THE SHAKESPEARIENCE OF A LIFETIME
Hamilton’s Marvin Karon has brought the Bard to 70,000 students in four countries, drawing praise from celebrities such as Drake, Colm Feore and Sir Kenneth Branagh for his electrifying Shakespeare literacy workshops
Shakespeare to young people the way lightning teaches path-finding to those lost in the dark. He illuminates what’s right before their eyes by lighting up the whole world, in bright flashes.
Marvin, executive director of Shakespearience, doesn’t teach just Shakespeare. He teaches self-mastery, comprehension, literacy, discipline, inner appreciation. He teaches movement through space, passion, psychology, problem-solving, subtlety and gesture, in direct and gettable ways.
He is, if I might turn up the lightning analogy, electrifying. In a colourful, not a showy, way. He moves in front of a class as though he’s sword-fighting; adroit, thrusting, parrying, and he talks as though he’s blowing painted flames out of his mouth, flickering faintly here, roaring there, red-hot, green-hot, apricot and blue, answering the nuances of Shakespeare’s language itself.
THIS IS . . . SHAKESPEARIENCE.
Marvin, who grew up on Thorndale Crescent, near McMaster University, started it in 1998 and since then Shakespearience has reached 70,000 students, staged more than 1,500 sessions and workshop in four countries.
The rapper Drake is a fan. When he was in the midst of his acting career, during which he played Jimmy on “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” Drake enrolled in the Shakespearience summer program. He loved it.
Shakespearience has also attracted the input and collaboration over the years of people like famous Canadian actor Colm Feore, actors Paul Gross, Martha Henry, Gordon Pinsent and even Sir Kenneth Branagh.
Marvin runs Shakespearience workshops in England every summer. He’s there now. “Like bringing coals to Newcastle (teaching Brits about Shakespeare),” says Marvin. “We’ve put on workshops in Leeds, York, Manchester, London.”
The program impressed Branagh so much he endorsed it.
“We’ve been to more than 135 schools in two dozen boards,” says Marvin.
He has a way of getting things across. He always did. When Marvin was eight years old and sick with the croup, he talked the doctor out of giving him a needle.
“He (the doctor) made me promise to be a lawyer when I grew up.”
Here’s an example of what he does. Marvin tells a class that when a character in Shakespeare is snakelike, the very language hisses — there are sibilant esses in the script. Shakespeare’s audience knew that. That’s not so much a lesson about Shakespeare as about how things jibe, how levels of meaning mesh, about a certain kind of literacy, how to read through and around a text, how to read the world. The deeper we understand, the better we see beyond the shadows.
When Marvin makes this point, about hissing language, he uses examples from the plays, and his face and mouth become serpentine, pushing air through the edges of the teeth.
Though he’s not particularly loud, Marvin has a rich variety and texture of voice; though he’s not unusually athletic, he’s nimble and lyrical in his motion. His face has a sharp and remarkable liveliness.
Near the end of the last school year I sat in when Marvin came to Sir John A. Macdonald Secondary in Hamilton and what I saw astonished me. He had Burlington actor Nigel Hamer with him. Marvin usually has his actor friends pitch in during scenes in the workshops.
(In recent years, the program has stepped up in Hamilton. The Hamilton Community Foundation came through with a crucial grant to help finance workshops in Hamilton high schools in 2015-2016.
More might be in the works soon. After all, Marvin practically lives here (despite actually living in Toronto). His fiancée is in Hamilton, as are many of his friends and relatives.
How well does Marvin hold a room? Let me fix it in your mind. Inner-city school, inner-city kids, right after lunch, when the post-prandial drowsies kick in.
You know how teenagers sit, perfect portraits of disinterest? Limp as clocks in a Dali painting? Well, here their backs were ramrod straight, heads thrust forward.
Most astounding, their Androids and iPhones languished unheeded. I imagined them glowering in the students’ pockets, spurned idols. How dare these young people not answer my vibration!
There were other vibrations. Shakespeare’s language — but more than that; the feeling and action behind it that Marvin and Nigel communicated so vividly.
“If you’re navigating through a text and don’t know what’s going on (in Shakespeare), do me a favour,” Marvin told the students. “Don’t worry about it. Shakespeare was not writing to be read,” but to be experienced on the stage. This is the presiding truth of the Shakespearience approach — feel the action; don’t worry about text.
