What can actors and scholars teach each other about theater? The Early Modern Scene Work Collaborative invites theater practitioners and theater historians to explore scripts by Shakespeare and his contemporaries together in a shared research/rehearsal room. This new workshop series investigates questions from archival research through the discovery process of rehearsal. Practitioners and academics will learn each other’s working languages and interpretive practices, seeking to better bridge the gap between those who make through thinking and those who think through making.
WHAT
This exciting new program will consist of five multi-hour sessions on Saturday afternoons (and one Sunday) spread out across the 24/25 season. These sessions will each have a specific subject and will consist of scholars and practitioners collaborating together in the spirit of discovery.
WHO
This group is targeted towards Scholars and academics and is open to all classical theater practitioners, as well as to students and scholars of early modern drama. For more information please email: musa@redbulltheater.com
WHEN & WHERE
UPCOMING SESSIONS TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON
CAPACITY & COST
Limited to 40 participants per event | $25 per person per event
HOW DO I SIGN UP
To sign up, please click THE BUTTONS BELOW which will take you to sign up for the specific event chosen. You can sign up for as many events as you like! If you would like to bring in groups of students, please email
musa@redbulltheater.com and nathan@redbulltheater.com
HOW DO I SUPPORT
While this new program is partially supported by the ticket price and a seed donation we are still reliant on additional donations of any amount to assure the future of this program. You can make a donation in addition to your ticket purchase through the links. If your institution requires any additional documentation for reimbursement for this research expense please reach out to nathan@redbulltheater.com.
UPCOMING EVENTS TO BE ANNOUNCED SOON
PAST EVENTS
Scenes from Thomas Heywood, A Woman Killed with Kindness
October 16, 2023 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Alchemical Studios, Studio 4 | 50 West 17th street, 12th floor
Lead Scholar: Laura Kolb
Actors Confirmed: Lisa Birnbaum, Rebecca S’manga Frank, Steve Jones, Derek Smith, and Josh Tyson
Anne Frankford, title character of the domestic tragedy A Woman Killed with Kindness, speaks relatively little, and never speaks alone onstage – that is, she never soliloquizes, though the men in her life do so with regularity, allowing the audience a relatively secure sense of their motives and desires. As a result, critics argue about everything to do with Anne: does she love her husband? Why does she commit adultery with his best friend? How does she feel at her wedding? What does she think about—well, anything? For readers, these textual gaps can produce a kind of tantalizing opacity. Literary critics revel in these ambiguities, but could learn much from how actors handle them; how they embody figures who withhold, rather than disclose, their inner worlds. Together we will ask: how do we stage actively what, on the page, reads as passivity? How do we create a female character with interiority and agency from the “speaking silences” in the script? This workshop explores three crucial scenes: the first, near the opening of the play, in which Anne is appraised by the men in her community, as though she were a jewel or a coat; the second, in which her husband’s friend Wendoll declares his attraction; the third, in which she and her husband have a very awkward dinner with Wendoll and another guest.
Scenes from The Fair Maid of the Exchange
December 4, 2023 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Space: ART/New York, Aibel Studio
Lead Scholar: Katherine Schaap Williams
This workshop will explore disability aesthetics in performance in an unattributed and little-known early modern play, The Fair Maid of the Exchange (1607). Critical analysis in disability studies has shown how the play foregrounds a disabled central character, Cripple (never identified by any other name)—but there is no performance history of the play, and scholarly work treats disability at the level of text. This workshop asks: how does disability signify in performance? Pairing a scholar who specializes in early modern disability studies with an actor who identifies as disabled, this workshop will consider how disability, in performance, inflects theatrical embodiment. Examining the choices available to an actor who brings their disability experience to characterization—and focusing especially on the end of the play in 5.1—the workshop will explore how performance offers a resource for thinking about disability in the past.
