Inspiring a collaborative spirit
CAMBRIDGE -- Bobbie Steinbach slips on a pair of kneepads and grouses, half-jesting, "I'm too old for this."
Then she joins a mass of growling actors on their knees, impersonating a single bear, who crawl as one toward their prey. The group, during a recent rehearsal at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center , is pursuing an ill-fated soul named Antigonus (played by Richard Snee ) in Shakespeare's "The Winter's Tale."
As the bear, the actors corner Snee, rearing up to hide his exit from view. Then they split up, and falling back down on their hands and knees, transform themselves into a flock of bleating sheep. Snee returns to the stage, now as their shepherd.
Curt L. Tofteland , director of the Actors' Shakespeare Project production that opened officially over the weekend, rocks back and forth on his feet as he assesses the scene.
"Any problems, sheep people?" he asks. "That was almost perfect, bear."
Tofteland, a strapping director with long, curly ginger hair and a grizzled beard, seems as pleased with the bear bit as if he'd come up with it himself. But he didn't. The actors did. At the beginning of rehearsals, Tofteland left them on their own for two days to see what impulses they would come up with. He calls this exercise "Ren Run," short for "Renaissance run-through," and says it's something actors did in Shakespeare's time, when there were no directors and they determined their own entrances, exits, and blocking.
This is Tofteland's first time directing with the Actors' Shakespeare Project, and he's brought such techniques to strengthen a sense of ensemble. He's honed his ideas over 26 years as artistic director, actor, educator, workshop facilitator, and more. He's producing artistic director of the Kentucky Shakespeare Festival . And as head of the 11-year-old program Shakespeare Behind Bars , he's put on the Bard's plays in the Luther Luckett Correctional Complex in LaGrange , Ky., using inmates as actors.
Tofteland's production of "The Tempest" was the subject of the 2005 documentary "Shakespeare Behind Bars," which followed the nine-month rehearsal process and the deepening bonds among the prisoners. Many of the plays he chooses for Shakespeare Behind Bars deal with revenge, justice, and redemption -- themes that would have particular resonance for men serving time.
Some of those same themes are present in "The Winter's Tale." The play starts out something like "Othello": A leader assumes, wrongly, that his wife has been unfaithful to him with his close friend. In this case, Leontes (played by Ricardo Pitts-Wiley ) doesn't strangle his pregnant wife, Hermione (Paula Langton ), he sends her to prison. His blind obsession causes him to seemingly lose everything: his son, his wife, his infant daughter, his best friend, a faithful servant; all either flee him or die. But "The Winter's Tale" is one of Shakespeare's late plays that end not in tragedy but in reconciliation and forgiveness.
The cast members seem unusually comfortable with one another, calling out encouragement to their fellows onstage.
Such free-spiritedness is encouraged by Tofteland, who does the same thing. A collaborative director, he seeks ideas from anyone in the production, even if he doesn't always follow them. That is true whether his actors are longtime professionals or incarcerated murderers.
"Speak the text, speak the truth, speak the big ideas, empowerment," he says in an interview before the rehearsal, summing up his basic principles.
One of the ways he encourages empowerment is to have the cast and crew sit in a circle at the beginning and end of rehearsal every day and share ideas. "Everyone sits on the rim," he says. "There are no leaders, and they're all leaders. You step into the circle, find out where the strength lies; collaborate with them."
He adds, "The work I do in the prison informs the work I do in the profession and as a teacher."
With Shakespeare Behind Bars, he's often worked with the same men over the past decade. He doesn't mince words about the prisoners; some have committed heinous crimes. But he doesn't judge.
"Their journey is to take responsibility for their crimes, then the healing can begin," he says. "Then you have to change your behavior, your view of the world, and become the good human being that lives inside."
And the work has paid off. As the award-winning documentary reveals, many of the men have achieved great personal growth through learning about Shakespeare's characters. Tofteland is proud of the fact that the recidivism rate for participating inmates is zero.
Because of Tofteland's work with prisoners, says ASP artistic director Benjamin Evett, "he has a deep understanding of the forces that drive these characters, this unreasoning jealousy that leads to the violent acts in the first part of the play, the necessity of forgiveness and the difficulty in forgiving oneself and others. He knows that to his core."
Evett says that after seeing Tofteland work with ASP in a couple of workshops, he chose him to direct "The Winter's Tale" because he felt his ideas would strengthen the company's bonds.
Company member Steinbach plays Paulina , who brings about the play's culminating reconciliation. She says that at the beginning of the "Ren Run" it was odd to start working without a director present.
"The first day was really kind of scary," she says by phone. In the daily circle, she says, "People get to talk about their discoveries, revelations, any ideas that may have occurred to them. We began to do that on our own. By the second day everyone was committed to talking about ideas and brought a lot to the table. Sometimes it was a train wreck, sometimes it seemed as natural as could be. The bear came out of an impulse a couple of people had, and then we started joining in."
On the third day, they did a run-through for Tofteland and others connected to the show.
"At the beginning, I thought it was a little, um, silly," Steinbach adds, laughing. "But then I got in the spirit of it. I think all of us started to have a good time."
Catherine Foster can be reached at foster@globe.com. 