Christina Nguyen and Jessy Ardern as Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

Freewill Shakespeare Festival artistic director David Horak, who directs Romeo and Juliet in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

By Liz Nicholls, 12thnight.ca

This summer, when lovestruck Romeo says “what light from yonder window breaks?” the light will break from stained glass windows and bounce off bevelled mirrors.

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Starting this week at the Freewill Shakespeare Festival, as announced on the Bard’s birthday, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night will alternate in a beautiful hand-made 1947 Belgian spiegeltent in the parking lot of the Edmonton EXPO Centre (7515 118 Ave.). David Horak directs the tragedy; up-and-comer Amanda Goldberg, soon to be the artistic producer of SkirtsAfire, directs the comedy (you can meet her in a companion 12thnight post).

Freewill has always known how to make big, bold, contemporary choices for their resident playwright in the great outdoors (hey ho the wind and the rain, etc.). And in COVIDian times they learned to be fast and light on their feet. They touched down in parks, community centres, people’s backyards; they even went to the Fringe, with a five-actor Much Ado About Nothing and a three-actor Macbeth in 2021.

Last summer’s edition (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Measure For Measure) was a finale huzzah in the Heritage Amphitheatre (Hawrelak Park is now shut down for three YEARS) where it all began as a bright idea 34 years ago.

This past winter Freewill was preparing to return to the touring life. The plays were chosen. And, says artistic director Dave Horak, “we were talking to Repercussion in Montreal” about their touring model whereby the company “pops into a park, builds a set in the morning, and stays for a couple of days.”

The Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by 12thnight.ca

That’s when the unexpected offer from Explore Edmonton came: why not Shakespeare in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltgent, after its K-Days trapeze artists, magicians, and improvisers have exited stage left? “If you’re not going to be out in a park, you will be in an interesting space,” as Horak says of the two 10-actor Freewill productions in the close-up environment of a 220-seat spiegeltent. “In the tent, you’re so close; you’re seeing the other people. You’re in a different world, and an old world at that. I’m excited!” As Goldberg says, “we’re adding an experience we don’t normally get in Shakespeare: intimacy.”

Doing a pair of Shakespeares almost in the round and up-close at the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent comes with its own challenges, to be sure. “Comedies tend to need more stuff,” as Horak puts it, “more props, more places to hide and listen in.” And Twelfth Night, a wonderfully strange, sexually adventurous, open-ended comedy, is full of cross-dressing, tricks, misidentifications, subplots set up by characters spying on each other.  The space, says Goldberg, “is another character to play with…. We’re leaning into the silliness of trying to hide there, in plain sight.”

And as for Romeo and Juliet in a tent, well, there’s the famous business of the balcony. Not happening in a tent.  Horak admits this crossed his mind, “but nowhere (in the text) does it actually say ‘balcony’,” he smiles. “Window, yes. Balcony, no. It’s only a convention. When you don’t have one, you have to be more theatrical. The text is so great. And being in a smaller space gives us a chance to really play that text!”

As summer festival mates, Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night are an intriguing high-contrast pair. “Two different versions of love,” says Horak. Romeo and Juliet, last seen at Freewill in 2016, starts as a comedy and ends up as a tragedy; Twelfth Night (last at Freewill in 2011) starts as a tragedy and ends up as a comedy.”

“I’m trying to keep the first part of Romeo and Juliet lively and fun for as long as possible; that first scene is full of posturing, male bravado that quickly goes too far.”

Amanda Goldberg, who directs Twelfth Night at this year’s Freewill Shakespeare Festival. Photo supplied.

With her interest in gender identity and the view through the queer lens, director Goldberg and Twelfth Night seemed an ideal match, says Horak. “What’s the tone going to be? Where’s it going to sit?” They’re questions every Twelfth Night director plays with. And the intimate setting of the spiegeltent is a perfect place to do that. His own strength, Horak feels, is in “intimate, smaller, indie kind of productions.”  

“Everyone comes to Romeo and Juliet with some sort of expectation,” he says of the early Shakespeare that returns at regular intervals in the festival rotation. “I’ve always had a love-hate relationship with the play…. My dad was an English teacher, and he always complained about teaching it: Romeo is such a dummy. I think I inherited that.”

Ten years ago, though, teaching R&J (with Mieko Ouchi) at ArtsTrek, the venerable Alberta summer theatre camp, Horak’s view changed, dramatically and unexpectedly. “Having teenagers read it out loud was so interesting…. They really understood these ‘stupid’ teenagers; they really understood the plot, the mopey multi-emo depression, they got it! How quick it all happens: it felt real to them. And I started to hear those scenes in a very different way. I warmed to it.” And the chance to direct it for the first time — and for the first time in Freewill history to pair it with Twelfth Night — grabbed him.

Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen in Romeo and Juliet, Freewill Shakespeare Festival in the Cristal Palace Spiegeltent. Photo by Eric Kozakiewicz Photography

The cast of 10 he and Goldberg have assembled is generously endowed with non-binary and gender-fluid talent. And, inspired by that, Goldberg says she found her entry point into Twelfth Night, with “questions about sexuality and gender.” Horak says “I wasn’t hard and fast about it, but I was open to doing something different with Romeo, to having a female-presenting actor in the role.” His production stars Jessy Ardern and Christina Nguyen as the star-cross’d lovers.

