American Shakespeare Center

Merry Wives of Windsor has officially started!!!! We started on Friday with Ren Run Prep where I worked as "the prithee girl" (What I like to call myself) Instead of calling line at ASC they say prithee. The reason behind it has never really been explained it just what they do. The ren run went amazingly well on Sunday Morning and I felt really proud of the troupe. We started table work that afternoon on Merry Wives and we got to meet the director. On Merry Wives of Windsor we will be working with a new director Rob Clare from the Royal Shakespeare Company. Working with him has already been a pretty amazing experience. The director is really trying to get into Shakespeare's head and understand the clever word play that he's using to help the actors understand the characters. We worked for 4 hours on Sunday talking about the characters and trying to understand how Shakespeare set them up. (The actors already knew the script and knew their lines from performing the ren run so they had done a good amount of homework already.) It was really fascinating to sit in on the conversation and see what discoveries the actors made about their characters and the community of Windsor just from sitting and talking about the play as a whole. Merry Wives of Windsor has characters from a few of the history plays and this play was actually requested by the royalty at the time because of the character of Falstaff (presumably). It's an amazing play and the depth of the characters is fascinating. For example Falstaff, a portly drunkard, is a wordsmith and a genius one at that. It is a play of trickery and quite strong female characters who are not afraid to stand up for themselves. To be honest it reminds me a lot of I Love Lucy and I already have so many ideas that I've come up with during rehearsals and scribbled in my notebook for future reference if I ever get to be a part of it again. I can tell you a million times over this is a production I will never forget.

- Lauren Dentler