Senior Gigi Lieze-Adams directs and choreographed “Lord of the Flies” for Cypress Lake High School. It’s not a musical, and there are no dance numbers. But Lieze-Adams had to choreograph half a dozen fight scenes.
“There [are] numerous fight scenes,” said Lieze-Adams. “There's a big end fight sequence and honestly throughout the whole show, these kids find reasons to tussle, whether it's serious or if it's playful.”
Lieze-Adams was up to the task.
“I studied with Juilliard over the summer, and we had an amazing fight choreo teacher,” Lieze-Adams explained. “His name is Mark Olsen, and he taught us a lot of different ways to handle stage combat …. I incorporated what I learned, took them through stage combat training, and slowly built it up into the fights that you'll see in the show.”
The result is brutal realism. Lieze-Adams also went for realism with her set, converting the school’s black box theater into a deserted island.
“We decided to fill the black box with sand,” Lieze-Adams noted. “I wanted our actors to be able to have real dirt and be able to feel the textures that they would feel on the island, and then we decided to build the jungle, making it like a playground, so ladders and platforms and the environmental aspects of the hunting screen and the paper trees.”
The fight scenes, set and lighting heighten the play’s disturbing theme that power corrupts and, when exploited through fear and groupthink, can threaten civility, democratic rule and life itself.
Performances are Thursday through Saturday at 7 p.m.
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In the play, a number of school-age children are stranded on a deserted island following a plane crash. Two boys vie for leadership of the rag-tag survivors. Ralph is elected, but his opponent, Jack, is far from happy and spends the rest of the play wresting the power he lost from Ralph and his followers. To do this, he forms a group of hunters, and rules them through terror and fear. In the end, Jack becomes a vicious dictator.
The book upon which the play is based was written by William Golding. After his manuscript had been rejected by a number of leading publishing houses, Golding sent the tatty typescript to Faber & Faber, together with an accompanying letter. After the firm’s reader also decided to pass on it, a new and aspiring editor, Charles Monteith, fished it out of the rejection bin and persuaded the firm to allow him to work with Golding on several rounds of edits, including a new title. “Lord of the Flies” would go on to become one of the most iconic novels of the 20th century.
A number of critics have concluded that Jack suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, which is characterized by self-defense mechanisms and violent behavior.
At the end of the play, Ralph weeps. It is left to the audience to decide if he merely weeps for the two friends who were killed by Jack and his band of hunters or as well for the loss of innocence and the sobering realization that humans are by nature murderous and egocentric.
Viewed from the latter perspective, “The Lord of the Flies” is about mankind's struggle to form benevolent governments or ruling bodies, and how reason and democracy so often give in to "strong men" and authoritarians who employ bogeymen and groupthink to destroy the high ambitions of civilization.
Carmen Crussard serves as theater director and teacher at Cypress Lake Center for the Arts.
Her students perform under the heading of Panther Theatre Company.
For “Lord of the Flies,” Crussard tasked Lieze-Adams to direct the play.
“Basically, as director I ran the entire process of blocking and staging, and the ideas that I had for the show we implemented throughout our weeks of rehearsal,” said Lieze-Adams.
Lieze-Adams expressed confidence that audiences will find more than mere entertainment when they see Cypress Lake’s production of the William Gelding classic.
“On one level, they’ll find it really entertaining,” she said. “It's intense, and I think audiences will be really captivated by it. But it also has a lot of valuable lessons that people can carry into their day-to-day lives.”
The production is also highly immersive thanks in large measure to the set, which includes several inches of beach sand spread across the floor of the black box theater.
“Audience members are sitting basically as if they were on the island,” Lieze-Adams noted. “If you're in the front row, your toes are in the sand and you're really going to get to feel all the emotions up close and personal.”
The cast includes sophomores to seniors.
“They auditioned at the end of last year and we have a pretty big range of kids.”
“Lord of the Flies” marks Lieze-Adams’ directorial debut. It just so happened that she auditioned for and was accepted into a two-week conservatory at Julliard this summer that really helped prepare her to direct the play and choreograph the stage combat scenes.
“Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard” is a fully immersive summer festival for ages 12–18 spanning dance, drama, musical theater, piano, and voice. Hosted off-site at cutting-edge facilities in Orlando, Florida, this program offers two-week intensives and is run in collaboration with Nord Anglia Education.
Students develop technical skills and artistic capacities in daily studio classes, workshops, seminars, rehearsals, and lessons, with a typical day running from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Students are exposed to college-level coursework in their major as well as interdisciplinary skills from faculty of other majors, preparing them for college and career auditions and the many pathways that the performing arts can take them. Summer Performing Arts with Juilliard is rooted in rigorous training within an atmosphere that is infused with positivity and celebrates the success of each student.
“We were trained by four of the current professors at Juilliard, who taught us all sorts of things.”
Mark Olsen's specialty is physical acting and stage combat. He has been on the faculty of Julliard since 2008. He is formerly the head of Graduate Acting at Penn State University, teacher emeritus and former secretary of the Society of American Fight Directors, and vice president of the Association for Theater Movement Educators. Olsen taught scene study and directed the industry showcase for the Columbia University Graduate Acting Program, stage movement at Carnegie Mellon University, mask performance at Sarah Lawrence College, and stage movement for New York Public Theater’s Shakespeare Lab. Olsen has appeared on Broadway and toured internationally with mime/mask ensemble Mummenschanz. Olsen has directed many professional and university productions and as a movement coordinator/fight director, his work has been seen on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and in productions at the Signature Theater, the Roundabout, American Repertory Theatre, Hartford Stage Company, Long Wharf, Alley Theatre, Houston Grand Opera, New York Shakespeare Festival, and others. In 2010, he was part of the artistic team winning the Drama Desk award for his work on "The Orphan’s Home Cycle." Olsen is currently the chair of the Musical Theatre Department for the New York Film Academy and is the author of three texts: "The Actor with a Thousand Faces," "The Golden Buddha Changing Masks" and "Acting: Scene One."
Besides stage combat, Lieze-Adams and her fellow students received instruction in Shakespeare and imaginative work.
“For two weeks we worked and then we had a public viewing, like an open rehearsal,” Lieze-Adams added. “I performed a scene from ‘As You Like It.’ I also did mask and clown work with different archetypes.”
Back in Fort Myers, Lieze-Adams put her instruction to work.
“I really incorporated everything that I learned there into my directing style, for sure.”
No question, Lieze-Adams is on a trajectory for a career in theater. On the acting side, she’s been performing since a young age.
“I did a professional show at Florida Rep my freshman year and I've done shows throughout my time in Cypress,” she pointed out. “I'm already cast in three shows coming up, so I’m definitely focused on acting, for sure.”
In addition to those shows and her studies, Lieze-Adams begins the arduous process of applying to and auditioning for a spot in a college theater program this winter.
Stay tuned for future developments.
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