Scenes from Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl
November 20, 2023 | 6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location: Manhattan Theatre Club Creative Center | 311 West 43rd street
Lead Scholar: Sawyer Kemp
This workshop seeks to bring the text of Middleton & Dekker’s 1611 city comedy, The Roaring Girl into a laboratory space to interrogate the play’s ethos of gender through the lens of early modern trans studies. The play’s bawdy and sensational titular character is based on the real Moll Frith, a pick-pocket and unabashed ‘crossdresser,’ who lived a public life of gender non-conformity and was embraced as a street celebrity in early modern London. Drawing on the embodied social knowledge of practitioners, our workshop explores the characterization of this nonbinary historical person through the performance of a nonbinary actor. Dekker and Middleton’s play presents Moll in context as part of the so-called “roaring boy” youth culture of early 17th Century England–a generationally “queer” phenomenon that saw a large population of young men move to London where they (to the pearl-clutching horror of the clergy, nobles, and self-respecting merchant class) shirked the traditional values of work, marriage, faith, and reproductivity. This workshop focuses on the youth culture elements of the play vividly realized in Act II Scene 1, an establishing street scene cutting between three neighboring shops. In this scene, the audience sees the gang of roaring boys carousing, smoking, shopping, and flirting with various Shopkeeper’s wives. We see Moll moving between shops, being greeted with friendliness and disdain in turns. The aura is of conspicuous consumption and display: fashion, smoking, window shopping that borders on loitering. The year is 1611, but it might well be 1995: these are teens hanging out at the food court, and we are closer to Mallrats than As You Like It.
INTRODUCTION TO ACTING SHAKESPEARE FOR SCHOLARS
March 9, 2024 | 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, Studio C | 18 Bleecker Street
Instructor: Zuzanna Szadkowski
Learn the interpretive skills of actors in this participatory class. How do actors extract playable information from scripts? How do they translate insights about language into embodied choices? What techniques do they use to “lift a scene off the page”? What questions do they ask of plays? Working on our feet, scholars will learn a range of foundational acting practices, drawn from the language focused tradition popularized by John Barton, as well as the work of Stanislavsky, his various students, and others. These techniques can deepen our understanding of our dramatic archive, enrich our scholarly reading practices, and are transportable to the classroom. Scholars who wish to participate should choose a short speech from any early modern play that resonates with them and come ready to experiment with different ways of playing it. No previous acting experience is necessary. There is no need to fully memorize your speech, but please familiarize yourself with the text. If possible, please bring two hard copies of your speech. At the end of the session we’ll have time to ask Zuzanna general questions about her craft. While this class is particularly oriented toward scholars, actors and directors who have joined us in previous sessions are also welcome to participate.
Zuzanna Szadkowski is known for playing “Dorota” on Gossip Girl. She can be seen as “Mabel Ainsley” on HBO’s The Gilded Age and in the Starz series Three Women. Other television and film credits include Worth, Bull, Search Party, The Knick, The Good Wife and Girls. Theater credits include queens at LCT3, Love, Loss and What I Wore, Arcadia and Uncle Romeo Vanya Juliet (WSJ Performance of the Year 2018) with Bedlam, The Comedy of Errors at the Public Theater, King Philip’s Head… with Clubbed Thumb and regional work at Bristol Riverside Theatre, The Actors Theater of Louisville, Two River Theater and at the Bucks County Playhouse. B.A. from Barnard College and M.F.A. from A.R.T./MXAT Institute at Harvard.
THE SECOND MAIDEN'S TRAGEDY
April 20, 2024 | 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: Manhattan Theatre Club Creative Center, Studio 1 | 311 West 43rd street
Lead Scholar: Lauren Robertson
In the fall of 1611, Thomas Middleton sold the King’s Men a play, called The Second Maiden’s Tragedy, about a deranged Tyrant’s attempt to resurrect a dead woman. The Tyrant exhumes the Lady’s decaying corpse from her tomb, dresses it in rich apparel and jewels, and claims to see signs of its liveliness. But the Lady refuses to revive, and when the unsuspecting Tyrant kisses the corpse, its lips having been secretly daubed with poison, her body finally serves as the weapon that kills him. The Second Maiden’s Tragedy seems to suggest that earthly resurrection is impossible, yet the play’s onstage enactment seems frequently to contest the play text’s emphasis on the inert materiality of death. In its final scene, for instance, the Lady’s ghost appears onstage alongside her corpse. There is no clear indication of how the King’s Men staged this spectacle: was the Lady’s ghost played by an actor and her corpse by a dummy? Or were both parts played by actors, and if so, what role did the actor who played the Lady while she was alive take on? This workshop will explore the possibilities for staging this scene, asking how actorly embodiment comes to constitute spectral immateriality, as well as how actorly liveliness contributes to the Lady’s interiority and agency even in her death.
