Welcome Post Readers and a Word from Will

Good morning all! First off I offer a warm welcome to those who just joined this experiment in terror, thanks to Ms. Jane Horwitz's Back Stage Column. Jane has always been a friend to the little guy and for those of you who have known me, I am the biggest of the little guys. Thanks Jane.

Just to catch all of you up. This is a blog which will help expose the ins-and-outs of producing small professional theatre in Washington, DC. It may turn out that like sausage and Nike tennis shoes you may enjoy the final product but you really don't want to see how they are made. While Rorschach has resorted to slave labor on occasion and on very rare occasions even child labor, our shows have and always will be fur free. So please come back here again and again and watch the unfolding of this, our production of The Beard of Avon (Pay-What-You-Can Previews start October 19th). For Tickets and information about a Season Subscription, (four shows at $60 for adults and $45 for Seniors and Students) follow the links.

Now for your reading pleasure, Rorschach Company Member Grady Weatherford shares with you, the public, his thoughts on bringing to life a man who on a play by play basis has killed more women, children and heirs to the English crown than anyone before or since, William Shakespeare.

Icon-ism,

Here is a subject that I have been faced with before, but fails to get any easier. In the past I have played George Danton, George Bernard Shaw, and directed Lord of the Flies. Each posed their own problems, not unlike trying to play (of all things) William Shakespeare.

Shaw and Lord of the Flies were similar in their difficulty. Since Shaw lived until 1950, there are many extant photographs of him and some record of what he sounded like, thus putting the actor in the position of choosing a seat atop a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there was a wealth of material to use, on the other there are those who also would have studied it and have a broader idea of what the man was like.

Flies was (and continues to be) a mainstay of English Literature, so it to benefited and suffered from assumptions and preconceived ideas about the play itself, as well as the characters.

George Danton, I felt a bit freer to experiment with. Having been a secondary character in the execution (hehe) of the French Revolution, I basically based my interpretation on the following facts:

1) he was mauled by a herd of pigs at the age of 10

2) he was known in the legislature as "the mountain," for two reasons, his booming voice and that he sat in the top row, being the tip of the growing mass of "non-nobles" in the legislature.

Also, not many Americans are familiar with Danton and so the liberté (hehehe) was greater in the development of his persona.

Shakespeare (on the other hand) comes with a great stigma. And there are many of them. There are the various portraits of the man (Droeshout being the most famous) as well as the lofty scholarly debates about who the hell wrote the plays. Prolific genius, or stand-in for some greater mind (or minds.) Amy Freed has made the task easier by making some of the more difficult choices for me. Those of station, education level, manner of speech and the like. But the task remains of finding Shakespeare. How I do find my self hating Joseph Fiennes at the moment. He made a wonderful Shakespeare, but has also saddled me with an inevitable comparison, even though Beard of Avon is not in the same style.

So, really, I guess what I have learned so far is that one must amass as much information as possible, try one's best to understand it, then just forget it and play the damn part. Really one can not play the icon at all, one must play the person. Now, you can all sit back and watch me fail miserably.