“There is an infinity within limitations”
—Irwin Appel
By Hannah Z. Morley
UCSB Theater and Dance’s program Naked Shakes staged its first 100% Zoom production of the fall season this past weekend, Immortal Longings, when each actor, theater technician and the play’s adapter and director, Irwin Appel, presented the production from various locations across the country.
Appel combined Shakespeare’s plays Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra with George Bernard Shaw’s Caesar and Cleopatra, to craft this three hour and fifteen minute long play, which has yet to be staged in a theater.
More than 300 people across the world attended this past Friday night as its first act was performed. Its second act took place on Saturday and both acts were repeated on Sunday.
“The irony is that we may be six feet apart, but we are more global than ever,” Appel, who chairs the department, said in an email interview.
A Soothsayer (Khrystyna Rosalye) warns the audience about the conspirators against Caesar. Photo by Hannah Z. Morley.
While Appel had Immortal Longings in the works for years before the recent pandemic, he felt pushed by the death of George Floyd and the “questions of freedom” brought forth by the upcoming election to finish writing it and put on the production with Naked Shakes.
This deep dive into Roman history would have been impossible to present without using Zoom as a platform, says Appel.
The production required a mastery of timing, with characters leaving and entering the Zoom session with an ease only possible after much rehearsal. By using sleight of hand tricks and the art of good timing, the play created the illusion that characters could pass items back and forth or even touch one another from their Zoom boxes, each actor reacting to the other’s movements in perfect time.
Immortal Longings was the first of several online productions UCSB Theater has planned for this fall, pushing Zoom’s boundaries and innovating its definition of what theater looks like in order to bring students and faculty back to work.
Julius Caesar (Jared Webb) and Cleopatra (Shekinah Bryant) converse. Photo by Hannah Z. Morley.
Coming up this season is Becoming Othello: A Black Girl’s Journey by Debra Ann Byrd, to be performed Oct. 17, and Trumpus Caesar written by Carlos Morton, which comes out Oct. 24. A production written by College of Creative Studies student Jordan Finley entitled Why We March is set to premiere on Oct. 30.
While Zoom was in no way designed as a theater platform, Appel said this new “hybrid front” allowed his recent production to become more ambitious. For example, large-scale battle scenes were portrayed by projecting on the screen ancient art of historic battles along with the sounds of screams and swords clashing.
Conspirators prepare to stab Julius Caesar (Jared Webb) on the Ides of March. Photo by Hannah Z. Morley.
The show’s actors also used their mobile devices, in addition to their laptops, to allow for some characters to be perceived as narrators while in the throes of the production’s action. In what can only be described as a mobile vlogging point of view, an actor connected to the Zoom play with a mobile phone. Then, with camera facing, the actor moved around the room, as if physically moving through the action, speaking directly to the audience while describing the scene.
The juxtaposition of characters appearing on mobile devices with those appearing on laptop screens kept the play visually engaging and helped immerse the audience in the show’s riot and battle scenes.
Such synchronicity could only occur after much dedicated rehearsal time. But the result is that Appel now believes that Zoom allows audience members to have a more intimate experience than he had previously assumed.
As if watching a “close-up film,” the audience gains “a window into the actor’s innermost thoughts and vulnerabilities,” Appel said. Zoom also takes the pressure off of the actors having to be “larger than life” and grants them the opportunity to create more “nuanced” and “truthful” connections to their global audience.
Brutus (Cyrus Roberts) stabs Caesar (Jared Webb). Photo by Hannah Z. Morley.
Inspired by current political turmoil, in the United States, especially building up to the Nov. 3 election, Appel's goal was to create a production that questions the meaning of freedom in the face of tyranny or enslavement.
He designed Immortal Longings to show that the Theater Department, and everyone at UCSB, should feel united in the face of whatever comes next. “We feel it is important to stand up for what we believe and what is right,” Appel said, demonstrating that adapting theater in the time of a pandemic holds a larger lesson.
“We must continue to innovate,” he said. “It may seem contradictory, but there is an infinity within limitations.”
Hannah Z. Morley is a fourth-year UC Santa Barbara student, majoring in Writing & Literature at the College of Creative Studies. She is a web and social media intern for the Division of Humanities and Fine Arts.