photograph by Sally McCay
Back to Macbeth
Toil and trouble? You bet, but worth every minute. A Royall Tyler veteran reflects on the challenges, lessons, and rewards of the college stage.
I couldn’t be certain, as I walked up the steps of UVM’s Royall Tyler Theatre for a dress rehearsal of the Department of Theatre’s autumn production of Macbeth, which would spook me more—the play itself, which is generally recognized as the darkest, starkest, and grimmest of Shakespeare’s tragedies, or the memories that might assault me just by entering the place. I spent eight years of my life as a student of theatre at UVM, both as an undergraduate (Class of ’76) and earlier, as a “junior apprentice” at the old Champlain Shakespeare Festival, where I was mainly employed as an errand-boy and “warm body.” This is a theatre term for anyone who can be pressed into service onstage in a pinch, to carry a spear or a torch, “sound an alarum,” shout, “What, ho!” or—if you are really lucky—play one of the little princes who gets smothered in the Tower in Richard III. I remember once, during a production of Romeo and Juliet in 1973, when a whole bunch of us “warm bodies” were told by the director (a rather important lady from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts in London), “Now, children, motivate yourselves off the stage! Just go! Go!” No one who wasn’t star-struck as a child can possibly imagine how wonderful this was, and being smothered in the Tower was a small price to pay for it.
Take it from me: Macbeth is one scary show, which accounts for the Royall Tyler’s use of the phrase “The Scottish Play” to describe it. It’s a long, well-established theatrical superstition that, during any production of Macbeth, no one involved in it should speak its title inside the theatre. To say “Macbeth” as a title, while performing the play, is considered as inauspicious as saying “Good luck!” on opening night, instead of “Break a leg!” Fortunately, “the curse of the Scottish Play” doesn’t apply to the audience, critics, or theatre alumni with their knees knocking together, wondering what they’ll find as they jaunt down memory lane. In my case, it turned out better than expected.
A little background, in the interest of full disclosure:
When I say I spent eight years as “a student of theatre” at UVM, it would be more accurate to say that I spent half that time as a pain in the neck, a high-school kid who just couldn’t be kept away from the place, until I finally got admitted formally as a freshman. I don’t think it was usual for a barely pubescent teenager to be allowed unfettered access to a college theatre, but so long as I learned to make coffee the way the company liked it and could competently sew buttons onto doublets and ball gowns, my presence was tolerated year-round. I became a kind of mascot.
For this privilege, specifically, I have two people to thank—the incomparable Edward J. Feidner, who, for many years, was chair of the Department of Theatre as well as co-founder and (ultimately) absolute autocrat of the summer Shakespeare Festival, a man whom words alone can barely describe; and Bill Schenk, the down-to-earth, no-bones-about-it technical director and professor of stagecraft and design, whose motto—“Just do it!”—long pre-dated Nike’s sloganeering, was the functioning command in those days, and is, in essence, the secret of professional theatre. Professional anything, I would guess. There’s no time to dither around and ruminate when you’ve got a production to mount in less than a month. You learn on your feet or you don’t learn at all.
My very first role in my very first play at UVM was in 1968, in Macbeth. I played Fleance, son of Banquo, Macbeth’s best friend and companion, whom Macbeth eventually has murdered, because the three witches, while promising Macbeth that he’ll be king, add for the record that his progeny won’t, but that Banquo’s will. Hence, in Macbeth’s demented view, as goes Banquo, so goes Fleance.
Though the role of poor Fleance is pivotal to the plot of Macbeth, he has only two lines to speak. The first, after Banquo asks him what time it is, has become famous: “The moon is down, I have not heard the clock.” (John Steinbeck borrowed from it for his 1942 anti-fascist novel The Moon is Down.) Banquo answers, “And she goes down at twelve,” and Fleance says, “I take’t ’tis later, Sir”—a line not as easy to deliver as you’d think, what with all the “’t’s” in it, and when you’re a nervous kid in your debut performance. Probably to make me feel better, Ed Feidner gave Fleance an extra line in that first production. So it was that during Banquo’s murder, from which Fleance escapes, I got to run off stage crying a line penned by Feidner, not Shakespeare: “Help, murder, help, murder, help!”
photo by William DiLillo
And that was it. For at least a year afterward, I was known (and ordered) around the theatre as “Fleance”—as in, “Fleance, get me a cup of coffee!” or, “Fleance, lace up my boots!” But it was a great way to begin. And so I thought the first thing I’d do when I went back to the Royall Tyler for the latest Macbeth was talk to the boy who was playing Fleance, only to discover that he wasn’t a “boy” at all, but a fully grown young man—Mark Leach, a freshman from Naples, Maine, who looked at me rather askance when I accosted him in the hall outside the men’s dressing room and asked him what he thought about the part and the theatre in general.
