JCA co-founders Aidan Morris (left) and Jake Hobbs pose for a production photo
“All the world’s a stage,” the bard once said, but a new community theater company is bringing one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, Macbeth, to the stage of the H.J. Ricks Centre For The Arts this fall.
The company, JCA, was formed when long-time friends Jake Hobbs, Claire Couture and Aidan Morris, who met each other through a character company earlier in their careers, got together and decided to create a company they could call their own, combining each of their first initials into the name of the company.
“Over the years, we’ve formed a really strong friendship, and we basically decided that we thought it’d be really fun to have a theater company that we could do with our friends and people that we trusted and loved,” Hobbs said.
Hobbs and Morris are directing the show while Couture is playing Lady Macbeth, argued by some to be the lead of the play alongside her in-character husband Macbeth, played by Christopher O’Hara, who called the role “a dream come true.” Morris and Hobbs are also in the show as Macduff and Malcolm, rivals to the title character.
The show is infamous for mishaps, stirring superstition in some theater circles that the play’s name should not be uttered, but Hobbs says the company is unafraid, adding to the ambience of putting the show, which has supernatural elements within the text, on in the fall.
The staging of the play in October placed it immediately adjacent to the Riley Festival, which Greenfield native Alex Ross, playing Witch 1 and Nurse, said was both exciting and concerning.
“I do worry about how the lack of parking is going to affect people being able to show up to see it,” Ross said. “I do think that we’ve advertised it well enough that we can make up for that, and the Riley Festival’s always fun.”
The show wasn’t cast through traditional auditions, rather through bringing together friends of the three founders who they had acted with before and knew would come together well.
“It’s a very, very good feeling to know that there are people that want to come and work with you and come together to create a project like this,” Morris said. “It also helps a lot to know their boundaries. Knowing how far I’ve seen this show go, you need to bring a little more of your ‘A game,’ it just makes the show as amazing as it can be.”
Despite the show being an amalgamation of friends, though, Couture and O’Hara have never been in a show together, requiring them to build their on-stage chemistry from scratch. “It’s been a lot of practice together and discussion about the characters so that we just understand exactly where the characters are coming from so we can play off of each other in the scene,” Couture said.
The show is heavy on combat, and, in addition to his roles as director and Macduff, Morris wore the hat of fight choreographer for the show, his first time doing so. A scream could be heard from outside the rehearsal venue during fight call, but Morris dismissed it with a laugh, saying “That’s just Caige’s scream,” referencing Caige Morris, who plays Lennox and Murderer 2.
JCA’s cut of Macbeth goes around two hours and 15 minutes and will run during the first two weekends of October.
