Peter Lichtenfels, left, and Lynette Hunter search through a very rare second folio edition published in 1632 of the Collected Works of William Shakespeare, found in Shields Library's Special Collections. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
Director and scholar discover new worlds by writing about Romeo and Juliet
You could simply thank the book publishers who commissioned a new critical edition of Romeo and Juliet for what is going on in the UC Davis Department Theatre and Dance.
But, really, the campus also should give a bow to Shakespeare himself, the Globe Theatre of London and, ultimately, to a theatre director and rhetorician who decided to talk to each other—really talk to each other—about what is going on in Romeo and Juliet.
The married couple, Peter Lichtenfels and Lynette Hunter, have spent nearly a dozen years co-editing a book on the saltiest—albeit most romantic— Shakespeare play existing, with expectations that it will be on local bookstore shelves by early 2007.
This international critical edition of Romeo and Juliet is the first such book edited by a professional director, with Peter offering his experience with acting, directing, sets and lighting. In addition, Lynette, using her own expertise explores the culture of renaissance England—family structure, medicine and science.
Their epiphanies about their own disciplines during this collaboration—the theatre and rhetorical criticism—encouraged Hunter and Lichtenfels to accept faculty appointments at UC Davis two years ago.
‘When I direct actors professionally …, I ask, 'Do my eyes want to watch them?’
Peter Lichtenfels
Peter is now chair of theatre and dance, teaching acting and directing. This follows a three-decade career as a successful director for the British and international theatre. His reputation led to four invitations in the past 13 years to be a Granada Artist-in-Residence at UC Davis before the campus offered him a permanent career change. Being a professor means Peter can stay in both worlds: He still directs plays, while nurturing the future generation in theatre.
As one of the few "scholarly" academics in a program of acclaimed theatre, television and film practitioners, Lynette was lured to Davis from the University of Leeds in England with the challenge of revitalizing the doctoral program in theatre, dance and performance studies. A renaissance scholar in the most catholic sense of the word, Lynette's intellectual breadth spans from post-colonial English literature and 16th century culture to Chinese movement. She is focused on training the theatre educators and critics of tomorrow.
Peter and Lynette's professional ties to The Globe, the re-created Elizabethan theatre in London, paved the way this summer for a new agreement with UC Davis that will bring enriched understandings of The Bard and his era to the campus and high school students in the surrounding eight-county Sacramento region. The plan calls for teacher training, undergraduate and graduate classes, scholar exchanges and courses.
Like many undergraduates, Peter and Lynette discovered what they wanted to do with their lives while attending their university -- at Queens University in Canada. They are encouraged by the possibilities of forging a new kind of dramatic art education at UC Davis that will help today's students discover their own career paths.
What advice do you have for student actors in general about how to pursue a degree in acting and how to get through the UC Davis system?
Peter: Actually, the system is very different here on the undergraduate level; students are still doing a liberal arts degree. In that sense students may focus in on acting and that sensitizes them to areas of theatre practice, but it is not as intense as going to the conservatory where you learn nothing but acting.
I would urge students, if they want to be an actor, to get in on directing, design, movement and voice to learn all components that go into making a production, so they know how an actor is situated in that process.
I think that taking acting courses is good, but also doing it on stage and auditioning for shows is worthwhile. I would also urge them to consider auditioning for a range of productions, for example, if they love musicals, don't just audition for musicals.
What do you think are the marks of a promising theatre student?
Peter: For theatre students, it is the hunger in their eyes and the adventure to explore all facets of theatre with all kinds of engagement. For an actor, it is very different. I don't think everybody can become an actor—and make a living at it.
I know on stage that the first thing that has to happen is that the audience has to want to watch you. Sometimes it is called charisma. When I direct actors professionally and I have them coming into a room, I ask, "Do my eyes want to watch them?" Because if my eyes don't want to watch them, why would anyone else's eyes want to watch them? And that's nothing you can study.
Lynette: I disagree. We are still trying to find the vocabulary in acting that explains acting, which is what we're trying to do at UC Davis, but I do think you can train people to be actors.
Peter, were you a theatre major?
Peter: Absolutely. The only thing I've ever done is theatre. I've earned my living doing plays for 30 years.
Were you an actor to begin with?
Peter: No, just a director. The first time I saw a play was when I was 19. And that night I knew that was what I wanted to do. It was that immediate and that complete.
Did you direct plays in college?
Peter: The first time, I went to a very good theatre in town and said I had directed 10. After a while, I had one real one and nine fictitious ones. And before you knew it, I had 10 real ones.
Lynette, did you know Peter when he discovered plays?
Lynette: I think I knew him just after that. I had started in science. Biochemistry was something my parents told me to do. I really enjoyed it, but I wasn't very good at it.
