Production of Shakespeare's Merry Wives of Windsor, Bosque River Stage, April, 2021.
Course Learning Objectives:
Modules Overviews: There are seven modules in this course. Each module takes approximately two weeks to complete, with two exceptions--What is Theatre? only takes one week and Designers will take three weeks and includes a group project.
1. What is Theatre? Theatre has its origins in religious ritual and myth. For something to be theatre it must have three things: an actor, an audience, and a space that they inhabit together. Theatre's purpose is to educate and entertain. Theatre is a way of explaining the world to ourselves. Humans have a mimetic impulse to act. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelly said, "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself." In this module we will examine our own theatrical experiences and discuss what makes good drama.
2. Audience: Theatre must have an actor and an audience together in a space. Audiences experience two contradictory impulses while watching theatre: empathy and aesthetic distance. Empathy is the emotional connection you feel to the characters and their story. Empathy is different from sympathy in that empathy requires you to feel as if you were the character, rather than just feeling for them. Aesthetic distance is a sense of detachment from the play happening on stage. It is the knowledge that what you are seeing is not real. Aesthetic distance is what lets you appreciate the skill with which the play has been crafted, the verisimilitude of the actors, the beauty of the sets and costumes, the atmosphere of magic created by lighting and sound. Empathy works on the audience's hearts, while aesthetic distance works on their minds. To this end, there are two different views of how theatre should affect an audience. Aristotle's view was that the audience should have a catharsis or a strong emotional release by the end of the play. Bertolt Brecht's view was that the audience should remain emotionally detached throughout the play and incite social change because of it. In this module we will examine the four types of stages as well as the different spaces in a theater building.
As an audience member in a theatre space, there are three rules you need to know to make your evening of entertainment enjoyable for you, the rest of the audience members, and safe for the actors. These rules are: 1. Arrive early to be seated 2. Turn your phones off or on silent and do not talk or text during the show 3. Do not record or take photographs of the show as it is illegal and violates the copyright agreement between the theatre and the publisher.
There are four different spaces in every theater building: The stage, the house, the backstage, and the front of house. The stage is where the play is performed. The house is where the audience sits. The backstage is the area in which all support activities take place, either behind the stage or off to either side of the stage. This area is where the dressing rooms, the green room, the wings, the fly rail, the scene shop, the costume shop, props storage, and the rehearsal rooms are. They may or may not be in the same building as the stage. Although the lighting and sound booth are located in the back of the house, these areas are also considered backstage. The front of house is the lobby area where the audience first enters the theater building before they enter the house. The box office and will call table are located in the front of house, as well as restrooms, seating areas, and possibly concessions.
There are four types of theatrical stages: Proscenium, Thrust, Arena, and Black Box. The proscenium stage has audience only on one side of it. The audience looks at the stage through a picture frame, which is the proscenium arch. The thrust stage has audience on three sides of the stage that is thrust into the audience. The arena stage has audience on all four sides of it. This is sometimes referred to as theatre in the round. The black box stage is a small room painted entirely black with the ability to move both the stage and seating so that the room can be arranged in any configuration to suit the needs of the play. It is usually for smaller productions that require a more intimate space or theatre that is experimental in nature. Each space has different requirements for scenic designers so that the audience has an unimpeded view of the action of the play.
3. Critics: All plays have a unique cultural and historical context that reflects the time it was written in as well as the attitudes of the playwright and the society he lived in. Many plays have a significant performance history and knowing this history will help the student to understand the play better. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying. In this module we will examine other reviews of productions and then you will write your own review of an MCC production.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were two rival film critics that were writing reviews for competing newspapers in Chicago in the late 1960's. Roger Ebert was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. They teamed up to host their own TV show in 1975 that originally aired on PBS once a month. The show's popularity grew and it soon became a weekly show. It eventually became syndicated, going through several name changes until they landed on Siskel & Ebert. The show was shot without a script and in one take, so that their opinions were a surprise to each other. Each review would end with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Although they didn't always agree and sometimes their difference of opinion became heated, they never let that interfere with their lifelong friendship. They are credited with changing film criticism from being esoteric to being relatable, something that the average movie-goer could understand. Their show won numerous Emmy awards and ran until Siskel's death from cancer in 1999. In 2000 Roger Ebert got guest co-hosts to be on the show with him until he also became too ill from cancer and had to retire from public speaking in 2006. He still wrote reviews and published them online starting in 2002. Although he died in 2013, his website is still up and running, being managed by his widow Chaz, with over 50 contributing writers continuing to publish movie reviews.
