In an upstairs rehearsal room, the actors of Shakespeare & Company are busily speeding through the second act of Tom Stoppard’s play Rough Crossing one Friday in mid-May. In the play, the principles of a Broadway theater troupe are crossing the Atlantic on a ship.
The actors stumble back and forth, dragging chairs across the hardwood floor as if the deck of the ship were rocking on an ocean swell. They are dressed casually, not yet in costume, as they run through the play’s nonstop cavalcade of puns, zingers and repartee. Jeans are standard and Jonathan Croy, playing the world-weary playwright Turai, is wearing sunglasses.
They are speeding through their lines in the morning session, working out the movements before they do a full read-through on the stage downstairs, which has just been painted that week. Director Kevin Coleman looks on, beneath a denim blue ballcap. He stops them to zero in on a key part of the scene.
In the scene, Turai has just told the ship’s captain, an aspiring playwright himself, that the manuscript he sent along is hopeless. The captain, flattered to have the Broadway troupe aboard, had turned the ship away from the storm, calming the deck and steadying everybody aboard but the steward, Dvornichek (played by newcomer LeRoy McClain), who stumbles about, taking every excuse to down another glass of cognac he is ostensibly carrying on a tray to Turai.
But after Turai’s curt dismissal of the captain’s dream to be a playwright, a horn sounds and the ship turns back into the storm, sending actors rocking and chairs clattering once again. This is where Coleman steps in. He stops the action and steps out on the rehearsal floor, trying to coordinate the actors’ movements so they don’t get in each other’s way.
After Bill Barclay, playing the young musical director Adam Adam, hangs up the ship’s phone, reporting to Turai that the captain “seems a little upset” over Turai’s evaluation of his manuscript, the horn will sound. In that moment, Coleman instructs the actors, they should have a moment of realization, then stumble into a grand circle, with Barclay somehow avoiding Jason Asprey — playing Turai’s writing sidekick Gal — who flings himself out of his deck chair and slides across the floor.
Meanwhile, Elizabeth Aspenlieder, playing the Balkan starlet Natasha, is to knock over a chair while staying upstage, while Malcolm Ingram, playing the aging star Ivor Fish, is to put on a 1930s-style life jacket and slink into a chair, ready for when Adam confronts him angrily over whether he did, in fact, write the amorous lines that Adam overheard him declaiming the previous night to Natasha, who is Adam’s fiancée, thus showing it was all an act and that Adam did not, in fact, catch them in a compromising position.
Got all that? After several rotations through the grand circle, with Coleman giving directions, the actors did. Coleman crouches on his chair seat like a catcher as the actors make it through to the choreographed singing number at the play’s end and then break for lunch.
Rough Crossing
Shakespeare & Company
July 1, 6, 7, 12, 13, 15, 18, 19, 22, 25, 29
times vary: 10:30 a.m., 3 p.m., 8 p.m.
Tickets $10-$57 with reserved seating
Founder’s Theater
70 Kemball St., Lenox
see website for complete list of performances and ticket information
http://www.shakespeare.org/
Box Office: (413) 637-3353
(Also, July 12, 5:45 p.m., lecture with Middlebury College professor Cheryl Faraone: “I Think I’ll Spend My Life on a Boat: The Wit of Tom Stoppard”)
