Tag Archives: Houston

Houston…we have Shakespeare | AFTLS lands in Texas

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Week seven is the “hot stop” of the tour, down in Houston. For weeks now, we have been imagining ourselves down here, in Hawaiian shirts and shorts and playing frisbee on the beach, margarita in hand… Hmm. Houston, we have a problem. But hey, warm winds and warm rain aren’t so bad – unless you forget where you parked the car in the parking lot, that is. Then you can get pretty wet, as a couple of us found out to our cost.

The University of Houston Clear Lake is made up of about eight and a half thousand students, on a sprawling campus that includes alligators and deer and armadillos. But Jas had watched a TV programme about how to escape from an alligator, so we felt quite safe. “So what do you have to do then, Jas?”. She replied: “Run”. None of them made it to a class, although an armadillo popped by the stage door after the show to say hello. No, I’m not joking.

Elizabeth Klett did a fine job of marshalling the troupe from airport to faculty meeting (where we discuss the classes to come with the teachers), and we had an eclectic mix of classes lined up for us this week: from Digital Photography to Creative Writing, from Public Speaking to Antigone (Sarah has become our Greek expert on this tour), from British Romantic Poets to Educational Psychology.

I must confess, I had had a few sleepless nights working out how best to do a class on “Manfred” by Byron, but actually it was a real pleasure. It’s an epic poem (also called a closet drama) and concerns a man seeking forgetfulness or forgiveness after he (it is implied) sleeps with his sister who then kills herself. We read the scene where he meets the spirit of his sister and explored the idea of status and eye contact and what clues there are in the text as to how the speech could be played. I then split the students into twos and had them improvise a situation where one person was seeking forgiveness from the other, looking to see if there was anything useful we could find from this exercise for the poem. One of them began with “I’m sorry I ate your grandmother’s sandwich. How was I to know it would be the last one she ever made for you…” Sometimes I love this job.

TV in Houston offers the NASA channel and a Russian channel; we soon discovered why. By the first evening we had met Vladimir and Yuri in the hot tub (Vladimir even came to see one of the performances). And we even got the chance, on Friday, to go and visit the Johnson Space Center – the highlight being the chance to go into Mission Control pictured below). It’s amazing to think what was accomplished from here. And all, we were told, using five IBM Supercomputers with the same memory as we use now for a couple of photos on our smartphone.

So yes, they can fly people to the moon and back but, as we would mutter more than once on this tour, “Why can’t they build any pavements?” [translation: sidewalks] We still skip our way around various obstacles to get to a local bar at least once a week, or to the local bowling alley – this week, with the help of NASA’s flight path technology (or maybe with the help of the local bar), brought the highest score of our tour. More importantly, Sarah got two strikes, the first being greeted with arms aloft and a bellowed “International Women’s Day!!” Never has lane 16 been that animated. Or lane 17 that bemused…

The shows went well here and built up through the week. On Saturday, remarkably, another Wyoming student turned up to see it (see Nashville blog), along with aforementioned armadillo. Thank you Kat. And, earlier that day, Will led a terrific community workshop that brought a good turnout, none more enthusiastic than six year-old Harper. It’s always difficult, without an outside eye, to know how the show is evolving, but feedback seems to be very positive – even from Harper, and we were treated to a hug and a drawing.

Saturday night, after the show, we promised to be reasonably abstemious, as we were booked in to the Houston Rodeo on the Sunday. But, Texan hospitality being what it is, and daiquiris being what they are, only Sarah and I saddled up on Sunday morning for the trip. Well, neither of us knew quite what to expect, really, but the whole thing was massive in size and massive in spectacle: a huge fun park outside, a vast livestock show, a horse show and a packed 70,000-seater stadium that hosted the Super Bowl a few weeks back. It was all quite ridiculously wonderful.

