To Shakespeare, of whom Lanihuli Gilbert is so enamored, all the world was a stage. But to Gilbert, aspiring stage actress, it’s also a pretty good practice studio.
For whether she’s helping to build a school dormitory in Cambodia or just kicking around the Northern Islands of Scotland with her mother, the La Pietra junior finds much in the experience of travel to inform and enrich the way she inhabits the characters she performs onstage.
“Being a child of mixed background, being exposed to other cultures is a big thing for me,” she says. “It’s a way to understand other people and other ways of life, and a chance to see how problems are solved in different ways.
“Shakespeare’s plays are like their own ecosystems,” she says. “Everybody has a part to play, and you have to be able to convey someone’s story that, chances are, is not the same story that you’ve lived. That’s the connection for me.”
As you like it, then.
If Gilbert wasn’t born to the stage, she certainly was close. Her parents have both been active in community theater, and Gilbert’s own first foray into acting came in a Nativity play when she was just in preschool.
Other school productions followed, but it wasn’t until Gilbert hit her early teens and her stepmother’s efforts to expose her to Shakespeare — she counts walking out of a production of “Henry VIII” at age 9 as one of her biggest regrets — took hold that she seriously considered acting as a potential career.
A history buff with keen interest in the Elizabethan period, Gilbert found wonder in the language and action of the Bard’s work. In time she also developed a particular fondness for Shakespeare’s villains, in whose monologues are seeded so much dark wit.
“I’m drawn to how funny and smarmy his villains can be,” Gilbert says. “I like the innuendo. I like the idea that I can tell a joke and one part of the audience will laugh, one part will be confused and another few will really understand it on a deeper level. I think that’s the beauty of Shakespeare.”
Gilbert approaches female and male characters with equal aplomb, playing not only Lady Macduff in “Macbeth” and Viola in “Twelfth Night,” but also Aaron, the villain of Shakespeare’s darkest and bloodiest play, “Titus Andronicus,” and Henry V.
She also takes her craft seriously, participating in the Washington, D.C.-based Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Camp Shakespeare summer program in each of the last four years.
For all of her explorations into the fantastical, Gilbert also remains grounded in the stuff of the real world. Last summer she traveled to Cambodia and Vietnam as part of a service mission in which she taught English and helped in the ongoing construction of a school. She plans on initiating a clothing drive at La Pietra to benefit the communities she visited.
