Meet the Cast - Becca Petersen as Clara Johnson

By Kristen Leinbach, Dramaturg

When asked about writing The Light in the Piazza and about the relationships of the characters, Craig Lucas said the following

“Clara apprehends the world differently than her mother. [Margaret] goes through Italy with a guidebook. But the girl sees experiences, she sees the light in the piazza. She literally experiences the light as representative of her deepest feelings…That’s why the score has moments where words no longer suffice or are no longer important. It’s the feeling and light. Those things carry us. Human beings are just a conduit for love. I think Clara sees that. Love comes before her and after her.”

I asked Becca Petersen, portraying Clara Johnson, to share a little about her life as well as her experience getting to really know Clara.

“I am Becca Petersen from Carmel, Indiana. I am a senior studying Music Dance Theatre. I will be graduating in April with plans of moving to New York City! At BYU I have performed in PETER PAN as well as two years in the Young Ambassadors traveling to Southern Africa and China. These past two summers I have performed professionally at The Muny and Music Theatre of Wichita. Aside from musical theatre I love to go thrift shopping, take naps, eat out, and spend time with my friends and family.

Clara Johnson has always been one of my dream roles and I could not be more excited and grateful to have the opportunity to play her.

The Light in the Piazza follows Clara and her mother, Margaret, as they travel through Italy. Clara is a very youthful girl who lives life exactly in the moment. She is bright-eyed as she sees and experiences this new place for the first time. The plot is centered around relationships: Clara’s relationship with her mother and her new budding relationship with a Florentine boy, Fabrizio. I feel that I connect with Clara on many levels. I love to travel, explore, and see new places. Because of previous travel opportunities I have had I understand what it is like experiencing different cultures and having to figure out how you fit in. In the show many of the characters, including Clara, go through big life transitions. Currently I can relate as I am getting ready to graduate, preparing to move to NY, having family members and close friends get married, and trying to understand love and relationships of my own. All of these experiences can be scary but can also be incredible if we let ourselves learn, grow, and live in them. We must allow ourselves to find the happiness and joy in all things we experience. In essence, that is what Clara does. Clara finds what makes her happy.”

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Light In The Piazza

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by Christian Riboldi, dramaturg Last time we had a brief overview of the play Twelfth Night. Today we'll be talking about a few for the versions of Twelfth Night that are currently out there today. One of the great things about Shakespeare is it's timelessness. These are stories that will be told and retold over and over again, because of how they speak each of us. Over the years Shakespeare has been performed in a multitude of genres. The most well known Shakespearean style is perform it as accurate to Shakespeare's time as possible. The Globe Theater has recently put together one such performance. It's not only accurate in how they dress but in the types of actors they use. In the times of Shakespeare all actors were male. Even the female characters were played by male actors. Here are two very funny clips from Twelfth Night performed at The Globe that show this style of Shakespeare. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AvL6LiJkCJQ[/embed] [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDPT2e26SgY[/embed] Another medium for performing Shakespeare is film. A slightly more realistic take of this story is Kenneth Branagh's version of Twelfth Night. In this version he doesn't try to be true to Shakespeare's times, but he does keep the production stage like. Though it's a film notice that every scene is set up like a stage, with the camera being the audience. If you're interested in watching the whole thing or just poking around the scenes here is the full production. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6i3J17Jp0ag[/embed] Still more movie like is the 1969 version. Where the illusion of the stage is completely dropped, and with some movie magic the same actress plays both Viola and Sebastian. If you pay attention you might recognize the actor for Malvolio from a special film he's famous for. [embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuwgQ9Qof88[/embed] Now we get into the movies that drop all sense of the stage and turn Twelfth Night into a full movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R39jE4SUEF4 These are just a few of the ways that Shakespeare has been performed over time. There are also movies like She's the Man which is based on the plot of Twelfth Night. That movie however removes all of Shakespeare's words altogether and just uses some names and basic plot points to tell it's story. It also changes the time period to a modern high school. Here in the BYU production we are going to be performing the show on stage, but the time period is going to be drastically changed to the Wild West. Even thought the show has been shortened significantly, almost every word we have in the script is part of the original Shakespeare. We hope to see you there. Next time we are going to focus on one of the fun ways that we have made this show into a western musical! See you then!

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by Haley Flanders, dramaturg Welcome to the blog for BYU’s upcoming production of The Taste of Sunrise. I am excited to be the dramaturg for this unique and powerful production, written by renown playwright Suzan L. Zeder and directed by Julia Ashworth, head of the BYU Theatre Education program. The show runs March 11-26 in the Margetts Black Box Theater in the Harris Fine Arts Center on campus. A bit about me: I graduated with my MA in theatre from BYU in December and am an elementary school drama specialist. I was the dramaturg for The Fisherman and His Wife in the fall of 2014. The Taste of Sunrise is a very special play, and will probably be unlike any play you have seen before. It centers on the story of a boy named Tuc as he grows up during the years of 1917 and 1928 in a little rural town called Ware, Illinois. The play takes place Tuc's mind and memory, showcasing his experiences as a Deaf boy during the Great Depression. The play features scenes of him losing his hearing as baby, learning to communicate with his father Jonas Tucker and other hearing folk in the town, making friends such as Maizie and Roscoe at the Central Institute for the Deaf in St. Louis, and ultimately trying to find his identity and place to call home. This play is unique because the ENTIRE production is signed and spoken (one actor signs, another speaks), and some of the cast members, namely the actor playing Tuc, are actually Deaf or hard of hearing in real life. In, fact, this is a requirement of the play - the actor who plays Tuc must actually be Deaf. Playwright Zeder states in defense of this requirement: [caption id="attachment_4265" align="alignright" width="174"] Playwright Suzan L. Zeder[/caption] “It is the difference between someone copying choreographed movements and someone dancing in the language of their soul … It sign language is to have dramatic impact it must have meaning; it must be real and specific if it is to have emotional eloquence and physical poetry.” –Author’s Notes to Mother Hicks (pg. 5) New actor, Ben Featherstone, will play the role of Tuc. Look forward to interviews from him and two cast members who are hard of hearing, David Hampton (who plays Dr. Grindly Mann and other characters) and Jason Keeler (who plays Roscoe). Many of the other cast members are fluent in ASL or have taken classes at BYU. Look for upcoming blogs that will highlight the Deaf culture and the power of ASL in performance, and will educate on how to sign certain words or phrases from the show! WHERE DID THE TITLE COME FROM? This play first premiered exactly 20 years ago (1996) at the Seattle Children's Theatre. The title came from a pertinent line in the play which preceded it, entitled Mother Hicks, written in 1986. Tuc feels as if people are only judging him for his disability and not paying attention to all of his abilities. He poetically claims, "You look at me and only see the things I cannot do, thing I cannot be; But I can taste the cool spring water and know what month it is. I can smell the difference between the smoke of hickory and apple wood. I can see the sharp sting of honey, and I can taste the sunrise." What vivid imagery, capturing how powerful the senses are to our understanding of the world around us. As you learn about this play on this blog and attend the show later in March, I implore you to think about your own abilities and limitations, and how this play seeks to empower those with disabilities through the always captivating medium of live theatre. I hope you will return to read more about ASL culture, our progress of putting together this production, the playwright, this remarkable trilogy (yes, this story is actually made up of 3 plays, this being the 2nd installment) and much more! [caption id="attachment_4261" align="aligncenter" width="300"] The cover picture for "The Taste of Sunrise" script, published by Dramatic Publishing.[/caption] Click here to order your tickets to the show. They go on sale February 8. Click here to buy tickets to see the first play in this trilogy, "Mother Hicks" at Utah Valley University!

Meet the Cast - Becca Petersen as Clara Johnson

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