Art of the duel

People in Center City are thrusting blades and filling the air with clanks and zings. They spring into the air as others slash with swords where they were standing just a moment earlier. Some spar while racing about, or hurl stray weapons and send them spinning into other fighters' hands. Some come at others with daggers.

Several die, it appears. Then they get up.

It's a coincidence, but this month of March features more swordplay on Center City professional stages than usual - three substantial productions that cannot be effectively staged without old-fashioned dueling violence.

And not just a little. In Arden Theatre Company's new translation of Edmond Rostand's Cyrano, now in previews and opening Wednesday, a fight usually just alluded to - when cocky Cyrano tells of fending off a hundred men - has been added to the rest of the swordplay. (In a stylized way, since the cast consists of nine actors, and a hundred men would break the bank, as well as the stage.)

"If we can make it more . . . v-o-o-o-o-m!" said Dale Girard at a Cyrano fight rehearsal a few days ago. He swiped his sword in a short arc that swooped slightly downward, then ripped the air by his shoulder. "If we can make that action when we step in, then the body's going to be much more animated." The actors took it all in.

Girard is, among other things, a fight director - a specialty that has become, in the last 40 years, a necessity for professional companies whose audiences expect swordplay to be more than a tink-tink here and a diffident poke there.

Three fight directors have been working in Center City, with the casts of Cyrano at the Arden; Romeo and Juliet, which opened Wednesday at Lantern Theater Company; and the Philadelphia Shakespeare Theatre's Twelfth Night, which begins previews next week.

As you can imagine, they know the classics well and can tell you easily who fights whom in, say, any Shakespearean play that calls for it. But fight directors aren't just chained to the classics; they are choreographers of chaos. They teach people how to realistically slap one another around, or do hand-to-hand combat, or die onstage.

And not just any old death. "It's especially important if the actors have lines to say while they're dying," says J. Alex Cordaro, fight director for Romeo and Juliet, where Mercutio (played by Charlie DelMarcelle) is dying a particular death nightly, given the way he has been stabbed in Cordaro's fight choreography.

"I research specific trauma and different side effects," Cordaro says. "Mercutio dies from a tension pneumothorax - he has a collapsed lung, due to a piercing trauma. His chest increases in volume, pushing his lung and heart to the side. Pain travels into the shoulder and the upper back, and mostly the symptoms of shock are what get him. He can get out all of his text he has to get out, and still has specific things he can act."

Will the scores of informed subscribers, curious walk-ins, persnickety Shakespeare scholars, malcontent critics, and students newly minted in the play grasp the details and applaud the research? Probably not, but they will know that it looks real, for whatever reason, and that's one of the major points.

"There are three components to it," says Lantern's artistic chief, Charles McMahon, who is directing Cyrano and therefore is the chief decision-maker on the staging. "It must be safe. It must look dangerous. It must help tell the story."

He also says, of his fight director, "everything has to pass muster with Alex for safety and elasticity."

Safety comes largely, fight directors say, through repeated rehearsal - beginning in slow motion, then gradually speeding up as actors develop "muscle memory," so moves come naturally and with perfect timing. The choreography for a 45-second sword fight, not atypical, can take more than 90 minutes in a first run-through, and may remain slow in rehearsals for weeks.

Those rehearsals never stop until the final curtain call of a show's run. Before every performance, actors must report to a "fight call" - a run-through no matter how many times the cast has done it onstage.

Just as musicals have dance captains, sports has team captains, and orchestras have concertmasters, plays have fight captains responsible for overseeing these mandatory sessions, for which producers must leave a minimum of 15 minutes under rules from Actors' Equity, the professional union. On a day with two shows, the actors have two fight calls.

"We want to create a system for actors where they can succeed in doing the same thing over and over again," says Michael Cosenza, fight director for Twelfth Night, in which he must stage a funny fight between two characters who should not be involved in any potentially lethal pairing.

"Actors have to get in the mind-set," he says. "A fight call allows them to run through the movement and make a mistake, and then they can correct it."

If that sounds like the sort of training fencers go through - over and over - it's not. Sports fencing has its rules and accepted moves "and uses minute movements to hit a partner," Cyrano's Girard says. "We want to magnify that movement so audiences can follow a story. Sword fights don't have very specific rules and there are a lot more moves available to you."

With each move comes a new danger, and fight directors say the rehearsal time allotted has paid off, lessening the calculated risks; you rarely hear of swordplay accidents or injuries in professional productions.

Another factor has been the influence of the American Society of Fight Directors, founded in 1977 and with more than 900 members. There's enough stage fighting live, in film, and on TV for them to make livings, though often supplemented by stunt work or teaching. All three involved in March's shows are members.

The society has helped oversee stage-fighting workshops, including an annual one in Philadelphia, and stage-combat training at theater departments, plus certification programs for actors. Two of the nation's leading programs, the society's literature says, are here at Temple University and the University of the Arts, and feature such well-known stage-fight pioneers as John Bellomo and Charles Conwell.

Whether it's a mark of Philadelphia's boom in professional theater - with 51 companies, the most in the region's history - or a sign that violence is never out of style onstage, Philadelphia now has its own fight master - one of only 16 in the country. In December, the fight directors' society named Ian Rose to the position, making him the person who observes the work of trainees and passes them to certification. In the past, local actors had to go to New York, or the society had to send someone here to observe their work. (Actors do not need certification to get combat roles, but it clearly helps.)

"There's always a market for safety in stage violence," Rose says. "What's sort of horrifying is, there are still companies not wanting to hire a fight director, and actors are in danger. There's nothing simple about a slap."

Rose spoke as he was on his way to do some serious karate work.

Watch actors (and one brave critic) work with Arden and Lantern fight directors at

www.philly.com/swordfight.EndText