{"id":22876,"date":"2023-11-02T08:43:48","date_gmt":"2023-11-02T12:43:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/?p=22876"},"modified":"2023-11-02T08:43:48","modified_gmt":"2023-11-02T12:43:48","slug":"esu-theatre-department-presents-twelfth-night-under-direction-of-former-power-ranger-jason-narvy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/esu-theatre-department-presents-twelfth-night-under-direction-of-former-power-ranger-jason-narvy\/","title":{"rendered":"ESU Theatre Department Presents Twelfth Night Under Direction of Former Power Ranger, Jason Narvy"},"content":{"rendered":"

William Shakespeare\u2019s Folio marks its 400th<\/sup> anniversary in 2023. To celebrate, East Stroudsburg University is staging a production of Twelfth Night<\/em>, 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\u2019s sense of creativity and celebration to the production. \u201cTwelfth Night is the beginning of Epiphany\u2014it\u2019s a festival season that ends with Mardi Gras. It\u2019s a time of absolute foolishness when everything is upside down. I\u2019m trying to dust off the cobwebs of Shakespeare. I\u2019m trimming it down\u2014it\u2019s about 90 minutes long.\u201d He adds, \u201cShakespeare\u2019s 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\u2019m constantly reminded how difficult doing a Shakespearean comedy can be.\u201d<\/p>\n

Directing Twelfth Night<\/em> and other theatre productions at ESU is the second act of Narvy\u2019s career \u2013 his first act included seven years on the hit television series Mighty Morphin Power Rangers<\/em>.<\/p>\n

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. \u201cI had asthma and was not a big kid, so sports were torture. A lot of kids aren\u2019t into sports, but when you\u2019re not in sports, what do you do?\u201d 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. \u201cI soon realized theater allowed you to have a voice, so I started writing and directing plays almost as soon as I started doing plays,\u201d 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. \u201cThis agent knew how to cultivate talent, so she started sending me out on auditions,\u201d he recalls.<\/p>\n

Besides \u201cauditioning like a fiend,\u201d 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 \u201cslapstick comedy and really funny stuff I was doing,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

One audition changed the course of his career. He initially auditioned for Power Rangers<\/em>, a new show Fox was developing, but was rejected at his first audition. The show\u2019s creative team did some recasting and tweaking of the script, and he was asked to read again. \u201cI went into the audition with a chip on my shoulder,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019d come straight from work. I was an auto parts driver, so I was in my work clothes\u2014all greasy. It turned out to be exactly what they were looking for.\u201d He was cast as Eugene \u201cSkull\u201d Skullovitch, one of the show\u2019s two bullies along with Farkas \u201cBulk\u201d Bulkmeier, played by Paul Schirer. \u201cWe turned them into more of a Laurel and Hardy comedy duo than \u2018bullies,\u2019\u201d Narvy said. \u201cPauly had a background in theater, too. We created our characters because we both knew how to improvise.\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Five years into his run on the show, Narvy started thinking about his next steps. He was inspired by a fellow Power Rangers<\/em> actor who completed her degree while working full-time on the series. \u201cI 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,\u201d he recalls. \u201cI decided if I was going to do college, I needed a clean break. I walked away at the height of our [the Power Rangers\u2019] popularity.\u201d Narvy went as far away from Hollywood as he could, to Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pennsylvania \u2014 \u201ca part of the country I\u2019d never been in.\u201d\u00a0 He earned his bachelor\u2019s degree at F&M, his master\u2019s at Mary Baldwin University, and his doctorate at the University of California, Santa Barbara.<\/p>\n

Now at ESU, Narvy is bringing his years of experience on stage and screen to the classroom. \u201cI find it\u2019s our job to focus on the individual, not the group as you would a sports team,\u201d he said. \u201cWhen 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\u2019s psychology\u2014their mental health and well-being. That\u2019s directly from my training in method acting, which is borderline psychology. That\u2019s how my training has informed my teaching.\u201d<\/p>\n

Narvy is excited to bring Shakespeare\u2019s words to life on the ESU stage. He said Shakespeare\u2019s timeless words speak to the importance of theater and the arts, particularly in the college campus setting and their abundance of cultural offerings. \u201cUniversities are here to help us have a conversation\u2014how 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\u2019s all around\u2014effortlessly. If you want to have a conversation with a renowned scholar, it\u2019s right at your fingertips. When you leave the college setting, you\u2019ll see how much it [the arts] inform your world.\u201d<\/p>\n

ESU\u2019s production of Shakespeare\u2019s Twelfth Night<\/em> runs November 9 \u2013 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\u2019s Fine and Performing Arts Center, Normal and Marguerite streets, East Stroudsburg.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0esu.edu\/theatretickets<\/a>. Tickets will also be available at the box office one hour before curtain on performance dates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

ESU is staging a production of Twelfth Night<\/em>, the classic tale of mistaken identity and forbidden love directed by Jason Narvy, assistant professor of theatre and theatre department co-chair.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":22878,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[143,42,58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22876","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-community","category-news-release","category-slider"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22876"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22880,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22876\/revisions\/22880"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22878"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22876"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22876"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quantum.esu.edu\/insider\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22876"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}