Performance Groups, and Assignment Details

Schedule

The Assignment

Each of you will perform in a scene agreed upon by all members of the group from the play to which you have been assigned, as indicated in the table above. You can obey the scene designations provided by the editor(s) of the play, or you can designate as a "scene" some chunk of the play that crosses received scene breaks, or that falls within a traditionally designated scene. In short, each of you will perform in a "scene" from the play to which you have been assigned.

This will give you a chance to work closely with a small group of classmates to engage with the play in new and innovative ways. It is an opportunity for you to discover and to develop a variety of skills (technical, artistic, and analytic), and to work together to produce a reading of a scene that tells us all what you think the text means. Your imaginations should be your only limit here; you are encouraged to get creative, funny, even weird.

Please don't be alarmed if you have never acted before. I have ensured that every group has members of Acadia's Theatre program in it, and I ask that they help others with stage fright, and I ask that the rest of you give the Theatre students your attention as they try to help in this regard.

The primary purpose of this assignment is to give you a chance to think carefully about what it means to bring a play-text to life.

The basic rules:

• I encourage you to try to develop a scene that could be seen as a thumbnail of the entire play, but I have decided not to make this a requirement.
• Your performance should be limited to 15 - 20 minutes
• You must involve every member of the group in some obvious way
• You must speak Shakespeare's language--no modernized scripts, please
• You must distribute a program containing a full cast list and a Director's Note of not-less-than 250 words*
• You are not required to memorize your lines.

 *If you email me your program ahead of time, I will copy it for you.

Rehearsing: When you begin your informal rehearsals, you should start with a read-through of your scene. As a group, you will have to decide what you think the scene is really about and how you can best communicate this idea to your audience. You will have to make decisions about casting (who will play which roles? will you need some people to play more than one character? what effect might such directorial decisions as doubling or cross-dressing have on the audience? the actors?); sets (you will be working with limited space and very limited resources--figure out how to make the best possible use of these); costuming (how should the characters dress? will they change clothes at any point? are there clothes in your closet at home you can transform and make use of?); properties (will you need to use props to further the action? to elicit a particular response from the audience? just for fun? are there things you can borrow from friends or pick up at the dollar store to contribute?); blocking (who will stand where and when? remember to script your movements carefully so that you don't either trip over each other or stand stiff as boards).

The point of the exercise: I understand this assignment not as an acting exercise, but as a chance for you to practice the techniques of thorough and intelligent close reading. Your goal is to make sense of the text and to communicate to your classmates as clearly as possible the sense you've made of it. This assignment is also designed to provide the class with a clear reminder of the performative aspects of Shakespeare's play-texts.

Evaluation: You will graded for this assignment by the rest of the class, but I reserve the right to moderate the assigned grade by one letter grade or less (e.g. I might change a C to a C+, B-, or B: of course it could go the other direction, too. Every member of your group will receive the same grade for this assignment. We will evaluate your performance on the basis of its effective and imaginative use of costumes, sets, and props, on the clarity with which you speak your lines, on the effectiveness of your overall concept, and on the quality of your program (with particular emphasis on the Director's Note). Here is a copy of the evaluation form we'll use.

N.B. If you fail to appear in class on the day of your presentation, you will receive a grade of F/0% for this assignment.

My thanks to my colleague Dr. Jessica Slights, who designed this assignment and allowed me to modify it to suit our purposes.