The sounds of Shakespeare’s words, the way they’re said by actors who know how to deliver them, the body language and stage cues that the Elizabethan audience understood — these, not the written word, drove home meaning, with utter clarity.
Marvin ran the students through a pivotal scene in Hamlet. The language, while difficult on the surface, becomes transparent as the “attitude” it expresses — young Hamlet’s seething contempt for his mother, uncle and their courtiers — is unfolded.
He pulled students down to play it out. “Here, Hamlet’s trying to get Claudius to hit him,” says Marvin. He’s provoking him.
The motivations, the choices, the subtext got drawn out; the students were able to intuit so much with just this little guidance. They had fun, the spitting belligerence of it, the barely stifled physicality; you could see it in their faces and body language, because it really is a great intergenerational piss fight, full of resentments and cross-resentments, universally relevant, fresh now as then.
All through this and all during his discussions of the general Shakespearean backdrop, Marvin would stride from one end of the class to the other, up and down the apron, as though carving up the space, turning it into scenes in a theatre, plucking passages from the air, recited in perfect character.
“She doth teach the torches to burn bright!” he quotes Romeo as saying, first glimpse of Juliet. “Isn’t that better than saying, ‘She’s hot?”
One minute Marvin was Hamlet, next Polonius, or Robin Goodfellow, Ophelia, Lear, Falstaff. They’re all there in his head, all their words and psychologies.
By the end, the room erupted in ovation, including me.
Now this is learning. How to know oneself and one’s world, deeply, passionately.
One Sunday morning in April, it being the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, CBC radio host Michael Enright had on Colm Feore, veteran of so many Shakespeare productions, not to mention movie and TV roles, lately including House of Cards.
The topic: Is Shakespeare Still Relevant? Colm went out of his way to single out Marvin’s Shakespearience, as a force for continued relevance. It’s the kind of loyalty and admiration he inspires. What happened in that classroom is why.
GROW UP TO BE A LAWYER?
“My Jewish parents would’ve liked that,” Marvin quips with wistful amusement, resuming his needle-at-the-doctor story.
Marvin, I have little doubt, could’ve been anything. For one thing, his memory is phenomenal. But on the stages of Dalewood and Westdale schools, acting bit him.
He applied to law school but at the same time he got a nod from the prestigious National Theatre School of Canada. Out of the 1,100 who auditioned, only eight got in.
He studied under people like Douglas Rain (the voice of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey).
After graduating, his first role was in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Manitoba Theatre Centre. There was more stage work, but in 1982 he had a chance to go to Los Angeles and did. He befriended Paul Haggis, the famous Canadian Oscar-winning screenwriter who at the time was writing for TV (“The Love Boat” was among his credits). Marvin ended up landing a role on “Knight Rider,” with David Hasselhoff, featuring that car.
He did one episode, but then was offered the lead part in a Theatre Passe Muraille play in Toronto. It was a dilemma but he chose Toronto. When he went back to L.A. after that play, work had dried up. He returned to Toronto but roles were scarce there, too.
Then his sister had a fateful conversation with him. Be a teacher, she counselled.
“It was the best thing I ever did.” He graduated from University of Toronto’s Faculty of Education and the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE).
One term, while teaching Macbeth to Grade 12s, he had a chance to bring R.H. Thomson (the popular Canadian actor) in to address the class. “We thought he’d just come up and we’d noodle around.”
It was such a success, Marvin had an idea. In 1998 he pitched On Board with the Bard and, to his delight, the Toronto school board approved a 20-school pilot project.
Soon it was 40 schools. It kept growing. In 2003 Marvin expanded the concept to include an after-hours program and a summer one, for students delving in more seriously. He made it independent and called it Shakespearience. Shakespearience has even been taken into prison settings.
Is Shakespeare still relevant? Ask the students at Sir John A. As relevant as life itself, as the world and all that’s in it, which is what Shakespeare — and Shakespearience — captures. The whole enchilada, in all its messy, wonderful drama. Experience itself. No fitter subject for young mind, or old.
“If you’re navigating a text and don’t know what’s going on, don’t worry. Shakespeare was not writing to be read.” MARVIN KARON