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by Helen Shaw Rachael Warren, a graduate of the A.R.T. Institute, returns this season to play Ismene in Antigone and Jennifer in The Doctor's Dilemma. She chatted with Helen Shaw about the past and the future. Rachael Warren is taking on Lady Teazle in The School for Scandal at Trinity Repertory Company. As the feather-brained fashionplate, she will tear through a dozen costume changes during the show, each more fantastic than the last - including a dress that is also an umbrella. But the Rachael Warren eating lunch at the Trinity Grill is a far cry from her flibbertigibbet character. Offstage she sports simple cranberry cords, a Western shirt, and red aviator glasses. Raised in Hanover, Kansas, a town of 700 on the Nebraska border, the rare trip to Kansas City (three and half hours away) to see touring productions kindled her desire to pursue musical theatre. By the time she was nine, she was already in a show, and by the time she was in high school, she was a pupil of the legendary Ann Reinking. That relationship proved formative, and Rachael has worked with Reinking on a number of projects, including Tonight at 8:30 this past summer at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. Rachael found herself firmly on a musical theatre track, choosing it as her major in college. But in the course of her undergraduate training, she fell in love with non-musical theatre, so she spent a summer in New York, getting a crash course. She worked as an intern at The Kitchen, Nada, and the Wooster Group, and immersed herself in the avant-garde dance and Fringe theatre scenes. At the Wooster Group she found herself splitting time between the menial tasks of interning and exploring their archives: cloistered in a dusty, hot room in the Performing Garage, she saw every tape the Wooster Group had - performances from LSD ... Just the High Points to The Hairy Ape. That summer was a shock - she realized that her training was far from complete. She says: "I took my mom to a show called Vomit and Roses down at Nada. She was terrified for my life! She thought I'd soon be rolling around naked in mud puddles!"
While at the Institute, she appeared on the Loeb Stage twice: as a raging Bacchante in François Rochaix's Bacchae and as a diamond-hard Violet in David Wheeler's Man and Superman. Now, as she returns to A.R.T., she says she is "giddy with delight" at working with Rochaix and Wheeler again. In The Bacchae, the Chorus worked closely with percussionists, scoring their every phrase. That sense of musicality - of a text as music - thrills Rachael when she talks about working with Rochaix again. "François is persistent and specific, he tunes his pieces. Having worked extensively in opera, he understands that words can only point at meaning. What communicates is music and sound. François' process exposes deep cross-cultural and cross-literal meanings." This is vital, she says, when tackling a Greek text in which the sheer size of the emotions staggers the actors and the audience. With Antigone, Rachael does not want to fall into the trap of seeing Ismene, Antigone's cautious sister, as a weak woman. Instead, she will find a way to reconcile Ismene's desire to preserve her family in the face of tragedy with the fact that all siblings must eventually take different paths. Confronting this daunting task, she enthuses, "I'm happiest when I'm in an 'anything can happen' group, with actors and a director who are ready to play. François is one of those. He always says he wants 'something more wild!' He is a buoyant spirit." She speaks with similar delight about Wheeler. "Shaw's language can appear terrifyingly dense, but not with David. David honors the text but keeps it fun and alive." This will be Rachael's third Shavian role, having also played Eliza in My Fair Lady (the musical based on Pygmalion), and her relationship to Shaw's language is still changing. "Shaw is beautifully specific. The characters' motivations are often the same as ours today, so the key negotiation is always going to be with the language." Wheeler's energetic approach keeps Shaw from being all "corsets and collars," and provides the vital function of "reendowing the text with meaning for today." Rachael's anticipation for the coming rehearsals with Rochaix and Wheeler is palpable. The reason? "At the heart of their work, there is something incredibly untraditional: a beating heart." Helen Shaw is a first-year dramaturgy student at the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.
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