All plays have a unique cultural and historical context that reflects the time it was written in as well as the attitudes of the playwright and the society he lived in. Many plays have a significant performance history and knowing this history will help the student to understand the play better. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying.
4. Playwrights: Aristotle's Poetics states that plays must have 6 things: plot, character, theme, language, music, and spectacle. Aristotle thought that of these, plot was the most important. Plot is what happens in the play, in other words, the events of the play as well as how those events are organized and structured. Character is the people in the play. Theme is the message the playwright is trying to convey to the audience; the moral of the story. Language is both the words the playwright uses as well as the way the words are arranged. For example Shakespeare wrote his plays (mostly) in blank verse called Iambic Pentameter (which is the way writers of the time felt that people talked naturally) and sometimes included rhyming couplets (poetry, not the way people naturally speak). Music refers to actual music like when actors sing in a musical or opera, incidental music like on a radio or TV, or scoring music to cover a scene change or enhance the mood of the play. Music also refers to all the sound effects used in the play, like environmental sounds of animals or weather, or man made sounds like crashes, gun shots, or doorbells. Music also refers to the way the actors' voices sound. Spectacle refers to all the visual elements--the scenery, costumes, props, lighting, makeup and hair, as well as special effects. Spectacle also refers to the "goings on" of the actors be it dancing, fighting, or dying. In this module we will examine Lin Manuel Miranda and his best known work, Hamilton.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, born January 16, 1980, is the hottest contemporary playwright/composer/actor in America and possibly the world right now. He's written two full length stage musicals--In the Heights and Hamilton, as well as a one act--21 Chump Street; scores for two animated musicals--Moana and Encanto, and composed songs for the stage musical of Bring It On. He's won a Pulitzer Prize, 3 Tony Awards, 3 Grammy Awards, 1 Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Honor.
Miranda was born in New York City, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants. Miranda's net worth is $40 million. He gets a $105,000 royalty check from Hamilton every single week that the show runs and it's been running almost continuously since 2015, with the exception of the period of time that Broadway was closed due to the pandemic. During that time, Disney bought the rights to show Hamilton on their channel. His latest project is a collaboration with Eisa Davis. It is a musical version of either the 1979 cult classic film, The Warriors, or the 1965 book it was based on, which are very different from each other. LMM may use both versions as source material, sources do not agree. The concept album is being released Oct. 18. The Warriors is about a New York City street gang that was wrongfully accused of murdering a rival gang leader at what was supposed to be a midnight peace summit. The intent was to make peace between all of the rival gangs and control the city because they would then outnumber the police three to one. The Warriors must flee for their lives as they are being chased 30 miles through New York City from the Bronx back to Coney Island by members of five rival gangs.
5. Directors: The director's job is to oversee all aspects of the entire production. To the playwright, the director is the person into whose hands the play is given to be fully realized onstage, much like a parent sending a child off to school, hoping that everything turns out all right, but knowing that they are no longer in control of what happens to their offspring. To the designers, the director is the artistic visionary whose concept they are trying to bring to life. To the actors, the director is an acting coach who helps them find their characters and tells them when and where to move on stage. To the audience, the director is the invisible force that gives each production its own unique style. To the critic, the director is the Captain of the Ship that is entirely 100% responsible for whatever the critic liked or didn't like about the performance. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. In this module we will examine Julie Taymor and her best known work, The Lion King.
