The student thespians met via Zoom three times a week for rehearsal and collectively began to study the rich history and culture behind the play. “[Research] helped us better understand our characters and frame our acting,” explains Suan Lee ’20, who served as the play’s dramaturge and took on the character of Bridget, one of the Irish-speaking villagers.
As not everyone had access to the same technology for video recording, the group decided to turn their full production into a podcast. An audio-only format would not only allow people to experience the play differently, but also posed new and welcome challenges for the actors. “It really forced us to make our voices the character,” says Ervin Williams ’20, who plays Hugh, the hedge school’s hard-drinking headmaster.
The stage crew faced their own challenges, including navigating how to produce and edit the material into a podcast format. Caitlin Sibthorpe ’20, the play’s stage manager and assistant director, believes these obstacles only made for a better learning experience. “In theater,” she says, “you’re going to be in a lot of different situations and you have to learn to adapt.”
To accompany the podcast, the cast also recorded a dress rehearsal on video, and both versions were streamed for the Exeter community in late May, with a run time of nearly two hours.
Opening curtain
The production opens with the strains of Celtic guitar and a voice-over by Director of Global Initiatives and English Instructor Eimer Page, who hails from Northern Ireland and has relatives from the region where “Translations” is set. In the video version, as Page narrates the stage directions, the actors materialize in their respective Zoom windows, which appear and disappear as they enter or exit the virtual stage. Dressed in black or dark clothing, they sit against plain backgrounds — white walls, a draped sheet — with barely a picture frame or edge of a window sill peeking out behind them. Their movements and facial expressions are also spare, making their voices the central feature of the viewing, or listening, experience.
From the play’s first scene, the actors tackle its complex central theme of language, as Manus, the son of the hedge schoolmaster (played by Colin Vernet ’21, one of several uppers involved in the production), patiently teaches Sarah (Grace Ferguson ’20), a student with a serious speech impediment, to say her own name. Meanwhile, during their lesson, the older villager Jimmie Jack (Emmanuel Vasquez ’20) intones phrases from Homer in ancient Greek.
The actors playing villagers relied on Page to help hone their Irish accents, while Classics Instructor Sally Morris contributed by coaching the cast on the pronunciations of the play’s Latin and Greek phrases. Having taught Friel’s play often in her English classes, Page developed a new perspective on it when the cast asked her to act as narrator for the virtual production, in which all the stage directions must be read.
She particularly remembers recording one key scene: a rendezvous between one of the British officers, the earnest Lieutenant Yolland (Paul Rogers ’21), and a village girl, Maire (Ella Fishman ’20), that Page calls the “emotional high point of the play.” In that scene, which closes Act 2, soft guitar music plays in the background as the couple exchanges a torrent of romantic declarations. While both of them are speaking English, in the world of Friel’s play, Maire (like all the villagers) is actually understood to be speaking Irish, of which Yolland knows only a few words. As the scene continues, the two characters grow closer and closer — even as they completely fail to understand what the other is saying.
“I was so moved, even as I was attempting to be a neutral narrator,” Page recalls of the scene, marveling at the actors’ ability to “play off one another in their tiny moon screens.”
The cast and crew found some much needed unity and creative expression in the virtual production process. “Given the state of the world right now, it’s been hard to keep creativity a part of my day-to-day life,” Fishman says. “This production allowed me to focus on art, which I don’t really think that I would have done a whole lot of otherwise.”