Maryland Shakespeare Players Draw a Crowd

By Samantha Pitkin on May 10, 2015

With anticipation in their eyes and foils drawn, Laertes and Hamlet dance around on a makeshift stage in front of the Stamp Grand Ballroom Lounge.

By 1 p.m., the Maryland Shakespeare Players were ready for their first performance of the day. About 30 attended this Saturday’s performance to watch the undergraduate cast put on their second Hamlet performance of the semester.

During the first half of the play, the actors and actresses struggled to raise their voices over the sound of blasting Beach Boys music from a performance next door. Audience members shuffled in their seats, looking toward the large white wall dividing the lounge from the Grand Ballroom.

By the second half of the show the actors got into a rhythm of banter and were no longer phased by the modern music next door.

Sam Sherman, a freshman mechanical engineering major, made his second appearance as an MDSP cast member this semester. He starred as Polonius, the chief advisor to King Claudius and father of Laertes and Ophelia, and could not have seen himself in any other role.

“Personally, I love Polonius,” Sherman said. “He’s one of my favorite roles in Shakespeare so it was a dream come true for me to be able to play him.”

Prior theater experience in high school served as preparation for acting in Hamlet, Sherman said.

“I did theater all throughout high school, and all of them were comical roles,” Sherman said.

The cast fully utilized the grand ballroom lounge, rushing in and out of the room to do costume changes and using the space between the audience and the back wall as makeshift hallway.

The floor where the audience sat was used as a stage just as much as the higher-up, curtained portioned of the actual stage.

Vera Belaia, a freshman civil engineering major, appeared as Rosencrantz, Bernardo and the Second Gravedigger throughout the production. Belaia, along with the rest of the cast, was new to the performance space until just before the show and had only ever rehearsed in classrooms on campus, she said.

“We had some time to warm up in the new space before the performance, and we set up the curtains and things beforehand, but it was a pretty easy transition,” Belaia said.

The first row of seats was open to the audience except for one chair at each of the row, which remained reserved for cast members to use in various scenes.

Danielle Gisselbeck, a junior romance languages major, incorporated a front row audience member into one of her scenes as Ophelia. The audience member agreed to participate, somewhat abashedly lending Gisselbeck his hand for one of her monologues.

The cast members put a twist on their costumes wearing more modern attire, such as suits and ties, and the occasional black Under Armour sweatshirt when a scene required all-black clothing.

Despite the more modern aspects of the play, the cast and crew took Shakespeare seriously and stuck to the early English language, Sherman said.

“Shakespeare is the greatest playwright of all time, and to a certain extent he created the English language,” Sherman said. “A lot of words we use come from Shakespeare. He took plays which were specifically meant for royalty, and created them for the masses.”

 

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