The first modern director was a German noble Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen who succeeded to his title in 1866. He was one of the greatest intellectuals of 19th Century Europe. He is particularly known for developing the Meiningen Ensemble out of his court theatre. Using his knowledge of art history and his drawing skills, he designed highly detailed, historically accurate scenery, costumes, and properties. In addition, he choreographed large crowd scenes that stunned audiences across Europe. He and his ensemble toured Europe extensively, and had a profound effect on theatre production across the continent. Their productions were famous for being esthetically unified and realistic in their presentations.
What Lin Manuel Miranda is to playwriting, Julie Taymor is to directing. As a Tony, Emmy, and Grammy winning and Oscar nominated artist, Julie Taymor has changed the face of Broadway with her innovative direction. Her Broadway adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997. An instant sensation, it received 11 Tony Award nominations, with Julie receiving awards for Best Director and Costume Designer. She was the first woman in theatrical history to receive the award for Best Direction of a Musical. In addition to her Tony Awards, she also received awards for her puppet, costume, and mask designs. The Lion King has gone on to become the most successful stage musical of all time; 24 global productions have been seen by more than 90 million people. The show has played over 100 cities in 19 countries, and its worldwide gross exceeds that of any entertainment title in box office history. Julie Taymor's other directing credits include films of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; the Salma Hayek vehicle, Frida, and the Beatles fantasy, Across the Universe. Her opera credits include Salome, Oedipus Rex, The Flying Dutchman, The Magic Flute, and Grendel.
Taymor is a recipient of the 1991 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a 2015 inductee into the Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater, the recipient of the 2015 Shakespeare Theatre Company’s William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, and a 2017 Disney Legends Award honoree. In 2016, Ms. Taymor created the Taymor World Theater Fellowship for enterprising American theater directors (ages 21-34) to experience a year-long immersion in theater in Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and/or the Middle East.
6. Designers: Designers are an important and necessary collaborator in theatre production. There are 5 types of designers who have unique and specific responsibilities toward the production. Scenic designers create the play's environment, costume designers create the way each character dresses, makeup designers create the way each character looks, lighting designers create the environment's atmosphere, and sound designers create the play's mood. Designers go through a series of steps to create the unique look of the play. Those steps are reading the play, making notes, researching, sketching, conferencing with the director, and building the designs. Plays have 7 characteristics that designers need to accommodate: genre, period, location, season, time of day, activity, and concept. Designers utilize the 5 elements of design: line, shape, form, color, and texture to influence the audience's reaction to the play. Designers utilize the 5 principles of design to organize and structure the elements of design. Those principles are contrast, balance, ratio and proportion, rhythm and movement, harmony and unity.
Ruth Carter has designed costumes for over 40 films in a career that has spanned four decades. She is the first African-American to win an Oscar for Costume Design, after having been nominated twice for Malcolm X and Amistad, she finally won for Black Panther.
7. Actors: Actors attempt to take on the outer mannerisms and inner life of a character. The first actor was Thespis who during a performance stepped out of the chorus to speak his lines alone. The first actors used masks to create the persona of their characters. 2000+ years later, masks were still being used by commedia del arte troupes in Italy, where all the actors wore them to play the stock characters of the vecchi (old people) and the zanni (servants), but not the inamoratos (the lovers). By the time of Shakespeare, masks were only used for special circumstances. Shakespeare wrote a famous speech that is known as "Hamlet's Advice to the Players" that advocated for a more realistic acting style. Hamlet is the most famous role that great actors long to play. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays and the character of Hamlet has the most lines of any of Shakespeare's plays. But it was not until the 19th Century that Shakespeare's advice was headed. A Russian, Constantine Stanislavski, re-defined the approach to acting by inventing "The Method": a more realistic and natural style of acting. Lee Strasberg was responsible for spreading this style of acting to the United States, through his school, The Actor's Studio. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying. In this module we will examine the differences between US and UK acting training.