Once we got into the stadium – standing tickets only – Sarah and I had a ruse prepared. We sat ourselves down in two empty seats and, if approached by the actual seat holders, would explain that we were from the British Seat-Warming Society, hired by the event to warm initial impact – “and the best thing is, there’s no charge for this service. But feel free to tip.” We thought we might make a few bucks along the way, jumping from seat to seat, but actually the ticket holders only turned up just as we were leaving. We tried to be interested in The Chainsmokers’ concert that followed the rodeo but, by then, we were too soaked to the brim of our Texan hats with what had gone before: pig racing, steer wrestling, bull riding, lassoing, calf scrambling, mutton busting…the list goes on, as do the memories.

Thank you Houston. No problem after all.

— Roger May (March 16, 2017)

As You Like It – Actors’ Blog #5

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“Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed”
 — Neil Armstrong

NASA's Johnson Space Center

NASA’s Johnson Space Center

This week we escaped the cold weather and basked in the balmy climate of Houston, Texas. Rice University is a regular stop on the tour (both Dan and Jen have been before), so I’d been primed to expect a beautiful campus and great facilities and certainly wasn’t disappointed. The Wellness Center would be the envy of most top health clubs and boasted machines we’d never even seen before. It could almost tempt me to join a gym back home, but somehow I think my local leisure centre might pale in comparison. It was surreal to turn up at the airport in all our Indiana winter gear to be met by Christina in Capri pants and sandals. Our hotel even had an outdoor pool. I was too much of a wuss to try it as it was un-heated, but Rob was hardy enough to give it a go.

We had a great week of classes and the students were bright and game enough to try whatever we threw at them. A highlight for us all was Friday’s lunch and afternoon class with Dennis Hutson who kept us entertained for hours. In fact, I had the pleasure twice as I also attended his Wednesday class…where I was slightly taken aback to discover (after a brief discussion about accents and dialect in performance) not one, but two fellow Brits among the students – one was even a fellow Essex girl!

On Thursday, we had tea at Baker Master House with some other fellow Brits, Rose and Ivo and their gorgeous dogs Bronte and Baker (though Bronte’s cute demeanor masks a true huntswoman’s heart, squirrels beware!) There is a large British ex-pat community in Houston, served by ‘British Isles’ a shop in Rice Village selling British goodies (crunchie bars, tea and Bridgewater china) and run by the Uncle of one of Rob’s good friends from home…who is also friends with Rose and Ivo…the world is small really, but we still crave our home comforts.

I was thinking a lot about our relationship to places and objects on Friday morning when I taught a workshop on A Streetcar Named Desire as part of a module exploring the writing of New Orleans. Rob had been in and done some scene study with the students earlier in the week, so I decided to focus the workshop on the senses and the actors’/characters’ response to objects and place. It was a great and thought-provoking session where we journeyed not only to New Orleans but also France, Vermont, El Salvador, Indiana, and Wyoming.

Then, at the end of the week, we journeyed to the moon. Well, okay, not literally, but via a trip to NASA where Christina had kindly put us in touch with fellow actor H.R., who performs in regular shows at the Center (letting us see what life is like on-board the International Space Station – who knew they recycled urine into drinking water!). H.R., in turn, linked us in with Tour Guide Kevin, who gave us a completely amazing private tour of the Center…which included the chance to sit in Mission Control for the Apollo landings! To sit somewhere so steeped in history and stories was truly awe inspiring; there was the red phone to the pentagon, an ‘abort request’ button, and, perhaps most poignantly, a mirror used onboard Apollo 13 and donated to the Control Center by the astronauts onboard, in recognition of the work done to save their lives.

AFTLS actors in Houston's Johnson Space Center

Clockwise from top left: Jennifer Higham, Joannah Tincey, Dan Winter, and Patrick Miller take over NASA.

We rounded the week off sitting outside (in February!), eating Tex Mex, and drinking a Margarita or two before team As You Like It got ready to head to College Station and Texas A&M.

Over and out.

