Every summer since 2021, the Forest Theatre Company has put on a free Shakespeare play in the open space behind the Altenheim.
This year is no different, as the group’s fifth annual Shakespeare in the Park kicks off next month. On August 8-10 and 15-17, the Forest Theatre Company is producing “The Two Noble Kinsmen.”
Set in ancient Greece, “The Two Noble Kinsmen” follows two cousins and lifelong best friends, Arcite and Palamon, along with Emilia — a woman who was in love with her best girl friend who died. Emilia also becomes a love interest for both men.
“They’re sort of in love with each other, these two young men, then they see her and fight over her,” said Richard Corley, producing artistic director of the Forest Theatre Company.
In addition to the obvious themes of friendship and love, the play explores the power structure of society and same-sex relationships.
“It’s really about the question of whether men and women can have relationships with each other that are just as strong as marriage or relationships with someone of the opposite sex,” Corley said.
“We talked a lot about the queerness in the play and this idea of, back in the day when this was written, there was less of a stigma for men to be with other men if it didn’t impact their property rights,” said Nathaniel Kohlmeier, who plays Palamon.
Part of the reason Corley chose to put on “The Two Noble Kinsmen” for Shakespeare in the Park is because of how relevant the story remains today.
“There’s no reason to do a play if it doesn’t speak to the moment,” Corley said. He added that he also picked it because it’s not a regularly performed Shakespeare play. He said a self-proclaimed “Shakespeare completist” from England emailed him to say she’s flying in just to see the play, since she hasn’t yet. “I have not talked to a single person who’s seen it before.”
As with previous Shakespeare in the Park productions, this one won’t use microphones or lights. Amos Gillespie is composing the play’s score, as he has for past performances.
But there are a few new elements to this year’s Shakespeare in the Park.
“Every year, I try to make the physical stage different, so the audience’s physical experience is different,” Corley said. While last year’s Shakespeare in the Park production of “Pericles” had a stage in an avenue setting, with an audience on both sides of it, this summer’s stage is in a thrust setting, extending out into the audience.
Most of the cast is also new this year, both to Shakespeare in the Park and Forest Theatre Company.
With a recent partnership with Madison Street Theater in Oak Park, Corley said he hopes to increase Shakespeare in the Park’s reach by bringing future productions to parks in other villages.
“As we expand our programming year-round, it’s really great that we’re having new actors and meeting new people,” he said.
Acting Shakespeare
The Forest Park Review sat down with the three leads of “The Two Noble Kinsmen” to hear about what they considered to be the most interesting and challenging parts of the play.
Sania Henry, who plays Emelia, said she’s eager to star in a Shakespeare play, since she won’t get the chance to while finishing up her undergraduate theater degree at Northern Illinois University. Henry said she’s also excited to act as a love interest, as she hasn’t yet done any onstage romantic work in college.
“The desperation and the juggling that Emelia has to go through, as well as her inherent indecisiveness and her being so open about that, is really appealing to me. As indecisive as women can be, I feel like society looks down upon women for being so,” Henry said. “But I think that the compassion presented when toggling between two choices only shows how much more human a person is, and so I’m really looking forward to being able to display that for people.”
Other actors said they’ve been inspired by Forest Theatre Company’s production process.
Part of the reason Marck Kiselevach — who plays Arcite and has a theater degree from Wayne State University in Detroit — said he wanted to be in this play is because of what he calls a unique audition process, where Corley roughly staged the play in 30-second intervals and had actors walk through it.
From there, the rehearsal process has been synergistic. In the first few table reads of the script, the actors said they discussed the characters’ possible motivations, and how they’re affected by the play’s setting.
“It’s very lovely to be in a room where somebody will say something and that sends me on this whole other train [of thought]” Kiselevach said.
“It’s very collaborative, which is really nice,” Kohlmeier said. He’s been doing theater since he was a child and says that some productions he’s starred in have been stricter. “It’s nice when a director is like, ‘We have an open stage. Let’s play, let’s try things.’”
“Every person’s piece in the story is affected by the other people in the room and welcomed for dissection by all. I think that gives every person in the room a richer understanding of where we want to go and what our foundation is,” Henry said. While her theater education has given her helpful groundwork into script and character analysis, Henry also has a background in social work and psychology. “I’m always thinking about people and what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. That is one of my favorite parts of this process,” Henry said.
It’s a collaboration that Corley says is “one of the great joys of being a director.”
“When you can get this group of collaborators in the room and you, thank God, don’t have to be the smartest person in the room, you can really learn from people,” Corley said. “The process is one of opening up your mind to all these people who can tell you much more, especially about the characters and the relationships, than you could possibly know.”
The actors say that among the most difficult parts was the text itself, how modern speech is different from that of Shakespeare’s time.
For Kiselevach, one of the harder parts of the production is “learning to give more respect to the text and to let the text work on me,” he said. “If I’m not careful or intentioned, what happens is I just lay a wash over something. But it’s about specificity and it’s about being able to be cognizant of, especially with Shakespeare, what the audience is receiving. Because if everything’s important, nothing’s important.”
Kohlmeier said this is one of the meatier roles he’s had in a Shakespeare production.
“When you carry a certain amount of the weight of the story, there’s an importance of clarity and making sure, not only that you’re understanding what you’re saying, you’re feeling the right emotions and conveying those emotions as a character, understanding your arc, but also that the audience knows what you’re saying,” Kohlmeier said. He added that the actors are “really making sure that [they’re] hitting key points in [their] lines, especially if there’s a great deal of plot within your lines that the audience has to understand.”
The actors also share what they hope the audience takes away from the play. For Kohlmeier, the lesson is twofold. Partially, he wants viewers to notice the impact of war and imprisonment on a community.
“Especially with everything happening right now, audiences should see an analog of the broad, sweeping consequences that happen when your country or nation chooses to go to war. Who benefits from that and who loses?” Kohlmeier said. He added that another lesson is not to take anything for granted. “Sometimes we let responsibilities, societal expectations, maybe even a vision that we have of ourselves, get in the way of love, relationships, and important things,” Kohlmeier said.
Henry has a similar takeaway, that there is love in all kinds of places.
“It can still grow in spaces in which it may not be expected or in spaces in which there are obstacles preventing it from being shown,” Henry said. She added that the actors are “able to depict love regardless of the words coming out of our mouths because it’s written in the entirety of the story. I feel like it’ll lay warmly upon our audience members.”
Henry said that she hopes the audience takes away how to express love to their friends, neighbors and partners in the way they did in the time Shakespeare lived.
“Now we’re taught to bottle things up or [that love] has to look a certain way,” Henry said. “But if we allowed ourselves to be as dramatic as the Noble Kinsmen, I think we would recognize love in our lives so much more frequently, often hiding in little corners.”