Denzel Washington (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, director, and producer. Known for his performances on the screen and stage, he has been described as an actor who reconfigured "the concept of classic movie stardom". He is also known for his frequent collaborations with directors Spike Lee, Antoine Fuqua, and Tony Scott. Throughout his career spanning over four decades, Washington has received numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, two Academy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2016, he received the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2020, The New York Times named him the greatest actor of the 21st century.
Washington's career began in television on the medical drama St. Elsewhere, which ran for 6 seasons. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in the Broadway revival of the August Wilson play Fences in 2010. Washington later directed, produced, and starred in the film adaptation in 2016, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Washington. He also produced the film adaptation of Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. His stage credits include appearances in Broadway revivals of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in 2014, and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in 2018. Washington is one of only five male actors to be nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades, and the only Black actor to have accomplished this.
Besides his philanthropy with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Denzel is dedicated to bringing all ten plays of August Wilson's Century Cycle to the big screen, with the permission of the Wilson estate. "We're going to do one a year for the next nine years. I'm really excited about that. That that they put it in my hands, the estate, and trust me. That's good enough for me. It doesn't get any better than that." The pandemic pushed his timeline back for a couple of years. The next play, The Piano Lesson, was revived on Broadway in 2022 and the film version, directed by his son Malcolm, was just released on Netflix and stars the original cast members, Samuel L. Jackson as well as Denzel's son, John.
- Upon completion of this course, students will be able to discuss how theatre reflects the time and culture in which the play was written as well as the time and culture of those who are performing and watching it.
- Upon completion of this course, students will be able to discuss that theatre is a collaborative art and the collaborators are playwrights, directors, designers, actors and audience members.
- Upon completion of this course, students will be able to watch a play and successfully analyze and critique the performance in terms of its historical and cultural relevance both when the play was written and when it was being performed, as well as the success or failure of all of its collaborators.
Modules Overviews: There are seven modules in this course. Each module takes approximately two weeks to complete, with two exceptions--What is Theatre? only takes one week and Designers will take three weeks and includes a group project.
1. What is Theatre? Theatre has its origins in religious ritual and myth. For something to be theatre it must have three things: an actor, an audience, and a space that they inhabit together. Theatre's purpose is to educate and entertain. Theatre is a way of explaining the world to ourselves. Humans have a mimetic impulse to act. The Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelly said, "The highest moral purpose aimed at in the highest species of the drama, is the teaching the human heart, through its sympathies and antipathies, the knowledge of itself." In this module we will examine our own theatrical experiences and discuss what makes good drama.
2. Audience: Theatre must have an actor and an audience together in a space. Audiences experience two contradictory impulses while watching theatre: empathy and aesthetic distance. Empathy is the emotional connection you feel to the characters and their story. Empathy is different from sympathy in that empathy requires you to feel as if you were the character, rather than just feeling for them. Aesthetic distance is a sense of detachment from the play happening on stage. It is the knowledge that what you are seeing is not real. Aesthetic distance is what lets you appreciate the skill with which the play has been crafted, the verisimilitude of the actors, the beauty of the sets and costumes, the atmosphere of magic created by lighting and sound. Empathy works on the audience's hearts, while aesthetic distance works on their minds. To this end, there are two different views of how theatre should affect an audience. Aristotle's view was that the audience should have a catharsis or a strong emotional release by the end of the play. Bertolt Brecht's view was that the audience should remain emotionally detached throughout the play and incite social change because of it. In this module we will examine the four types of stages as well as the different spaces in a theater building.
As an audience member in a theatre space, there are three rules you need to know to make your evening of entertainment enjoyable for you, the rest of the audience members, and safe for the actors. These rules are: 1. Arrive early to be seated 2. Turn your phones off or on silent and do not talk or text during the show 3. Do not record or take photographs of the show as it is illegal and violates the copyright agreement between the theatre and the publisher.
