An End to the Struggle of Commedia Dell'Arte

The past three weeks in Theater class we have been studying Commedia Del Arte, and the various stereotypes that are involved in this theater style. After studying this style, Mrs. Morris assigned us in two groups, with the purpose of each group performing a scenario of Commedia with each type of stock character present. In my group I was assigned with Talah, Rema, JC, Abdul, and Yara. At the beginning of the performance, we decided on a scenario in which I plat Grace's (Talah) father in the form of the Capitano stock character, and I force Grace (the female lover) to marry Richard, short for Dick (JC, who plays Pantalone as hinted by his nickname). Grace refuses to marry Richard, because she is already in love with Alex (Abdul, who plays the Brighella), so she desperately turns to Baba Ghanoush (Yara, who is Dottore) for help. Although at the beginning of the unit our group was making steady progress towards achieving a perfect Commedia scenario, after a week of practicing the people in my group started to lose interest in our act. We had problems every class with at least one person in the group being missing, and when we improvised another person to fill in this gap, there would be not enough characters to play all the roles. For example, Talah was absent for a few classes in a row, so we eliminated Yara as the Brighella and switched her to Talah’s role as the lover. But then Talah returned, and we were forced to switch roles just when we were getting comfortable with the new ones. Also since we had so many absences, it was hard to replace people because each of us were individually studying our own stock characters along with the way they moved/acted/talked and randomly getting placed into another stock character’s role, such as how we did with Yara, was very difficult. Therefore, the continuous absences of people in my group throughout the performance preparation weeks led to many challenges. Another great challenge was the lack of commitment of some people in my group in terms of performing and improvising. At one point, I was trying to act out my performance while JC, the only character who was with me in the scene, was lying down on the ground refusing to get up. Also, some people brought up their discomfort with the gay topics touched in our performance towards the end of our practicing when they could’ve brought it up earlier, and this led to our group having to change our entire storyline last minute. Apart from the group challenges, I faced challenges when trying to play my stock character, Il Capitano. The biggest challenge I faced was making my voice deep enough to match the typical manly voice of Capitano: since I’m a girl, my voice came out croaky and unrealistic if I tried to talk like a man. Also, another challenge with playing the role of Capitano was that it was physically draining to walk in the uptight stance such as Capitano does and do the moves and stiff stances he is known for using.

On the other hand, the other group was amazing at their formative performance that we saw. Jonathan’s performance as the Arlecchino stock character was incredible, as he exerted all his energy into making his character entertaining and identifiable. His back was arched the whole performance, and his head was always pointed up to show his status as a Zanni. The group had many lazzi in every scene to make the performance humorous for the audience: for example, I especially enjoyed the scene where Westin (who played the perverted Pantalone) was pretending to fall just so he could get physical contact with Alia. The entire group did a great job depicting the various stock characters, and they were easily identifiable for the audience. Overall, I think the group definitely deserved a 10/10!!

I think if I had another chance at creating and performing this Commedia performance properly, I would firstly make sure the whole group was comfortable with what we were doing so that no one would bring up last minute concerns with the plot. I would also make sure that we used class time wisely to develop the story and the lazzi, despite any absences. Also, I would make sure we are using the information about Commedia stock characters we have learned in class to make the characters easily identifiable such as the other group did. Overall, working with this group and this genre was a huge struggle but I think I’ve learned a few things here and there about from the success of the other group and the failure of our group about what it takes to develop a successful performance as a team (not being absent is definitely part of the criteria!!!!!).