• About
  • Editorial Board
  • Advertise
  • Join Us
  • Archives
The Wellesley News -
  • News and Features
    • Students With Medically Restricted Diets Struggle to Eat On Campus
      Students With Medically Restricted Diets Struggle to Eat On Campus
    • Students find new ways to celebrate Diwali
      Students find new ways to celebrate Diwali
    • Changing COVID-19 regulations impact students’ mental health
      Changing COVID-19 regulations impact students’ mental health
    • News
      • News in Brief
      • Nation & World
      • President’s Corner
      • Senate Report
    • Features
      • Alumnae Spotlight
      • Eye on Science
      • Faculty Focus
      • LGBTQIA+ Column
  • Opinions
    • Wellesley, why can’t you meet our dietary needs?
      Wellesley, why can’t you meet our dietary needs?
    • The block system is a joke
      The block system is a joke
    • Spineless nonpartisanship: how the Girl Scouts convinced me they no longer care about girls
      Spineless nonpartisanship: how the Girl Scouts convinced me they no longer care about girls
    • Staff Editorial
    • Letters to the Editor
    • The Elephant in the Room
  • Arts
    • Music Performance Courses Adapt to an Altered Semester
      Music Performance Courses Adapt to an Altered Semester
    • Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of “Rebecca” fails to deliver compared to its classic counterpart
      Ben Wheatley’s adaptation of “Rebecca” fails to deliver compared to its classic counterpart
    • “Dash & Lily” Find Love, Stranded
      “Dash & Lily” Find Love, Stranded
    • Arts In The News
    • Reviews
    • Music Peek
  • Health and Wellness
    • No image
      Athletic impacts of Covid-19
    • No image
      A new kind of PE
    • No image
      Maintaining wellness as the cold sets in
    • Athlete of the Week
    • Boston Sports Update
    • The Vegan Digest
    • The SHE Corner
  • Miscellanea
    • No image
      Remote students experience existential crises; change class years in email signatures
    • President’s Column: The Butterfly Effect
      President’s Column: The Butterfly Effect
    • Your next on-campus romance isn’t going to work out
      Your next on-campus romance isn’t going to work out
    • The Artichoke
    • The Dose
    • The Olive Branch
    • Multimedia
      • Galleries
      • Infographics
      • Videos
By Annabel Thompson Features, News and FeaturesNovember 7, 2018

Delaney ’20 spends summer helping stage authentic Shakespeare productions

Margaux Delaney ’20 spent the summer as an intern at the American Shakespeare Center (ASC), a Shakespeare theater in southern Virginia, and gave a Tanner presentation on her work on Oct. 23. As an English and medieval studies double major, the experience of being in a working theater rather than engaging with her field in an academic context was new to Delaney.

“I don’t study theater, and that was one difference between me and the rest of the interns; they were all theater students, and I was the only one who wasn’t,” she said. “So I was coming with a bit of a different background in med-ren as opposed to theater, which [had] strengths and weaknesses for sure. It was different.”

However, Delaney embraced that difference, feeling that it contextualized the work she was doing within her field, and provided a possible path for her future.

“Part of it is thinking about the applications of an academic career, and what I can do outside of the academy,” she explained. “I don’t necessarily know if I want to go in that direction, but it just sort of expanded possibilities. I wouldn’t have to stop doing the things that I want to do by pursuing a professional career rather than academic.”

The ASC presents itself as “the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre” due to its unusual staging and teaching practices. Aside from the theater using costumes from a wide variety of time periods including contemporary costumes, and mixed-gender casting rather than all-male casting, the theater tries to keep each production as close as possible to what an audience in the seventeenth century would have been able to see, using original staging conditions.

“The most important piece is what is called universal lighting,” Delaney said. “The lights don’t turn off. Universal lighting changes how you can stage a play; for example, think about the mechanics of having an onstage death when there isn’t a blackout or a curtain. Other actors are going to have to physically bear a body off stage and get it out of the way that way.”

Another practice the ASC takes from Shakespeare’s time is the use of cue scripts during rehearsals.

“In a cue script, an actor would have seen only his own lines and the single word that cues him,” explained Delaney. “This was partly a practical timesaving device; since a scribe would have to copy out each individual actor’s part by hand, it made sense to keep the writing down to a minimum.”

Delaney demonstrated the effects of using a cue script by having two other panelists attempt to practice a scene from “The Merchant of Venice” by reading from one, and the result led to a lot of interruptions. For example, the cue word for one panelist was “bond,” but in the scene they were practicing, the word “bond” occurs very frequently, so she attempted to say her lines several different times before her real cue.

“As you can see,the interruptions are real. The feeling of being interrupted is real, and that really transforms what we see here,” said Delaney. “This is the interaction that Shakespeare deliberately programmed into the text, and that he used cue scripts in order to achieve.”

The ASC’s use of seventeenth-century staging conventions like cue scripts and universal lighting was one of the things that drew Delaney to work there in the first place.

“This idea of original staging conditions is really integral to their work, and that’s why I was interested in working there in the first place as a Medieval and Renaissance Studies major,” she said. “Although I like Shakespeare and other early modern playwrights, I had never actually done any related work personally … Through the performance-based workshops that I was helping out with, I learned so much about how to take scholarship and research about the conditions of early modern performance and make it meaningful on the modern stage.”

 

Share on

  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Google +
  • LinkedIn
  • Email
Previous articleShruti Laya explores diversity in South Asian cultures
Next articleAdministration holds listening session on demonstration policy

You may also like

Students With Medically Restricted Diets Struggle to Eat On Campus

Students attending the puja ceremony

Students find new ways to celebrate Diwali

Changing COVID-19 regulations impact students’ mental health

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Email Newsletter

Sign up to receive our weekly digest in your inbox

* indicates required

Top Articles

Sorry. No data so far.

Recent Tweets

Tweets by @Wellesley_News

The independent student newspaper of Wellesley College since 1901.

Sign up to receive our weekly digest in your inbox

* indicates required

  • About
  • Editorial Board
  • Advertise
  • Join Us
  • Archives
COPYRIGHT © 2021 THE WELLESLEY NEWS
Back to top