[MR] Need some SCAdians for small parts in Shakespeare!

[Lara Coutinho]

Friends, Atlantians, Countrymen! Lend me your ears! For those SCAdians
living near the magnificent Canton of Elvegast in Raleigh, NC, please pay
heed!

The Canton of Elvegast is partnering with a local theater troupe, Scrap
Paper Shakespeare, to produce a period-authentic (as best we can) 90-minute
version of Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew at our annual spring event,
Festival of Elvegast!  https://the-festival-of-elvegast.windmastershill.org/

And we need some SCAdian actors for small parts!!

We need at least THREE SCAdians to portray some small parts in the frame
story of Sly and his friends.  Memorizing lines is optional. One rehearsal
is requested.
Please read the description from the Director, Emma Szuba Winek, below, and
email me directly (orangesophie AT gmail DOT gom) if you are interested in
playing one of these parts.

Come join in the partnership!!
Sincerely,
Dame Sophia the Orange, OL

Director's Note:
The Taming of the Shrew is the only play in Shakespeare’s canon with a true
framing device.
The play that we know as Shrew is presented as part of an elaborate trick
played on Sly, a
drunkard who is taken in by a Lord and tricked into believing he is
nobility.
For our production at Elvegast, I want to lean into this metatheatricality
– both because it
creates context for Shrew as a play, and because it provides us with even
more opportunities to
share Early Modern staging practices as we pretend to be a troupe of
players on the road.
This text comes from both the Folio of Taming of the Shrew, and from the
text of The Taming of
a Shrew, an earlier text that is clearly closely related to Shakespeare’s
the Shrew. Some
scholars believe that it was an early draft, some say it was a bad quarto,
some that it was
Shakespeare’s source material or that both plays derive from a lost
ur-Shrew. Theories abound.
For our intents and purposes, both texts help us build out a framing
narrative that situates the
play in context and hopefully will be quite fun for Elvegast attendees.
I hope that we can play the Sly-plot as “reality” within the Elvegast
universe. I will play Player 1
and bring in my acting troupe to present Shrew. Because this is a frame
narrative, I am very
open to improvisation / changing lines to better fit the niche of Elvegast.
However, the text that
you’ll find below lays out clearly what beats need to be hit for the
framing device to work.
Essentially, Sly is found drunk, the prank is played, Sly sleeps through
most of the show, and in
the end is returned to the streets – where he’s taken away a message that’s
not quite what we
would hope from the play!
The critical roles to fill are Sly, the Hostess and the Lord. Additional
Servants can be conflated
or inflated depending on how many folks want to be a part of the show!
I would like to have a brief rehearsal / workshop on Sunday, April 7th, and
add the frame show at
our dress rehearsal on Thursday, April 11th

. We will have an additional performance on the
evening of April 14th – we may or may not have the frame show at this
performance, depending
on interest and availability!
- Emma Szuba, Artistic Director of Scrap Paper Shakespeare