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November 6, 2024 | By Jacob Sharpe (A27)

St. John’s is identified as a “book school,” but from day one students are also acquainted with the power of oral performance through Homer’s Iliad. In their fall seminars on Aeschylus, freshmen are subsequently familiarized with the beauty of language when performed by multiple actors, aiding students greatly when they translate Antigone or another Greek tragedy in sophomore year. 

Reading and working with theatrical pieces in the Program itself, it’s no wonder that many students seek opportunities to perform them outside of class. Two student-run and directed organizations foster these opportunities: the King William Players (KWP) in Annapolis and Chrysostomos in Santa Fe.

The KWP and Chrysostomos receive many suggestions for plays to perform every season, including well-known ones performed many times before. Therefore, prospective directors must demonstrate a unique vision or tactic through which to explore their play and explain it in a formal proposal. These proposals then face a vote: in Annapolis, by members of the KWP, and in Santa Fe, by the elected board of Chrysostomos. The results are in, and the plays are selected; Annapolis and Santa Fe boast four outstanding shows this fall.

A common method of bringing life to a “tired” old show is to envision it differently than originally staged. Margaret McConnell (A25) believes Anton Chekhov’s The Seagull deserves the opposite treatment. According to her, the show has been sullied with the moniker of “tragedy” from its first showing in 1896, and she seeks to tastefully rediscover the humor in a complex show that includes elements of tragedy and oft-downplayed comedy. “I think [the way] a lot of great comedies are, is [that] you have to have a bit of tragedy in it,” she says.

Although The Seagull is not usually included in the St. John’s Program, it is featured this year on the preceptorial schedule in Annapolis—an opportunity for students to enjoy it both as classroom text and theatrical show. In directing, McConnell has rediscovered Chekhov’s original vision for the play: a comedy of the absurd featuring characters tragically lacking self-awareness and confidence, to bittersweet results.

Hopes are high for a performance better than its debut in 1896. That show, she recounts, was a disaster on many fronts; a hostile audience intimidated the lead actress into muteness, and its mortified director hid backstage from the jeering crowd. St. Petersburg back then might not have been ready for Chekhov’s vision, but McConnell anticipates Annapolis will be.

While not making any major deviations from Shakespeare’s original, Magnolia Vandiver (A25) believes her staging of Hamlet will feed an inquisitive audience through analyzing elements and characters often neglected in sophomore seminar. Over the summer, the director ambitiously compiled the script from multiple folios and quartos; she will be reimagining the plot from several perspectives, including doubt.

Hamlet is one of the best-known shows in history, but Vandiver has devised something new, and believes she has created a rendition that—true to the adage that brevity is the soul of wit—results in a tolerably shorter production that still includes novelties like Old Danish oaths. She has used her own experience with Hamlet the seminar text to ensure that Hamlet the play attacks ideas that couldn’t be covered in a two-hour seminar. While more obscure concepts like madness often serve a seminar conversation well, Vandiver takes a more immediately relatable directing angle from the uncertainty the characters all face. “Hamlet, I feel like it’s a play that’s riddled with doubt,” she says. “He can’t be reduced to the silly man in black with the skull.”

Ironically, coinciding with Annapolis’ staging of Hamlet is Santa Fe’s first year in some time not staging a Shakespeare play. First in the season is Erin Ashley Kelley’s (SF25) staging of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound. Her rehearsals­­­—often resembling impromptu seminars—have yielded many epiphanies. One of Kelley’s biggest challenges, and ultimately, successes, has been finding changeable aspects in a show nominally bound to a singular location. Without the means of creating variety through set changes, Kelley is determined to visualize Prometheus’ predicament through the lenses of isolation and eternity.

In one translation Kelley perused while conceptualizing the show, Prometheus’ infamous rock is referred to as the “cliff edge of the world.” She is determined to explore such unbroachable distance through physical staging, yet also wants to portray Prometheus as residing on the edge of time. “Time seems to be moving forward without Prometheus,” she observes, and, likewise, the immortal Titan will be clad in timeless garments, juxtaposed with the anachronistic clothing of his visitors. Kelley asks the audience whether Prometheus’ torture is not imprisonment within time, but banishment from it.

Time features heavily in Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia, which frequently questions the relationship between past and present. Director Sophia Caplan (SF26) likens her experience directing the play to her experience at St. John’s: “I don’t [completely] understand all the intricacies of it, but I can see where there’s been really careful thought poured into [it].”

Arcadia is a notoriously complex show, but Caplan finds that its evasiveness marks each rehearsal with new discoveries. And just like how Johnnies all come to seminar having picked up different things from the same reading, Caplan anticipates that audience members will all pick up something different from seeing the production.

The show offers ample fodder for consideration: for instance, many mathematical and scientific concepts featured in the show are derived from Program authors from Leibniz to Newton. But Caplan selected Arcadia not for its references to the Program, but from curiosity in how Johnnies would treat it. Their four-year immersion in its ideas, as well as formidable experience in wrestling with complex texts, make them especially able to appreciate and handle a dramatic Leviathan like Arcadia.

Here is this fall’s full theatrical schedule in Santa Fe and Annapolis:

The Seagull: Saturday, November 9, and Sunday, November 10, at 7:30 p.m. in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium in Annapolis.

Hamlet: Friday, December 6, and Saturday, December 7, at 7 p.m. in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium in Annapolis.

Prometheus Bound: Friday, December 6, and Saturday, December 7, at 7 p.m. in the Great Hall in Santa Fe.

Arcadia: Saturday, December 14, and Sunday, December 15, at 7 p.m. in the Great Hall in Santa Fe.

All productions are free and open to the public. Seating is on a first-come, first-served basis.