OTHELLO
May 18, 2024 | 2:00 PM - 6:00 PM
Location: The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture, Studio C | 18 Bleecker Street
Lead Scholar: Miles Grier
Othello is a problem. Before the play was a century old, the critic Thomas Rymer blasted the play as a bundle of improbabilities: a Black general, a dishonest soldier, and a marriage undone by a misplaced handkerchief. In our own time, some audience members laugh at Othello's gullibility despite the best efforts of Black actors to imbue the character with their own dignity and intelligence. One could argue that casting choices in Othello have evolved to make the play more "realistic" and thereby to avoid responses that seem to exceed the decorum appropriate for interacting with one of Shakespeare's "four great tragedies." But the burden of making Othello plausibly real has fallen on the Black actors and white women who are now routinely cast as the doomed couple at the play's center. Abraham Popoola counseled actors playing Othello not to undertake the alienating part unless they have "someone close" to return to at home.
But what if we were to give this problem (back) to white men by experimenting with original conditions? What might we learn about what actors and audiences saw and responded to if elements of gender and racial impersonation were restored to the play? In particular, what might restoring the potential of color transfer do to our understanding of Desdemona's guilt, Iago's motive, and Othello's nature? Director Sheila Rose Bland once proposed an all-white-male Othello framed as fraternity hazing gone wrong. While we won't restrict ourselves to that conceit, we do look forward to the different nuances of tone, genre, and character motivation that may surface when Othello can, again, "dye upon a kiss" (as the line is rendered in the Second Quarto).
Borderlands Shakespeare - Winter’s Tale and Invierno
Produced in Partnership with the Borderlands Shakespeare Colective
October 12, 2024 | 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: MTC Studio 2 | 311 West 43rd Street
Lead Scholar: This session will be led by the co-founders of the Borderlands Shakespeare Colectiva, Drs. Kathryn Vomero Santos (Trinity University), Katherine Gillen (Texas A&M University–San Antonio), and Adrianna M. Santos (Texas A&M University–San Antonio), with direction by John Gould Rubin.
This workshop brings together parallel statue reanimation scenes in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and José Cruz González’s Invierno, which is published in Volume 2 of The Bard in the Borderlands: An Anthology of Shakespeare Appropriations en La Frontera. Set in California’s Central Coast, Invierno toggles between the twenty-first century and a period of time leading up to the U.S. invasion of Mexico that would end in 1848 with the Mexican cession of more than half of its territory to the United States. In González’s play, Don León is a prominent Californio ranchero, and Hermonia is a Chumash mestiza. Her half-sister, Paulina, is a Chumash healer, who serves as a bridge between past and present throughout the play. González's Invierno offers a Borderlands appropriation that embraces The Winter’s Tale’s themes of resilience, revitalization, and repair in order to consider how the past reverberates in the current moment.
This workshop will experiment with the transformative final scene of The Winter’s Tale and the parallel scene in Invierno (the end of 2.7), focusing on dramaturgical approaches to the moment when the statues of Hermione and her counterpart Hermonia stir to life and reunite with their families. What performance techniques can we use to create these miracles on stage? Whereas the lifelike statue of Hermione is guarded by Paulina and reported to have been made “by that rare Italian master Giulio Romano” (5.2.94–95), it is Don León who “spent years carving the very likeness of [Hermonia] into [a] grand tree” on the sacred land of the Chumash Peoples as an act of atonement (2.7). We will examine the Indigenous frameworks that infuse Inverno’s ending and that shape the play’s treatment of misogyny, intergenerational trauma, and family reconciliation. We will further consider how these dynamics might inform interpretations and possible stagings of The Winter’s Tale while also shedding light on González’s innovative approaches to adapting Shakespeare.
