 Welcome to Center Stage. I'm Crystal, not Donna. Unfortunately, Donna had to go and do something from Family Matters urgently, so Donna, I hope you're okay, and I hope you're watching this. Happy to be here in replacement of you. Today, we're going to be talking about something very, very interesting for me, Passionist Theater, so it's always lovely to talk about the magic behind the scenes. Now, what magic do we have today? Shakespeare magic. So, why don't we introduce my wonderful guest today, who is going to talk about being the director and a professor at UH. How about that double bill, huh? He can talk and act and direct. So, let's introduce Professor Paul Metri from the University of UH, I give you well, Theater and Dance Department, Professor in Voice, Movement, Shakespeare. Stage combat. Ooh, I like that one. I get all the fun stuff. Come on, I'll give you more. When you're an actor yourself? Auditioning, yeah. You're a SAG member. You created the Seattle Shakespeare Festival? Yeah, I was the principal founder of Seattle Shakespeare long ago. I actually started it right out of grad school. I was at the University of Washington, and I still had money left over from a slightly illegal student loan. Who has money left over in theater? I didn't eat that year. It was worth it, right? It was good. Yeah, so Seattle Shakespeare Festival started in 1991 and still going strong. It's kind of the premier classical theater north of Ashland. How do you start a festival? That's fascinating. Well, that's another topic. But it's kind of indicative of how do you create art? So I saw a need. I saw a niche. There really wasn't a lot of Shakespeare being done in Seattle at that time. Really? The Seattle Rep would do a show maybe every other year or so. There was a theater called Intiman that was the classical theater, but they had actually started to do more check off and more contemporary things. Right. So I just kind of saw that and coming out of grad school, I had just done a season at Utah Shakespeare and said, hey, we should be working on that. And I know a lot of actors that they want to work on Shakespeare. Yeah, who doesn't want to. So you could get them to work cheaply. Get the hungry starving actors. Yeah, because Shakespeare is great to work with. Shakespeare is so rich. It's wonderful. So for two years, I actually just produced on my own. I just kind of tried to do almost everything on my own. I remember driving Shuttle Express to go to the airport. I would drive that all night long, then basically get two hours of sleep, come back, rehearse, try and get one more hour of sleep, drive for another 10 to 12 hours and do that. What was your first Shakespeare play? That I ever did. Well, for that, when I produced on my own, we did Romeo and Juliet. Okay. And it's actually very similar to the Baz Luhrmann one, but it was 10 years before. We set it in modern times. All right. I love that. And kind of changed it up to kind of have this, it was kind of more of a yuppies and punk type of. Cool. I really love that type of modern interpretation. It was a lot of fun. It gave us a lot of freedom to do whatever. I remember cleaning blood off the back wall that we had to do because Mercutio gets shot by Tybalt instead of Stab. So we had that kind of stuff. And it was actually Romeo and Juliet and violence is actually an interesting thing because later on during Seattle Shakespeare, we would use that play to bring anti-violence programs to the high schools. Right. You know, it isn't just, oh great, let's do a show of a lot of violence, but it's also being able to use Shakespeare as a tool to teach certain things that society needs to. So have you always combined the concept of education and theater and performance or is it just something innate that you'd like to carry out? I think it kind of has to do it, especially with Shakespeare because you have to learn how to do it. It doesn't tend to come naturally. How do the younger generations take that play and what do they get out of it? That's very difficult in translation. I mean, Shakespeare said the whole idea is to hold the mirror up to nature. So in any time that I think about a play is trying to say, well, what do we want to say with it specifically? Not just, oh, let's set it on the moon because that would be fun. But if you're going to make a concept to try to go all out with it and try to say, if this is what it means, how does that change all other choices within it? 12 Nights is kind of a good example. That was my perfect segue. So why 12 Nights and why? What's your concept of this one? 12 Nights. See, this is actually a production that I did way back in 1996 for Seattle Shakespeare. And we toured it up to Whitby Island and did it in Seattle. And I later did the same concept in Cairo, Egypt when I was teaching at the American University in Cairo. Is that in Egypt? No, no, said in the way that we did this. So the way we do it is I was heavily influenced by the movie Strictly Ballroom. Are you a dancer yourself? I was, I was a dance major. You can tango? Really? When I first went to the U-Dub, yeah. And then I changed