The Second Shepherds' Play
by the Wakefield Master
Produced by Bad Quarto Productions, December 2010.
Cast
Col, the first shepherd ... Amanda Devlin
Gib, the second shepherd ... Dan Trombley
Daw, the third shepherd ... Jessica Malicki
Mak, a thief/The Angel ... Rachel Quagliariello
Gil, his wife/Mary ... Jamie Weaver
Crew
Director .... Tony Tambasco
Asst. Director .... Kimberly Lenz
Musical Director .... Amanda Devlin
About the project
The fun part of any experiment is when you tweak the variables, and for this year's production of The Second Shepherds' Play we tweaked a few of necessity (adding some new cast members to the mix), and a few by choice (doubling Gil and Mary and Mak and the Angel). Another key innovation was that, rather than Martial Rose's translation that I have used in previous productions, I constructed a script using more Middle English where it seemed to make sense. I think the script was more understandable more often than Rose's text.
Once again, we rehearsed the whole of the show in two-days' time, following the traditions that E.K. Chambers desrcibes in The Medieval Stage and that Glynne Wickham describes in The Medieval Theatre. The resulting performance is rougher than we're used to seeing in modern theatrical performance, althogh this fact alon brings it closer to original medieval practices. A less polished performance is per-force more self-consciously theatrical.
In the spirit of the season, the play was performed as a benefit for the Virginia Haiti Collaborative, an organization attempting to fund the construction and operation of a school in Haiti.