This week’s Take Ten finds CLAIRE SCHOONOVER tackling the role of Amanda Wingfield in Tennessee William’s The Glass Menagerie [1] at Annapolis Shakespeare Company [1] through April 15. Get the inside scoop on this tractor-driving, chrysalis-busting artist who is one of “four people struggling to express their poetic souls.”
1) What was the first show you ever saw, and what impact did it have?
It was the RSC production of The Merchant of Venice, 198I, in Stratford-Upon-Avon. My best friend and I were supposed to be celebrating graduating high school by whooping it up on the Greek island of Ios but saving for college caused us to rethink and go local. I’d love to tell you it blew my mind but, sadly, not even David Suchets (Shylock) or Sinéad Cusack (Portia) could take my 18-year-old mind off Greeks in Speedos! Maddening and I still haven’t made it to Ios!
2) What was your first involvement in a theatrical production?
I was in 8th grade in Barry, South Wales. I played the Chrysalis in Karel and Josef Capek’s The Insect Play. I spent most of the play in an elaborate cocoon declaring that I was going to change the world once I was born! Despite these optimistic declarations, I burst out of the cocoon only to perform a brief, but tragic, “Moth dance” and promptly died. My mother said I was “oddly entertaining.” I think she meant “fantastic.”
3) What’s your favorite play or musical, and why do you like it so much?
I tend to see and enjoy plays more than musicals, but I have to choose Gypsy for many reasons but mostly because I still can’t get over the 2015 production I saw featuring Imelda Staunton as Momma Rose. There are many similarities between Momma Rose and Amanda (who I am playing in The Glass Menagerie), they’re both a ‘pioneer woman without a frontier’, driven, and determined to be the wind at their children’s backs regardless of what errant direction that force of nature blows.
4) What’s the worst day job you ever took?
One summer I picked hops on a farm in Kent; it was dreadful. I couldn’t drive, but the farmer insisted that I drove the tractor that ferried the pickers along the avenues of hops. I was constantly crashing. It was terrifying and humiliating. Once, I nearly decapitated the pickers by driving through one of the taut wires that held up the hops. I did learn to drive a tractor though.
5) What is your most embarrassing moment in the theatre?
Back to the The Insect Play, whenever the Chrysalis spoke, a bright light shone on her and a beautiful harp played. Everyone looked expectantly at the cocoon that was empty because the Chrysalis was busy trying to impress the high school kids backstage by taking a puff of their cigarettes. Terribly embarrassing but it cured me of missing an entrance at an early age.
6) What are you enjoying most about working on The Glass Menagerie [1] at Annapolis Shakespeare Company [1]?
Wonderfully talented cast and crew, and I appreciate that Donald Hicken (director) has framed this production in a way that highlights four people struggling to express their poetic souls in a society and circumstances that tend to crush that inherent human creativity. It rings current to me. I love Amanda’s determination to keep her family together at all costs, and that tenacious, overbearing need to control your kid’s rings true in my own life too.
7) Other than your significant other, who’s your dream date (living or dead) and why?
Billy Connolly, the Glaswegian comedian and actor because he’s f---ing hilarious and because he once quipped, "A lot of people say that it's a lack of vocabulary that makes you swear. Rubbish. I know thousands of words but I still prefer 'f---.'”
8) What is your dream role/job?
I’d love to tackle Winnie from Happy Days. I did a short scene from the play last year and found the fragmented language and props extremely challenging. What a beautiful play, both funny and deeply disturbing. Lady Bracknell has been on my list for a while too.
9) If you could travel back in time, what famous production or performance would you choose to see?
Laurette Taylor as Amanda in the original production of The Glass Menagerie. Uta Hagen in the original production of Who's Afraid of Virgina Woolf?
10) What advice would you give to an 8-year-old smitten by theatre / for a graduating MFA student?
To both: try to enjoy the process and not the outcome. Celebrate the mysterious nature of a performance; don’t try to understand every nuance of it. Let some of it remain mysterious. Naming everything robs it of its magic. Theatre should not be your life, explore everything off stage so you have something to put onstage. Finally, never smoke backstage, and visit the Greek Island of Ios (or Stratford-Upon- Avon is nice too).
CLAIRE SCHOONOVER has been working in Washington theatres since 2013, she started acting in Stuttgart Germany in 2008 and has appeared locally at Annapolis Shakespeare Theatre in Much Ado About Nothing and The Glass Menagerie.
Other credits include: Romeo and Juliet Love Knows No Age (Unexpected Stage), The Trojan Women Project and Henry IV Parts 1 & 2 (Brave Spirits Theatre), Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Edge of the Universe Players 2), Solomon & Marion (Anacostia Playhouse), The House of Yes (The Theatre Company). Claire is a 2014 grad of The Theatre Lab's Honors Acting Conservatory and is a recent graduate from Shakespeare Theatre and GWUs Academy for Classical Acting.
Claire is from Oldham England.
Links:
[1] http://www.annapolisshakespeare.org/index.html