Students are really searching for what to do and listening to what their parents tell them to do. How did you deal with that?
Lynette: How did I get out of it? Simply because my parents were supporting me through my first year and they wanted me to have an economically viable job, so I did what I was told. But by the end of the first year, I was supporting myself as a lab technician. I finished the first three years while I was doing that degree but all the while I was taking courses in English, French, Greek and all sorts of things.
By the end of my third year they gave me my B.SC. The way things work in Canada is they said, "If you trade in your B.Sc., we'll give you the credits, as long as you can make up the required credits in English." So I worked very hard between May of my third year and May of my fourth year and I made up the extra 11 credits and got my English degree instead. I've written since I can remember. I'm really only interested in words and the theatre. It was a much better match for what I enjoy, what I love, what I get passionate about.
‘I think we found very, very quickly, working on the edition of Romeo and Juliet, that we didn't have nearly as much in common as we thought we did.’
Lynette Hunter
Lynette, I can understand how Peter got interested in Shakespeare through his theatre work, but what about you?
Lynette: I moved to England in 1974 and from then onward taught English and Canadian literature, specializing in post-colonial studies. At that stage I was also getting interested in feminism and I said I would never teach Shakespeare. It was far too authoritative, patriarchal and the rest of it. I had not necessarily learned Shakespeare particularly well at university and I had seen a very lot of very bad Shakespeare in the theatre. So I really didn't know how to look at it or read it.
In the 1980s, I worked as a computing-in-the-humanities teacher. In the beginning of the '80s it meant telling people how to turn the machine on. It also meant a lot of strategies for dealing with the statistical analysis of vocabulary, database, publishing and archival work. That got translated into textual editing and bibliographies. And that's what led me to the Shakespeare material. Most bibliographic material is based on Shakespeare because the people who started doing bibliographies back in the middle of the 19th century used Shakespeare as their primary text. In teaching bibliography, I had to engage with Shakespeare in a precise and detailed way, and I just began to love it.
Peter told me something humorous about how when you two were working on your first book, there was a point when you were looking at him. He said he was assuming, "My god, she's probably thinking, 'How could I have been married to you this long? We have such differences.'"
Lynette: I know what he is talking about. I didn't think that. If you want to get down to the nitty-gritty: He's come from the theatre and I've come from a literature background. You ask most people who are working on, say, Shakespeare, and we tell them that we come from theatre and literature, and they say, "Oh, that's interesting. You have two different perspectives." But they also assume you have a lot in common.
I think we found very, very quickly, working on the edition of Romeo and Juliet, that we didn't have nearly as much in common as we thought we did. I've been used to people saying, "Wow, you went from sciences to the arts. That's a big step," and me saying, "Well, no, it's not really that big because there a lot the two have methodologically in common."
Our classic clash was over the word "character." Peter was always talking about "character" as finding a psychologically real reason for a character to do something. I've been trained in structural and post-structural and theoretical skills for reading and the idea of a "psychologically real character" being something that motivates a human being that is being written about is a complete anathema to me because that's just a reader's artifact that they have brought in.
He was doing something far more complex that he wasn't articulating. He was using a directing/acting shorthand. And I was using a critical shorthand that didn't pay enough attention to what happens in theatre.
Lynette, what are the frustrations for someone who comes from the scholarly background looking at theatre?
Lynette: The biggest frustration is that most people in scholarly work don't understand theatre practice. They understand how to talk about what they see and interpret and they write really eloquent and interesting things, but they really don't understand how directors direct and actors act. For example, when they talk about how actors act and directors block plays, they have an extremely limited understanding about what that means.
It's almost like somebody watching a scientist in a laboratory doing an experiment and telling you simply what that scientist did and that's supposed to be the main body of what you are supposed to interpret. Whereas any scientist doing an experiment knows that there is this huge body about the understanding of the natural world going into every single thing that they do.
Peter, what is frustrating to you about this divide between the scholars and the practitioners?
On the home page: Theatre and dance professors Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels, foreground, use the Main Theatre stage for educating. In the background, students rehearse for Macbeth. (Karin Higgins/UC Davis photo)
Peter: What I like about what is happening here is that practitioners are really intelligent and thoughtful but they focus on people skills rather than intellectual analysis. The challenge for practitioners here is to begin to learn from people who think about theatre how to conceptualize in a way that a wider world might understand and that will make scholarly contributions. For a person like me, that is learning a new set of skills.
And you think a program like the one at UC Davis might help more people do that?
Lynette: Exactly. It's going to be a long hard road because we don't have a vocabulary for this yet, although we're beginning to devise one, and we don't have the methodology. We've been borrowing from everybody else, like anthropology, sociology and cultural studies. All of those disciplines, in the end, will be contributing to what we create but none of them grasp what practitioners do. That remains for us to discover and articulate.