There are four different spaces in every theater building: The stage, the house, the backstage, and the front of house. The stage is where the play is performed. The house is where the audience sits. The backstage is the area in which all support activities take place, either behind the stage or off to either side of the stage. This area is where the dressing rooms, the green room, the wings, the fly rail, the scene shop, the costume shop, props storage, and the rehearsal rooms are. They may or may not be in the same building as the stage. Although the lighting and sound booth are located in the back of the house, these areas are also considered backstage. The front of house is the lobby area where the audience first enters the theater building before they enter the house. The box office and will call table are located in the front of house, as well as restrooms, seating areas, and possibly concessions.
There are four types of theatrical stages: Proscenium, Thrust, Arena, and Black Box. The proscenium stage has audience only on one side of it. The audience looks at the stage through a picture frame, which is the proscenium arch. The thrust stage has audience on three sides of the stage that is thrust into the audience. The arena stage has audience on all four sides of it. This is sometimes referred to as theatre in the round. The black box stage is a small room painted entirely black with the ability to move both the stage and seating so that the room can be arranged in any configuration to suit the needs of the play. It is usually for smaller productions that require a more intimate space or theatre that is experimental in nature. Each space has different requirements for scenic designers so that the audience has an unimpeded view of the action of the play.
3. Critics: All plays have a unique cultural and historical context that reflects the time it was written in as well as the attitudes of the playwright and the society he lived in. Many plays have a significant performance history and knowing this history will help the student to understand the play better. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying. In this module we will examine other reviews of productions and then you will write your own review of an MCC production.
Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert were two rival film critics that were writing reviews for competing newspapers in Chicago in the late 1960's. Roger Ebert was the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize. They teamed up to host their own TV show in 1975 that originally aired on PBS once a month. The show's popularity grew and it soon became a weekly show. It eventually became syndicated, going through several name changes until they landed on Siskel & Ebert. The show was shot without a script and in one take, so that their opinions were a surprise to each other. Each review would end with a thumbs up or thumbs down. Although they didn't always agree and sometimes their difference of opinion became heated, they never let that interfere with their lifelong friendship. They are credited with changing film criticism from being esoteric to being relatable, something that the average movie-goer could understand. Their show won numerous Emmy awards and ran until Siskel's death from cancer in 1999. In 2000 Roger Ebert got guest co-hosts to be on the show with him until he also became too ill from cancer and had to retire from public speaking in 2006. He still wrote reviews and published them online starting in 2002. Although he died in 2013, his website is still up and running, being managed by his widow Chaz, with over 50 contributing writers continuing to publish movie reviews.
All plays have a unique cultural and historical context that reflects the time it was written in as well as the attitudes of the playwright and the society he lived in. Many plays have a significant performance history and knowing this history will help the student to understand the play better. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying.
4. Playwrights: Aristotle's Poetics states that plays must have 6 things: plot, character, theme, language, music, and spectacle. Aristotle thought that of these, plot was the most important. Plot is what happens in the play, in other words, the events of the play as well as how those events are organized and structured. Character is the people in the play. Theme is the message the playwright is trying to convey to the audience; the moral of the story. Language is both the words the playwright uses as well as the way the words are arranged. For example Shakespeare wrote his plays (mostly) in blank verse called Iambic Pentameter (which is the way writers of the time felt that people talked naturally) and sometimes included rhyming couplets (poetry, not the way people naturally speak). Music refers to actual music like when actors sing in a musical or opera, incidental music like on a radio or TV, or scoring music to cover a scene change or enhance the mood of the play. Music also refers to all the sound effects used in the play, like environmental sounds of animals or weather, or man made sounds like crashes, gun shots, or doorbells. Music also refers to the way the actors' voices sound. Spectacle refers to all the visual elements--the scenery, costumes, props, lighting, makeup and hair, as well as special effects. Spectacle also refers to the "goings on" of the actors be it dancing, fighting, or dying. In this module we will examine Lin Manuel Miranda and his best known work, Hamilton.
