Roxbury Latin Summer Festival Theatre Shakes Up Shakespeare

The Summer Festival Theater at kicks off its 2011 season on Thursday with Tom Stoppard’s absurdist retelling of “Hamlet,” to be joined next week by William Shakespeare’s fast-paced romantic comedy

During breaks at a rehearsal of “Twelfth Night” earlier this week, director Ross MacDonald and cast members David W. Frank and Kenny Steven Fuentes spoke about the play, the characters, and why Shakespeare remains relevant to today’s audiences.

David W. Frank is a longtime teacher of English at Roxbury Latin. He also runs the school’s theater program. He plays Sir Toby Belch.

“The Sir Toby parts of the play are really fun,” said Frank. “He’s the uncle, the ne’er-do-well older relative of Lady Olivia. He has a title but no job, and nothing really to do, so he sits around partying all the time. For his own amusement, Toby befriends and victimizes Sir Andrew Aguecheek, who wants to marry Olivia. And with the help of some other characters, he plays a nasty joke on Olivia’s stuffy steward Malvolio. But he has a conscience in there somewhere.”

Kenny Steven Fuentes is a 2004 graduate of Roxbury Latin, where he acted in a number of plays that were directed by Frank, before he went on to be an acting major at Brandeis. He returned when he heard that Roxbury Latin had created a theater company. He plays Malvolio.

“Malvolio is the servant of the countess Olivia,” he said. “He’s a very stern, by-the-book kind of guy, who’s secretly in love with her. He upsets some of the other household members who then play a funny, cruel little prank on him. I’m having a blast with the part.

“The thing I enjoy the most about Shakespeare is the opportunity to work with poetry and verse in a theatrical context,” he added. “Most of the theater I do throughout the year is 20th century and contemporary – things in prose, narratives, realism. It’s all great to do. But it’s very different to be real and to be spontaneous and alive onstage while also speaking in verse and poetry.”

Frank is a huge fan of Shakespeare, and especially of “Twelfth Night.”

“The Shakespeare plays are fun to watch, if you’re not jaded about them,” he said. “With ‘Twelfth Night,’ if you just roll with it, you’ll have a terrific time. You don’t have to be a scholar. The story is funny, the
situations are funny, the characters are incredibly cool and very complicated.”

Fuentes agrees.

“There’s a lot of connotations with Shakespeare. Some are good, some are bad,” he said. “I’m not a big fan of the big epic ‘Shakespeare through the ages’ kind of thing. But these are really great stories, the writing is beautiful, and when it’s done well, you might not know exactly what they’re saying – because the language has changed – but you figure it out.

“‘Twelfth Night’ is a comedy,” he added. “With most of the comedies, so long as you let them be funny, they’re very easy to enjoy. ‘Romeo
and Juliet’ isn’t really a tragedy till the end. Up to that point it’s romantic, it’s funny, and it’s full of life. And then everybody dies.”

Ross MacDonald is doing triple duty with Summer Festival Theater. He’s the artistic director, he’s playing Guildenstern in “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern,” and he’s directing “Twelfth Night,” which has been set in the 1920s.

“Shakespeare really writes about all that exists within the human soul, and Tom Stoppard writes about all the problems that we face and how surreal life can be,” he explained.

MacDonald calls “Twelfth Night” one of the plays that changed his life when he was a schoolboy in England.

“I wasn’t particularly academic, and the classroom usually bored me,” he said. “Shakespeare was just another subject. But we were studying
‘Twelfth Night,’ and I was finding it interesting. Then we went to see it at the RSC, and it was one of those moments where I thought, ‘This is amazing and brilliant and witty and funny and sad and passionate. There’s all these things going on.’”

He hopes that audiences will love what his company is doing.

“I need them to come in and realize what fun they can have,” he said. “I believe that with really good theater, from the moment you step into the building to the moment you leave you’re in another world. You can forget all your worries and cares outside, and just enjoy it and be entertained and maybe be enlightened.”

“Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” runs from July 28-August 14. “Twelfth Night” runs from August 4-14. Both shows run in rep from August 11-14. Tickets are $25; veterans, $20; seniors & students, $15. For times and more information call 617-325-4920, ext. 383, or visit www.roxburylatin.org.