A High-Octane "Troilus and Cressida" Celebrates Shakespeare’s Legacy
January 15, 2016
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, whose plays—including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth—are staples in high school and college English courses around the coun
This year marks the 400th anniversary of the death of William Shakespeare, whose plays—including Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, King Lear, and Macbeth—are staples in high school and college English courses around the country. During the spring 2016 semester, the University of Maryland is presenting “Shakespeare@UMD 2016,” a series of events—designed to honor the anniversary of the playwright’s death—that will include film screenings, workshops, roundtables, and exhibitions.
As part of this celebration, the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies will stage Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida, a complex love story set against the backdrop of the Trojan War, February 12-20, 2016, at The Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center. The production will be an epic, fast, and fun journey complete with a large cast and amazing battle scenes. With relatable characters, memorable performances, and stellar design choices, the play is a high-octane production that will leave audiences captivated.
In a society where theatre is competing for an audience with the likes of Star Wars, The Real Housewives franchise, and Empire, making a 400-year-old-plus play appealing to today's audience is a challenge that should not be taken lightly. But director Matthew R. Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and performance studies, was more than up to the challenge. As Troilus and Cressida is among his favorites, he was happy to take on one of Shakespeare’s lesser-produced and more demanding plays.
During a recent interview at the School of Theatre, Dance, and Performance Studies, Wilson discussed Troilus and Cressida’s relevance to today’s audience, why people should turn off their TVs and come out to see the production, and why Shakespeare is still the man after all these years.
Director Matthew R. Wilson (Photo by ClintonBPhotography)
Wilson: Troilus and Cressida is one of my favorite plays. It has the most profound philosophy that Shakespeare deals with, and some of the richest poetry. The characters are human, relatable, and relevant, and there is some great comic relief.
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Wilson: The backdrop of the play is about warfare and the decision to go to war. Important questions are raised: When do we commit ourselves to fighting for something? How do we judge if the fight is worth it? How do we deal with the cost of the fight? The characters have these debates, much like people today are still struggling with these same questions.
Then there’s the love story between Troilus and Cressida, from their awkward “first date” to complications with friends, families, and allegiances. Their struggles capture what it’s like to risk telling someone that you have feelings for them or to risk trusting their commitment to you.
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Wilson: This play is an epic, fast, and fun journey through some of Shakespeare’s best writing. There are obviously logistical challenges when dealing with a large cast of 22 actors in 33 roles. There are the expansive design elements, including the number and the complexity of the costumes, and the volume of lighting and sound cues. There’s also all of the fight choreography. This play takes a lot to produce. It taxes the resources for the production company, but it is also a great showcase for our talented designers, cast, and crew.
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Wilson: Well, you don’t get too many opportunities to see this play. It’s not one of Shakespeare’s most-produced plays because it’s a huge undertaking with an enormous cast (22 actors in 33 roles), but our audiences will see a host of amazing performances, stellar design choices, complicated battle scenes, and a real epic journey.
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Wilson: I think the fights will stand out. And the very funny comedic characters. A lot of people will be surprised how human and relatable the story is. I hope it invites people to think about what they value in their lives and what battles are worth fighting.
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Wilson: Cressida (played by Ashley Pugmire) is my favorite character. I think she is one of the most nuanced and engaging female characters Shakespeare ever wrote. She’s placed in a lot of difficult situations, and has complex and profound responses to them. In her soliloquies, she shares the conflicts she has in herself and how to approach the conflicts around her, and I just always find myself smiling and nodding along and thinking, “Yep, that’s the human condition.”
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Wilson: It’s important to me that plays—especially these kinds of epic plays about whole societies—represent the beautiful diversity of people in the real world. Because this play takes place in an ancient battle, almost all of the characters were written as men, but our production will feature strong, awesome women in a lot of those warrior and statesmen roles. It helps to modernize the world of the play, I think.
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Wilson: The design team has been really creative and fun to collaborate with. We worked to create a Trojan world that borrowed elements from antiquity and elements from contemporary sports and popular culture. For example, the costume (by Alexa Duimstra) for our Helen of Troy is a mix between a classical, Grecian queen and a modern, pageant queen. For the warriors, we created hybrid soldier-jocks, mixing elements of classical armor with the style of contemporary sports uniforms.
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Wilson: The lighting (by Connor Dreibelbis) at times will be moody and dramatic. At other times it will be like Vegas on fight night. The sound designer (Patrick Calhoun) is composing original music, combining the sounds of ancient battlefields with the sounds of marching bands, stadium noise, and the current spectacle of fandom. Troilus and Cressida is a play about adrenaline, and the lighting and sound design are a big part of keeping the adrenaline pumping.
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Wilson: Shakespeare is an artist who saw humanity more deeply than most of us usually do. Even as a man more than 400 years ago, he wrote some amazing monologues for this young woman Cressida that still beautifully expose what it is like to be in love and what it is like to be in danger. He had really great insights into human psychology that way.
Also, the criticisms that Shakespeare leveled against his culture are still valid for us today. He had a keen understanding of what made people tick. While culture has changed since he wrote Troilus and Cressida—and has gotten faster and louder and flashier—his play still rings true. After all these years, Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida still speaks to us.
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Matthew R. Wilson, a Ph.D. candidate in theatre and performance studies at TDPS, serves as assistant professor of performance at the University of Mississippi. Founder of Faction of Fools, D.C.’s Helen Hayes Award-winning Commedia dell’Arte company, Wilson recently directed Much Ado about Nothing for Chesapeake Shakespeare Company in Baltimore and previously directed Molière Impromptu for TDPS. He is a certified teacher with the Society of American Fight Directors. He will choreograph the fight scenes in Troilus and Cressida, as he previously did for TDPS productions of Spring Awakening and The Human Capacity. Wilson is a published scholar and playwright, and a proud union actor who appeared opposite Kevin Spacey in House of Cards. Learn more about Wilson at www.MatthewRWilson.com.