“Romeo is a hard part; he’s often presented as a bit of a simp, less interesting than Juliet.” Ardern plays Romeo as a male, “but there’s something about her being female … when Romeo and Juliet see each other, it’s so immediate. There’s something they recognize; in a way they know each other, see each other reflected in each other. I’m hoping that helps us buy that they connect in such a different, fast way,” says Horak.

He was struck by the “sharp timeline” of the play, and he’s been leaning into that. “It all takes place over four days. It’s so compressed; it just shoots like a bullet…. For me, this play is a lot about the compression of time. Shakespeare is making the point that that’s the point: everything happens too fast. Nobody’s thinking.”

In the original, Juliet is 13, even younger than Shakespeare’s source for the play as Horak points out (he’s taken out that age reference). But “even to an Elizabethan audience” that would have been pushing it. Shakespeare’s point, Horak argues, is that the lovers are “too young, operating on impulse….. Everything is too fast; everyone’s making choices way too quick that aren’t thought out.”

Shakespeare is amply supplied with characters who scheme, long-term, like Richard III, or Hamlet who takes ages, thinking, re-thinking, possibly over-thinking, everything. Romeo and Juliet are, decisively, not like that. “They’re ‘I’m in the moment; I’m just moving’,” as Horak puts it. “It’s sometimes a knock on the play; I’m thinking of it more of a feature…. And in the tent, unlike the park, there are no long walks to exit or enter. It’ll happen, Boom!, right before you.”

“The only thing that’s been going on for a long time is the feud (the “ancient grudge” between the Montagues and the Capulets), so long that the original reason is long gone.…”

Matthew Skopyk’s original score reflects speed-up urgency, says Horak. He describes it as “contemporary, grunge-y kind of rock, music that drives things, totally quick, a pulse, a heartbeat!” And as for the setting, designed along with costumes, by Stephanie Bahniuk, “these are contemporary people. With just a touch, a nod, to Europe in the 1800s, not too on the nose, a turbulence in the scene, warring countries, inspired a bit by Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812.” The look has “a kind of elegance that fits the tent.”

As per the first line of the play, “two households both alike in dignity,” Horak says there will be no colour-coding of the Montagues and Capulets in the Romeo and Juliet we’ll see. “The two families have the same social status; they look the same; everything about them is the same. That is the tragedy; they’re the same damn family.”

And, as for the fighting in the close confines of the tent, swords are out (no imminent decapitations of first-row fans). Knives are in. “It’s fast and it’s nasty,” says Horak. “That’s why accidents happen.”

The fun of seeing actors take on different roles on alternating nights is at the heart of Freewill’s rep season. We’ll see Ardern as Romeo one night and the saucy clever Maria in Twelfth Night the next. Scott Schpeley is Mercutio (and Paris) in Romeo and Juliet one night, Orsino, the love-sick count of Twelfth Night (“if music be the food of love, play on),” the next. It’s a great stretch for actors, “a real theatre gym,” says Horak who has first-hand experience as a Freewill actor himself (though by coincidence never in either of this summer’s offerings).

The festive entertainment is enhanced by an assortment of pre-show events, including Malachite Theatre’s interactive introductions to the two plays. There are talks (by Mipre-show for kids and their grown-up companions before matinee performances (you get to spin the wheel of scenes. Matthew Morgan, the Vegas-based clown who’s been production manager of the spiegeltent shows for K-Days, will do his late-night clown drinking game comedy version of Macbeth, Shotspeare. The House of Hush is bringing a Shakespeare-themed burlesque.

There are discussions about Freewill’s celebrated playwright-in-residence. And because Freewill overlaps the Fringe, there’s cross-festival collaboration. On the Tuesday of the Fringe, the signature Late Night Cabaret will cross the river to the spiegeltent. And Aug. 18 to 20, so will the Fringe’s annual Free-For-All (of Fringe show excerpts). And did I mention the food trucks? See freewillshakespeare.com for the full schedule and details.

There is, of course, a risk in opting to “draw people to a different location,” as Horak says. “People have been consuming so much stuff online. But I do think live experiences are going to draw people again…. If people have seen these plays before they’re be intrigued and delighted by these new takes, I hope,” he grins. “If they haven’t seen the plays, they’re still getting Romeo and Juliet and Twelfth Night.

PREVIEW

Freewill Shakespeare Festival

Romeo and Juliet, Twelfth Night

Directed by: David Horak and Amanda Goldberg

Starring: Jessy Ardern, Christina Nguyen, Brett Dahl, Scott Shpeley, Kris Unruh, Dean Stockdale, Graham Motherwill, Nadien Chu, Troy O’Donnell, Yassine El Fassi El Fihri

Where: Cristal Palace Spiegeltent at EXPO Centre, 7515 118 Ave.

Running:  Aug. 8 to Sept. 3, Romeo and Juliet on all odd nights and even matinees, Twelfth Night on all even nights and odd matinees

Tickets: freewillshakespeare.com