ESU Theatre Department Presents Twelfth Night Under Direction of Former Power Ranger, Jason Narvy

William Shakespeare’s Folio marks its 400^th anniversary in 2023. To celebrate, East Stroudsburg University is staging a production of Twelfth Night, the classic tale of mistaken identity and forbidden love directed by Jason Narvy, assistant professor of theatre and theatre department co-chair. This version is set in 1950s New Orleans, a city that has never failed to inspire Narvy over the years. He hopes to bring the city’s sense of creativity and celebration to the production. “Twelfth Night is the beginning of Epiphany—it’s a festival season that ends with Mardi Gras. It’s a time of absolute foolishness when everything is upside down. I’m trying to dust off the cobwebs of Shakespeare. I’m trimming it down—it’s about 90 minutes long.” He adds, “Shakespeare’s comedies are much harder to stage than the tragedies. The tragedies and histories try to be timeless, but comedies are written in the way people talk. Slang has changed so much over the years. I’m constantly reminded how difficult doing a Shakespearean comedy can be.”

Directing Twelfth Night and other theatre productions at ESU is the second act of Narvy’s career – his first act included seven years on the hit television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.

Acting was an unconventional career choice for Narvy, who is in his second year at ESU and has an impressive list of stage and TV film roles to his name. For him, it was the only choice. “I had asthma and was not a big kid, so sports were torture. A lot of kids aren’t into sports, but when you’re not in sports, what do you do?” he said. He came from a family that embraced the arts. His mother was a singer, his sister was active in theater. Narvy decided to try acting. “I soon realized theater allowed you to have a voice, so I started writing and directing plays almost as soon as I started doing plays,” he said. For a young actor living in Los Angeles, film and TV roles were the obvious next step. A theater colleague connected him with an agent. “This agent knew how to cultivate talent, so she started sending me out on auditions,” he recalls.

Besides “auditioning like a fiend,” as he describes it, he enrolled in the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute to further hone his acting skills. There, he studied method acting, a huge shift from the “slapstick comedy and really funny stuff I was doing,” he said.

One audition changed the course of his career. He initially auditioned for Power Rangers, a new show Fox was developing, but was rejected at his first audition. The show’s creative team did some recasting and tweaking of the script, and he was asked to read again. “I went into the audition with a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I’d come straight from work. I was an auto parts driver, so I was in my work clothes—all greasy. It turned out to be exactly what they were looking for.” He was cast as Eugene “Skull” Skullovitch, one of the show’s two bullies along with Farkas “Bulk” Bulkmeier, played by Paul Schirer. “We turned them into more of a Laurel and Hardy comedy duo than ‘bullies,’” Narvy said. “Pauly had a background in theater, too. We created our characters because we both knew how to improvise.” Narvy continued to do occasional cameos on the show after his regular run ended, one as recently as last winter. He also appears at several Comic Con events throughout the year which give him a chance to meet fans and reconnect with old friends.

Five years into his run on the show, Narvy started thinking about his next steps. He was inspired by a fellow Power Rangers actor who completed her degree while working full-time on the series. “I asked the producers if I could do night school, and they said no. I was working 12-hour days, so it was hard to even go to night school,” he recalls. “I decided if I was going to do college, I needed a clean break. I walked away at the height of our [the Power Rangers’] popularity.” Narvy went as far away from Hollywood as he could, to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania — “a part of the country I’d never been in.”  He earned his bachelor’s degree at F&M, his master’s at Mary Baldwin University, and his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Now at ESU, Narvy is bringing his years of experience on stage and screen to the classroom. “I find it’s our job to focus on the individual, not the group as you would a sports team,” he said. “When I teach, I try to give a lot more attention to where the individual is and bring them up accordingly. Coming out of the pandemic, we became more attuned to people’s psychology—their mental health and well-being. That’s directly from my training in method acting, which is borderline psychology. That’s how my training has informed my teaching.”

Narvy is excited to bring Shakespeare’s words to life on the ESU stage. He said Shakespeare’s timeless words speak to the importance of theater and the arts, particularly in the college campus setting and their abundance of cultural offerings. “Universities are here to help us have a conversation—how we see our world and how we want to intersect with it. The arts will never be as accessible as they are on a college campus. If you want to experience the arts as an adult, it takes more of an effort. At a university, it’s all around—effortlessly. If you want to have a conversation with a renowned scholar, it’s right at your fingertips. When you leave the college setting, you’ll see how much it [the arts] inform your world.”

ESU’s production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night runs November 9 – 12. Curtain times for the production are 7:30 p.m. Thursday through Saturday and 2 p.m. on Sunday, November 12. All performances are in the Smith-McFarland Theatre of the university’s Fine and Performing Arts Center, Normal and Marguerite streets, East Stroudsburg.

General admission is $15, senior citizens, faculty and staff (with ID) are $12, students (with ID) are $10, and youth are $5. Tickets are available online in advance at esu.edu/theatretickets. Tickets will also be available at the box office one hour before curtain on performance dates.

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