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Mount Holyoke puts on radio play, ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ BY KATIE GOSS ’23 STAFF WRITER
This semester, the film media theater department adapted to current limitations set by the COVID-19 pandemic and produced “Much Ado About Nothing.” Because the play could not be performed in person or in front of an audience, its director, Noah Tuleja, decided to produce the comedy in the style of a radio play. Tuleja, director of Rooke Theatre and assistant professor of film media theater, said that as early as May, he knew that the theater would not be able to host 100 to 150 to watch the show even if students came back to campus. With that in mind, he began to reimagine and adapt the season to avoid cancellation. Tuleja himself is a part of a professional theater company and had just finished performing a radio play over Zoom. He thought it was a good way to keep the season going while everyone involved in the production was still remote. The initial audition process was done virtually and asynchronously. Tuleja sent out a few different monologues from the play, and the actors had to record an audio clip of themselves voice-acting out the monologue. He then held a callback audition over Zoom and decided on the official cast. Typically, those who choose to audition are asked to bring a different monologue to perform onstage. Due to the time restraints and varying schedules, however, Tuleja decided to send out monologues from the same play instead and let people submit their auditions as audio recordings. Zoe Fieldman ’22, the assistant director of the radio play, saw this new audition process as an advantage from past processes. “We had so many new people audition,” Fieldman said. “I think it’s a little bit less intimidating. Instead of standing up on stage along with just two or three people in the audience, one of them being Noah [Tuleja], and giving your initial audition monologue, they got to record and send in videos.” Rehearsals also proceeded in an adapted format. “We started the re-
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hearsal process, which was different than a normal rehearsal process,” Tuleja said. “Usually you read through the play, and then you start at the beginning of [it] … and work through the entire play, scene by scene, onstage — blocking it, staging it, talking about it. And then you get through the whole play, and it’s really rough, and you might run the whole thing, and it’s a disaster show because no one remembers what they did in Act 1 when they got to Act 5.” The cast would rehearse an act for a few days over Zoom, and then once it was ready to be recorded, they would record it a few different times before moving onto the next one. Instead of running through the whole play or multiple acts in one setting like usual, once an act was recorded and finished, they moved on and did not return to it. Every act was recorded multiple times to ensure that the final edited version of the audio would sound as good as possible. That way, if someone’s audio cut out while speaking, there would be other recordings of the same section that the sound designer, Ginger Maley ’20, could edit in to keep the act sounding smooth. Not only did the radio play deviate from the normal procedures of an onstage production, but it also changed the logistics of what actors focused on as a whole. Kylie Levy ’21, who played Benedick in the radio play, highlighted the shift from learning to employ physical characteristics to better play a character to learning to use only speech to do so. “I think a particular challenge, but one that I really enjoyed [to] sort of work through, was how to infuse Benedick’s lines with color without using your body and being in a physical space. … This really forced me to focus on the exact words I was saying and the way that [Benedick] would deliver them and [how to] evoke certain physical gestures or attributes with voice,” Levy explained. “There [are] a lot of things, from an acting perspective, that you focus on
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Graphic courtesy of the Mount Holyoke department of Film Media Theater
Attorneys present new arguments in Hachiyanagi case BY KATE TURNER ’21 NEWS EDITOR
In a hearing on Tuesday, Dec. 8, Assistant District Attorney Matthew Thomas filed a motion to obtain the employment records of former Mount Holyoke Professor of Art and Studio Art Chair Rie Hachiyanagi based on the advice of an unidentified third party. According to Hachiyanagi’s defense attorney, Thomas Kokonowski, the anonymous third party is also employed by Mount Holyoke College. As previously reported by the Mount Holyoke News, Hachiyanagi was charged with multiple counts, including attempted murder, following her alleged assault on a fellow Mount Holyoke faculty member some time between Dec. 23 and Dec. 24, 2019, to which she has pled not guilty. She has been in custody since December 2019. Thomas argued that Hachiyanagi’s employment records could “show some kind of modus operandi or state of mind of the defendant,” according to the Daily Hampshire Gazette. In response, Kokonowski argued that the commonwealth’s motion is “extremely broad, if
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not overbroad.” “[It] looks like they are looking for her entire personnel file or any discipline with other professors or people at Mount Holyoke College,” Kokonowski said in court. “If I read the commonwealth’s motion correctly, they’re looking for a different motive or more motive, which I have argued from the beginning either makes no sense or does not exist.” He added that there does not seem to be “a very specific date or situation” that the commonwealth is searching for in this investigation for new evidence. On Wednesday, Nov. 18, Kokonowski filed a motion to dismiss two of the nine charges against Hachiyanagi: one count of home invasion and one count of assault and battery with a dangerous weapon on a person over 60 years of age. Both charges revolve around whether Hachiyanagi was armed with a dangerous weapon upon entry of the defendant’s home and the subsequent attack. Kokonowski argued that the alleged victim never “told police she … saw the rock Hachiyanagi allegedly armed herCONTINUED ON PAGE 3
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