THE BORDERLANDS SHAKESPEARE COLECTIVA (BSC) seeks to amplify the work of Chicanx and Indigenous artists who adapt Shakespeare to reflect the histories and lived realities of the U.S.–Mexico Borderlands. They aim not only to change the way Shakespeare is taught and performed but also to promote the socially just futures envisioned en el arte de La Frontera. Together, the co-founders of the Colectiva, Drs. Santos, Gillen, and Santos are editing a three-volume anthology of plays, including Invierno, titled The Bard in the Borderlands (ACMRS Press). Their work has been supported by funding from the Mellon Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Folger Shakespeare Library.
JOHN GOULD RUBIN, AD of The Private Theater, and former co-AD/ED of LAByrinth Theater Company, for which he directed 7 plays. He’s directed throughout NYC at Rattlestick, Ma-Yi, and The Public among others, notably: King Lear at The Annenberg Center in LA, Turn Me Loose (w/Joe Morton) at The Westside Theater, The Wallis-Annenberg in LA and Arena Stage, DC; Rocco, Chelsea, etc. a devised project about the consciousness of conflict for The Private Theatre, Peer Gynt at The International Ibsen Festival in Oslo, Norway, Playing With Fire (a deconstruction of Strindberg’s one-act about wife swapping, voyeurism and exhibitionism at The Box,) Queen For A Day (David Proval & Vinnie Pastore) at St. Clements and The Cherry Orchard with Ellen Burstyn at The Actors Studio, American Buffalo with Treat Williams and Stephen Adly Guirgis at The Dorset Theater Festival. Current projects: Turn Me Loose on Broadway and A Doll House, a radical translation of the Ibsen classic at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.
Invierno is written by José Cruz González, a prominent Chicanx playwright. Professor Emeritus at California State University, Los Angeles, González has written a number of plays including If by Chance, The Extraordinary ZLuna Captures the World, Under a Baseball Sky, American Mariachi, September Shoes, The San Patricios, and The Sun Serpent.
Thinking on the Line: Hamlet's Soliloquies with Musical Support
September 29, 2024 | 5:00 PM - 8:00 PM
Location: Sheen Center Shiner Theatre | 18 Bleecker Street
Lead Scholar: Jacob Ming-Trent & Cortez Farris
Join Jacob Ming-Trent for an interactive demonstration of an actor’s process, as he works on several of Hamlet’s speeches, sharing techniques that help create the illusion that the grieving prince is articulating his thoughts as they are occurring to him. The development of changeable, idiosyncratic characters that have new ideas in real time was a significant field of innovation for early modern playwrights, with Shakespeare’s Hamlet offering a strong and influential example of emerging subjectivity effects in the drama. The sense that a character is saying out loud ideas that are new to them, or “thinking on the line,” was not only a major invention of early modern playwrights, it is a basic goal of classical actors.
This workshop gives a detailed illustration of fundamental acting practices such as specifying and personalizing language, and finding “beats” or shifts in thought and feeling—and does so in a formally experimental way. Inspired by the flexible and sensitive relationship between verse and music in hip hop, Ming-Trent will collaborate with multi-platinum music producer Cortez Farris to create a dynamic soundscape that supports Hamlet’s shifts of thought. This innovative way of using music with verse to help specify a flow of ideas—different from the underscoring traditionally used in Anglo-American Shakespeare to create an emotional wash that covers the meaning of text—has been explored by Ming-Trent in his one man show, Shakespeare Saved My Life, as well as in other recent productions that draw of the language-sensitive musicality of hip hop to unlock the fluidity of thought in classical verse.
JACOB MING-TRENT TV: "White Famous," Showtime (series regular), "Watchmen," HBO (series regular), "Ray Donavan," Showtime (Recurring), "Feed the Beast," AMC (recurring). Also seen on "Only Murders in the Building," "WU-TANG: An American Saga," "New Amsterdam," "God Friended Me," "High Maintenance," and several more. Film: Superfly, Forty-year-old Version, Snakes, R#J, Possession of Hannah Grace, The Bygone, Julie Taymor's Midsummer Night's Dream and others. Broadway: Shrek The Musical (Original cast), Hands on a Hardbody, (Original Cast). Off Broadway: The Alchemist, Mammon, Red Bull Theater, Lortel Nom; The Harder They Come, Pedro, Public Theater, Lortel Nom; Merry Wives, Falstaff, Public Theater, Drama Desk nom; Father Comes Home From The Wars, Public Theater, Lortel Award; Twelfth Night, Sir Toby, Public Theater; Cymbeline, Public Theater; Mother Courage, CSC; Merchant of Venice, TFANA; Midsummer Night's Dream, TFANA; Widowers Houses, Epic Theater Ensemble; Tempest, Public Theater; On the Levee, Lincoln Center.
