In January, I was a participant in the month-long intensive at Shakespeare & Company. Tina Packer, Dennis Krausnick, Kevin Coleman and their colleagues have been teaching the intensive for more than 30 years, and intensive is categorically one of the operative descriptors: the hours are long and the work is profound (should one choose to…
I just directed Thornton Wilder’s Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility, a maximum security prison. (If you’ve visited this site before, followed me on Twitter or possibly stumbled across my path on the subway, no doubt you already know this.) Even though the play was selected by their peers, several of the men in…
The individuals on the play selection committee all said that they wanted a comedy, or at least a story with some lighter moments in it. Over the course of several months, my colleagues and I made almost three dozen suggestions that fit the committee’s criteria, which include having a dozen or more roles for men…
In Acting II at Sing Sing this summer, we’ve been working on developing points of concentration, physical awareness and sense memory, discovering the dramatic action and building a character. In this regard, our class is much like Acting 201 just about anywhere. But we’re also looking for life skills, for mindful ways to interact with…
Last night, we had the first session of an Intro to Acting workshop at Sing Sing. It was supposed to be for the men new to our program, but in the event, we had a nice mix of veterans and newbies, 15 men in total. I was leading a Patsy Rodenburg physical warm-up; at one…
You probably think this post is about you, don’t you? Don’t stop me if you’ve heard this one before. Last Thursday and Friday, I was casting a show that I’ll direct in June. The artistic director of the theatre and I were working with two capable, consummately professional casting directors. At the initial casting session,…