Pop-up Shakespeare

We needed production and performance opportunities for our students during the COVID pandemic. I decided to pursue an idea that first occurred to me in 2018 when I saw a small deck attached to a commercial building in Water Valley, MS. What if a troupe of college actors appeared out of nowhere, like the travelling players of Shakespeare’s day, and put on a public performance for all and sundry. This gave birth to Pop-up Shakespeare, which we performed in Spring, 2021 at four venues in and around Oxford, MS and the university campus. I began with over a dozen scenes and then winnowed them down to six based on the table reads with the actors I cast. The troupe worked together to create transitions among the scenes and provided some of their own costumes and props.

We included some staging and costuming that would address the contemporary issue of the pandemic. For example, in Twelfth Night, act one, scene five, Olivia puts on her veil, which we costumed as a face shield. We had company members dress as nurses and take temperatures of the actors. Other contemporary references included Olivia, at the end of the scene when she offers to tip Viola/Cesario, take out her cell phone and say, “I thank you for your pains. What is your Venmo?” That line scans just as well as “I thank you for your pains. Spend this for me.” It got a great laugh every time. 

Even though the governor had rescinded the statewide mask mandate, the actors wished to remain cautious. This created a challenge for volume and articulation that they valiantly attempted. We opened and closed the show with the two principal scenes featuring the rude mechanicals of Midsummer, followed by R&J 2.2, M4M 3.1 (Isabella and Claudio), Much Ado 4.1 (Beatrice and Benedick), and the scene from Twelfth Night. It all ran about an hour. At the top, the actors filed on stage and began to prepare, as themselves. Seamlessly, one of them stepped forward and began to speak the lines of Peter Quince and we were off. I love this device of showing the audience how the actors can shift between performance and reality.