'Coriolanus' addresses issues of gender, politics

By Maggie Beidelman

This theater season, a soldier's mentality of warfare will be laid bare and an army of fierce Volscian women will aim to crush a maledominated Roman army in the theater department's production of Shakespeare's timeless "Coriolanus."

Considered Shakespeare's most political play, "Coriolanus" is based on a legendary Roman figure of the same name. Compared to Shakespeare's other plays, "it's not so much about love as it is about power," said director Aldo Billingslea, who is also the chair of the theater department.

In the play, Coriolanus, a powerful Roman military hero whose hapless ambition gets him exiled and publicly shamed, joins his former rivals, the Volscians, in an attempt to get revenge on Rome.

"This is a war play and we are at war. It's a political play and it opens the week before the election," said Billingslea of the reasoning behind the decision to do the play this year. The intent of the cast is to make students think about the weighty issues of war, politics and gender and "hopefully bring out a better world" because of it, he said.

"As written, the play has only three female roles," said Billingslea. "That's unacceptable in our society." So Billingslea, who has himself acted in "Coriolanus" three times, decided to have a different take on casting.

"We have some powerful women," Billingslea had said during casting. "Let's make an army of them." Thus, the entirely female Volscian army was born, and the question of which gender was more powerful began its debate.

Although Shakespeare wrote the play in the 17th century, its themes are timeless. Billingslea said, "We've placed (the play) in a non-period period," because time setting is insignificant.

"Shakespeare did tights and pumpkin pants - that's not what we're going to do," said Billingslea, who has performed in 23 different Shakespeare productions himself.

Instead, the actors will be using weaponry and wearing costumes from several time periods to show that the message of this play surmounts time boundaries.

Actors will be using a combination of a Roman short sword, a Tommy gun, a dagger and a .45 handgun, and they will utilize different styles of combat and dress, including leather for the female Volscian army.

A few Army ROTC cadets made a visit to rehearsal to teach the role of the Romans to the actors. "Everyone, including the stage manager, was learning right face, about face," said Billingslea. He described this imposed discipline as essential to the performance of the play, for it shows the effects on young men's mentality during war.

Billingslea said that, although soldiers go through a thorough process to be able to actually kill in war, "They don't go through an extensive process to go back into society." He explained how this can have negative effects on a soldier's life post-war, when the soldier begins to question his "killology," or the ability to kill other humans in war.

Billingslea is very passionate about this issue of war, a passion he hopes to convey in his directing. During an interview, he pulled out a copy of Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech on soldiers coming home from war.

Billingslea read, "This business of ... sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love." If wisdom, justice and love cannot heal the mental lesions, said Billingslea, then what can?

The actors, who have been rehearsing five nights a week for three and a half hours since the second week of school to put on this nearly two-hour production, have found themselves placed into "the mindset of warriors who have to kill people," said Billingslea.

"When we were learning fight combinations, although it's fake, you realize you could kill people (with the weapons we're holding)," said Alex Tavera, who plays the role of the Roman General Cominius. "It's interesting because after the guys came in from ROTC, I realized that my focus (to get into the character) has gone up tenfold."

Tavera credited Billingslea for getting the cast so in touch with their roles in such a short period of time. "He'd go into real scenarios about Iraq and everything," he said. "He's gotten us to seriously focus."

Contact Maggie Beidelman at (408) 551-1918 or mbeidelman@scu.edu.