Acting Shakespeare: An Introduction

Like Shakespeare’s own company of players, our “Cotuit Shakespeare Company,” led by veteran Shakespeare director and educator Ed O’Toole, will work together to unpack Shakespeare’s language and not only learn to deliver Shakespeare’s lines with power and understanding, but have plenty of fun along the way. (They’re not called plays for nothing.)

To understand Shakespeare and his characters, to appreciate his skills and his inventiveness, we cannot simply read Shakespeare silently when we are studying him, but hear him, listen to his words, listen to what his characters say and listen to how they say them. This is the way Shakespeare intended us to encounter his characters and his plays.

Only reading on your feet can allow us to examine, explore, unpack, dig into the text. (It’s no coincidence that the word “rehearsal” derives from a French word that means to dig into and to turn over.)

In short, we must read him aloud. Listening to Shakespeare’s plays and reading them aloud are vital to our attempts to understand not just the intricacy and the splendor of his writing, but also of his gifts as a director and a producer.

Using the text as our guide, and the rehearsal process as our lab, we will learn how to create characters and bring them to life on stage using research, timing, pace, focus, and physical action, among other skills.

Collaboration will be emphasized, but we also will emphasize the importance of using our knowledge of Shakespeare’s language and techniques in order to perform Shakespeare with the poise and conviction needed to tell a character’s story to the audience.

We will read and perform scenes from a variety of plays, including some of the best known, like Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth, Hamlet, Othello, Twelfth Night and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, but also a few of the less familiar plays, like Cymbeline, 1 Henry IV, Henry V and The Merry Wives of Windsor. And, of course, some of your choice.

4 Saturdays, June 5-26
1-4pm
Black Box Theater
$180/$153 members