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During the spring semester, Kiira Benzing ’07 (Ridgewood, N.J.) put in 14-hour days, seven days a week, honing her theater skills at the O’Neill National Theater Institute (NTI) in Waterford, Conn. The 14-week intensive program challenges students from all over the country to improve their abilities in acting, directing, playwriting, movement and voice, and design.
“I feel like there’s something so innate about theater – that it’s existed for so many centuries, from the Greeks who really connected and wrote about such raw tragedies and then these lighter but very loaded comedies from Shakespeare, and even now our contemporary plays have elements of these styles,” says the double major in French and performance studies. “On stage, if we can represent these styles, then we can hopefully reach something cathartic in theater and really move an audience. This is my goal as a performer; if I can move an audience member – just one – for one moment, then I’ve brought a piece of what makes theater live on.”
Benzing was encouraged to apply to the rigorous program by her academic adviser Suzanne Westfall, professor and head of English; Michael O’Neill, associate professor English and director of theater; and alumnus Chris Hutchinson ’91, who has directed Benzing in several College Theater productions and attended NTI. Located outside of famed American playwright Eugene O’Neill’s summer home, the NTI experience culminates in a final project that gives students less than two weeks to produce a theatrical piece from a novel.
The NTI students also spent two weeks in St. Petersburg, Russia studying and performing at St. Petersburg Academy of the Arts. Russian masters led their training in movement, voice, acting, and ballet. Each night, they attended theater productions ranging from puppetry to works by Anton Chekhov. At the end of their stay in St. Petersburg, they performed their Greek chorus work for the Russian students who translated their classes and performances.
For their final project, Benzing and a team of 12 other students adapted and staged Iranian author Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis. They began by researching Iranian culture and history. Because the focus was on the ensemble, each student did not always play the same part. For instance, various women in Benzing’s ensemble played Satrapi; Benzing portrayed the author when she visits the black market in Tehran. Benzing also played Descartes and several other characters from Satrapi’s childhood story.
“The hardest part of the process was deciding how to rewrite or select chapters and sentences from the text,” recalls Benzing. “Satrapi’s novel was dually difficult because Persepolis is a graphic novel, and we needed to narrow our selection of images and words based on theatricality and plot points. This selection was important because most of us received our line assignments the night before the first performance opened.”
Benzing believes her NTI experience will benefit her as she begins work on her honors thesis project of translating the medieval French play Sotise A Huit Personnaiges [Le Nouveau Monde] (Sotis Played by Eight Characters [The New World]) into English and producing a staged reading of the translation. O’Neill and Olga Anna Duhl, associate professor of foreign languages and literature, will advise the interdisciplinary project. Duhl has conducted extensive research on the same play.
“My theatrical studies have influenced me both inside and out,” says Benzing, who plans to pursue a master’s degree in acting. “I really believe that this past year has inspired me and transformed me emotionally, mentally, and physically – a sort of total theater and life experience change – because theater is life for me.”
A member of College Theater, Benzing played the role of Grandma in The American Dream, Anya in The Cherry Orchard, and Alice in You Can’t Take It With You.She was stage manager for Far Away and participated in the staging of Sekou Sundiata’s The 51st (Dream) State as part of Lafayette’s Imagining America first-year program for the Class of 2008.
As a first-year student, she conducted independent study research under the guidance of O’Neill on the various post-modern styles of acting, including the techniques of Stella Adler, Michael Chekhov, Sanford Meisner, and Constantin Stanislavsky.
Benzing was stage manager for the musical Travis Tanner at the New York City Fringe Festival and will serve as an acting apprentice this summer at the Williamstown Theater Festival.
She has studied abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris and participated in the three-week Lafayette course A Moveable Feast: American Writers in Paris with David Johnson, associate provost, and Bryan Washington, associate professor of English.
A past recipient of the Gilbert Prize, Benzing is a member of the Marquis Players, Five Actors in Search of a Director, Le Cercle Francais (French Club), Arts Society, Newman Association, and Delta Delta Delta sorority. She also founded French Club for Kids.