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Digby Does Shakespeare!
Airedale Extraordinaire, Ch. Country Aire's Wingin' Digby, CD was featured as 'Sparky the Wonder Dog', in a modified version of Shakespeare's "As You Like It" in December at the Takoma Theatre. The play was set in San Francisco in the 1960s. "Sparky" was the ever-present companion to a far-out hippy named Boris. Digby performed in 6 shows in 3 days with a cast of 60 people, most of them children. He nailed his lines in every performance. Sparky's lines included a well-timed kiss on the lips of the leading man as he turned to kiss his leading lady. Sparky slipped in at the last second to steal the kiss and the show. His other great moment was successive jumps through a hula-hoop during a dance scene.
Training Digby for the play was a real challenge and loads of fun. There was a live rock band, loud sound effects, fight scenes, and just a lot of commotion. Most of the work was in de-sensitizing him to all of this. I used a clicker (Corally Burmaster is my clicker training guru) as I do for teaching any new material and shaping old ones. He knew most of the behaviors he needed, on verbal, before the play. Much of my efforts were in teaching him hand signals to replace the verbals, and getting him to pay attention to the direction of two middle school handlers instead of me. I also had to train the handlers, two delightful 8th graders at Takoma Middle School. One of them was a little afraid of dogs! They both did a great job!
Of course, Digby added a few of his own touches to the script. Any Airedale worth his salt would seize the opportunity to ad-lib. We had one harrowing moment in a dress rehearsal when an adult actor ran out of the dark audience toward the stage with an outstretched hand (toward what Digby viewed as HIS kids). I thought he was going to take her head off. We modified the scene for the real performance to fix that problem.
"As You Like It" was produced and directed by Jillian Raye and David Minton, with script adaptation by David Minton. They run Lumina Studio in Takoma Park Maryland where they teach acting to adults and children, and occasionally, dogs. Digby is consulting his agent about future acting opportunities. In the meantime, he enjoys being an adored house pet and a therapy dog at Duckworth School for profoundly disabled children.
Ann Riley