This month you can see 14 MFA students tackle Shakespeare’s rarely produced "Henry VIII" as part of a program called The Old Globe and University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program.
Director Sam White says Shakespeare can change lives.
"My mother was a ferocious reader, and we weren't allowed to listen to rap music," White recalled. "But she heard me listening, knocked on the door and had a big smelly book. It smelled like an attic. She had pulled her big 'Complete Works of Shakespeare' out of the attic, and she handed it to me and told me if I liked lyrics so much, that was what I was going to have to read. And so it took about eight summers to finish the 'Complete Works.' Hated it almost the entire time until I was about 16, maybe 17, and eventually fell in love with it."
Now White is working with the Old Globe and the University of San Diego Shiley Graduate Theatre Program to change the lives of a new generation of actors.
"If you know how to do Shakespeare, and you know how to do it well, you'll be employed all the time," White said. "If you know your verse versus prose, your heightened language, your metaphor — that's going to really serve you to get jobs after you graduate. And not only that, those tools from Shakespeare help you do any play well."
Jesse Perez is the director of the Old Globe and USD Shiley Graduate Theatre Program.
"The MFA program was started to support the Shakespeare productions out in the festival stage," Perez explained. "Basically, Craig Noel and Sister Sally Furay over at USD, decided to start a two-year MFA program that brought young people, to teach them how to do classical work so that they can be on the stage with great Shakespearean actors."
White is directing a production of "Henry VIII" with a cast of exclusively MFA students.
"But what's exciting about working with actors who don't have a lot of Shakespearean baggage is that the freshness and the excitement of it all for them really bleeds through in their performances, which is exciting," White said. "It's almost like they tasted a new food for the first time, and it really has ignited those taste buds. And that enthusiasm, that hunger, is something that was really, I think, really great for 'Henry VIII,' because it's not a play that's often done."
"Henry VIII" concerns the early years of the 16th century English king and his political maneuverings as he discards one wife for another. White did not want to try and modernize the look of the production.
"I think by putting the play in the 16th century, it really does make it more blatantly obvious that things really haven't changed," White stated.
And Perez wants students to see those connections.
"Shakespeare is really hard to make personal and make it sound human," Perez noted. "I always tell my students to bring Shakespeare to them. When we're here at the Globe, we're in America and we get the story through our lens, through an American lens. It's Shakespeare in America. That, to me, is what's exciting."
The MFA program brings in seven students for each two-year program. But when the time comes to tackle a Shakespeare play, two classes combine to take on the large cast of characters and to sink their teeth into Shakespeare’s words and the music they create.
"It's the rhythm. It's the cadence. The verbs are so flavorful that if you have a monologue that's written in verse and it has all of these, I call them juicy verbs, you can't help but be enraptured by the language," White enthused.
Perez also finds music in the language.
"The musicality of the language is ringing in ourselves," Perez said. "It's ringing within us. The sounds of Shakespeare are within us, especially if it's done well. You carry a vowel sound out there. It can reverberate in somebody's body. Then all of a sudden we're like, 'Whoa, where's that sound coming from?'"
This weekend and next that sound will be coming from MFA students bringing fresh, vivid life to Shakespeare’s Henry VIII at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre.
