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Students perform in the 2017 Bardathon at Quill Theatre (Photo by James Ricks courtesy Quill Theatre)
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Photo by James Ricks courtesy Quill Theatre
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Photo by James Ricks courtesy Quill Theatre
Nine years and a few company and venue names changes ago, actor/director/producer Cynde Liffick started the “Bardathon,” in which regional high school theater students interpret a scene from a Shakespeare play and perform it in a noncompetitive format. The lights go up Friday, March 23, at noon on this latest iteration, through the Quill Theatre and sponsored by the English-Speaking Union Richmond Chapter, at the Gottwald Playhouse of the Dominion Energy Center.
A full dozen groups, including schools from Middlesex County and St. Petersburg, Russia (in a return visit) will perform “Romeo and Juliet.” The traffic of the stage will be live streamed. (Here's 2017's "Love's Labour's Lost" — a quick scan shows the variety of approaches the students chose).
Liffick undertook a “16-year apprenticeship” with Shakespeare as part of the Richmond Shakespeare Co., where she worked as the company’s director of education. RSC merged with the Henley Street Theatre that then morphed into the Quill Theatre. Liffick’s role ended in 2013, so she and the Bard took to the road, creating Shakespeare programs for wineries and breweries and other unconventional venues.
Quill invited Liffick back to oversee this ninth Bardathon. She is conducting workshops prior to the production.
The program began through Liffick’s appreciation of the English Speaking Union’s annual sonnet competition. Around the same time, she heard about how a program in London’s rebuilt Globe Theatre put on scenes with young actors. For the sonnets, “the local winner advances to the state level and so on,” Liffick explains. “I am not in favor of competition, though, in a theatrical way. What I think Bardathon accomplishes is getting kids into Shakespeare and demonstrating that theater is a collaborative process. The ESU sponsors schools that bring in a scene or two, but from the same play, so we all collectively create a Shakespeare production.”
Actor Alex Tissiere, a Henrico High School graduate who now lives and works in theater in New York City, participated in the first Bardathon. He came to the program a professed “Shakespeare fanatic” and joined Richmond Shakespeare’s youth troupe, who performed as strolling players on the grounds of Agecroft during the RSC’s summer shows. He recruited friends to join him in the Bardathon’s “Twelfth Night,” in which Tissiere played Feste the clown. He went on to study theater at New York University and, just out of school, worked in a Kenneth Branagh version of “Macbeth.” He now performs in Shakespearean and modern classical and new works with the Hedgepig Ensemble Theatre.
“I now do theatrical work with students from elementary to high school,” Tissiere says. “Cynde was a huge inspiration for me as an education director, and her approach influences me to this day.” Getting youngsters to negotiate the lustrous language of Shakespeare is a baby-steps proposition. He adds, “What’s being said in a certain passage is how you start, and you first get them to say it in their own way, and they invest that feeling into the text. Seeing students make that connection, it’s amazing and rewarding.”
Another veteran to the program is Atlee High School’s theater director, Charles Wax. He came to the program fresh from a year of study at The Globe through an ESU scholarship. He recalls, “It was a brand new experience for all of us, and it was nice to go to a theater festival that wasn't about picking a winner at the end.”
In his own career, Wax’s Shakespeare experiences have run from productions set in 1920s gangland to the 31st century. His first paid acting gig came in a 1994 Virginia Historical Theatre interpretation of the “Scottish Play” ("Macbeth"), in which he was set on fire every night — on purpose. “Some folks get very purist about original practices, but I love to see meanings of words stretched across the centuries into completely new forms.” Kids who consider themselves worldly and edgy gain greater appreciation when getting acquainted with what’s actually happening the plays, and Shakespeare’s enjoyment of puns, and some of them thoroughly wink-wink-nudge-nudge. “They love how bawdy it can get,” Wax says.
Lovers of the language include Tatyana A. Bogdanova, of the English Theatrical Society, St. Petersburg, Russia, who, through the ESU and families of the Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, brought a group to Richmond beginning with the Jamestown Quadricentennial in 2007. This is how Liffick first experienced Bogdanova’s group. An annual Shakespeare Festival is held in St. Petersburg each April, and since 1998 actors under her tutelage have participated. Though she and her students are steeped in their Shakespeare, these scene shows are instructive. “With 'Twelfth Night,' which I know practically by heart in both languages, I still learn something every time I stage it,” she says. New details are brought out in sharper relief through alternative perspectives. And youthful invention.
Liffick recalls a school that staged the storm and wreck scene of “The Tempest,” as occurring on the bridge of a "Star Trek” Enterprise-like vessel. “There is a broad range of how they go about it. The students are inspired by each other. And that’s inspiring to see when it happens.”
