The Bard goes digital
As first published on The Columbia Journalist (columbiajournalist.org) on May 2, 2014
Director Jessica Bauman (right) jokes with Drew Ledbetter during a break while shooting Romeo and Juliet. (Photo by Asha Mahadevan)
Drew Ledbetter is holding a vial of poison in his right hand. With four video cameras ready to film as he drinks it, six people in the room watch silently.And then one person stops him.“Can we get a colored cap or some colored liquid in that bottle?” asks Jessica Bauman. She’s realized that the vial’s white cap does not provide enough contrast against his shirt and the white backdrop for the cameras to pick it up.Bauman is directing Ledbetter in a filmed version of William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Ledbetter plays Romeo, and they are shooting Act 5, Scene 3 when they encounter the problem. After a quick discussion with the stage manager, Bauman decides to reschedule Romeo’s death.
“We are not going to kill you just yet,” Bauman laughingly tells Ledbetter as the crew sets up the next scene.
Bauman is directing the tragedy for WordPlay, an iBook project that fuses video with text to make Shakespeare more accessible to students. In WordPlay productions, which are viewed on iPads, the play’s text runs up the left half of the screen while a video of actors performing the scene runs simultaneously on the right half of the screen.
Merging the text and video into a digital format was a new challenge for Bauman. A theater director for more than 20 years, she hadn’t worked with video before her first WordPlay production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2012.
“It was clear that we were inventing something,” she says. “The vocabulary is not a television or a film one. It is a hybrid.”
That’s precisely what Alexander Parker, the publisher of The New Book Press, had in mind when he came up with the idea for WordPlay as a way to introduce students to Shakespeare. “I didn’t want their first experience to be like mine, dry and hard,” he says. The iBook format aims to “help students demystify the language without dumbing it down,” he says.
Since the productions are meant to be educational, Parker says he wanted “accuracy of language” without the aesthetic of a highly-produced film. To balance the text and the performance, he chose to collaborate with a theater director rather than a filmmaker. “Theater directors understand the challenges of language,” he says. A friend of a friend put him in touch with Bauman two years ago. “I was lucky I found Jessica,” he said.
Bauman liked the idea of WordPlay and says she viewed it as an “exciting, thrilling way to use technology.” But she was apprehensive about being a part of the project. “I had no camera experience at all,” she says. “And we were working with four cameras!”
Bauman and Parker did a beta test of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream “just to see if the idea held out,” she says. It did, and Bauman knew she wanted to do more.
Bauman has directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and now Romeo and Juliet. The tragic tale is close to Bauman’s heart: she fell in love with Shakespeare after reading Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade. And Bauman has another connection to the Bard: Her parents named her after Jessica, Shylock’s daughter in The Merchant of Venice.
Bauman directed plays throughout high school and college and majored in English literature at Yale College. “I grew up in D.C., and almost every adult I knew was a lawyer,” she says. “I didn’t know any artists. It took me a while to realize you could do this for a living.”
After Bauman graduated, she moved to New York. She won’t disclose the year or her age, but she’s been working in theater since her arrival and has directed plays for the New York Theatre Workshop, Rising Phoenix Rep, New Georges and her own company, New Feet Productions. She works with both classical and contemporary texts but feels that Shakespeare’s plays have a unique richness. “The world he makes in all his plays is so expansive,” she says. “There is so much breadth that shows you the vastness of human experience.”
Translating the depth of the work into a digital medium was the goal, and Bauman has worked closely with the actors to experiment with different approaches.
“We had to figure out what the principles are,” she says, “but we were all doing it together.”
The actors appreciate her collaborative point of view. “She admits that she is still learning, and that shows a lot of wisdom,” says Ledbetter, who is performing in a WordPlay production for the first time.
Bauman’s attitude has affected the way he views his own performance, he says. “I have performed on stage before, but in this medium, the performance is more internalized. So I have to rely on an outside eye more than usual. I am really relying on Jessica, trusting her opinion. She is great.”