over to theaters. Me too, I did the same thing. I love it! It's great. I mean, they go together. Yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. And U.H. is theater and dance. And dance, yeah. It's all related. It's one of the reasons I wanted to come here is you had the combination of dance. So Strictly Ballroom, yeah. So we said Illyria in Twelfth Night is this mystical, I mean, Shakespeare's geography was not so good. Can you recap for people who aren't as familiar with Shakespeare's stories in a nutshell, what is the long line for Twelfth Night? Well, for Twelfth Night, like the plot line, you could kind of say like many of his twins get separated and come back together at the end. So that's kind of what happens. In the meantime, they all find true love. Right, but then there's a lot of gender crossing and humor in falling in love with the wrong person and all that kind of stuff, right? Well, for me and for this play and for this particular concept of the production, to me it had to do with what is Illyria. And Illyria to me is this glitzy world, kind of looks like a 40s MGM musical type of thing, where it's all about the glitz of it, you know, the glamour or whatever. It's people that are in love with the idea of being in love. They don't really know what real love is. Until Viola gets shipwrecked into this place for us, shipwrecked. She just kind of lands in it a little bit like Wizard of Oz. But she's the catalyst. She's the instrument that kind of allows Orsino and allows Illyria to say, oh, that's what love is. That's what it really is about and they really start to feel something. Whereas all before they're just professing to be in love or Illyria is kind of professing to be in mourning. You just don't really believe it until these guys come along, Sebastian and Viola, the twins. And Viola especially says, you know, Olivia says, well, you know, what would you do if you were in love? And then she has this beautiful Willow cabin speech where she says, make me a Willow cabin at your gate. And, you know, and it's just the most beautiful thing in the world. And Viola dressed as a boy says this and Olivia goes, oh, that's love, you know, falls in love with him, her. What's that context to modern day youth? I mean, do you think the younger generation now also have kind of a misconception of love? Because, you know, I talked to my son, I know he's younger, he's 16, but, you know, they say everything is so casual now and nobody really has a real concept of genuine true love. It sounds corny, but how do we take that with us today? What I would say is that plays into why is Shakespeare important? Shakespeare is about words and it's about language. Shakespeare's working vocabulary was 30,000 words. In modern, you know, normal American vocabulary is 8, maybe 15. Exactly, exactly. And that's what the, there's a linguistic theory that, you know, basically says if you don't have the words for it, you can't really experience it. Well, what are we going to do with Trump? He's got less. Sorry. I heard that knock. Yeah, I mean that, I think, if you look at how President Obama speaks and the amount of, you know, words that he uses. Articulation. And it is, it just kind of dumps everything down and simplifies everything. And I think that that's really true, as you're saying, with the younger generation and the idea of being in love. I think Shakespeare, you can look back and look at these words and go, oh, that's what love is. It isn't just, oh, I love you, I love you, I love you, or I don't really love you, but hey, let's, you know, hook up. But instead, it's these, this deepness, you know, read the sonnets, you know. Yeah, it's a lost art, isn't it? Yes. Did you ever see Captain Fantastic? No. Oh, please do. I will. I mean, I'm sorry, I don't want to offside track here. But really, because they go off and they, they are so well read, living in the forest growing up, not going into a normal social environment. But the teenage boy falls in love with a girl and he starts ranting these, these philosophical sayings. A little girl, this young modern girl is like, what the, you know. And it's really quite interesting what words can mean. Yeah. Or the lack thereof. The words are powerful, which is as we're finding the whole, you know, Twittergate thing. It's just, you know, how you use words, they can wound or they can heal your choice. And is it a loaded word or is it oversimplified where it's lacking so much depth? Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah. Do you have a favorite part of Twelfth Night? Oh, I love it. Probably the... Without giving away the story? Probably when the scene with Olivia and Viola is really, really just beautiful, I think. I think the poetry is fabulous. How our actors are doing it is a lot of fun. And then later on, I think part of that fun too, is you get to see them later on too after Olivia falls in love with Viola. And then she's there and she's like, try to hold his hand, you know? And he's like, no, no, no. All right. I'm a servant. You're a princess. No, you know. But even the cross-gender thing, I think I find that very, very relevant today, you know, does it or maybe not. Because Shakespeare in times, what's seen before is times in terms of talking about, you know, men and women and your identities and who you think you're attracted to. But today, this whole neutral gender thing going on is a very, very different concept. So you say you think you're in love with someone. You think you're in love with the opposite sex, but you're not. So are you in fact, I don't know if those issues come up in it? They are. And if you want to stress them, you certainly can. I think Hawaii Shakespeare did Twelfth Night last summer. And I think that they dealt with it more from that kind of modern standpoint. For us in setting it in this time period, I think that begs other certain choices to be made. But we do talk, I mean, in a way we have Festi, the clown, and we've chosen it to be more androgynous. In a way, Festi is almost like, this is what Viola could become if she ends up just staying in Illyria. If Illyria is almost a trap and just, you know, she just can't get out of it. So Viola's kind of whole struggle is, why don't I just tell people I'm a girl? Right. Why don't I just do that? So the photo is that Viola? No, that's Olivia, played by Emily Hodley. And that is Festi played by Rachel Lueno. Oh, okay, all right. Yeah, so you can see the clown, yeah, we're going much more with androgynous. But the Festi kind of then also has the ability to kind of see what's underneath all the glitz as well. Right. Festi as the clown is able to say, this is what's really going on, you know, and sees through Viola's disguise, and it's kind of going, I know what you are. And the brilliance of Shakespeare, though, you always have one character who's going to spill it if you can read between the lines and not. We're going to take a quick break, and a lot of interesting stuff with 12th Night. So I'm going to pick your brain a little bit more after this, and don't go away because we are going to talk and dig more into 12th Night at the University of Hawaii. Aloha, and happy New Year. It's 2017. Please keep up with me on Power Up Hawaii, where Hawaii comes together to talk about a clean and just energy future. Please join me on Tuesdays at one o'clock. Mahalo. Hey, has your signal just been taken over, or am I supposed to be here? This is Andrew, the security guy, your co-host on Hibachi Talk. Please join us every Friday on Think Tech Hawaii. Hi, I'm Marianne Sasaki from Life in the Law on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm delighted to tell everybody. I'm so excited. I'm going to Washington to march with women on Saturday, January 21st. It's going to be a huge, huge event. And I think we're doing something in Hawaii, too, aren't we? Yes, we are here on O'ahu. We're going to be at the Capitol starting at 8 a.m. Back here on Center Stage with Professor Paul Mitri, talking about his directorial tarot performance, upcoming performance of 12th Night at the University of Hawaii Theatre. Now, 12th Night, if everybody knows this is a Shakespearean play, but Paul, your take on this is to combine ballroom dancing, which I think is a really interesting combo. Now, I know you have a little dance background, but why did you choose specifically ballroom dancing and how do you think that works with this play specifically? I think especially like setting it in a ballroom and using the ballroom dance, there's so much etiquette to it. There's so much glamour to that, elegance to it, too. And at the same time, though, is what is underneath it? Where's the passion underneath it? If you think of a tango, it's technically brilliant, but it also has the reality of the feeling under it, too. That, to me, is that dichotomy that I think Shakespeare should have. Absolutely. You've got to blend technique with passion. Sure. But my interpretation of 12th Night often is because it's shipwrecked, so it's on an island, and people are in shreds, and they're kind of like not really in the best threads. So how did you turn that into...? That, to me, is tempest. Okay, true. Everybody's like that. In this one, it's really only viola, and let's face it, it's a pretty flimsy plot point. She goes, oh, I'll dress as a guy and serve the Duke, you know? Okay. So it doesn't really hold up, you know? So for us, also, it's kind of, well, Ilyria is this strange world, you know, where you can kind of be like, didn't I just see you as the captain, and now you're doing this over here? So it's a little bit like Oz, I think, in those... Do you think this is a particularly musical piece? Is that why you brought this into it? Yeah, I think... Twelfth Night's kind of the most musical of all of Shakespeare's plays. Is this the one where they have the famous line, is music, the food of love, play on? That's the first line, very first line of music, be it a food of love, play on. That's one of my favorites. Yeah, and Festi sings three songs in it. Okay. It could have been four. So there's plenty of music in there, and that for us, also, is kind of indicative of this world. So the way that we're using it, too, so we use music and dance