Today’s Date: 6/17/2019

Show Title: Gallathea

Director: Mary Finch

Assistant Directors: Lauren Carlton and Cortland Nesley

Production Intern: Spencer Cohen and Jules Talbot (Author)

Rehearsal Room: Grafton Library

What we did:

After a long day of auditioning, the cast of Gallathea assembled for our first read-through of the script and began to explore the play’s weird, enchanting world of shipwrecks, alchemists, goddesses, lovers, and forest-dwellers. We pronounced classical Greek names (Mel-ee-be-us? Mel-ih-bus? A bus?) and tackled the various, unstandardized spellings typical of 16th-century plays (Tityrus or Tytrus? Gallathea, Galatea? Or is it Galathea?). As we read the script aloud, we punctuated every scene with a quick crowdsourced synopsis (“Cupid ruins everything”) and titled each individually for future reference (2.2 is now “God Squad“).

Quick and Quotable

From the play:

“I understand not one word you speak” (2.1.158), perhaps the most relatable line in early modern drama.

From the director: 

“Are they lesbians? Are they Trans? When we try to place 21st-century labels onto them it is both fascinating and frustrating that nothing seems to quite fit.”

From a cast:

“He such a Renaissance millennial.”

Production Insights:

Gallathea is unique among the Session 1 plays not only because of its authorship, written by John Lyly instead of Shakespeare, but for its status as a prose play. Whereas Romeo and Juliet and Measure for Measure are written largely in blank verse, aside from a few musical interludes Gallathea doesn’t have any meter. We began a discussion about how performing a prose play differs from a verse one and what our actors will be analyzing instead of iambs, trochees, and spondees: antithesis, alliteration, other rhetorical devices, and the unique performance opportunities of prose.