CORTEZ FARRIS is a versatile music producer, engineer, and musician with over 20 years of industry experience. His journey began at the legendary Hit Factory in New York City, where he rose from intern to in-house engineer, learning from industry titans Ed, Troy, and Daniel Germano. Having refined his craft at prestigious studios such as Sound on Sound under David Amlen's mentorship and The Cutting Room with David Crafa, Farris brings a deep understanding of musical storytelling. Farris's impressive portfolio includes work on 5 RIAA-certified multi-platinum recordings and 2 Grammy-nominated albums, collaborating with artists including Whitney Houston, Method Man, Mary J. Blige, RZA, Black Eyed Peas, Alicia Keys, Lil Kim, and others. His expertise spans genres, from pop and hip-hop to Broadway plays, and major motion picture soundtracks.
Animal Impersonation in The Witch of Edmonton
November 16, 2024 | 3:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Location: MTC Studio 1 | 311 West 43rd Street
Lead Scholar: Jean E. Howard
The purpose of this session is to explore the theatrical consequences of having a human actor perform the part of an animal on the early modern stage, rather than bringing a real animal onstage as may have been done with Lance’s dog, Crab, in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, or having a prop stand in for a living animal. In The Witch of Edmonton the Dog, Tom, has one of the major speaking parts in the play. This part could not be performed by a real dog nor by a purely fabricated simulacrum of a canine being.
Henslowe’s Diary includes in a lengthy appendix a list of props held by the Admiral’s Men, including a number of animal skins. What we will test in our session are the expressive affordances and philosophical consequences of human actors personating animals--perhaps wearing their skins to do so (on not)—on the early modern stage. Are these boundary crossings merely comic (think Bottom in the lion’s skin) or can they be uncanny and unsettling, or familiar and strangely comforting? These queries are given particular force in The Witch of Edmonton because the dog in question is arguably also a demon, summoned by the curses of an old woman accused of witchcraft. Tom thus not only crosses species boundaries, but also the boundary between the human and the supernatural. On a stage in which embodiments are often fluid (i.e., boys play women; living actors perform corpses), is there something unique and uniquely unsettling about humans performing as animals or animal/demons?
JEAN E. HOWARD is George Delacorte Professor Emerita in the Humanities at Columbia University where she has taught early modern literature, Shakespeare, theater history, and American literature of incarceration. Howard is author of over fifty essays and editor of seven essay collections. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration (Illinois, 1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (Routledge, 1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598-1642 (Pennsylvania, 2007), which won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for the outstanding work of theater history for 2008; Marx and Shakespeare, co-written with Crystal Bartolovich (Continuum, 2012), and King Lear: Language and Writing (Bloomsbury, 2022). A co-editor of The Norton Shakespeare (third edition 2015), she is completing new book on the different fates of the history play in 20th and 21st century Britain and America. At Columbia Howard has served in a number of administrative roles and has won the Presidential Teaching Award and the Graduate School’s Award for Distinguished Mentoring.
DR. MUSA GURNIS is an early modern theater scholar (PhD Columbia) and theater practitioner. She is the creator and convener of Red Bull’s Early Modern Scene Work Collaborative. Dr. Gurnis is author of the book, Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018); and co-editor of the essay collection, Publicity on the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave, 2021). Her articles on Shakespeare and early modern theater culture appear in various academic journals, including Shakespeare and Shakespeare Studies, as well as in such collections as The Changeling: State of Play (Arden, 2022). Dr. Gurnis has held several research fellowships at the Folger Shakespeare Library, and at the Huntington Library. She teaches at Baruch College. Musa has dramaturged for Bedlam Theatre (NY), Red Bull Theater (NY), LABrynth (NY), the Private Theater (NY), Brave Spirits (DC), and the Abbey National Theatre (Dublin). With Eric Tucker, she co-wrote the Shakespeare mash-up web series BEDLAM. Musa has studied acting at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London); and performs both regionally and in New York. She directs new works at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research.