Live Broadcasts Enrich Education

Middlebury’s Town Hall Theater screened Othello last Thursday through the London National Theater’s program NTlive. The program broadcasts certain plays from the National Theater to theaters all around the world — over 1,000 people total were watching this version of Othello at the same time.

Doug Anderson, the executive director of Town Hall Theater, explained that he invested in special satellite dishes when the Metropolitan Opera began live broadcasting its productions about six years ago. Since then, the theater has been able to stream ballet, symphonies and plays from all over the world.

“But for us the most exciting development is that our system allows us to pick up the National Theater broadcasts,” Anderson said.

The Othello performance was recorded this summer and broadcast on October 3 in HD; it also included an interview with the director about the choices he made for this production, and an intermission video about the process of bringing the show to life. In the interview, the director explained that this version of Othello was set in a modern day cosmopolitan city, like London, and then moved to a foreign modern day army base. A war veteran who had been stationed in Iraq was involved in the production, helping the design team and actors make the setting feel real.

This year is the National’s fiftieth anniversary. For Anderson, who was a student in London in the early 1970s, that is “kind of a big deal.”

“I remember as a student going down to the Old Vic when it was just started and seeing Lawrence Olivier for seventy five cents,” he said.

Like the shows Anderson saw as a student, these video broadcasts from the National Theater are valuable opportunities for students of the College.

“The acting at the National is probably the finest in the English-speaking world,” said Anderson.

Professor of Theatre Cheryl Faraone agreed.

“Nothing compares to live theater,” she said. “But the NTlive program is as good a record as we’ll get. And an imperfect record of an extraordinary company’s work is better than a mediocre experience in the flesh.”

Seeing a play performed live gives the audience a fuller experience of the work than reading it on the page. Faraone was one of many professors to require a class to see Othello.

“Theater is meant to be three-dimensional,” said Faraone. “If you’re not seeing theater, you’re just looking at the blueprints.”

When an audience watches a piece of theater, the audience members receive the playwright’s message in the form the playwright intended. Faraone explained that going to plays provides her class with a specific “shared body of knowledge and ability to discuss it in a more immediate way.”

Professor of English and American Literature Timothy Billings also required his Shakespeare and Contexts class to attend Othello to experience the text in a theatrical setting.

“I assign some kind of performance for every play we read, if possible,” said Billings. “Although some scholars think that Shakespeare’s plays were meant for readers, undoubtedly most people experienced the plays as live productions starring popular actors.  In some sense, the plays are not really complete until they are embodied by actors in the presence of an audience.”

“Since we are always experiencing the plays as modern audiences and readers whether we like it or not, “ he added, “I love to see productions that remind us of that in creative ways, and that challenge us to measure ourselves against Shakespeare’s art.”

Billings’ class had read Othello before seeing the production and many of his students were surprised by how different the play feels on the stage than on the page.

“Some [students] were surprised by how compelling and attractive the character of Othello was early in the play,” said Billings, “and some were surprised by how loathsome Rory Kinnear’s Iago was since they had admired the intelligence and cunning of his speeches on the page.”

Because it was a live performance seen through the eyes of a modern director, the production also served as a vehicle for discussion of contentious social topics. Joelle Mendoza-Etchart ’15, who was required to see the show for Faraone’s Theater History (THEA0208), connected the modern take on Othello to the portrayal of women in Elizabethan theater, a topic the class is currently discussing.

“The contemporary setting of the production helped to highlight the absurdity of some of the more sexist practices in Shakespeare’s time,” she said. “This choice of setting made the sexism all the more jarring.”

Billings asked his students to pay attention to a different social issue.

“In the case of Othello,” he said, “I have been taxing my students to distinguish the anti-racism from the racism in the play, which is not as easy as you might think; and having a modern production is the perfect vehicle through which to reflect on such serious questions.”

All students — not just theater students or those studying Shakespeare — can benefit from going to see theater.

“Anything that opens the door to various parts of the human condition is valuable … I can think of few things that are more applicable to life as we live it, however we live it, than theater,” said Faraone.

Upcoming National Theater broadcasts at the Town Hall Theater include Macbeth, A National Theater 50th Anniversary Celebration, which will be streamed live, Coriolanus and War Horse.