Labors of love: Shakespeare Festival challenges actors to think tragedy tomorrow, comedy tonight

 By Diana Nollen

Study is like the heaven's glorious sun / That will not be deep-searched with saucy looks.

- “Love's Labour's Lost”

But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? / It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.

 - “Romeo and Juliet”

Ah, two faces of love, burning brightly as the sun through Shakespeare's plumed pen.

And yet, so very different.

The first, a sacrificial love for all things academic, the latter the all-consuming love of youth.

Both will be performed under a canopy of stars when Riverside Theatre brings the Bard to the Festival Stage in Iowa City's Lower City Park.

The little-known comedy and the universally known tragedy will alternate weekends and weeknights from June 11 through July 11, 2010.

“Love's Labour's Lost” launches the annual festival June 11 to 13. Shakespeare paints in broad comedic strokes when four fetching French beauties arrive right as the young king of Navarre and his noblemen have sworn to pursue their studies, not lovely ladies.

“Romeo and Juliet,” the classic tale of forbidden love's ultimate cost, will play June 18 through 20. Then the two shows will go into rotation. To keep it all straight, go to www.riversidetheatre.org

Keeping it all straight is surprisingly easy for the actors, despite rehearsing dual roles.

“It's actually pretty wonderful,” says Cristina Panfilio, 27, of Chicago, who plays lovely lady Rosaline in “Love's Labour's Lost” and the title role of Juliet.

“For my track, I don't think I could have a better pairing, as far as these girls go,” she says. “For me, it's nice to be doing different things. It can be a tough couple weeks at first, to keep your head on straight. So much information is coming at once that my brain hurts, but that happens with any rehearsal process.

“It's so satisfying to go into Juliet. I get to fall in love and have a first love every night, then turn around and in ‘Love's Labour's Lost,' I get to be a grown up woman - totally confident, brilliant, witty and so different. I think audiences really like seeing that - watching actors do drastically different things.”

“I have to put my attention on the show that opens first,” says Tim Budd, 48, of Iowa City, who plays the comic Don Adriano Armado in “Love's Labour's Lost” and Lord Capulet in “Romeo and Juliet.”

“After six summers of Shakespeare and three at Summer Rep, you get used to using half of your brain on one show and half on the other. I know I'll have an additional week (to prepare) for the second one,” he says.

“I find Shakespeare fairly easy to memorize in verse - there's a poetic movement to it,” he says. “You know if you get off track because the flow is interrupted. The comedies are written in prose, which can be more difficult. The humor is topical and doesn't align to our frame of reference 500 years later.”

Having wildly different characters is part of the festival's appeal for Budd, a professional actor who earned his graduate degree at the University of Iowa.

“That's what I like most about doing two shows same time: having two characters at either end of the spectrum. It gives me the chance to flex my acting muscles to inhabit two characters.”

He describes Don Adriano Armado as “very buffoon, very Mediterranean hotblooded. I can play him a little broader than in a realistic show. Having the license to go over the top can be very fun.

“With Juliet's father, here's a man I might even call suburban. He has a wife, he has money and he has a daughter. He's reached a point in his life where he's very comfortable. What I hope to bring out in the role is that he's focused on his own life and reputation and wants to uphold that. He's not paying attention to what's happening in his child's life. I want audiences to have a heightened awareness of what can happen if they're not paying attention to their children.”

He uses his diverse characters to shape each other.

“I like to imagine the two characters in the same room together. Would they talk and get along? Mentally putting them side by side helps strengthen their differences. It helps as I play them.”

Budd enjoys the demands of the Shakespeare festival.

“It's very challenging,” he says. “It also forces you to use your imagination. The way the shows are staged down there (in the park) is the way they were staged in Shakespeare's time, with a fairly empty space. You have to imagine your surroundings and help the audience image the surroundings, using heightened language, heightened situations of life-and-death circumstances and emotion.

“With the language and imagination required, you have to play on all cylinders. I find that very rewarding in the end.”

This marks Panfilio's fourth summer with the Riverside festival.

“So really, they can't keep me away,” she says, adding that founders Ron Clark and Jody Hovland “are really good at assembling a company that always feels like I'm working for family.

“They focus on the company a lot and that makes a really wonderful work environment. They hire great actors, great designers and great directors. That's how you get people to come back.

“And Iowa City really likes theater,” she says. “During the flood summer, it was so incredible to see the way people were coming together to help out, whether getting money to the theater or the man who donated his farmhouse so they could have a costume shop.

“It's a good place with good people - that makes for good work.”

