Five years ago, Nicole Lowrance was traveling with her fellow Austin, Tex. high school students, competing in dramatic monologues and debates.
Four years later, in 2001, she found herself performing as Ophelia in "Hamlet" at Washington, D.C.'s Shakespeare Theatre. Her performance led The Washington Post to say, "Nicole Lowrance is an appealing Ophelia, and her mad scene comes off less like incoherent insanity than as the most powerfully rendered grief in a grief-riddled play."
Surely her talent is the foundation for such a splendid review, but Lowrance will be the first to say that her classical training helped her make a four-century-old character not only her own, but the audience's.
The training came primarily at The Juilliard School in New York, where she enrolled after graduating from high school.
"I never did anything classical until I went to Juilliard," Lowrance explains. "I felt very far behind in experience and that type of language. I worked my butt off as hard as I could to be part of the group. Then opportunities came up in that particular field that allowed me to have the beginnings of a career."
She praises her teachers at Juilliard, and particularly recalls Barry Edelstein and a semester of Shakespearean text in her second year. "He had the amazing ability to eliminate the mystery and get down to the tools of iambic pentameter and finding the action of the argument, and being able to articulate that to where it's completely relevant today," says Lowrance. "I remember his taking 'Richard II' and relating it to Monica Lewinsky and different subjects of the day. I found that one of the most useful tools—not being intimidated by the text and going with my gut instinct and making it modern, relevant to my situation."
She notes that other teachers like Ralph Zito and Liz Smith urged her "to get the text into your body, and right there on the part of the diaphragm where you laugh, cry, breathe deeply, or cut off all sound. You work Shakespeare into that chakra, if you will. Sometimes we were successful; sometimes we were miserable failures. But they wanted us to make the characters our own."
While obviously grateful for all she learned at Juilliard, Lowrance reflects on one concern she had: "They were very, very technical, and I feel the technicality estranged me from the text; still, I took it as information and backup tools. But I don't approach the text from a technical point of view. When you approach Shakespeare, it's like someone setting in front of you 400 years of history. It's connected to so many things before you, and there've been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people who have played it before you. It's exciting. You want to make it so much your own—forget everyone that came before, and you're the only Juliet at that moment, the only Ophelia. Not to make it modern, but make it clear so people understand you."
Lowrance refers to the works of O'Neill, Williams, Miller, and Hellman as the modern classics, adding, "I could put Pinter into that." She expresses great concern about the baseness of many of today's playwrights. "The English language is going down the toilet now, and I hate it."
But she quickly adds, "I'm not trying to bash modern theatre and act like I'm a classics snob. That's not where I'm coming from in my heart."
She seems to feel that embracing the classics will help the young actor in taking on any modern role. To approach the classics, she says, "You need some type of vocabulary in voice and speech and movement, because they're talking with words and tools you're not familiar with." But once the actor's honed the classical instrument, "You can make it a part of your tool chest, so you can pull it out when you need it."
—Roger Armbrust