Pulling Punches with Angie Jepson

In January 2012, the Boston Globe and Playbill reported that actress Johanna Day had broken her hand during a scripted scuffle in the Huntington Theatre Company production of Yasmina Reza’s God of Carnage. Although Day was quoted as saying the injury came from slamming into a prop, the online buzz was that she had slapped her costar far too hard. As a professional fight choreographer, Angie Jepson knew that story was hogwash. She knew this because in theater what we see as a slap is rarely a slap at all, but a carefully rehearsed visual trick (in this case directed by a colleague of Jepson’s) and the hand of the slapper and the face of the slapped can be as much as a foot apart.

The notion of stage fights conjures images of Shakespearean jousts or operatic duels, all clanking swords and fancy footwork. But in the three decades since they  have become fixtures in professional theater, fight directors like Jepson are called upon to craft melees from playful wrestling to barroom brawls. “There’s an incredible range of things that can fall under the need for a fight choreographer,” says Jepson, a lecturer in the College of Fine Arts School of Theatre, who in February coached a student production of Emily Mann’s Mrs. Packard, the story of a mid-19th-century woman committed to an asylum by her husband. “It can be anything from a fall on the stage to just a slap to full-out brawls to stylized dance fights in a musical.” Jepson has choreographed staged rapes and attempted rapes as well as intimate physical tussling. “We’re often called in to work on scenes like this, to figure out how to make them safe and look believable,” she says. And of course there are the classical sword fights.

Inspired by an existing organization in England, the Society of American Fight Directors (SAFD) was incorporated in 1977 and has been certifying coaches like Jepson in skills that weren’t held in particularly high regard during centuries of theater. SAFD’s first national meeting, in New York City in 1979, was attended by 20 directors; its membership is now nearly 42,000, and stage combat is part of all reputable college acting programs. Actors still occasionally get hurt (a quick Google search reveals a string of mishaps, most the result of using weapons not specifically designed for the stage). But stage combat training is all about safety as well as verisimilitude.

For Jepson, becoming a stage combat choreographer and instructor was a perfect fit. As an acting student at Texas Christian University, she was captivated early on when she came upon a theatrical sword fighting class on the campus lawn; soon she took the class herself, and excelled at it. “I took to it really well,” says Jepson, who also teaches at Worcester State University and has taught stage combat at Harvard and Northeastern. “I’d done a lot of gymnastics, dance, and cheerleading, so I loved the physical aspect, and as an actor I loved the theatrical and imaginative aspect.”

The SAFD breaks stage fighting skills into eight levels, from “actor combatants,” who are proficient in unarmed bouts—the use of arms, fists, and feet—to expertise in knives and swords. “Small sword is the hardest level, because it’s a very fine weapon requiring lots of precision and control,” says Jepson, one of a half dozen professional fight directors in the Boston area. Actor combatants have solid knowledge of where the safest places are on an opponent to hit or grab, she says. “It’s safer to go for major muscle groups as opposed to joints. And actors have to know how to make sure there’s enough space for a noncontact move, though to the audience it appears contact is made.”

To someone positioned at the back of the stage instead of in the audience, choreographed unarmed fights would look silly. “We never really do punch a face on stage,” says Jepson. “That would be unsafe, and actors like to keep their faces intact.” And despite how real they look and sound to the audience, stage weapons are different from the real thing and must be specially designed. “A safe stage combat weapon is made of steel, but with a blunted edge,” she says. “Sometimes these weapons have to be even stronger than the real thing.” When actors sustain stab wounds—as was the case in 2008, when British actor Daniel Hoevels slit his own throat with a knife in the final scene of Friedrich Schiller’s Mary Stuart—it’s most often because props are switched unintentionally, notwithstanding Murder, She Wrote–style rumors of lethal mischief by jealous rivals. “It’s astounding how often these mix-ups happen,” Jepson says.

Jepson enjoys choreographing girl fights (“there aren’t enough of them” in theater), but her favorite job ever was directing a brawl in the punk rock musical Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson. “There were 15 to 20 actors breaking bottles, throwing chairs, slamming into the piano,” she says. “It was by far my favorite fight, and definitely the craziest.”

In addition to being on the School of Theatre faculty, Jepson teaches stage combat for the CFA Opera Institute. Her fight direction credits include Ryan Landry’s M with the Huntington Theatre Company, In the Heights, reasons to be pretty, Blackbird, and Fat Pig with SpeakEasy Stage Company, Nicholas Nickleby and Legacy of Light with the Lyric Stage Company, boom with New Repertory Theatre, Spring Awakening with Gloucester Stage Company, The Lover with Bridge Repertory Theater, Don Giovanni with the New England Conservatory, and The Tragedy of Carmen with Boston Midsummer Opera.

Jepson says it’s hard for her to be a disinterested audience member when there’s fighting on stage—she can’t not critique. “If it’s really, really good, I can not only be in awe of the combat work, but enjoy the story,” she says. She was generally unimpressed when she recently saw the Broadway musical Rocky, “but the fights were incredible,” she says. What happens frequently “is I focus on the execution of the combat and I’m taken completely out of the story.” In productions of Shakespeare, for example, actors are cast for character, sometimes to movie stars who haven’t done their own stunts, so when Jepson is supposed to be directing, she’s often teaching. “In Romeo and Juliet the character of Tybalt has 3 fight scenes and only about 15 lines of text,” she says. “So you don’t need your strongest actor; you need someone who can fight really well.”

Ironically, Jepson herself has done only one fight scene on stage. She was in college, and it was her first professional production, in the play Sueno by Jose Rivera. Scorned by a lover, Jepson’s character challenged him to a sword fight. No one was hurt.