ARTS EXTRA

What: Riverside Theatre's Shakespeare Festival: “Love's Labour's Lost” and “Romeo and Juliet”

When: June 11 to July 11, 2010; plays alternate various nights

 Times: 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays; 7 p.m. Sundays and Tuesdays

Where: Riverside Theatre Festival Stage, Lower City Park, Iowa City

Tickets: $15 to $37 at (319) 338-7672 and www.riversidetheatre.org

Extras: Grounds open 90 minutes before show times for picnics; Green Show Stage performances start 60 minutes before show times

Information: http://www.riversidetheatre.org/

Finding the right fit key to Shakespeare festival

By Diana Nollen

On the surface, “Love's Labour's Lost” and “Romeo and Juliet” look like polar opposites. But dig just a little deeper, and the similarities rise to the top.

“They're both very much a young person's play,” says Ron Clark of Iowa City, Riverside Theatre's production manager and resident artist. “It's a very young cast in ‘Romeo and Juliet,' with the title characters, as well as their compatriots. Then in ‘Love's Labour's Lost,' you have young lovers, as well. From a casting point of view, they dovetail beautifully.

“Both plays are about love and what happens when we create barriers to natural love, real love and the aftermath of that. They're very different plays, and that's good,” he adds. “‘Romeo and Juliet' is a timeless, tragic epic. On the other hand, ‘Love's Labour's Lost' is beautiful, light and fluffy.”

Clark, 59, is having a busy summer. In addition to his regular duties with the professional theater troupe, he's directing “Romeo and Juliet” and appearing briefly on stage in both shows.

He says he juggles all that “with great assistance and support” behind the scenes.

Before anyone can even step into the scenes, he's hard at work with his wife and Riverside partner, Jody Hovland, in choosing the festival shows.

“Jody and I think about it all the time, and start with that,” Clark says. “We talk to our good pal Miriam Gilbert from the University of Iowa, one of the leading Shakespearean scholars in the world, saying, ‘We haven't done this yet; what would you match up with this?' If there's a play we know we really want to do, we have to figure out what is possible in terms of casting.”

In shows calling for large casts, actors may play multiple roles. Some of the actors are familiar faces to Riverside audiences. Others are new.

Clark and Hovland travel “quite a bit” to seek out actors in major Midwestern cities and head to New York every few years.

“We cast as wide a net as possible,” Clark says. “We really want to find the best people we can.”

This year's show pairing is a mix of familiar and new, as well.

“Romeo and Juliet” played opposite “The Comedy of Errors” in Riverside's 2002 Shakespeare season.

This time, the well-known drama runs in repertory with a lesser-known comedy.

It's the first time the troupe has staged “Love's Labour's Lost” and the first time Theodore Swetz of Kansas City, Mo., has joined the Riverside directing staff. His history with Shakespeare is long and colorful. As an undergraduate, he performed in three plays with the legendary producer and director Joseph Papp in the New York Shakespeare Festival in Central Park.

 “We did some amazing things, including ‘Hamlet.' Of course, I was beating a drum behind him - Sam Waterston was the Hamlet.”

 Swetz, now 57, went on to be a founding member of the American Players Theatre in Spring Green, Wis., where his work caught the Riverside founders' attention.

The timing was right for them to join forces this summer.

“We started talking with Ted last summer,” Clark says. “We've admired his work for over 25 years and have known him for three or four, since he started teaching at (the University of Missouri-Kansas City). We're completely taken with him. He's an amazing scholar and wonderful Shakespearean. His directing is just terrific.

“We're all feeling pretty happy this summer to be working with Ted. He loved the play; he played the lead romantic character when he as a younger fella. He's more than exceeded our expectations as a director, collaborator and friend.”

The feeling is mutual.

“I'm quite thrilled to be a part of it,” Swetz says, calling Clark and Hovland “unsung heroes.”

“What they're adding to the culture in Iowa City is an immense contribution,” he says.

Clark is approaching “Romeo and Juliet” in a classical style and period, while Swetz is turning up the heat on “Love's Labour's Lost” by placing it in the early 20th century.

“I'm not a purist,” Swetz says, “but I have a great respect for the story and the playwright. It's a piece of fluff - it doesn't have to have the same care one would take with other plays. I'm putting it around 1900 to 1915. It will look absolutely beautiful. We're using a ragtime piano motif to keep it buoyant. It plays like a silly movie. I'm not a huge concept guy - the plays can speak for themselves. This is a frame we can make beautiful.”

He's not worried about audiences losing the story in the language of the late 1500s.

“I don't even think of it,” he says. “We live in iambic pentameter. It's our heartbeat. I'm a circumstance action guy. I think these people were passionate, full-blooded storytellers. We will go with what a human need is and satisfy that need. Comedy is about obsession. I'm directing it with that in mind, not any model of speech. So far so good.

“Theater in Shakespeare's day was a visceral place about people and circumstance,” Swetz says. “That where I find my greatest joy in directing.”