SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT.

SEEING KING JOHN VERSUS READING IT. Reading all the Shakespeare plays is different from seeing them. There is good reason to being a completist. The Guerrilla Theatre cast found all kinds of things that I had not seen when I read the play. For one thing, I had commented to Mary Jane that I couldn’t imagine how Constance could be played because she enters at high intensity and her lines keep ratcheting up from there. The actress playing Constance, Ginger Eckert, gave meaning to each hysterical line. Tom Schwans captured the Bastard’s duality—participating in the action and standing aside to provide the perspective of a later time (there is an element of time travel because the Bastard seems to speak to and for an Elizabethan audience living four centuries after the action). Mary Jane had wondered how they could find a young boy to play the part of young Arthur (of course,in Shakespeare’s time, not only did boy actors play all the women, but there were important companies where boys played all the parts.) The problem was solved by a fine performance by a young woman, Patricia Lynn. Finally, I had not succeeded in imagining a King John who spoke forcefully and acted weakly as Jordan Kaplan did.