SHAKESPEARE NOW!
Shakespeare in Performance (SIP) plays are modernized and adapted for today’s students and audiences! We make Shakespeare’s plays anew by reimagining their possibilities. What if his dramas are muses, who inspire you to be creative? The timelessness of Shakespeare’s art, after all, requires the talents of today’s theater artists.
How might Shakespeare speak to us, right now?
To answer that question, students begin with a careful reading of the play as a whole—its themes, characters, and main conflicts. Yet they also learn to read like actors do: searching for a character’s “wants,” or objectives, or motives; exploring the different rhythms of prose and verse; discovering cues, figures of speech, or embedded stage directions in early modern scripts. Adaptation begins in Shakespeare’s living language, getting behind his scripts. Watch troupe members at work on Much Ado About Nothing:
Each SIP production synthesizes the original text with fresh ideas about how to stage its action. Key themes or moments of a play are emphasized by the addition of pop music, or numbers from music theater, or hip-hop dance. This acoustic cover of “Sweet Dreams” by the Eurythmics featured actors from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2015). The song highlighted the behavior of Titania while under a love spell. She had just exited in adoration of Bottom, whose head was transformed (by Puck) into that of donkey. A mystified chorus tries to make sense of Titania’s “sweet dreams”:
Shakespeare’s own acting company didn’t have any female actresses! SIP productions, however, not only cast women in female roles but also create roles for women for artistic reasons. Prospero, for example, became Prospera in our Tempest (2019). The introduction of Prospera brilliantly replaced a snarling patriarch and explored new emotional dynamics between Prospera and Miranda in a mother/daughter relationship.
Prospera from The Tempest
Played by Grace Williams (2019)
Canonical texts or iconic moments are explored in unexpected ways like when Hamlet begins his “to be or not to be” monologues in song:
Stock characters are reimagined according to more recognizable types from television or movies or music, as when the male suitors from Taming in the Shrew are ironized as scrubs from a TLC song:
JOIN US and make shakespeare Anew!
A skilled acting coach and award-winning director and teacher, Dr. Travis Curtright invites young people of any major or career path to encounter Shakespeare’s art through performance. He presents the craft of acting as a sincere gift of self, combining the practice of acting techniques with St. John Paul II’s vision of the human person. Students and graduates, as reported in the Naples Daily News, reveal that studying under Dr. Curtright is a life-changing experience.