Twelfth Night was my undergraduate senior thesis. To produce this play, I was awarded a competitive “Performing Arts Senior Thesis” grant which allowed me the ability to use The Evergreen State College’s main stage theatre space and the use of facilities and staff time to support our production. The use of the main stage theatre space for a student-originated production was a rare occurrence – so rare that it had not happened in my time at the college until our production – and I wanted to take maximum advantage of this opportunity.

To that end, every production member and actor was either a current Evergreen student or a recent college graduate (for this effort we combined forces with Animal Fire Theatre Group, a new Shakespeare-in-the-Park company hailing from the University of Idaho, who had just come to Olympia the previous summer), and I coordinated with the media interns on campus to produce a 4 camera live shoot and broadcast of one of our performances to local access television channel: TCTV. You can watch my edit of the full play from this broadcast below.

Work on this production was a long, collaborative effort. I joined forces with Animal Fire Theatre Group when I discovered that they also wished to produce Twelfth Night in the winter, but they didn’t have an indoor space – while at the time our production had a space but lacked experienced actors, particularly with Shakespeare, which Animal Fire had in spades- including one company member who had just returned from a season at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as the 2009 Rex Rabold Fellow. After we combined forces, we compared our cuts of the scripts, painstakingly discussing each choice line by line. This depth of care for our work and level of collaboration would be a theme throughout our 3 month rehearsal process.

It was a highly experimental production. We intercut scenes from other plays (such as The Tempest to show the storm which shipwrecks Viola); the music was all created by actor Tod Davies who played Feste; and we made extensive use of a “fountain” on stage which held 300 gallons of water. But the process was also experimental: I designed and facilitated several workshops on acting Shakespeare (including workshops on how actor’s can utilize scansion and on Scott Kaiser’s technique of “Orchestration”); we enjoyed an exploratory, collaborative rehearsal process which arrived at blocking instead of starting with blocking; and when we didn’t know how to do something we made it up. Our house was full night after night, our live audiences loved the show- and I would continue to hear about folks who had seen and enjoyed reruns of our production on TCTV, which would continue to broadcast our production years later.

Although this was my first full directing experience, it is one of my proudest.

Above, I’ve highlighted a 10 minute clip from Act 2 Scene 3 which is one of my personal favorite moments from our production.