Intimate touch, live combat, a man dangling upside down by his ankles speaking in an Irish brogue. Welcome to the theatrical world of Matthew R. Wilson, CCAS MFA ’09. As an accomplished actor, choreographer and director, he goes “there” – wherever the story leads – and embraces the macabre, the tragic and the comic, reveling particularly in scenes where they intersect.
One title he carries is that of fight director — a review proclaimed that he “took stage violence to the next level” — and he gravitates toward found weapons.
“I’ve staged two different murders in bathtubs and a third assault,” he says. “One was a very disturbing choking/drowning in a bathroom during a party. One was an empty, discarded bathtub on the beach. The third was a very messy and wet tussle in and out and around a full tub during a water torture sequence.”
After studying classical acting at GW via the Shakespeare Theatre Company, Wilson returned in fall 2018 to the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design as associate professor of theatre. His students benefit from knowledge and techniques he picked up in a wide-ranging career centered mostly in D.C., with a recent three-year detour to teach in the Acting for Stage & Screen program at Ole Miss in Oxford, Miss. Wilson loved his time there, but also feels energized about the move back.
“The opportunity to return full-time to D.C. and to join the amazing theatre program at GW’s Corcoran School is truly a dream,” he says. He credits his time at GW for launching the career that has now led him back.
“All of the professors at the Academy for Classical Acting were amazing, and I’ve taken something from each of them both for my artistic life and for my teaching.”
He has a special fondness for and professional focus on Commedia dell’Arte, a form originated in 16th Century Italy, where stock characters, often masked, both follow a script and improvise, with heavy use of pantomime and other comedic elements.
“The masks of Commedia imply a world of higher contrast where furrows are deeper and noses are longer,” he says. “The highs are higher and the lows are lower, and those journeys through high and low bring out the humor, the sorrow, and the pathos by contrast.”
He founded the award-winning Faction of Fools Theatre Company in Washington and served as artistic director from 2009 to 2015. He tours the world with his own “The Great One-Man Commedia Epic,” and his PhD dissertation at the University of Maryland focused on historiography and reconstruction of Commedia dell’Arte performance.
Wilson has also directed world premieres and established classics, including The Lieutenant of Inishmore, a 2015 production at the Constellation Theatre Company that was nominated for a Helen Hayes Award for Outstanding Choreography. It was one of five nominations Wilson has received, in addition to winning once.
The production oozed blood, featured the fake murder of a real cat, and required a character to hang suspended upside down from the ceiling by an ankle harness for 10 minutes, while speaking in Irish-accented English. Wilson tried the upside-down maneuver himself first.
“I don’t want to ask people to do something I wouldn’t try,” he said in a media report about the play. He describes Lieutenant as “a real complicated show that was fun to solve.”
Wilson has not yet taught stage combat at the Corcoran, but he did in Mississippi and hopes to here. His fall 2018 students experienced a corollary interest – stage intimacy – during the fall 2018 semester.
Wilson’s mentor is Tonia Sina of Intimacy Directors International, a non-profit organization that provides advocacy and education around directing intimacy on-stage, and preventing violence, abuse, and harassment. Sina joined one of Wilson’s classes to conduct a workshop about sex and erotic touch on-stage in the age of the #metoo movement. WAMU featured the class in October.
“There is a strong connection between intimacy work and issues in combat and violence choreography,” Wilson says. “Also, I am really interested in bringing consent culture and best practices for collaboration into my acting teaching.”
Someday soon, if Wilson’s example continues, his students will become collaborators, and maybe even colleagues.
“That’s a great example of what we all want from our students,” he says. “That they will grow in school and graduate to be our peers in the professional industry.”
-Dan Simmons