Well, um, you know, Mark is just starting out in college, never mind the theatre, but yes, of course, he’s done acting before. He loves the theatre and wants to do more of it, but he has a double major—as I did, as most do—because you never know, do you, what kind of curves life will throw you, and it’s better to be safe than sorry, right? When I asked Mark if he had aspirations to become an actor, he replied, with the light shining a little brighter in his eyes, “Oh, yes!” And then (a certain doubt here), “You mean—for a living?” Whereupon I patted him on the shoulder and said, “You’re going to do just great!”, at the same time telling him that that had been Ed Feidner’s response to any challenge, large or small: “Great! Just great!”—like Tony the Tiger. Only Mark had never heard of Ed Feidner, apart from the plaque that now hangs in the Royall Tyler’s downstairs lobby, next to the one for Bill Schenk, and which registers awards for excellence in the craft. “Time flies,” I suggested, to which Mark replied, “Yes. I’ve got to get my make-up on.”
I was thrilled, on entering the Royall Tyler for the Macbeth rehearsal, to find two of my former classmates and compatriots in lead production roles— first, Patrick Orr ’77, who is now the “Bill Schenk” of the department, teaching students how to keep from cutting their hands off when they use a table saw; and Paul Ugalde ’76, billed as “Fight Choreographer” for Macbeth but actually much more than that. Of all the people I ever knew in the theatre, Paul had the surest sense of movement, an impeccable sense timing, and an expert’s knowledge of what works and what doesn’t on stage. “On stage” is not the same as in “real life”—they are very different things, the trick being to make what happens “on stage” look like “real life.” And at this there is no one better than Paul.
photo by William DiLillo
I strode into the rehearsal, fresh from my interview with Fleance, and said, “Oh, if you boys don’t stop fighting, I don’t know what!”—which got a laugh, I’m glad to say, but in fact they were busy getting it right, as was Patrick up near the tech booth, cuing the sounds and the lights and telling me, when I said, “Oh, I see it’s all now done by computer!” that indeed it was not: “Some of it is, but not all of it. Sound cues, for instance—we still do it the old-fashioned way, counting seconds and watching what’s actually happening on the stage—I mean, you can’t have a clap of thunder for the witches if Lady Macbeth is still worried about the blood on her hands.”
The next night—opening night—I was proud to stand back and hear Patrick tell the assembled audience, specially invited as alumni, that “there’s one thing people need to understand about the theatre—this theatre, in particular. It is home to us. This is our home. For every person you see on stage there are ten backstage.” Words that were echoed by department chair Jeff Modereger in noting that this spring at UVM there will be twenty-three theatre graduates—young men and women with degrees in theatre, not just “affiliations” there. Those students will learn about their craft in their theatre classes, to be sure, but just as many lessons will be picked up in the theatre itself. And with a captive audience of alumni in the house, Modereger took the opportunity to drop a little reminder that Royall Tyler is self-funded through ticket sales and contributions. Lean resources, actors and crews and directors pressed for time, there’s nothing easy about staging a college theatre production. Ultimately, it comes down to one lesson that applies not just to Royall Tyler, or college drama, but to stages everywhere—in the theatre, it’s all done for love, and if it isn’t done for that, it isn’t done at all.
About the production
Director Peter Jack Tkatch’s production of Macbeth stripped both the text and its characters to their barest bones, emphasizing a cycle of blood-letting, usurpation, and naked pursuit of power that must, inevitably, end in disaster. Tkatch’s production was set in no particular time, in no particular place—a “post-apocalyptic world,” as Tkatch described it, that was neither Scotland nor Tahiti (nor Iraq), but all of them together. “The world of Macbeth is one of depraved morality,” Tkatch remarked in his program notes, “of dream and nightmare, of foreboding and betrayal, and of tyranny and fear.” The sets were designed to look like “the ruined walls of anyplace,” and the costumes—a series of military fatigues, which seemed to have been stolen from corpses on the battlefield—could be distinguished only by the number of holes at their knees and shoulders: The “winners” got the nicer clothes, the “losers” got the remains. It was like watching a pack of dogs gnawing at a single bone.
—PK
About the author
Building on his auspicious three-line Royall Tyler stage debut as Fleance in Macbeth, Peter Kurth ’76 went on to win the Theatre Department’s Emma Frederick Bandel Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Acting in 1975. After earning his UVM degree in English and Theatre, Kurth, opted for a career as a writer, alack, rather than as an actor. His first book, Anastasia: The Riddle of Anna Anderson, was an international bestseller and was made into an NBC television mini-series. Kurth’s biography of anti-fascist journalist Dorothy Thompson, American Cassandra, won the Frank Luther Mott-Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award as the best book about American journalism of 1990. His other works include Tsar: The Lost World of Nicholas and Alexandra and Isadora: A Sensational Life. Kurth is currently at work on a historical, true crime book about the still unsolved murder of Sir Harry Oakes in the Bahamas during World War II.
(for UVM staff)