Shakespeare & Company isn’t only about Shakespeare. Over 30 years they have salted their repertoire with non-classical fare, with an increasing emphasis on modern works. This summer, two of the troupe’s mainstage offerings are Shakespeares and two are contemporary plays. Ironically, for a company whose trademark is Shakespeare with an unapologetic American accent, the two modern plays are English.
And they couldn’t be more un-alike. Rough Crossing, by Tom Stoppard, is a slapstick farce, a parody of 1930s plays about plays, a kind of cross between Room Service and Anything Goes. Blue/Orange, by Joe Penhall, is an engrossing three-character piece in which two psychiatrists debate the condition of a delusional schizophrenic patient.
Three of the company’s actors—Jason Asprey, Malcolm Ingram and LeRoy McClain—appear in both plays, sometimes on the same day. I caught up with Ingram and McClain between shows on a recent double-duty day.
In Blue/Orange, McClain plays the object of psychiatric evaluation, a young man who claims to be the son of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin and declares that the orange he’s holding is blue. In Rough Crossing, he’s the novice steward on an ocean liner, finding his sea legs and constantly serving glasses of cognac to the wrong person—himself as often as not.
“Getting to step into two very different characters exercises different muscles,” he says. “It’s a great experience, but it’s a workout.”
McClain finds it a stretch to locate any similarities in his two roles. “An inept drunk steward and a paranoid schizophrenic? Well, both of them are at the margins of society, and the fact that they’re English kind of concludes the similarities between them.”
By contrast, Malcolm Ingram’s two roles have a lot in common. He’s an ambitious psychiatrist in Blue/Orange and a vain leading man in Rough Crossing, both of them arrogant, self-possessed and upper-class. But while the actor he plays in Rough Crossing is an object of ridicule—“because he’s so full of himself and not very smart”—Ingram’s character in Blue/Orange is very intelligent, a prominent doctor and a successful power broker in the health-care system. “On reflection,” he concedes, “the audience might think he’s a bit of a prick too.”
Such different material requires differing approaches to rehearsal and performance. As McClain explains, “So much about farce is about mechanics and timing, A-B-C-D-punchline. Whereas Blue/Orange is very realistic, relationship oriented, three people on an almost bare stage, talking the whole time. The approach to that one was much more about breath work and being very open, going on emotion.”
The demands of performance are similarly distinct. Once all the interlocking gears of a farce are in place, the actors’ job is to keep the mechanism running smoothly night after night. But with a play like Blue/Orange, each performance is an opportunity to explore it more deeply. “In three weeks of rehearsal you’ve just about got time to learn the lines,” Ingram says. “Then as you play it you’re discovering new things every time.”
When they have to do both shows on the same day, which order do the actors prefer? Turns out both men like doing the easier one second—but it’s a different one for each of them.
For Ingram, “Rough Crossing is less onerous than Blue/Orange. I have less to do, and fewer lines to remember.” McClain’s bigger challenge is Rough Crossing. “There’s so much business, he’s always coming and going, exit, entrance, gotta have the cognac. Whereas in Blue/Orange, I have only one prop.”
McClain, Ingram and Asprey will perform Rough Crossing and Blue/Orange back to back on Aug. 25 and 26 and Sept. 1 and 2, with one-show days in-between.
