With 2023 Tony Award Winner for Best Featured Actress in a Play MIRIAM SILVERMAN (The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window) for 7 weeks and Tony Nominee Andy Groteluschen for 3 weeks*​
*Andy Grotelueschen will teach on 10/30, 11/6, 11/13
**There will be no Class on 10/23 and 11/27.
Please hold December 11th as a possible makeup day
ACTING INTENSIVE
SHAKESPEARE'S THE WINTERS TALE
A Play Study with MIRIAM SILVERMAN and ANDY GROTELUESCHEN
and guest artist Amanda Quaid
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10 Wednesday Evenings*
September 18 - December 4th**
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6:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Location | The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture | Studio C
18 Bleecker Street, New York, NY 10012
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Class size is limited to 16 participants | $775 per student​
“Speak the speech as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue.”
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For four hundred years, Shakespeare’s immortal words have had us rolling in the aisles, crying into our drinks, or contemplating life's great mysteries. Back and EXPANDED by popular demand, learn how to make Shakespeare’s immortal play THE WINTER’S TALE jump off the page and invoke delight or dole with 2023 Tony Award Winner Miriam Silverman and Tony Nominee Andy Grotelueschen. Act now to take advantage of this exciting opportunity.
Essential Question:
How do you approach Shakespeare’s plays with knowledge and confidence, utilizing the clues and tools in the verse to find the dynamic truth of your character and situation? What aspects of an actor’s preparation are most essential when approaching Shakespearian performance? How do you engage openly and honestly with your scene partner?
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Course Objectives:​
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Study the entirety of Shakespeare’s play using exercises and table work
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Demystify Shakespeare’s words
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Learn how to use Shakespeare’s verse, text, and rhetoric to find clues about your character
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Learn how to rehearse and work a Shakespeare scene with a partner
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Learn exercises that can be used with any text
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Discover (or remember) the joy and passion in performing Shakespeare
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Enduring Understandings:
Actors will learn that Shakespeare’s language is not an archaic fortress that requires a knowledge of the rules to enter but rather an intensely honest heightened text with a multitude of tools that can aid and assist an actor on their journey to the truth. In this class, actors will learn how to demystify Shakespeare and his verse and find the internal truth of the character. By the end of the class, actors will have confidence they can step on to a Classical stage and deliver dynamic truth to both the audience and their scene partner.
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Process:
Miriam and Andy will lead students in an exploration of The Winter's Tale over the course of 10 weeks, utilizing her unique combination of table work, scene work and group exercises which will illuminate Shakespeare’s text in a whole new way. Each week students will delve into different sections of the play using a series of exercises to unpack the text and understand verse in a tactile manner. Without a performance goal in mind the class will examine different scenes within the play, giving students an opportunity to take on different roles each week - developing their skills with text, script analysis, physical awareness and partner work.​​
Instructors:
MIRIAM SILVERMAN is an actress, teacher and born and raised New Yorker. She holds an MFA in Acting and a BA in East Asian Studies from Brown University. Miriam won the 2023 Tony Award for Best Featured Actress in a Play for her critically-acclaimed performance in the Broadway production of The Sign in Sidney Brustein’s Window. She has been the proud member of countless NY and world premieres including Will Arbery’s Plano, Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide, Amy Herzog’s Mary Jane, Anna Ziegler’s A Delicate Ship, Clare Barron’s You Got Older, Ethan Coen’s A Play is a Poem, Joe Gilford’s Finks and the Tony-nominated Broadway production of Junk by Ayad Akhtar. With roots in Shakespeare and the Classics, Miriam has also performed at theaters across the US, including The Goodman, Guthrie, Yale Rep, Arena Stage, The Folger and numerous productions at The Shakespeare Theater in DC. She played Winifred in Red Bull’s production of The Witch of Edmonton. Select television and film credits include Breaking, Bad Education, Dead Ringers, Fleishman is in Trouble, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, The Blacklist, Blue Bloods and NOS4A2. Miriam is the recipient of a TCG Fox Fellowship and teaches Acting, Voice and Text Analysis at NYU in both the Graduate Acting program and the Department of Dramatic Writing.
ANDY GROTELUESCHEN was nominated for a Tony Award for his performance as Jeff in the acclaimed musical Tootsie. Additional Broadway credits include The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window with Miriam Silverman, and Cyrano de Bergerac directed by Jamie Lloyd. He was nominated for a Lortel award for his work in Into the Woods and received the St. Clair Bayfield award for The Two Gentlemen of Verona - both produced by Fiasco Theater where he is a longtime company member. He's appeared Off-Broadway as Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew and in many other Shakespeare plays, as well as many world premieres of new work. Film: Música, Here Today, Coin Heist, Ordinary World, Still on the Road, Tumorhead. TV: The Gilded Age, Lincoln Rhyme, Elementary, The Good Wife, The Good Cop, The Knick. He has taught at The Public Shakespeare Lab, the Actors Center, NYU, CAP21, Yale, LSU, Duke, the American College Theatre Festival, Manhattan School of Music, Marquette University, and Fiasco Theater's Free Training Initiative. MFA in Acting, Brown University.
Preparation:
Ideally you will have read through The Winter’s Tale at least once before class begins.
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Dress and Materials:
You should wear clothes that are easy to move around in. We suggest you bring a water bottle and a notebook.​
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Concerns? Questions?
Contact Nathan Winkelstein and Dominique Nadeau
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AMANDA QUAID has taught speech, accents and heightened text in New York for 20+ years. Her clients include award-winning stage and film actors, comedians, singers, media personalities, and others. Select coaching credits include The Wanderers (Roundabout, starring Katie Holmes), Becky Nurse of Salem (Lincoln Center, starring Deirdre O’Connell), A Touch of the Poet, Butcher Boy, Translations (Irish Rep), and many more. She has been featured as an accent expert on WNYC, and her book, American Accent Drills for British and Australian Speakers, was published by Routledge in 2020. For more, visit talkshopnyc.com.
All of our teachers are committed to these classes. As working performers, unexpected conflicts may arise. If this were to happen, Red Bull would strive to provide an equally qualified replacement to ensure the quality of your experience. We thank you in advance for this understanding.