Lend them your ears, and you’ll hear the Bard’s words as he originally intended.
Janus Theatre Company’s multiyear Elgin Shakespeare Project, made possible through a grant from the Palmer Foundation, concludes with a look at literature’s most famous couple, Romeo and Juliet. The tale of the star-crossed lovers will be told using several techniques employed back in Shakespeare’s day — including the use of original pronunciation.
“I call it verbal pyrotechnics. It’s very exciting because the way the language pops out of your mouth and comes off, it’s like ‘wow! That’s cool.’ It’s like the first time you ever heard it,” Artistic Director Sean Hargadon said.
The theater company presents “Romeo/Juliet” at 7 p.m. Aug. 19-21 at Vero Voce Theatre in St. Charles and at 7 p.m. Aug. 22 at Elgin Public House in Elgin. Admission is free, but reservations are recommended in case a performance sells out.
During the first year of the Elgin Shakespeare Project, Janus Theatre Company performed works using the cue script technique, in which actors received just their own lines and a few words of other actors’ lines to serve as their cues printed on scrolls carried throughout the performance. In the second year the actors performed plays with minimal or no rehearsal.
Instead of just focusing on the original pronunciation for the third year, the decision was made to showcase all of the techniques by telling the tragic love story in a 70-minute narrative framework. The cast will start telling the story of the play using a narrator.
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“Then we’ll have certain moments where that scene will open. We’ll actually show you that scene in full, or mostly in full, and then that scene will end and we’ll move on to the story,” Hargadon said. “It’s like jump cutting through a movie … with a narrator in the background. It’s a bit of a crock pot of ideas as a presentation/performance for the audience.”
The original pronunciation, also referred to as OP, has been a lot of fun and “absolutely fascinating to work on,” he said.
“In Shakespeare’s time there was a variety of accents coming from all over the place. And certain vowel sounds would sound different then than they do today,” Hargadon said. “There were grammar books that were written in Shakespeare’s time that would talk about different sounds when you speak them. And if you start to apply that to the text, it changes things.
“The other thing too is certain rhymes in Shakespeare’s plays don’t work today because we sound different from the way they did,” he said.
Today people articulate every word very clearly. But in Shakespeare’s time they wouldn’t have done that, he said.
“It would have been trippingly on the tongue, as they say, and a lot of words would get elided,” he said. “You’d almost drop them so the text moves a lot quicker.”
To help learn the correct pronunciation, Hargadon and two other company members met with dialect coach and professor emeritus at University of Kansas Paul Meier over Zoom for a workshop.
“Once you learn the different vowel sounds, then you apply them to the words, and then it changes them,” Hargadon said. “It changes it in a way that sounds brand new. And from that comes new understanding and ideas and meanings. So that’s really exciting. And that’s a thrill. And I think in some ways it gets us closer to the audience and to the characters.”
The performance of “Romeo/Juliet” is a good opportunity to see all the techniques the actors learned in the last few years done in a fun and lively way, he said. “Shakespeare performances can be a lot of fun. It doesn’t have to be something that’s drudgery or to be scared of,” Hargadon said.
“We’re taking a play that everybody knows culturally in some way or another, and I got to say, you’ll see it in a new way. It’s kind of fresh the way we’re doing it, just by the OP alone. It’s just different. And it’s fun to do.”
‘Romeo/Juliet’
When: 7 p.m. Aug. 19-21
Where: Vero Voce Theatre, 3755 E. Main St., #158, St. Charles
When: 7 p.m. Aug. 22
Where: Elgin Public House, 219 E. Chicago St., Elgin
Tickets: Free
Information: rj.eventbrite.com/ or janusplays.com
Kathy Cichon is a freelance reporter for the Courier-News.