Leaping into the fray

Monday night our fight director, Carla Pantoja dropped by, and we all kicked each other's asses.

With all the fighting many of us have to do on a daily business (for our rights, for recognition, for the retention of our credit card limits, you name it), you'd think we wouldn't want to fight when we don't have to. But stage combat (staged fighting) is exhilarating! A big part of the reason we started the company was that many of us women had tons of stage combat training but never got to use it outside of class. And just like men, we love the camaraderie of a good tussle.

I met Carla in 1999 when another fight director said we just had to use her in our "Coriolanus." Love at first sight. I ended up playing Coriolanus (that's still pretty funny to me, at 5'2" and I think I weighed about 100# at the time), and she was my nemesis. We had one scene together in which we raved about how we loved fighting each other much more than sleeping with our wives, and I could feel it. Our fight was vicious and passionate and I felt intimately and infinitely connected to her. She was a company member for many years and still is our company fight director. (She also is co-owner of other company: www.duelingartssf.com, which offers public classes.)

So there we were on Monday night, building comic fights in exactly the same way we build the serious ones. She asks an actor what move comes to mind, what instincts she has, and then builds from there. I leap in and then try to contain my enthusiasm. We try to remember which of us punched the other in the groin in that Coriolanus fight—I think it was me punching her, followed by her kicking me in the face into that backward roll—and suddenly the conversation is all about how extreme a situation would have to be for a man to actually go beneath the belt. Pretty extreme. Or highly comic, anyway. There are elements of Shrew that are pretty "3 Stooge-y."

And of course it's not just the actual punches and kicks; fighting starts with how all the characters relate to each other physically, and so off went Carla to see how Kate and Petruchio naturally circle each other and discover how that gets fight-y, while I worked with our servant-clowns to see what tables they might use for hiding places or how their heads might happen to come in to contact with doors or other painful objects. I think we ended up with some hilarious choreography, but right now I don't even care—the night was so full of laughter and wonder both at the crazy things people do to each other and at what we can create together.

Seriously, I think everyone should be given a strict regimen of comic fighting. It's as good as a massage for getting everything out of your system, and I have never laughed so hard at a massage.

—Erin