Sword Play at Van Vorst Gazebo

An ‘Intro-Sword Fighting Rehearsal’ is how Jon Ciccarelli, Director of the Hudson Shakespeare Company explained the clashing and clanging occurring in the Gazebo at Van Vorst Park on the afternoon of the last Sunday in May. Now in its 18th season, the Hudson Shakespeare Company actors were learning how to brandish rapiers as part of their preparation for one of the bard’s more obscure works, Troilus and Cressida. “It’s not quite a romance, it’s not a quite a tragedy,” says Jon. In fact, the play is one of those “problem plays” some scholars talk about. Sorry to say, it’s one of the plays I haven’t read. It takes place during the Greek & Trojan war and has two plots, a re-telling of the Iliad, with Agamemnon, Achilles, Ajax, Hector and that bunch and the other plotline is the tragic love story of Troilus and Cressida, a sordid medieval yarn and the basis of a poem by Chaucer. According to Joyce Carol Oates, “Troilus and Cressida, that most vexing and ambiguous of Shakespeare's plays, strikes the modern reader as a contemporary document—its investigation of numerous infidelities, its criticism of tragic pretensions, above all, its implicit debate between what is essential in human life and what is only existential...”. The Hudson Shakespeare Company will perform the play on July 16th at the Van Vorst Park Gazebo. The sword fighting rehearsal seems to have went well. “We want the sword fighting to be more like gladiators, not swashbuckling,” adds Jon.

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