The stars at night – are big and bright –

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HAMLET hits Texas

Being from London, (where the temperature varies but a very few miserable degrees in late January) I am unable to help myself referring avidly and endlessly to the weather conditions in this mighty country, the latest excitement being the warm balmy air that greeted us in Houston. More British murmurs of delighted approval and a joyous scrunching up of gloves and kicking off of snow boots at the airport. Wow – at 73 degrees it’s HOT! An extremely respectable height-of-summer’s day for us – Roll on Texas.

And our second insight into a stretch of American countryside along the journey to College Station. Our first was the drive from South Bend to Chicago’s airport, but there was thick fog, though I spotted a deer in a field as the snow cover subsided. We’re still very excited when we catch sight of an old wooden house and porch. We have no such thing in England where it’s mostly bricks and being still relatively new to the US these houses strike us with the utmost charm whenever we spy them through the great strips of malls and billboards.

Texas on a sunny day, the rolling stretches of grassland were a revelation. I think I’d anticipated oil fields back to back.

It has taken us a little time to surrender our natural British bent to walk down the street by way of exploring a place. Our eyes comb the freeways for what we call ‘pavements’ but you call sidewalks. There just ain’t none, this neck of the woods and we’re beginning to appreciate that what you do is you get in your large car and you  float along the straight roads and float off them again when you reach your particular destination. What you cannot do is stop and ‘nip’ out to investigate on a whim.

We’ve hit the classrooms. The students are all very friendly and willing and some very capable indeed. A young lad called Caesar comes immediately to mind. A Science student, he shyly took the floor as Polonius to interrogate Ophelia and turns out, unassuming and polite though he was, he simply couldn’t hide the fact that he had the voice of a Roman emperor, resounded like a great bell, really terrific.

We’ve served up a few sessions on ‘ To Be Or Not to Be’, exploring the rhythm of the verse and pushing through the whole of the speech – hopefully – giving the students some kind of insight into the twists and turns of Hamlet’s thought processes. Get up on your feet and change direction at each new thought – the mind has mountains!  A big challenge was what on earth to do with 135 students all stuck on chairs behind rows of desks in a large lecture hall. Mercifully, the hall had two levels and we were able to convince ourselves – loosely and via an urgent plea to 135 imaginations – that this could constitute the battlements of Elsinore’s precipitous castle. We had one brave volunteer, right up the back at the top, cry out the first line of the play, ” Who’s there?” and, some way off and below, a brave colleague cry back, ” Nay, answer me. Stand and unfold yourself!”. Throw in a stormy soundscape created by several creaking desks, hums, hollers, bird screeches and whatnot and we had the makings of a far grander production than our own 5-man version!

A class tomorrow with some students who’ve studied the Pre-Raphaelite paintings of Ophelia’s ‘romantic’ death. I shall certainly mention that the poor model who sat for the most famous of all by Millais perished in real life from so many hours in a cold bath. The image of the girl floating rather beautifully downstream with her fingers  clutching soaked flowers has its one and entire Hamlet reference in Gertrude’s speech, “There is a willow grows aslant a brook”. Only 17 and a half lines of verse have given way to a cult of romantic images.  Did Gertrude paint a beautiful lie? Surely if she’d really caught Ophelia at it and seen the branch crack she’d have waded in pronto to give the poor girl a hand?

We made the welcome discovery of downtown Bryan today. A delicious lunch, too and an hour’s interlude in which we forgot about Hamlet and came across the heart of the old town with its very pretty high street lined with old buildings including the Carnegie Library, red brick and white pillars and another red-brick, gracious warehouse building labelled ‘Corn Exchange’. Lunch was homemade and inside the old market hall; we even heard the melancholy moan of a train passing through as it would have done when this place was simply a pit stop between Houston and Dallas.

We open tomorrow. Lord knows what Texas’s A&M students will make of Hamlet. It’s been a long journey to our first audience and probably for many of them an extremely unlikely way of spending a Friday evening. We shall all have to be set our chins to the wind and hope for the best! – Shuna Snow

Editor: Tickets for this week’s performances at Texas A & M may be purchased here.