The cultural moment and the rehearsal process Fall 2017 turned out to be a very peculiar moment to be working with undergraduate students on a play that is about discovering and exploring one’s sexuality. When I accepted the project last spring, I had, half-jokingly, urged the Chair of the Department of Theatre & Dance at…
Paula Vogel’s Desdemona cannot outrun Shakespeare’s Othello. She cannot escape her death. Nor, at least as much to Vogel’s point, can any woman escape the restrictions and restraints placed upon her by the men who define her existence. Desdemona: A Play About a Handkerchief is one kind of feminist retelling of Shakespeare’s story. Vogel locates…
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…
In Fally 2013, I directed the premiere of Rosemary McLaughlin’s Paterson Falls within the Department of Theatre at Drew University in Madison, NJ. Paterson Falls chronicles and celebrates the ‘fragile bridge’ (to borrow a phrase from Steve Golin) that was built in 1913 between striking silk workers in Paterson, NJ and artists, intellectuals and Village…
I directed Our Town at Sing Sing Correctional Facility and the men, with their female civilian counterparts, performed the play twice for the population of the facility and once for an invited civilian audience of ~225. Thornton Wilder’s Our Town opened on Broadway on February 4, 1938 — this year, we celebrate the Pulitzer…
Charese Scott-Cooper as Angel, Aissatu Young as Malika and Michelle Quintero Williams as Prix. I heard one of the first readings of Breath, Boom at the Public Theatre several years ago; I was immediately struck by the force of Kia’s writing. I also remember thinking that no one would ever let a white girl who…
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…
Last night, we put Claudius on trial. Miching mallecho If you’ve been reading my blog or following me on Twitter, you probably know that I’m teaching a Shakespeare workshop at Sing Sing Correctional Facility this autumn, that the men were curious but deeply skeptical about Shakespeare when we began. A few weeks into the workshop,…
Prologue While I was pursuing my M.A. at the Shakespeare Institute, I studied with Dr. John Jowett, who has done a tremendous amount of work on attribution studies in general, and the relationship between Shakespeare and Thomas Middleton in particular. I was particularly intrigued by his scholarship with regard to Measure for Measure, and the…
Prologue Execution of Justice ran from January 28 trough February 8, 2004 on the Babcock Stage at Pioneer Theatre, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The acting company was comprised of students in the Actor Training Program at the University of Utah; not only did they embrace George Moscone and Harvey Milk, who died before most…
The particular challenge I worked to tell the stories of the play as truthfully and as clearly as we can, but I also wanted to celebrate the innate theatricality of the play. We examined every irregularity in the scansion, every short verse line, every shared verse line, every transition from verse to prose: what is…
Five Women… grapples with questions about the nature of friendship and sexual relationships for generation which was born in the wake of the sexual revolution and which has come of age in the era of AIDS. As they watch two of their peers celebrate what looks to be a less than promising union, five women…