In 1982, Royal Shakespeare Company director, John Barton, led a series of televised master classes with RSC actors Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellen, Judi Dench, and Ben Kingsley, among other memorable names. These programs are an invaluable and enjoyable way to develop your sense of acting Shakespeare.
The World’s A Stage Players is excited to host a series of five workshops that will take the programs as a starting point and work with the scenes, speeches, and sonnets used in them. The workshops will take place in the Goodwin Forum at the Concord Free Public Library. Open to participants and observers alike, the workshops will tackle:
– using both verse and prose;
– finding character through language;
– exploring speeches and soliloquies; and
– utilizing irony, passion, and coolness.
The workshops will not be instructor-led, but gently facilitated to create an opportunity for collaboration and peer learning amongst a group of interested community theater actors and Shakespeare fans.
The first three of five planned sessions are scheduled for January 8, January 29, and February 26 from 1:30-4:30 p.m. To participate email worldsastageplayersma@gmail.com to RSVP and receive the viewing/reading prompts for each session.
All nine episodes of the “Playing Shakespeare” series are available via YouTube and are also transcribed in the volume, Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide (available at the library and on Amazon).
Session 1 – The Playing Shakespeare Workshop
The Two Traditions and Using The Verse
How to Participate:
1. Email worldsastageplayersma@gmail.com to let us know you’re coming!
2. Watch the first two episodes of the Playing Shakespeare series: The Two Traditions and Using The Verse (available on YouTube) or read Chapters 1 and 2 of Playing Shakespeare: An Actor’s Guide.
Our first session will tackle what it means to follow Hamlet’s instruction to “suit the action to the word, the word to the action.” Within that topic, we may explore how to find “hidden” direction within the text, how to balance naturalism with the heightened language of Shakespeare, and how Shakespearean verse should help guide, rather than stand in the way of, your performance.
Scenes that may be utilized are:
Act I, Scene 1: The Merchant of Venice
Act III, Scene 3: Othello
Act III, Scene 1: Henry V
Act II, Scene 3: The Winter’s Tale
Act IV, Scene 1: The Merchant of Venice
Act I, Scene 2: The Winter’s Tale
Act II, Scene 5: 3 Henry VI
Act IV, Scene 2: Cymbeline
Act IV, Scene 4: Troilus and Cressida
Act I, Scene 2: Richard III
but participants are free to bring in any piece of Shakespeare they might like to work on.
For more information, please visit https://www.concordplayers.org.
