By Geoffrey Kent
I hated my first encounter with Shakespeare: An awkward teenager in a ninth grade English class, plodding through Romeo & Juliet, reading it aloud incomprehensibly. It might as well have been in Latin. It was humorless, dead, and dusty.
What I really wanted was for school to end so I could rush home with my friends to play Dungeons & Dragons. D&D was my escape from the doldrums of public education into castles infested with monsters.
I often led the groups as a Dungeon Master, which meant pre-planning our encounters, designing maps as well as characters for them to ally with or slay as well as collaborating on the story of the campaign with the players. I loved bouncing from a charismatic king to a diabolical dragon to a cowering kobold. And the combat! I may not have known at my age how to throw or catch… well anything. But in D&D I could throw knives with pinpoint accuracy, loose arrow after arrow at a charging Bugbear and then flourish a swept hilt rapier for the coup-de-gras. Little did I realize my early teenage years inside the game would build the skills I needed for my career in professional theatre.
Step one I had to fall for Shakespeare. Lucky for me, my AP English teacher and mentor, Bill Tosh, offered to take me to catch Romeo & Juliet at the Colorado Shakespeare Festival. I howled at Mercutio’s humor; I held my breath as he leapt upon benches battling Tybalt and I wept as he exited the play proclaiming “A plague o’ both your houses!” I did not know that theatre could do that. To quote Barrymore brandishing a rapier in I Hate Hamlet, “This is why one acts! This is why actors are envied!”
Fight Direction came first. My theatrical education came not from university as I dropped out of undergraduate in my first year. I felt out of place and was not enjoying theatre in a classroom at all. I was working in the kitchen at Boulder’s Dinner Theatre and occasionally backstage, slinging books at the university bookstore and chasing the Bard via small community theatres. And then someone offered me a shot at a rapier and dagger class.
The minute I put a sword in my hand, acting and action made sense. It clicked. It is hard to explain that feeling, especially as a kid that took part in soccer solely for the post-game Capri Suns and freeze-dried apple slices. I felt like an action hero. I would have been hopeless in a real sword fight but in a choreographed one I could be the hero or the villain and die or be victorious eight shows a week.
Fairly quickly this led to teaching my new skill to others and assisting action on productions. I started with middle schools then high schools and within four years I was back at the university I left… now as an adjunct professor teaching stage combat to students that were once my classmates. I rapidly added the National Theatre Conservatory to my teaching schedule, an MFA program where my new “students” were older than me. And that led to work across the street fight directing for the Denver Center of the Performing Arts and to the Colorado Shakespeare Festival to stage action for… Romeo & Juliet. Full circle.
Acting came next. Theaters soon decided on their own that they would just cast me as Tybalt, Laertes, Young Siward and more since I already had the skill they needed for the action. And I was suddenly cutting in line for roles that I might not have landed via audition (or a cursory look at my resume). Having skipped acting training via classroom, I learned it as a trade, like a blacksmith. Watching the leads hone their work, asking questions and I was always in the room. I honestly do not think I thought of myself as an actor until I realized I was playing Benedick at CSF, a character with no discernible skills in swordplay. My first non-action leading role (aside from the pratfalls).
Directing then followed. Fight Directing was all about composing a small story of action (Hamlet vs Laertes for example) inside the larger story of the play… but I kept wandering out of my lane. Chatting with Claudius and Gertrude about poison and how to play it, conversing with Hamlet about his goals in the final scene and inevitably stepping on director toes when something was not my department.
My first directorial effort was an independently produced Wild West Macbeth. Deadwood meets Scotland. Some of it was successful, some was drowning in directorial conceit. But I stacked the cast with action actors, and we had a lot of fun bar room brawling and falling off things and now that I was in the game, more directing followed.
All things being equal, Shakespeare has paid the rent. I have been lucky enough to direct more than a few, act in most of them and I have now professionally fight directed all of them but three: King John, Pericles, and Coriolanus. But it is Coriolanus I have chased for decades now. He does not come along often, like a lunar eclipse, and I could not be more excited to bring both the role and the action to life at Penn Shakes in an Extreme Shakespeare production no less. A story bookended with action about a warrior struggling as a politician at war with his own self. I cannot wait to put it together for you all with this cast.
I am now in my middle-aged artist years; I continue to wear all three hats: Fight Director. Actor. Director. And all of them continue to have roots in the imagination of a ninth grader bent over graph paper rolling dice and fighting monsters. In D&D rolling a twenty-sided die and getting a 20 is guaranteed success, rolling a 1 is an automatic failure. I have rolled my share of both, but I am feeling confident Coriolanus is going to roll plenty of twenties. You know until the end. (Rolls a 1) Because Tragedy. ■