VIRTUAL ARTS
Shakespeare is being adapted for the Zoom age.
William Shakespeare famously wrote “King Lear” as the bubonic plague spread through Europe, a feat that is celebrated today by a lot of memes telling us to start creative hobbies during the pandemic. Two separate Houston groups are taking that advice and trying to keep Shakespeare alive, despite theaters being closed.
But there is a lot of overlap between Zoom Shakespeare and Drunk Shakespeare. For one, Drunk Shakespeare also takes place over Zoom and Zoom Shakespeare is not always performed sober. The two camps swap members regularly.
Zoom Shakespeare was founded in March by Rebecca Bernstein, who has been acting and directing in Houston since she was a child. She was set to open “The Glass Menagerie” at Pasadena Little Theatre when the coronavirus pandemic hit. Not wanting to sit completely idle, she organized 19 local actors to read through “Much Ado About Nothing” and put it on YouTube.
“It was a healing process from all of this stuff hitting out of nowhere,” says Bernstein. “From there it grew.”
Her cast has grown to include actors from all over the world So far, they have performed half of the Bard’s plays, including some obscure ones like “Pericles.” The online format has also allowed them to play with settings and ideas more freely than they would have on a stage requiring costumes and sets.
Her actors are given a lot of leeway in creating their own costumes, which is helped by the changes in time period from Elizabethan England to, for example, the American 1980s. Kissing and fight scenes are hard, though. Still, the actors work with what they have.
“You’d be surprised how many people just happen to have swords in their homes,” she says.
Because they have far more women participating than men, Zoom Shakespeare has been producing several all-female renditions of the classics. These include a version of “Julius Caesar” set in 2050.
That production featured Nicole Nesson, the founder of Drunk Shakespeare, as Caius Ligarius (one of the stabby characters). Like Bernstein, she has been acting in Houston since childhood and has maintained regular appearances in the local industry since 2011.
Drunk Shakespeare is a somewhat looser production. In their first performance (“Romeo and Juliet” ), the production ran more than four hours, thanks to a combination of technical difficulties and over-generous servings of alcohol. Now they have refined the system down to one play a week, and the readings are jolly but brisk.
“We’re not looking to create great works of art,” Nesson says. “We’re all still trying to bring new things to old material. I feel that this is some dark humor because of the outbreak..”
She too has been using these opportunities to cast women and female-presenting actors. Her personal favorite so far was “Othello.” They have also used Zoom to have some characters portrayed as American Sign Language users by actor Heba Toulan, with supplemental voice work to help the audience understand.
“When the opportunity presents itself, I can’t help but showcase it,” says Nesson. “These chances to show off women and female-identified actors come so rarely. I want to seize that. Just the coming together of so many talented people makes me heartsick for how much fun it would be if we were on stage together. We don’t know when that will be. It makes you long for home, but it’s heartening to find even a tenuous connection to keep the theater together.”
DRUNK SHAKESPEARE’S “TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA”