Kristen Schier on the Commonwealth Classic 'Tempest'

But my favorite Shakespeare in the park moment may have been a Commonwealth Classic Theatre Company (CCTC) performance of The Taming of the Shrew in Love Park on an especially windy evening, when the freestanding metal proscenium of the set blew down and cracked a whole square of concrete. Fortunately, nobody was under the proscenium when it went down.

These summertime actors take it all in stride, and it’s a great reminder that Shakespeare, often viewed by the general public as the most sacred, highfalutin form of drama we have, is also possibly our richest and even most necessary ground for improvisation.

A show on its toes

Teacher, actor, and improviser/deviser Kristen Schier knows this as well as any Philly performer. Chatting with BSR, she says one of her favorite moments was a night during a Shakespeare in Clark Park performance of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which she played one of Bottom’s mechanicals in the role of Thisbe in the play-within-a-play. Things were already crackling because, on its last night, the performance had unexpectedly been moved inside due to rain.

“The actors were really excited,” she remembers, because they were working in a different space, which put the show “on its toes a little bit more.”

And then Bottom’s prop sword broke off, right at the hilt, when he killed himself in the role of thwarted lover Pyramus.

“So I’m supposed to go out and kill myself with that very same sword,” Schier continues. “So I go out and I say, ‘Come, trusty sword. . . . ’ I’m just looking at this sword broken, trying to figure out as I am saying the lines, what I am going to do to kill myself.”

Missed lines and meter, and beetles

She’s well qualified to think on her feet onstage. Besides being the veteran of numerous Shakespeare in the Park productions, including Richard III and Much Ado About Nothing, she’s Philly Improv Theater’s (PHIT) season producer, an improv teacher, and a member of PHIT house team the Future. Also the artistic director of the Philly N Crowd, she does an ongoing show with another local improv and physical theater maven, Nick Gillette of Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, called The Wadsworth Constant. It’s an hour-long “improvised absurdist play,” in the style of Beckett, Ionesco, and Pirandello.

Currently, Schier is appearing as Ariel in CCTC’s production of The Tempest, on its way for free to audiences in parks around the region (for a complete list of dates and venues, click here).

The play between an improvised structure and the exacting demands of Shakespeare’s language is an intriguing mix for the actress.

“If something goes off-script in Shakespeare, it’s very difficult possibly to improvise, because the language is so specific,” she says of the need to maintain not just the sense of the dialogue, but its poetic meter.

But of course there’s never a run of any show where no one flubs a single line, so it’s okay: “It’s not like it can’t and shouldn’t and doesn’t ever happen.” And really, with any show, the Bard or not, you should be improvising all the time, she says: not that you’re making up lines, but “you should be responding to the moment, not really knowing what’s coming next.”

And from a production design standpoint, Shakespeare can have a lot of leeway in “creating all these amazing worlds,” versus more contemporary plays that are pinned in their own time period or place.

Working outside, as CCTC does, adds another layer of the unexpected.

“We all sort of work with what’s happening,” she says of being in this year’s Tempest. Take the swarm of beetles that flew through the set during rehearsal the other day: “So here I am and doing this big speech, and this beetle comes winging by my face, and it’s very visible — it’s like a big bug.”

A hassle? Or the perfect way to set the mood for Tempest, whose lines repeatedly reference the grass, the earth, and beetles and bugs in Caliban’s speeches?

Honest questions and honest answers

Under Allen Radway’s direction, she says the show unfolds so that a particular moment happens just as the sun goes down, “and that’s going to impact the feel of it every night” in a different way. The actors are “listening to each other and listening to the audience, to that space and that moment, and that time, to really be open to it.”

That’s another reason Shakespeare appeals to this improv veteran.

“There are a lot of questions and dialogue. Everything is really shared with Shakespeare, shared either directly with the audience or with another actor,” she says, so there’s “a lot of freedom to really ask an honest question and wait for the honest response as a character thinks through a moment. . . .You can create those questions really honestly and really wait for a response.”

So what happened with the broken sword that Midsummer night?

“I took the two halves of the sword, and put it on either side of my belly and my back, so it looked like I had been run through with the sword, like one of those arrow headbands,” she explains, and then just slumped over her costar. It turned out to be one of the most memorable moments of her career so far.

“I don’t know why, it’s the stupidest thing, but people laughed for a good solid five minutes,” she says, calling the broken prop a sudden piece of magic that was a “gift” and not a crisis.

It was “to say yes, and this now, instead of being like, crap, now I can’t do my scene. Whatever happens, that’s what’s supposed to happen in that moment.”

Full disclosure: BSR’s editor in chief, Judy Weightman, who is a student of improv, assigned this story because she knows Kristen from Philly Improv Theater.