Juan Rivera LeBron, Actor

Juan Rivera LeBron is an actor at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. He portrayed Valentine in The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

Interview Excerpts

ON VALENTINE

JUAN RIVERA LEBRON: And, you know, people often put down this play, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, because of that end, and they say, “Oh, either Shakespeare was young and he didn’t know what he was doing,” you know, he didn’t have quite the craft as a writer down or he just kind of wrote himself into a corner and he tried to get himself out quickly.  But I think he’s really making a point about just that, about forgiveness.  And in an almost impossible situation, to have a character forgive another character like that goes so opposite against what we’re used to now. You know, we’re used to the kind of Hollywood standard, where, you know, the bad guy gets it in the end and everything blows up and the good guy gets the girl and it’s all kind of a clean, nice ending.

Well, I think Shakespeare in a way he was – in a way I think was playing with our expectations in that ending and saying, “Well, what happens if I go opposite what you’re expecting.  You’re expecting him to be livid and for Proteus to be shunned and sent away.  Well, what if I turn that upside down and say, ‘Okay, what if he forgives him?’  And what does that do to all the characters on stage?”

So, as far as it being a place to go, I think there’s a – I think that’s right, I think that there is a point where I go sort of emotionally where I look at all the options – emotional options and kind of the options that Valentine has – on stage – toward all the other characters.  How is he going to deal with this – with Silvia, how is he going to deal with this — with Proteus, or his life in the future.  And he makes a choice – an unusual choice – but in a way it’s the only sort of choice that will heal everything in the end.  And that’s forgiveness.  And I think that there’s something to that, that in the end Valentine acts as sort of – you know I have to say – a god-like figure in that he forgives the worst and by doing that he heals – he begins the healing process of everyone – on stage.

ON BRINGING SHAKESPEARE TO NEW AUDIENCES

JUAN RIVERA LEBRON: People I think often don’t often realize how much they know, already, about Shakespeare.  Just how much Shakespeare has been ingrained in our culture and in our literature and things like that.  I mean, this last year we did a school tour and we went to a really tough high school where the kids – you can tell these kids have just been beaten and bruised by violence and it’s kind of an inner-city high school and all that stuff.  And Terry and I developed a workshop on Hamlet that we did for them.  Actually, the education department developed a workshop and we kind of tweaked it for their circumstances, when we got there.

And, you know, I remember saying to them, “You know, has anybody seen The Lion King?”  The movie The Lion King.  And they said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, I’ve seen that movie”.  Well, I said, “That’s kind of the story of Hamlet.  He has a father and his uncle kills off his father to try and get the crown.”  And this was just like life altering for these kids because they realized, “I know this story.”  It was – you could really see it change them, in a way, when they kind of had an ownership of the knowledge that they could say, “I know what Shakespeare’s about.  I know that story.”

So, it’s – I think it’s really rewarding and I mean, the motivation for kind of going out to these rural towns and doing these performances for these people, I think that has a lot to do with it.  It’s a lot of – you know, we live and breath this stuff every day here and being able to share that is really important, I think.  And it’s rewarding because we often take it for granted and when you go out and you see somebody’s face light up and they go, “Oh, Richard III, he’s really mean but I really laugh at all his jokes and I really enjoy him telling me how he’s going to kill off all these people.”  That’s really great.  To see that.

ON THE AMERICAN APPROACH TO SHAKESPEARE

JUAN RIVERA LEBRON: I think that, you know, there — there’s something about sort of American training and American acting that has its basis on just emotional — an emotional center.  As opposed to sort of – I don’t want to term it this but it’s the best word I can think of – a sort of intellectual approach to the text or about the words or about the literary aspect of a play.  As opposed to the emotional aspects of a play, and a story.

And I think how we approach Shakespeare as American actors is we tend to look at the emotional aspect of things first.  And that’s often, I think, sort of made fu – made fun of.  Because people say, “Well, it’s not about the emotion.  Shakespeare’s about the words and the story and how beautiful the language is.”  Well, the truth is it’s really both, I think.  And it’s just a difference in how you approach it.

I mean, as an actor you can come at a play and say, you know,  “Let me figure out . . .”  and I know actors in the company who look at characters and say, “These are the emotional aspects of things, and eventually that will guide me to how to speak the language.”  And then there’s the reverse.  There’s actors, also, that will concentrate on how to speak the language, what words are important – things like that – “ . . . and that will eventually guide me to the emotional center of the character, or the scene.”  Or things like that.

And – but I think there’s something uniquely American about concentrating on the power of emotions in a story.  That’s not to say that other theaters and other people don’t do that; they certainly do.  But I think there’s something about how we approach the work that kind of concentrates on that.