Students to perform ‘Timon of Athens’

At a time when Americans have a tough time relating to those with different views, a group of University of Pittsburgh at Bradford students has been undertaking an old-fashioned exercise in empathy – theater.

In addition to working with Dr. Kevin Ewert, professor of theater, the students in next weekend’s staging of one of Shakespeare’s lesser-known plays spent three days in September in deep discussion to add humanity to the words on the page.

The result of their work, “Timon of Athens,” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 14-16 and 2 p.m. Nov. 17 in the KOA Lobby and Studio Theater Blaisdell Hall. Tickets are $6 for the public and $2 for all students and may be bought in advance at the Bromeley Family Theater Box Office at upb.pitt.edu/TheArts or by calling 814-362-5113.

An accomplished interpreter of Shakespeare himself, Ewert called in backup to give students more perspectives on English’s most produced playwright. Actor and writer Keith Hamilton Cobb and director Jessica Burr of Project Untitled spent a brief residency with the students to discover their characters and the play and cut it down to a manageable hour and ten minutes.

This is not Cobb’s first trip to Pitt-Bradford. In 2017, he performed “American Moor,” which he also wrote and which is now in the permanent collection of the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C.

Cobb said, “At the heart of this process is sustained, intensive text analysis, workshopping, and ensemble creation, with an uninterrupted focus on what, in deepest truth, are the human animals that people these plays.”

Ewert, who ran a classical theater company in Pittsburgh and earned his doctorate from the Shakespeare Institute, said, “The rallying cry is ‘show me the human being’ – something we don’t get in classical Shakespearean productions.”

He chose one of Shakespeare’s more obscure works because the idea of transactional relationships is very topical. “Any good work of art has an emotional core to it,” he said. “There’s something in ‘Timon’ about friendship and what we do if it’s not real.”

Audience members will have a chance to attend one of Timon’s lavish parties and enjoy hors d’oeuvres in the theater lobby before enjoying the play’s second act in the theater.

Miranda Mong, a junior English major from Russel, plays the titular lead role. While this was the fourth play she has taken part in at Pitt-Bradford, she was feeling nervous about tackling the early modern English of Shakespeare.

“Once you understand that they’re human, it makes them more accessible,” she said. Timon is a rich person who spends lavishly on her friends. (One thing the workshop helped Mong do was translate a male character into a female character.) And Timon has many friends, until she runs out of money. Then she discovers that most of her “friends” were not real.

“I think the workshop changed everything for me,” Mong said. Throughout the workshop, she dug deep into her character and into herself to figure out how Timon got to the place she was in the play and how she would process her friends’ betrayal.

“It was a great opportunity to get help fleshing out an intricate character and be able to relate to what she says by tapping into my own experiences.”

Zecheriah Waterman, a freshman English major from Bradford, said that the guided discussion and understanding Mong’s character helped him understand his own. Waterman plays a professional cynic and at first thought of him simply as an angry old man, but he said the workshop helped him see his how his character relates to Timon and feels protective of her because he sees her false friends for what they are.

Wren Lehman, a freshman interdisciplinary arts major from Carmichaels, agreed that the workshop helped him interpret his own character, a poet who cuts Timon off. “That character did not work in that way before the workshop,” he said.

Other students taking part in the production are Ethan Winkleman, a freshman English major from Downingtown; Jedidiah Waterman, a freshman pre-vet student from Bradford; and Marah Martinec, a junior English education 7-12 major from Oil City.

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