as kind of transitions between the scenes, either to help the characters get out of a scene or to show the characters coming back into a scene is to use dance as a metaphor. Did you find it difficult to use your cast and their talents with dance and music and voice in that combination now? You know, we're in educational institutions, so that's our job is to educate. Right. And I absolutely am indebted to Mike Romney, who's the choreographer. So he's an MFA student in the dance program, and he teaches ballroom for us at the school. So I said, hey, Mike, would you want to choreograph that? And he leapt at it, and he has been working so hard. Many of the actors had had some dance, but not a lot in many cases. And we have at least one dancer who doesn't have a lot of theater background, and she has grown herself totally into that. So that's also why I love doing the show right now, is it allows different sides of our department to come together and work together. But some of our actors, you know, they are so versatile. They're absolutely triple threats. So watch them and enjoy their work. What do you think? I know it's hard to speak on behalf of them, but what do you think their biggest challenge was during this process with you in particular? Dealing with me. Yeah. Oh, no. I'm sorry. That too. You know, our students are really, really busy, and especially, you know, if they're good, they're in high demand. So they are really constantly trying to balance, well, okay, Rachel, who plays Festi, she just did Elephant Man at Minoa Valley. She teaches two classes for us, beginning acting. She's carrying a full load of classwork also. Right. And if they're my classes, that means you're doing a lot of other scenes and a lot of memorization. Right. And she's also, you know, being... That's all right? That's Rachel. Right. So she's also being asked to be in, you know, X number of other scenes for directing students and all of that. Isn't that wonderful? I mean, that's the real world. If you're good, you're going to be busy. That's, ideally, you do. And that's kind of why... That's part of her job, is to learn to balance all of this. Right. And that's... In theater, a lot of times when it rains, it pours. Yes. You get three shows at the same time, and then you go months or years without getting anything. Yeah. And in that meantime, you've got to still be training. Right. You can't just, you know, say, oh, I didn't get any work. So keep learning new skills. Keep learning new skills. And so for this one, the dancing, especially, Mike is really, you know, taking her through her paces for the dance part of it. And it also gives her a chance to show off her vocal work, which actually, an elephant man, we had used her as a vocalist in that too. Okay. So, again, it's like you learn some skills in this show. You apply them to the next one. Yeah. You learn some skills here. You apply them to the next one. And isn't it wonderful to be able to see such talent in Hawaii? We have an amazingly talented stable of actors here. And the question is just, how do we let the world know about it? Yeah. How do we get people to understand that, to see them? You know, we've rejoined the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival, and we co-hosted it last year with Shamanad. Okay. And so we were able to show our Hawaiian Theatre program. We were able to show musicals, some scenes that we had done from Sunday in the Park with George. Our students competed. Our student, Nathiel Nimi, won the National Directing Competition at the Kennedy Center. Wow. We have great, great students. And people don't know about it. No. That's the crazy thing. I mean, I really think, if I can get on the soapbox for a second. Yes, please. I can compare the arts to theater. You know, the arts to sports. You know, you pick up the paper, and you see about student athletes in that. And they get a lot of great coverage to it too. And money. And sponsorships. These students that you'll see on stage, you might very well see them in a movie. They might become the next Matt Damon. They might, you know, be the next Angelina Jolie. They're that talented. That's so wonderful. And that's just so inspiring too to know that, you know, you're in a small community, a small island, but you've got such versatility and talent here. Wonderful. Wonderful. It's so underestimated. Yeah. You know, they don't have the kind of head start that their peers do if their peers are studying in New York or L.A. or Chicago. So our students have to work doubly hard. Yeah. Because once they go there, they kind of have to start from scratch. Right. And we've got some students there doing some wonderful stuff. And I'm glad you, as a professor or as a director, as a creative person, is continually being inspired by people and works that you want to work on, right? So what inspires you to keep going and creating new projects? I like a challenge. Yeah. We just did Elephant Man at Manoa Valley. Right. And that had been on my bucket list, because it's one of those things you look at and you go, that looks hard. I should do that. You think? I should