How did you come about adapting King Stag?

I have had a very long love affair with commedia dell’arte. I was talking with Lisa Hall (who was department chair at the time) about a work that I would be excited to bring to the UVU stage, and I had long wanted to translate and adapt a commedia piece. And so I pitched that, because I love commedia and I wanted to expose our students and our audiences to commedia, plus because it was a good chance for me to try my hand at translating and adapting. I did a first draft which was a literal translation, which was just me going through and translating the script word by word. And then I took it into a workshop at UVU, the New Script Workshop, where I worked with students for six weeks on the first round of the adaptation, and then two years later it went into production.

Did you discover anything during that workshopping process, from the translating to the new script workshop?

It was a rediscovery of what a delightful story it is. Commedia dell’arte was performed by troupes of actors that would travel around what would be known as Italy (as well as the rest of Europe and even into Asia). One of the things that they often did before their first performance in a new town was spend some time with the locals, listening to conversations and gossip, you know, what was happening, and it was very common for the things that they learned to make their way onstage. That was something that I really wanted to include in the adaptation process, that even though the play itself we’re keeping in a fairly classic fairytale time, that there was a lot of connection to our local audience. So that was a lot of fun working with the original workshopping cast, but it has also been a lot of fun with the new cast, because there’s a two year gap between when we did that workshop and the production, so some of those jokes were just out of date. New references and new things got to be included in this production, which has been a lot of fun.

The other thing that I really focused on in that original workshop was gender, and there are two aspects of that. One, as is very common in a lot of classic shows, commedia scripts are very maleheavy, so there’s lots of great male characters and a sprinkling of female characters. I wanted to see how I could play with the script to bring more equity between the amount of male and female characters onstage and also play with the types of women that are shown onstage. The Angela character, for example, in the original script, is kind of a wimp. (Laughs) She spends a lot of time crying and bemoaning things. I was really interested in transforming Angela into a character that has her own wants and her own passions and her own drive, who is not just a girl who sits and cries in the corner, but takes action, both so that she would be a more interesting character to watch, but also a much more interesting character to play for the actress.

And you did a wonderful job with that. I’m not going to spoil anything, but bravo.

(Laughs) Thank you.

What’s your opinion on the value of translating or of adapting classical works for today’s audiences?

I think it is always valuable to learn from our past, and to learn from our history. For me, the adaptation is really about helping modern audience connect to and hopefully fall in love with this particular genre of theatre, that they can understand its popularity, that they can delight in it as much as the original audiences. Particularly for commedia, a lot of that delight was the connection with the audience, seeing themselves onstage. So I think that for a modern audience to truly experience commedia, you have to have that same sort of connection, which is harder to do when you’re using a stilted language, references that no one understands, and jokes that were really funny three hundred years ago but don’t mean anything to an audience now. You have to go through the same process that the contemporary writers were doing with their audiences to delight and amaze them.

What is your favorite moment in the script?

Oh, that’s so hard! I have so many favorite moments! I still think, to this day, my favorite line is when Brighella accuses Leandro of not having a loaded gun, and he retorts that it’s “loaded with kindness”, because I think that just captures his character so brilliantly.

Brighella, Leandro, and Pantalona together in the woods is always one of the highlights for me watching the show for sure. Last question: What would the world be missing without your play?

I think on one level is that the world would be missing some laughs. Comedy is so important. It’s important at all times, but I think especially for in times like now with the pandemic and the quarantine and the amazing amount of turmoil that is happening in so many aspects of our society right now, the ability to gather in a room with people, whether that’s physically or virtually, that there is something so needed to have a time where there can be a lightness of souls. I know for myself, just being in the process and being able to come and laugh every night, has been so good for me and my outlook.

One of the characteristics of original commedia was stock characters, these highly recognizable characters that are driven by motives and personalities that we see and understand daily. I find it so fascinating that hundreds of years later, those stock characters, which are coming to us from a different time, culture, and a different language, resonate. I think particularly in a time where there’s so much division that to be able to look at a piece like King Stag that was written so long ago in, you know, for us in Utah, a very different time and culture, that we can see ourselves in these characters, and that there is something important in recognizing that there’s a lot more that unifies us than…disunifies? Is that the word? I don’t know if that’s the word.

Than divides us.

Than divides us. There you go, thank you (laughs). That there’s a lot more that unites us than divides us. And yes, they may be silly characters, but I think the world needs more reminders that we are more alike than we think we are.