By Candice J. Wanner

So, you’re probably wondering what the Popcorn Hat Players, that bunch of crazy actors that stage children’s theater in Strawberry Square, and the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival could possibly have in common? Well, the answer to that would be Clark and Melissa Nicholson, the founders of both the Players, the Festival and a group of roving actors called Bard Senseless.

When I talked to Clark about the driving force behind all these endeavors he stated that he and his wife had both been professional actors and were constantly being hired in different states for different jobs and so didn’t see very much of each other. They had come to Harrisburg to visit Melissa’s family and they decided to check out the local children’s theater scene. Seeing that there really wasn’t anyone consistently doing children’s theater in the area, although several of the local theaters offer children’s classes and do an occasional children’s piece, they decided to give it a go, with astounding success. The Popcorn Hat Players perform four to five shows a week in their Strawberry Square home plus they do three to four travelling shows a week at various schools, parties and workshops. It gets even crazier around the holidays, says Clark.

I went to visit the Popcorn Hat Players and was treated to a whacky rendition of that timeless fairy tale classic, Cinderella. Now, not knowing what to expect, I was pleasantly surprised by the well-filled audience of youngsters ranging in age from babes in arms to pre-teen. The children sat en masse on the floor in front of the stage with their mothers and a sprinkling of fathers lining the rear of the room on the folding chairs provided for the adults. The children were well-behaved, helped by the fact that the actors before the real show even started took them through several fun stretching routines and nursery songs that gave the children an outlet for some of their energy and helped them to remain quiet during the show. When Cinderella finally got underway, who should appear as the ugly stepsisters but Clark and his co-hort Eric Messner in drag doing their very own version of West Side Story’s “I Feel Pretty”.   It was a sight to behold, let me tell you. The show was full of funny asides, pratfalls and silly humor which appealed to the children, but also contained some humor that had the adults in the back chuckling. The show, with the introduction and stretching routines in the beginning, ran a little under an hour. The children didn’t seem to have any trouble staying focused for that period of time nor did I, as a matter of fact. As I was looking around at the adults in the audience, I could tell they were enjoying the show as much as their children. I know I did. The cost is $3 per child, $2 per adult.

The Popcorn Hat Players also offer theater classes and camps for kids. The camps accommodate children ages 6-12 and the classes are separated by grades. There are two camp sessions being offered, one in July and one in August. If your child is interested in acting, call 238-4111 and talk to Melissa for all the details.

On a very different note, I also went to observe a rehearsal of the Shakespeare in the Park production of 12th Night, which is to be staged in Reservoir Park June 5-7 and 11-14. Performances are free although there is a $2 charge for parking. If you bring a canned good, however, parking is free and all canned items are being donated to the Bethesda Mission.

This is The Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival’s fifth annual performance and is sponsored by HARSCO, the City of Harrisburg and the Allied Arts Fund. 12th Night is a comedy based on mistaken identity and confused mix-ups. Clark stated that it is a show about “realizing some adult truths” and he hopes that the set and staging will reflect this interpretation. The set, designed by Scenographer Lynn Porter, is to be a “faded gypsy carnival” where they took the “happy colors of childhood and muted them with a bit of reality”.  Clark stated that he cut many of the more obscure references and repetitions from the script to make it more accessible and appealing to modern audiences. Those coming to see the show and expecting the ‘traditional’ elizabethan costumes will be disappointed, as the show is going to keep with the “faded carnival” theme. They wanted to give the show a feeling of age, but didn’t want to set it in any one specific time period. Especially since 12th Night is a “kind of Shakespearean fairy tale”, according to Clark. It does best when you think of it as being set in a time “long, long ago and far, far away” to quote the beginning of another, more modern, fairy tale.

At the blocking rehearsal I attended, I overheard Clark instructing two of the actors, Megan Towle (Viola) and Mike Knarr (Antonio) to make their entrance from the back of the park and through the audience. Later, I questioned him if there was going to be a lot of audience interaction in the staging and he said that “Shakespeare had a different idea of theater than what it’s evolved into today. Today, we view the stage as a closed set and the audience as a non-existent fourth wall that acts as an uninvolved observer. Shakespeare understood theater as an artificial construct and so makes the audience an observing character of the show through many asides and soliloquies that are to be directed right to the audience. So, there are many times within the show when the ‘4th wall’ is broken and the audience drawn into the production” almost in a one-sided dialogue.

When asked about the difficulty of performing Shakespeare to people who generally view it as something they struggled through in high school and who find it somewhat incomprehensible, Clark smiled and said that the challenge is to convey meaning in other ways than through the words alone. “It’s fitting the proverbial ‘square peg into a round hole’ at times”. But, if you provide a ‘looser reference’ and make the shows more accessible through cuts or body language or some careful modernization, audiences will understand and grasp more than they think. Humor is humor and “much of the physical schtick that we associate with say, the Three Stooges, has been around for a very long time and in fact came from an italian form of theater.” (I’m sure those ancient italians would’ve laughed just as hard at Moe slapping Curly as we still do today). So, if people come with an open mind, they’ll find themselves enjoying themes and subjects that are as universally true now as they were in Shakespeare’s time.