Woodstock Arts

“All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players.

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts.”

For over 400 years, the words of William Shakespeare have been held up in Western theater as the finest dramatic poetry in the English language. His great catalogue of characters—from Juliet to Hamlet to King Henry V—speak with a soaring eloquence and impassioned clarity that has attracted the world's greatest actors since the time in which their plays were first written.

But what exactly is an actor supposed to DO while they are speaking such rich, dense, complicated language? How should one's body move and change as the words are spoken aloud? Which character should they be speaking to? And why? And what if—as so often happens in Shakespeare—an actor must speak a large swath of Shakespearean text alone?

“Shakespeare and the Target” is a rigorous classical workshop designed to help maturing actors (16 and up) answer these very questions. Drawing on the foundational pedagogy of Declan Donnellan’s seminal acting treatise, The Actor and the Target, this 6-week class will provide students the tools to identify, envisage, and address the precise “targets” of Shakespearean text: be it another character, a circumstance, the audience, or one’s own self. In addition to weekly games, exercises, and discussions, students will develop both a solo speech (monologue or soliloquy) and one small-group scene, culminating in a final in-class presentation on September 17th.