ON BEING JULIET
Allison Lynch makes role her own
Ron Jenkins is talking about his fight director, Karl Sine, and his penchant for choreographing sensational sword fights. But he might as well be talking about his life in theatre.
“Karl gets it,” he says. “Karl is always about telling the story in the most exciting way possible.”
So is Jenkins, the kinetic Edmonton director of such Calgary productions as Othello, The Motherf--er With the Hat, The Money Shot, High Life, and Playing With Fire: The Theo Fleury Story that have ignited the city’s stages in recent years.
Jenkins is back, directing Romeo and Juliet for The Shakespeare Company, which opened Friday night and runs through Oct. 17 at Vertigo Studio Theatre.
It’s Jenkins’ second consecutive year directing for The Shakespeare Company. He says he learned a very simple lesson from directing Othello at the same theatre in 2014.
“Trust what the words do,” Jenkins says, “And what the text does.
“Trust that when things fly away emotionally,” he says, “they come back to what the text wants to dictate. I’ve kind of always believed that anyways and (that) anything you do to show off is just extraneous.
“Just tell that story about the kids,” he says, “and that’s the main thing.”
Those kids — the 14-year-olds who fall hard for each other — setting off a war for the ages that culminates in bodies everywhere falling even harder — are played by Allison Lynch and Eric Wigston.
“I love playing Juliet,” says Lynch. “Shakespeare’s terrifying to me and that’s why I love it so much. It’s a huge (acting) challenge and makes your brain work in so many different ways all at once.”
For Lynch — who, in her other artistic life is an accomplished musician (ukulele) and composer (The Penelopiad at ATP, among others) — the trick to playing a role as iconic as Juliet is not to spend too much time reading about the great ones who played her in the past.
“I had some good advice from a number of different mentors in the community,” she says. “They’ve all said to me, it’s impossible to make Juliet like any of the iconic people who have played her — so the advice I got was to make her my own, and to be my own Juliet — and that has helped a lot. That takes the pressure off a little bit.”
Also, while she never studied theatre in university, she did study music — which, it turns out, helps with trying to perform a play written in Shakespearean verse.
“Singers are trained,” she says, “to get across a phrase or an idea or a thought in one phrase or breath.
“I spent a lot of time in university,” she adds, “working on stuff like the kind of emphasis you put on different words and the weight different words have, and which ones stand out — it is a lot like that in Shakespeare as well.”
And while she’s now married (to actor Braden Griffiths), Lynch still remembers what it was like to be 14 and in love for the first time.
“I had a crush,” she says, “which I call it now — but then, it was the deepest love I will ever feel in my life, that I’d had up until that time.
“So I remember feeling that kind of just all-encompassing (emotion),” she says. “It just takes over all of your thoughts about this person, and how much you want to be with this person.
“I remember how that felt like,” she says, “and I could see how it could go there (to a dark place).”
She also can connect to a 14-yearold girl who doesn’t exactly play by the rules.
“Juliet is the ultimate badass,” she says. “She’s a young woman who, against her family’s wishes and the rules of her society, takes her future in her own hands, and makes the ultimate sacrifice for what she believes in. And she’s only 14! It doesn’t get much more feminist or badass than that!” Lynch plans to commute to the Vertigo Studio Theatre on her favourite mode of transportation: her motorcycle.
“It’s a Suzuki Marauder,” she says. “It’s such a tiny little one — it’s a 250. Small little engine. But you know — nice little cruiser bike. It’s great — not great for highway riding because it doesn’t go too fast — but good for driving around the city.”
She didn’t get bit by the motorcycle gene, she was born into it. “Both my parents rode motorcycles when they were my age,” she says, “and then they kind of hid that from us for a while — probably because they didn’t want us (she has a motorcycle riding brother) to do it — but now both of us do.”
The Shakespeare Company presents Romeo and Juliet at Vertigo Studio Theatre through Oct. 17
www.shakespearecompany.com or 403-221-3708