Shakespeare’s *Love’s Labour’s Lost*

Improbable Fictions presents a staged reading of Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost, Thursday March 10th, 7:30 pm, in Farrah Hall Room 214 on UA’s campus.  Pre-show music begins at 7:00 pm.  Free and open to the public.

~ Cast ~

Ferdinand…….…………………Charles Prosser
Princess….……………….Sara-Margaret Cates
Biron………….……………………….David Bolus
Rosalind…….………………..Jean Fuller-Scott
Longaville….………………………Russell Frost
Maria….….………..…………………Abby Jones
Dumian…..……………….Lawson Hangartner
Katharine…….……………..Meredith Wiggins
Costard ………………………………Steve Burch
Boyet ……..…………………….Deborah Parker
Messenger……………………David Ainsworth
Pre-Show Music………..Mark Hughes Cobb
…………………………………………….Nic Helms
Director/Dramaturg…….…..…….Scott Free

Program notes included below.  Scott’s words here are a great overview of Improbable Fictions’ aesthetic.

***********

Love’s Labour’s Lost and Found

(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bard)

When I was in 8th grade English, we had to read two Shakespeare plays each year. That year, they were Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth. For Romero and Juliet, we read it to ourselves and I promptly got nothing out of it. It just lay there on the page and I slogged my way through it. But for Macbeth, we read the play aloud in class. Suddenly, I got one of the jokes (yes…there are jokes in Macbeth) and I started to laugh out loud. Needless to say, I was a bit embarrassed but I had made a discovery: Shakespeare is much easier to understand when you hear it as opposed to reading it. A little bit later, I made a quantum leap forward when I saw a fully-dramatized version of Hamlet on PBS. “Wow…ok……THAT is what this is all about……neat!”

The plays of Shakespeare are not novels or even short stories. They are studied as literature (and rightfully so as it is some of the finest writing in the English language) but they were never intended to be read; they were meant to be PERFORMED. As a dear friend of mine so rightly explained it,

“It (Shakespeare’s work) is daring and passionate and scary and dirty and mean and poetic and dangerous and romantic…it’s supposed to live and breathe and weep and bleed and sigh….the text is just the blueprint of the building not the building itself…it’s a guideline for how it’s supposed to be done…it doesn’t tell you what color things are, what materials it’s made of, what kind of furniture and lighting is going in there, how warm or cool the temperature is..it’s nowhere near the final, finished product…it was never meant to simply be read…it was intended to be seen and heard…the full production IS the finished product!”

So consider what we have for you here tonight as a trip to the building site. It is a bit better than just looking at the blueprints, but it is not the finished building. A staged reading is a strange animal. It is a performance but not a complete one. You are visitors at what can only be described as an early rehearsal for the play. We will do our best to give you a sense of performance but our scripts are still in our hands…we’re still reading. I feel that this particular play, Love’s Labour’s Lost, is uniquely suited for this form. There are no big battle scenes; no sword fights. It is charming witty people saying charming witty things. I promise you will find something to amuse you. You will be entertained and you will have a better idea of what Shakespeare is like than reading it off a dry and dusty page.

But it is not the last word; not the finished product. If you like our efforts, I implore you to seek out full productions. They can be found ranging from elaborately produced extravaganzas with sumptuous costumes and massive sets to bare bones efforts with a couple actors and a stool representing a castle. All are worthy of your attention.  Only then can you see the full majesty of the Bard. The play IS the thing. Go and see as many as you can.

~Scott Free~

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