What's Up in Ave Maria: Another labor of love from Shakespeare in Performance

Reading “Love’s Labour's Lost,” the Shakespeare play put on this year at Ave Maria University (AMU), was for me a not-so-lovable labor, even though I usually enjoy reading Shakespeare.

With so much unremitting wordplay and so many inaccessible jokes, it seemed such a tangle that I slammed my book shut halfway through. And then I began worrying that for the first time, I might not like a play put on by Shakespeare in Performance.

As it turns out, I should not have feared, because under the direction of Travis Curtright, who teaches the Shakespeare in Performance troupe members and directs their productions, the play was not only intelligible but hilarious, and once again my admiration for these highly skilled young actors went soaring. And judging from the audience’s laughter and involvement, my opinion was certainly shared.

The prospect of four young lords devising a program of study that includes a vow to shun all contact with women for three years is funny in itself, and every character was comic. One of the most hilarious roles belonged to Holofernia, a self-satisfied pedant played by Katie Driscoll whose delight in displaying her trove of knowledge brought to mind the teacher Dolores Umbridge from the Harry Potter movies. Another was Don Adriano de Armado, played by Robby Gotschall, with his overwrought passion and over-the-top rhetorical flourishes.

The next day I spoke to actor Rachel Wisely, who seeking both a change from her former roles as a leading lady and a challenge to her acting, played Moth, a boy in service to Don Armado. I like how she described exchanging her naturally smooth gait for that of a boy as “walking more stompy and less glidey.” All I can say is that any young woman who cuts off her waist-length tresses for a role as Wisely did has given ample proof of dedication to her art.

There are always characters in the plays put on by Shakespeare in Performance who don’t show up in the program, and they would be the people in the seats who at points interact with the players.

“The audience isn’t extraneous to our plays,” said Curtright, who added that in these “theaters of encounter” the audience has something to teach the cast members “if they listen.”

Students in the Shakespeare in Performance program seem disinclined to leave it all behind when they graduate. Some go on to study acting and theater at the graduate level as Louisa Zachmann will do at Mary Baldwin College in Virginia next year and as Rachel Wisely will at Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York.

Others get married – to each other. Eight couples have resulted at least in part from their involvement with the troupe. Perhaps they’ll follow Curtright’s lead and name all their children after Shakespearean characters, though I counsel them to think twice about “Dogberry.”

In terms of AMU’s admissions, Curtright noted that his program is translating into a competitive advantage, and not only against schools listed in the Newman Guide to Choosing a Catholic College.

“Contenders like Hillsdale are sometimes passed by," he said. "We’ve had 16 or 17 high school seniors come to see the play and they’ve been speaking with me.”

Of his students, Curtright said, “They did something spectacular, putting on a 1594 play with contemporary music, a play with such sophisticated language, so many rhymed lines in verse, so much dance and with so many intricacies they had to master. I’m very proud of them and I think it was a very special performance of 'Love’s Labour's Lost.'”

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More news and other information about Ave Maria can be found in The Ave Herald, which Patricia publishes along with her husband, David Shnaider.