanguageReview, theorized that the decision torebuild the Globe was economically

“unnecessary” — especially consideringthat the King’s Men had secured the private Blackfriars Playhouse — but rathera decision that served as an “affirmationof an old tradition.”

Signs of nostalgia are evident in thematerials used to build the second Globe.Rather than use more durable materials,such as those used to rebuild Fortune afew years later, the sharers of the Globereturned to the same location and rebuiltthe theatre in much the same fashion.Gurr added that it was possible that

Heminges, Condell, and Burbage wanted to continue operating a more inclusivepublic theatre. When asked about possiblemotives for Shakespeare’s decision not tore-invest, Gurr cited “chronic penny-pinching” and “retirement, I dare say.”

Gurr, author of The ShakespeareanStage, 1574-1642, Playgoing inShakespeare’s London; The ShakespeareanPlaying Companies; and Shakespeare’sOpposites: The Admiral’s Company1594–1625, closed his presentation byfocusing on the possibility of Shakespeare’sGlobe in London recreating their own version of the Blackfriars, and ASC’s plansto build a Globe in the Shenandoah Valley.In many ways, this modern desire to connect with early modern London’s pro-fessional theatres ties us to “the sense oftraditionalism” demonstrated by the King’s Men in 1613.

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Second-year MLitt student Jeremiah Davis, center, takes in a view of the Blue Ridge Mountainswith guest scholars Andrew Gurr and Tiffany Stern.

CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHTS

Scholars from around the world came toStaunton for the Blackfriars Conference.

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who write the books and articles theyspend their days poring over.

The MLitt/MFA program waswell represented. Numerous studentshad a chance to perform in presenta-tions; several students and alumnishared their work in the daily round-table sessions; and current studentsErin Baird (“Taking Advantage of theInterlude Structure”), MatthieuChapman (“The Appearance of the

Negroid Races on the Early ModernStage”), and Christine Schmidle(“Adaptation or Translation? EnglishComedians and Der BestrafteBrundermord”), had the honor of pre-senting their research alongside estab-lished scholars.

The guest of honor was AndrewGurr, who has been one of the world’sleading Shakespeare authorities since thepublication of his 1970 book TheShakespearean Stage, 1547–1642. He wasawarded an honorary doctorate at a

banquet in Mary Baldwin’s Hunt DiningHall, after enduring — good naturedly— a half-hour roast titled, “Hats offto Andy Gurr.” Written and narratedby Bob Jones ’09, the tribute was per-formed by American ShakespeareCenter company members.

All paper sessions and keynoteswere filmed, and will be kept in the ASCarchives. Tony Tambasco organized liveblogging for most of the presenta-tions, which can be accessed at http://ascblackfriars2009.blogspot.com/.tttt

Conference, continued from p 1

First, I would like to state I’m not surewhy I was asked to write a summation ofmy experience with this specific play as Ihave a rather large superstition sur-rounding its title. That being said, theactual title of Shakespeare’s Scottish Playwill never appear in this review.

On August 30, the Blue Room of theMasonic Building played host to theUniversity Wits’ touring production ofMacTragedy. Eight boxes filled and cov-ered with costumes and props graced thestage from the moment the audienceentered the space. Confused as I was bythis concept, when the actors beganmadly switching between characters, thelogic behind the decision became clear.Additionally, I was intrigued by howeach actor transitioned from one char-acter to the next simply by a change of

hat or coat or even just a prop.What struck me right from the

outset about this Maccers was the music.The way the company incorporated bitsof songs throughout the play could havebeen jarring, but the music choices andlocations were flawless. The audience gotto see Mac, the Musical. I would love tosee that show fully staged, because evenjust the taste we had was amazing.

Despite the very general overviewthis review is proving to be, I certainlyhad a lot of fun watching a production ofThat Play About the Thane Who KillsPeople and Subsequently Goes Crazythat was more musical comedy thandark, witchy tragedy. I enjoyed walkingout of the theatre with a spring in mystep rather than thinking the trees weregoing to attack my castle.

Meet the WitsEvery summer, the University Wits, the graduate student organization atMary Baldwin College, produces andtours a fully staged early modern play.This year’s production of Macbethopened in June 2009 at BlackfriarsPlayhouse and performed through thesummer. The performance reviewed atleft was the closing night show, whichserved as part of this year’s orientationfor new students. Glenn Schudeldirected the production with assis-tance from Jeremiah Davis. The castincluded eight actors doubling in mul-tiple roles, including Johnny Adkins,Rin Barton, Katie Crandol, AmandaDevlin, Rachel Kohler, Cass Morris,Bonnie Morrison, and Paul Rycik.Devlin also served as music directorand costume designer, Kohler servedas dramaturg and properties mistress,and Morris served as tour manager.

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MARY BALDWIN COLLEGE IN PARTNERSHIP WITH AMERICAN SHAKESPEARE CENTER

Master of Letters/Master of Fine Arts in

Shakespeareand Renaissance Literature in Performance

PO Box 1500Staunton, Virginia 24402MLitt Admissions: 540-887-7019www.mbc.edu/shakespeare

Wits Tour with MacTragedy By Shannon Schultz

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MLITT STUDENTPRODUCTIONFebruary 15 and 16

Blackfriars PlayhouseMLitt student Amanda Devlin presents HenryPurcell’s The Fairy Queen as a dance-opera.

MFA DIRECTINGPRODUCTIONFebruary 22 and 23, 2010

Blackfriars PlayhouseMFA directing student Brett Gann will presenttwo performances of William Shakespeare’sTitus Andronicus.

THESIS PROJECTFESTIVALSMarch 21, 22, and 23, 2010

Blackfriars PlayhouseJoin students in the Master of Letters andMaster of Fine Arts in Shakespeare andRenaissance Literature in Performance as theywork toward their degrees during creative per-formances in fall and spring. MFA directingstudent Alisha Huber will exhibit her directorialwork in Love’s Labor’s Lost on March 21.

MFA ACTINGPRODUCTIONApril 4, 5, 11, and 12, 2010

Blackfriars PlayhouseFounder and artistic director of Shakespeareand Company Tina Packer directs WilliamShakespeare’s Pericles.