Friday, October 15, 1999

SMT rings in season with ‘As You Like It’

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

DAYTONA BEACH — Orlando and Charles squared off, pacing warily. Then Charles (the Wrestler) goaded Orlando, sneering and wiggling his fingers in a "come and get me" taunt.

The boy charged the Wrestler, and their bodies slammed together. Again and again they hit, slapped, lunged, groaned, grappled and broke apart. Charles drove his knee into Orlando's back, lifted him off the ground and crushed his lungs. Orlando managed to break free, and gradually used his youthful energy to gain the upper hand.

The struggle grew more heated, the savage groans from the fighters more ferocious and gut wrenching. Finally Charles fell, and didn't get up. Victorious, like a kid nudging a sleeping pet with his toe to see if it would waken, Orlando kicked the Wrestler onto his back.

"OK Charles! But, Orlando, don't take so long before that final tackle," said John Cashman from the back of the Theater Center. He stood, then walked toward the stage where Orlando (Derrick Peterson) and Charles (the Wrestler, played by Robert Morgan) stood.

The two characters in the production of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" that opens Seaside Music Theater's Winter Season on Oct. 22 nodded. They mimed the suggestions made by Cashman, the Orlando director who had choreographed the fight.

Then they faced each other again and, for the next five or six minutes, seemed to be doing their best to kill each other. There were no swords or daggers here, unlike the blade-in-mouth scene in the Orlando-UCF Shakespeare Festival production of "Macbeth" that Cashman just directed.

Better: There was deadly hand- to-hand combat, complete with slaps that rang through the theater and punches that had the fighters reeling, each in his turn.

"No, pull -- pull!" Cashman interrupted, and strode on stage.

To the side at the rehearsal that afternnon sat Lester Malizia, director of the play, and his crew. They watched calmly from seats pulled up to a long table littered with scripts, as Cashman demonstrated.

Charles threw an arm around Orlando's neck, and walked him across the stage, slugging him in the kidneys as he staggered, trying to free himself.

The sequence played itself out again, with each agonizing blow and jab and groan and slap echoing in the empty theater as Cashman watched. The segment, which, by opening night, will take less than two minutes from start to finish, would have been balletic if it weren't so ferocious, so seemingly brutal and spontaneous.

The actors stopped and started, like musicians practicing a complicated piece from one bar to the next, and their fight director fine-tuned each miniscule turn, bow, slap and tumble. Cashman's job was only partly to create a convincing struggle, to add to the drama of Act I, Scene II, however.

It was also to builds a wide margin of safety into their performance.

"It's so important that the actors don't get hurt," said Malizia. "This particular scene has to be staged safely and dramatically -- it's pivotal, so pivotal to the plot.

"The fight between Orlando and Charles comes early in the play, and it's what begins to liberate everybody's passions -- there was a moment of violence between Oliver (Matt Semrick) and Orlando, but this is different," she said.

Cashman stepped away from the fighters and picked up the theme.

"There is some other incidental violence, but this is the main fight." said the choreographer, who is a Disney animator and actor when he isn't choreographing mayhem.

"The key to stage combat is that we want the audience to believe that the characters are in danger. The minute they think the ACTORS are in danger, we lose them. This is more like dancing than stunt work -- actors are not stuntmen," he said. "We train actors so they can do eight shows a week, then comeback and do eight more the next week and not have a bruise.

"What we teach has been called different names, but whether it's violent dance, combat mime or martial acting, it is its own thing."

Cashman's preparation for "As You Like It" followed a precise personal script" he reread the play because "everything comes from the story." He coordinated his and Malizia's interpretations, and learned that the director wanted a play "about love, a little fantastical and also tense," said Cashman.

"So that's what I've choreographed. I plan each move, but my moves are always somewhat fluid until I see them on the actors -- I need to see it in motion, to see their level of ability," he added. "You know, if they look good, you look good. With the fight, as with the play, you tell a story, with a beginning, a middle and an end.

"I want a fight filled with dramatic effects, but above all it has to be safe," said Cashman, turning back to his fighters. They had taken a break on stage, and now were rested enough to clown around for a moment.

"OK," he said to them. "let's do it one more time, only better."