probably try that. Okay. If it's hard, it's worth doing. Yeah, sure. They struggle itself, right? Yeah. What are some other things on your bucket list that we should know about? Well, there's... Give me one. Give me one you really want to do that you haven't done yet. As a director or as an actor? Oh, two questions. That's what we've got. Yeah, about that. Or both. Okay. Sooner de Bergerac. Oh, okay. That hasn't been done in Hawaii, huh? None since I've been here. And my colleague, the late Glenn Cannon, he was so wonderful. And after seeing the company that we started, All the Worlds of Stage, one of the first things he said to me was, you need to do Serino. And so just to honor him, I would like it somehow to be... As an actor or director for that one? Well, I'd probably do both. How do you feel about self-directing and acting in the same production? Do you see it in films? And it doesn't work often. Yeah, I think it depends. I don't know why it doesn't work in film. They have a lot more money. Because they have huge heads. They have a ton more money. They're totally obsessed with themselves. And that's a thing. Too much money. It gives you too much room. Absolutely. It can. It can. It's dangerous. I think in theater, it depends. And there's certainly some productions that I'd say, yeah, there's no way that I would want to direct myself in. But some productions, the character that I play, like there's one called Inventing Van Gogh. Okay. And I played Patrick, the artist, not Van Gogh. So I was able... Patrick spends most of his time watching. Okay. So in a way, you're going, well, I'm already watching. I'm just watching from a slightly different angle. I've also found that with many of some of the people in town that I keep working with, Rob Duvall especially, that we have a wonderful working relationship in a way that we can just kind of direct each other. It's not comfortable. Absolutely. We share pretty much the same vocabulary. And certainly as I'm training students then to come up and be my colleagues, for instance, we did proof for all the worlds of stage. And there were four people in the show, myself and Rachel and Alex Monroe and Hannah Schauer-Galley. And we basically said, we're going to direct ourselves. So we called it Collabber Acting. So how do you come to constructively criticize each other? You have to leave the ego at the door. You just have to check it. Easier said than done though, right? You know, if there are people that you admire and there are people that you respect, and it's something that I try to teach my students anyway is that never be a diva. The world is way too many divas. Yeah, I totally agree. So there's just no room for that in the rehearsal hall. And theater doesn't breed divas anyway, usually. I've seen some. I had to tell some stories about some, not here, but yeah, my work at other theaters, I told some stories to my auditioning class recently about some of those. Oh, okay. But there's, yeah. And I said, please, never be a diva. There's just no reason for it. It's about the work, you know? Yes. Stanislavski said, you know, love the art in yourself, not yourself in the art. Yeah. So if you can do that, then I should be able to go, yeah, tell me what you think. I may not agree. Right. That's certainly fine. But you can welcome that feedback. But yeah, and I might go, I didn't think of it that way. Let me try that. Let me see what happens. Oh, that's important. That's a person too, because you're always growing and you're always morphing so fun in your career. So if there are some young people, well, not that young. I mean, anyone who is aspiring to be a performer, what are some tips you would give them based on your experience in front and behind the scenes and, you know, throughout your creative life? What's the way to go about it? Well, what I tell my students, it's about you have to become aware of yourself first, you know? You got to know exactly how you come across. You have to be willing to use your own feelings to make it real for yourself. And I think a lot of actors, partially because what we see on TV, we do see a lot of fake stuff, you know? Oh, God, yeah. And a lot of that gets held up as props. You know, it's like, oh, this is really good. So you have to kind of have your own work ethic and your own bar, you know, that you say, I'm going to work to that. I'm not going to try to bring that down here. Good point. And be real to yourself. But Paul, before we forget, let's remind everybody when this upcoming performance of 12th Night is. 12th Night opens January 27th on Friday night. It will be at 7 o'clock that Friday, and then two shows the following, that next Saturday, the 28th at 2 and at 7. And then the following Friday, February 3rd at 7, and then the 4th at 2 and at 7 also. This is not at the theater. This is at the campus ballroom because it takes place in a ballroom. Yay, so lots of dancing and singing. Yeah. And if food be the love, no. If music be the food of love. Lay on. Lay on. Thank you so much, professor, for being here, and good luck. Thank you. Thanks so much. God, I screwed up on that line.