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Dressing The Part

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Vice: Hi Bonnie. Can you please tell us a bit about the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey, of which you are the leader?
Bonnie Monte:
It’s an old company, as theaters go. It’s a 48-year-old institution. I’ve been here as the director for 20 years. We are now the sixth- or seventh-largest Shakespeare company in the nation. We do anywhere from six to eight major, epic-size productions each year, an equal measure of Shakespeare and non-Shakespeare classics. We also have 12 educational programs that go on all year round.

You have both an indoor and an outdoor venue, correct?
Yes, we have a Greek amphitheater that we use in the summer.

That’s great. Do you recall what got you started as a soldier in the name of Shakespeare?
When I was a little kid, I loved it. But then I did not have great Shakespeare teachers when I was in school. So I wasn’t going to follow that path at all. I was more interested in American classic theater, the Greeks, Chekhov… But in a weird way, Shakespeare pulled me in. I had to deal with him because I was suddenly running a Shakespeare theater.

How fortuitous.
I very quickly became a complete and total convert. I can’t imagine my life without his plays now. After 20 years of working here, I feel like I know the man.

Thanks, Bonnie. And now, let’s hear your takes on our Shakespearean looks for Michael Kenneth Williams…

CALIBAN
“I love Caliban. What a great character. I think he has one of the most beautiful speeches ever written, the one about ‘be not afeard, the isle is full of noises.’ It’s a great thing. Here’s this grotesque monster, and yet the most beautiful piece of poetry in the play comes out of his mouth when he talks about dreaming and wanting to stay in his dream. I think that Caliban is a far more difficult character to pull off than most people give it credit for.”

HAMLET
“This works right off the bat for Hamlet because it’s Denmark, it’s cold, and they have to wear fur! I just did a production of Hamlet, and fur figured extremely prominently in mine, but for a very different reason. I’d been working on an idea for Hamlet for about 30 years, and I finally got the chance to do it. Imagery of rodents—mice and rats—runs all throughout this play. In fact, the play within Hamlet is called The Mouse Trap. My entire set was a kind of massive abstract mousetrap that slowly, over the course of the play, descended. All the costumes had tinges of fur everywhere. It was subtle. You didn’t look at it and go, ‘Wow, everybody’s dressed like a mouse.’ What you have here is a very good costume for Hamlet.”

JULIUS CAESAR
“This is a great look for Caesar, but only before he becomes a ghost in the play. When you’re directing something that includes characters that are specters, I believe that you have to do something for the audience so that they know it’s somebody who’s come back from the dead. For example, I just did Hamlet, and his father appears as a ghost. We just did two things for that. He was dressed exactly as he had been before he died, but we kept the visor on his helmet very low. Then I also body-miked him with reverb. Every time he spoke, there was a slight reverberation. Immediately, one just knew he was a ghost.”

KING LEAR
“The undergarment Michael is wearing as Lear was created for a production of it that I did a couple of years ago. The outer garment he has on is from a production of King Lear that was many, many years ago. I just did this play again recently, and I had a great time. I don’t think the character of Lear is mad for one second. I think that he willingly descends into a very dark place that’s like madness as the only way to get through what he’s dealing with. So he goes to a place that emulates madness in order to avoid going mad from grief over the betrayals he’s suffered. He wanders in the wild as his mind tries to make sense of what’s happened.”

MACBETH
“There’s something very primeval about the play Macbeth. One can certainly set it anywhere one wants to, but it is a kind of precivilized society, and it’s completely populated by a warrior ruling class. The better a warrior you are, the more power you will have in that play. And is that a good thing or a bad thing? Well, in Macbeth it’s a very bad thing. I did a production of Macbeth that was considered quite revolutionary, and I had scholars tell me they’ve never seen anything like it. I’ve studied this play for so long. It’s my favorite of Shakespeare’s. The witches in Macbeth, to me, are really the internal demons that rule us and our desires, fears, insecurities, and anxieties, and so my witches were handled very differently from how they usually are. They’re the tangible evidence of our dark side.”

OBERON
“This was a great costume for Oberon. He was the fairy king in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The fairies in this play are not the froofy little flower fairies that we typically think of now. In the play, Shakespeare makes Oberon a kind of raging, tyrannical, angry husband. He’s very sexual too. A lady’s man. Loves the girls. Not only has he got this fabulous fairy-queen wife, but he’s also off having a fling with the mortal wife of the duke. And then you see him fall for Helena, this poor little waifish chick in the woods. He’s just falling for the girls right and left. It’s great that this costume was left open so we can see some bare chest there. The gold works nicely here too.”

RICHARD III
“We just did Richard III a couple of years ago. It was a huge hit, but it also upset people tremendously because of the character’s massively evil presence. But don’t most evil people come from some sort of great trauma? That’s how they get that way. Richard is a very tortured man. Male society at his time was far more brutal than it is now, and for someone who was crippled and hunchbacked like Richard was, he had to do whatever he needed to in order to survive.”

ROMEO
“This wouldn’t be my interpretation of Romeo. It’s a little too froufrou for him. Certainly he’s one of the richer kids in town, but I see these ruffles and I think more of a poetic, Byronic kind of a thing. This is more of an As You Like It look to me. Now, I like this look, and you could use it for Romeo, sure. If I were dressing Romeo, I would think about high boots. I think they’re sexy and they automatically put us in a place that transgresses all kinds of time frames, a place that could just as easily be Elizabethan as modern. So the boots in your look do work. But I’d put him in dark or earth-colored pants, and fabulous cut velvets—something that’s a little more ‘Even though I’m a rich kid, I’m out in the street and I’m sticking people with swords.’”