Rick Sordelet knows how to fight dirty. “When you’re going to Wisconsin bars as a college kid, you’re going to get in fights, that’s just a given,” he said. He also knows his Shakespeare. He has choreographed fight scenes for sixty-three productions of Romeo and Juliet, including the Guthrie’s current staging. He’s plotted fisticuffs and swordplay for at least a dozen other Shakespeare plays, not to mention twenty-five Broadway shows, a handful of productions for Disney, the Public, the Roundabout… but I digress. He is a certified fight director, and I guess he talks like one.
“Let’s take the Mercutio-Tybalt fight,” he said the other day during final previews. “It’s about honor, not killing. It’s about humiliating the guy in his own town, so that he has to hang his head low. You got Tybalt calling out Romeo, and the crowd is going, ‘Alright, now Romeo’s going to kick Tybalt’s ass.’ But Romeo can’t kick his ass because of Juliet, so Mercutio has to pick up the flag.”
The color commentary continued: “Mercutio’s not up to par with Tybalt as a swordsman. But he’s a good scrappy street fighter.” Based on that interpretation of the famous brawl in Act III, Scene I, Sordelet turned Mercutio into a goofball scene-stealer who gleefully parries Tybalt’s angry prowess. He grabs Tybalt’s sword and kisses both it and its owner; he leaps with mock-fright into the arms of his page; he pauses to swig from his flask, then sprays a mouthful of booze in his adversary’s face. It’s all great rowdy fun until Romeo, as he is destined to do, bursts into the fray with the cry of a true pantywaist, “The prince expressly hath forbidden bandying in Verona streets!”
Sordelet’s job is to make murder and mayhem seem as real as possible—or, as he puts it, to create “truthful behavior under imaginary circumstances.” As one of the busiest fight directors in the country, he notes that “the sun literally never sets on my work. I have shows in times zones all around the world.”
Born and raised in Duluth, Sordelet described himself as “very cocky” while attending the University of Wisconsin at Superior, where he got his initial theatrical training and was first exposed to stage combat. “I felt like I should be a part of that—it seemed so exciting and swashbuckling,” he said.
He now lives with his wife and kids in Montclair, New Jersey, a short commute from Manhattan’s Theater District. Currently he’s choreographing nearly a dozen productions, and gets twenty-eight emails every night about different shows he’s got onstage in the U.S. These are reports from stage managers, which include notes from the fight captains, the appointed actors in each play who “keep the integrity of the show” and watch over their fellow actors’ swordplay, punches, kicks, lunges, and so forth.
Also helping keep things in line are the “fight calls” preceding each performance, right before the actors get into costume. With Sordelet having returned to the East Coast to work on other productions, Michael Anderson (a local certified fight director in his own right) acts as his on-the-ground assistant at the Guthrie.
“Ready?” shouts fight captain Michael Booth (who plays Peter). “Let’s fight!” The run-through of Romeo and Juliet’s fight scenes is curiously wooden, with lackluster acting and slightly slowed-down, belabored motions. Anderson explained, “This isn’t for show, but more for memory. You can’t fix things that are wrong with the choreography if you’re going full speed. Fight call lets actors look at targeting, distance, and traffic patterns. They can pick out the moments they have to breathe. The slow tempo lets them try things on, and revisit their movements so they become natural, absorbed into the actor’s body.”
Afterward, the actors discussed problems (“we can struggle a bit longer there”), practiced extra-slow-motion groin kicks, and got advice from Anderson. “You’re both tending to stand up,” he cautioned Karl Kenzler (Mercutio) and Alex Podulke (Tybalt) on the last night of previews. “It’s a little bit rote, and that will come back to bite you in the ass, hard. In a real fight, you’re running—either toward the guy you want to kill or from the guy who wants to kill you.”
Sordelet compares theatrical violence with songs in musicals. “The character is saying, ‘I can no longer express myself with words, so I have to sing.’ In some cases, he has to fight. This is where Shakespeare is so brilliant. In Henry IV, Hotspur says to Hal, ‘I can no longer brook thy vanities.’ Or when Macduff sees Macbeth, who’s just killed Macduff’s family, he says, ‘I have no words: My voice is in my sword.’ The idea is so clear: ‘I can’t talk about it anymore, I have to come kick your ass now.’”
Suffice it to say that Romeo’s proclamation, “fire-eyed fury be my conduct now!” unleashes much spectacular pugilism in this production, including stabbing, stage-diving, and an act that would give Mike Tyson (the ear-biter and the boxer) pause. “I know a good fight scene’s not going to save a play if the rest of the production is awful,” said Sordelet. “But even though my wedge of the pie is small in a lot of cases, often it’s got the most berries.” —Julie Caniglia
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