Not every theater artist favors Shakespeare’s “problem plays”—those works generally defined by an ambiguous tone that shifts between comic and tragic. But for Jess Meyer, the fight and intimacy director for Commonwealth Shakespeare Company’s upcoming production of “The Winter’s Tale” on the Boston Common, the Bard’s problem plays hold particular relevance.
“As a nonbinary theater artist and a multi-hyphenate theater artist, I find the impossible-to-categorize [plays] resonate with me the most because I tend to be a person others can’t categorize,” says Meyer. Since the role of fight and intimacy director is to choreograph bodies in both staged combat and passion, duality and contradiction are integral to the action. “The Winter’s Tale,” says Meyer, is a play in which “intimacy and violence highlight the themes of jealousy versus romance, illusion versus truth, romance verses farce, and comedy versus tragedy.”
The CSC’s 28th annual Free Shakespeare on the Common production of “The Winter’s Tale” runs July 16 through August 4 at the Parkman Bandstand (for details, visit commshakes.org).
Associate Artistic Director Bryn Boice helms the epic parable of betrayals, renewed hope and the transformative power of time featuring a cast of CSC veterans including Nael Nacer as Leontes; Marianna Bassham as Hermione; Omar Robinson as Polixenes, King of Bohemia; Paula Plum as Paulina/Time; Tony Estrella as Camillo; Richard Snee as The Shepherd; and Robert Walsh as Antigonus.
The production marks Meyer’s debut at the CSC’s Boston Common venue, but they’ve been part of CSC for three years, serving as assistant director for Boice’s apprentice program production of “Romeo and Juliet” then revisiting that play as fight and intimacy director last year for a CSC2 production. Meyer, who earned a BFA in theater performance from Emerson College, has served in numerous roles in local stages, including assistant director for Lyric Stage’s “Preludes” last year. They are also a producer for the site-specific play company “Plays in Place,” which develops new plays in collaboration with historical organizations in the Greater Boston area.
“I call myself a jack-of-all-trades. I’ve always had a hunger for learning and a reverence and respect for everyone on the team,” says Meyer. “I consider myself a director first, but in order to have a clear understanding and rapport of the lexicon when I’m in the director’s chair, I want that firsthand experience.”
Meyer credits Emerson College professor Ted Hewitt—“the best fight director I’ve ever known”—for their training as a fight and intimacy director and for imparting the essential knowledge that stage violence is a form of intimacy, says Meyer. “That was something I fell in love with; our body doesn’t know that [the contact] is any different even though our brain does.”
Even before they got to Emerson, Meyer had been in training for a stage career that balanced physicality and poetry. A native of Virginia, Meyer was active in children’s theater from the age of five, sang in a children’s choir at Temple, attended an arts high school, played soccer and other sports and studied dance for 10 years. There was also exposure to Shakespeare from an early age. “I grew up going to the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton [Virginia]. I have always had a reverence for Shakespeare—a love of the poetry and language but, for me, it was the physicalization of poetry,” Meyer says.
In keeping with their “jack-of-all-trades” credo, Meyer is also a certified American Sign Language Interpreter. “A lot of what I’m doing when representing a deaf person and interpreting for them feels like storytelling. I am there to be the voice to their story … [giving] vocal tonality to their expression and being able to lend my body and voice. Part of why I make a good interpreter is because I’ve trained in theater my entire life.”
That training is tested at every level in a production like “The Winter’s Tale,” a complex problem play that challenges the audience to be “active in the process of playmaking,” says Meyer. “It’s not cookie cutter. I’ve always taken the hard route and not boxed myself in or believed in limitations of society.” That comfort with “in between” or gray areas both on and off the stage suits a theater artist tasked with communicating the nuances of “intimacy that turns violent, and violence that turns intimate,” within relationships that then shift over the course of the play.
“Shakespeare walks that line,” says Meyer. “That double-edged sword always exists and that’s what is the most interesting.”
More: commshakes.org
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