Bauman hopes that the WordPlay productions help students engage with Shakespeare’s plays accessible. The key, she says is “to be respectful of the material without being intimidated by it.”
Whether she’s working on stage or screen, Bauman’s directorial duties stay the same. “My job,” she says, “is to figure out what the story is and to tell the story to the audience in the most interesting and engaging way I can.”
“We are not going to kill you just yet,” Bauman laughingly tells Ledbetter as the crew sets up the next scene.
Bauman is directing the tragedy for WordPlay, an iBook project that fuses video with text to make Shakespeare more accessible to students. In WordPlay productions, which are viewed on iPads, the play’s text runs up the left half of the screen while a video of actors performing the scene runs simultaneously on the right half of the screen.
Merging the text and video into a digital format was a new challenge for Bauman. A theater director for more than 20 years, she hadn’t worked with video before her first WordPlay production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 2012.
“It was clear that we were inventing something,” she says. “The vocabulary is not a television or a film one. It is a hybrid.”
That’s precisely what Alexander Parker, the publisher of The New Book Press, had in mind when he came up with the idea for WordPlay as a way to introduce students to Shakespeare. “I didn’t want their first experience to be like mine, dry and hard,” he says. The iBook format aims to “help students demystify the language without dumbing it down,” he says.
Since the productions are meant to be educational, Parker says he wanted “accuracy of language” without the aesthetic of a highly-produced film. To balance the text and the performance, he chose to collaborate with a theater director rather than a filmmaker. “Theater directors understand the challenges of language,” he says. A friend of a friend put him in touch with Bauman two years ago. “I was lucky I found Jessica,” he said.
Bauman liked the idea of WordPlay and says she viewed it as an “exciting, thrilling way to use technology.” But she was apprehensive about being a part of the project. “I had no camera experience at all,” she says. “And we were working with four cameras!”
Bauman and Parker did a beta test of a scene from A Midsummer Night’s Dream “just to see if the idea held out,” she says. It did, and Bauman knew she wanted to do more.
Bauman has directed A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth and now Romeo and Juliet. The tragic tale is close to Bauman’s heart: she fell in love with Shakespeare after reading Romeo and Juliet in eighth grade. And Bauman has another connection to the Bard: Her parents named her after Jessica, Shylock’s daughter in The Merchant of Venice.
Bauman directed plays throughout high school and college and majored in English literature at Yale College. “I grew up in D.C., and almost every adult I knew was a lawyer,” she says. “I didn’t know any artists. It took me a while to realize you could do this for a living.”
After Bauman graduated, she moved to New York. She won’t disclose the year or her age, but she’s been working in theater since her arrival and has directed plays for the New York Theatre Workshop, Rising Phoenix Rep, New Georges and her own company, New Feet Productions. She works with both classical and contemporary texts but feels that Shakespeare’s plays have a unique richness. “The world he makes in all his plays is so expansive,” she says. “There is so much breadth that shows you the vastness of human experience.”
Translating the depth of the work into a digital medium was the goal, and Bauman has worked closely with the actors to experiment with different approaches.
“We had to figure out what the principles are,” she says, “but we were all doing it together.”
The actors appreciate her collaborative point of view. “She admits that she is still learning, and that shows a lot of wisdom,” says Ledbetter, who is performing in a WordPlay production for the first time.
Bauman’s attitude has affected the way he views his own performance, he says. “I have performed on stage before, but in this medium, the performance is more internalized. So I have to rely on an outside eye more than usual. I am really relying on Jessica, trusting her opinion. She is great.”
Bauman hopes that the WordPlay productions help students engage with Shakespeare’s plays accessible. The key, she says is “to be respectful of the material without being intimidated by it.”
Whether she’s working on stage or screen, Bauman’s directorial duties stay the same. “My job,” she says, “is to figure out what the story is and to tell the story to the audience in the most interesting and engaging way I can.”