On Stage: Performing Arts at Our Oneonta Campuses by Rachel Frick Cardelle
Columnist Gains Insights into Production of ‘The Tempest’
For a playwright who is arguably the best-known playwright in the English-speaking world, I’m always amazed at how much we don’t know for sure about William Shakespeare. This proved true yet again when I went to do a little background research on his play “The Tempest,” currently in production at SUNY Oneonta under the direction of Andrew Kahl (Drew). I can tell you that “The Tempest” was written sometime around 1610 and is generally believed to be the last play Shakespeare wrote alone. The play centers on Prospero, an exiled duke living on an isolated island with his daughter, Miranda. Prospero has magical powers, and as the show opens he has used those powers with the help of his spirit servant, Ariel, to create a storm that shipwrecks his enemies upon the island.
When I went to watch a rehearsal of the show several weeks before its opening, rather than watching a full run-through, I had the opportunity to watch Drew work with a few members of the cast on specific scenes. Most notably they ran through the opening scene on board the ship as it is tossed about in the storm, and the next scene just after the storm, when the ship’s passengers find themselves stranded on the island. Having recently come off-book (when the actors no longer read from the script), the focus was on movement through the set, and the cadence and clarity of lines. After each run through of a scene, Drew would give the actors his notes, telling this one, “Could you make the inflection on this word rather than that word” and that one, “Reach around behind you as though you are far more unsteady on your feet than this other character since you are not a sailor and he is.” I was struck by the impact each seemingly small note made.
Then one actor expressed having some trouble with a particular speech. Drew first had him repeat the speech. Then Drew gave him a verbal exercise to do, in which the actor repeated the speech with just the consonants (an exercise that hurt my brain when I tried to do it later). Then Drew had him do the full speech again. Had I not been sitting there, I would not have believed such a huge difference could be made with such a short, quick exercise.
Later, as I pondered the kind of training a director’s ear must have to be able to hear what it is the actor is struggling with and to know the remedy, I was reminded again of how full the world is of expertise to learn. So I asked Director Kahl about the practice. Like any wonky expert, he gave me a great explanation. “Isolating vowels (or “pthongs”) or consonants (“obstruents”) is a helpful technique for teaching actors not to trust their habits of eliding or under-stressing sounds in words. When the spoken language slurs or rushes expressions of thought, forcing an actor to slow down and find the muscle memory with the articulators for sounds that punctuate and shape the flow of sound creates a new pattern and, sometimes, a better connection to details of sound (without the added tension of “trying” to speak clearly by over-activating the articulators)… Clear thought lives in the obstruents, and full emotional expression lives in the pthongs. It all seems a bit woo-woo and unscientific, but I have relied on this approach countless times as an actor, director, voice coach, and speech teacher. It works,” Drew said.
What makes this SUNY Oneonta production distinct from others is that included in the cast is a professional actor, MaConnia Chesser, who is part of the Actors’ Equity Association, the labor union for those who work in live theater. MaConnia has come to Oneonta as part of the university’s Artist-in-Residence program that began in 2022. This program has allowed faculty to bring professionals in music, art, and now theater to work with SUNY O students. I decided that for this article, it would be interesting to interview MaConnia and hear about her experiences as an actor and as an actor working with college students.
I began by asking her what had drawn her to apply for the Artist-in-Residence program. She told me she had worked with Drew over the summer at the Franklin Stage.
“I have a background in Shakespeare. I used to work at ‘Shakespeare & Company’ in Lenox, Massachusetts, Berkshires. I’m not a teacher, but at ‘Shakespeare & Company’ I was the manager of the actor training program, so I have some experience working with that [young actor] demographic when it comes to actor training,” MaConnia said. “Usually I’m not good at explaining to students how something should go, or why it’s important to do something a certain way, but I like being a role model to young students, helping them try to figure stuff out. Also, I can help explain how to navigate the business a bit. So it seemed like a good fit.”
MaConnia said the part of Prospero also called to her.
“It’s one of the parts on my bucket list of the great Shakespeare roles that you want to play someday. I would say the themes of having to know yourself and having to fight against outside forces that seek to destroy you, and having to have your inner strength and resilience in order to continue–some of those things spoke to me,” she explained. “Anything that has to do with parent and child having a close relationship is something that still resonates with me; I had a close relationship with my Mom. She passed away a couple years ago. So those types of relationships, exploring that resonates with me a lot.”
The challenge for MaConnia coming into a university theater rather than a professional production had nothing to do with her fellow thespians, but rather adapting to a very different work schedule.
“For me it was less about them and more about the structure of rehearsals. Because normally for our rehearsals it’s at least six hours a day in professional theater, and there’s more time for in-depth scene work. So you’re just going over and over it. In part, that is what’s helping you to learn, learn it and get it into your body. And we [here] just didn’t have that much time in rehearsal, because the students can’t. And so it became very challenging for me to just learn the lines and to really start to understand what Prospero wants, what is his motivation for the things that he does, because there’s just so little time to develop those relationships and so that’s the most challenging thing that I’ve had to deal with.”
MaConnia and I went on to talk about other Shakespeare roles she has on her bucket list: Hermione from “The Winter’s Tale,” Beatrice and Dogberry from “Much Ado About Nothing,” King Lear and the Fool from “King Lear,” and Kate from “The Taming of the Shrew.” The last role would be a repeat for MaConnia, and that led us to a discussion about how to bring some of Shakespeare’s works to a modern audience. Kate’s relationship with Petruccio, her husband, for example, is understood to be abusive today, yet the play is a comedy with a happy ending for the couple, perfectly acceptable in Shakespeare’s time. MaConnia had liked the challenge of trying to keep the beauty of Shakespeare’s language while making the show relevant, but wanted to have another chance to continue working on that.
As someone who spent seven years managing an actor training program, MaConnia also clearly enjoys watching the professional growth of others, a trait critical to a good Artist-in-Residence, in my opinion.
“When you do see a student who is very inhibited and maybe Drew plays a game with him, or maybe he is able to explain the text in a way that they can relate to, and you see that light come on—that’s always something that’s great to be a part of. And just being in the space is a beautiful space,” she shared.
Having watched Drew just a few days before do exactly that—and Marc Shaw at Hartwick College do the same earlier this month with the students in “Antigone”—I had to agree with her.
“The Tempest,” directed by Andrew Kahl, plays at SUNY Oneonta’s Goodrich Theatre November 14-16 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 17 at 2 p.m. Tickets go on sale November 14 and are free with a SUNY Oneonta student ID and $5.00 for general admission.
In the spring, Hartwick College will be producing “SNAP!” and “On the Verge or The Geography of Yearning,” while SUNY O will be offering “The Alleged Children of Darkness” and “A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum.” Stay tuned!
Rachel Frick Cardelle covers performing arts at SUNY Oneonta and Hartwick College.