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Summary
Act 1, Scenes 5–9
Act 1, Scene 5
During their first class, Gwendolyn, a teacher-director, announces they will be pushed much harder than in previous years. She asserts that fear of vulnerability is the chief impediment to excellent acting and that they will be challenged to boldly face their most intimate anxieties. Acting is, she argues, half the words of the playwright and half the emotions of the actor, a fact especially true for Shakespeare’s passionate dramas. Meredith volunteers and endures a grueling public examination of her most private insecurities. Gwendolyn goads her to admit her fear that she is more beautiful than she is intelligent or talented. The others watch uneasily.
Act 1, Scene 6
On their way to their next class with Frederick, James and Oliver agree Gwendolyn was ruthless. Frederick’s teaching style is nurturing as he teaches students the social, cultural, and intellectual connotations of the plays they perform. Fourth year students sip tea during each of Frederick’s class while discussing Shakespearean tragedy, their focus for the year. Oliver observes that Julius Caesar is a tragedy, not a history play, because its emphasis is personal and Frederick muses that its tragedy may lie in the fact that Caesar is killed by his friends.
Act 1, Scene 7
Dean Holinshed presides at the opening convocation, encouraging all the students to live boldly, even to the point of making enemies. He cites Julius Caesar and urges them not to waste a minute of their lives.
Act 1, Scene 8
The students all receive envelopes with instructions for a school tradition, a Halloween performance of scenes from Macbeth on the conservatory’s grounds. Oliver is surprised to be cast as Banquo, a loyal friend to Macbeth, a role he thinks James would usually play. The students can’t discuss or rehearse their roles prior to the performance. After opening his envelope, Richard leaves, visibly upset. Meredith follows but is unable to coax Richard into returning.
Act 1, Scene 9
The group, minus Richard, attends combat class, where they learn how to simulate fighting onstage. Camilo, their instructor, observes that Shakespeare’s plays are visceral and violent and actors must be able to draw on those emotions if the audience is to believe what they see. He demonstrates various techniques but, when Oliver and James practice, Oliver fails to move as anticipated and is grazed by James’s watch, drawing blood. James is horrified and, although he insists that he is fine, Oliver feels as if he has actually been struck.
Analysis
The students understand that they are often “type-cast” and, as the novel makes clear, this is not only a problem for the theatre, but also for their lives outside of it. As Meredith’s vulnerability exercise makes clear, society also sorts people into types, from which others make assumptions and draw conclusions. Pushed by Gwendolyn to be more vulnerable, Meredith admits that she fears people only see her physical beauty to the exclusion of her talent or character or intellect. Not only does an emphasis on her physicality obscure the work she puts into being in shape, it also encourages people to judge her as promiscuous. While it is sometimes said in jest, Meredith is shamed for her physicality consistently. The female roles in Shakespearean drama are often less nuanced than the male ones, so the concern Meredith shares would be especially pronounced at an institution that privileges Shakespeare’s male perspective to the exclusion of all others.
If We Were Villains develops a unified theory of acting, one which has tragic consequences. A basic tenet of this theory is the necessity of a fusion between the character as written by the playwright with the emotions and experiences of the actor. It is not hard to see how this theory supports the novel’s investigation of the relationship between life and art, particularly as it creates the conditions of possibility for the tragedy of the students’ fourth year. As Gwendolyn explains, half of what an audience sees on the stage comes from the author and half from the actor, who must access his or her private passions and fears and memories to make the words come alive for viewers. The students are catechized publicly, forced to put their vulnerabilities on stage, in an emotional investigation that borders on abuse. When, late in the novel, Meredith is said to have established a sharp boundary between her public life as an actor and her private life, it is not hard to see an implicit rebuke to the ramifications of this idea of how to create emotional intensity on stage.
In addition to a theory of acting, the novel also details the generic features of tragedy. In their second class of the semester, the students elaborate on these elements, with each student offering an idea that is in some way related to the role they will play in their private tragedy. It is Richard who says there must be a tragic villain and James who volunteers the tragic hero. Oliver notes that fate versus agency is a key element of tragedies and Meredith adds that the conflicts are internal and external. Filippa emphasizes structure, Alexander source material, and Wren imagery. As the novel unfolds, each character will be associated, sometimes negatively, with the idea they offer. Equally important, though, is a specific feature of the play they will perform, Julius Caesar. The key issue of this play is that Caesar is assassinated by his friends. The willingness to murder a friend is, according to Frederick, the essence of the play’s tragic power.