Lin-Manuel Miranda, born January 16, 1980, is the hottest contemporary playwright/composer/actor in America and possibly the world right now. He's written two full length stage musicals--In the Heights and Hamilton, as well as a one act--21 Chump Street; scores for two animated musicals--Moana and Encanto, and composed songs for the stage musical of Bring It On. He's won a Pulitzer Prize, 3 Tony Awards, 3 Grammy Awards, 1 Emmy Award, a MacArthur Fellowship, and a Kennedy Center Honor.
Miranda was born in New York City, the son of Puerto Rican immigrants. Miranda's net worth is $40 million. He gets a $105,000 royalty check from Hamilton every single week that the show runs and it's been running almost continuously since 2015, with the exception of the period of time that Broadway was closed due to the pandemic. During that time, Disney bought the rights to show Hamilton on their channel. His latest project is a collaboration with Eisa Davis. It is a musical version of either the 1979 cult classic film, The Warriors, or the 1965 book it was based on, which are very different from each other. LMM may use both versions as source material, sources do not agree. The concept album is being released Oct. 18. The Warriors is about a New York City street gang that was wrongfully accused of murdering a rival gang leader at what was supposed to be a midnight peace summit. The intent was to make peace between all of the rival gangs and control the city because they would then outnumber the police three to one. The Warriors must flee for their lives as they are being chased 30 miles through New York City from the Bronx back to Coney Island by members of five rival gangs.
5. Directors: The director's job is to oversee all aspects of the entire production. To the playwright, the director is the person into whose hands the play is given to be fully realized onstage, much like a parent sending a child off to school, hoping that everything turns out all right, but knowing that they are no longer in control of what happens to their offspring. To the designers, the director is the artistic visionary whose concept they are trying to bring to life. To the actors, the director is an acting coach who helps them find their characters and tells them when and where to move on stage. To the audience, the director is the invisible force that gives each production its own unique style. To the critic, the director is the Captain of the Ship that is entirely 100% responsible for whatever the critic liked or didn't like about the performance. A script is just a blueprint and the director will inevitably put his own spin on the play as will all the collaborators. The same script can be performed in a number of radically different ways. The collaborators choose how to present the play in order to focus attention on the story they are trying to tell, which may be similar or completely different from the playwright's intent. In this module we will examine Julie Taymor and her best known work, The Lion King.
The first modern director was a German noble Georg II, Duke of Saxe-Meiningen who succeeded to his title in 1866. He was one of the greatest intellectuals of 19th Century Europe. He is particularly known for developing the Meiningen Ensemble out of his court theatre. Using his knowledge of art history and his drawing skills, he designed highly detailed, historically accurate scenery, costumes, and properties. In addition, he choreographed large crowd scenes that stunned audiences across Europe. He and his ensemble toured Europe extensively, and had a profound effect on theatre production across the continent. Their productions were famous for being esthetically unified and realistic in their presentations.
What Lin Manuel Miranda is to playwriting, Julie Taymor is to directing. As a Tony, Emmy, and Grammy winning and Oscar nominated artist, Julie Taymor has changed the face of Broadway with her innovative direction. Her Broadway adaptation of The Lion King debuted in 1997. An instant sensation, it received 11 Tony Award nominations, with Julie receiving awards for Best Director and Costume Designer. She was the first woman in theatrical history to receive the award for Best Direction of a Musical. In addition to her Tony Awards, she also received awards for her puppet, costume, and mask designs. The Lion King has gone on to become the most successful stage musical of all time; 24 global productions have been seen by more than 90 million people. The show has played over 100 cities in 19 countries, and its worldwide gross exceeds that of any entertainment title in box office history. Julie Taymor's other directing credits include films of Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, The Tempest, and A Midsummer Night's Dream; the Salma Hayek vehicle, Frida, and the Beatles fantasy, Across the Universe. Her opera credits include Salome, Oedipus Rex, The Flying Dutchman, The Magic Flute, and Grendel.
Taymor is a recipient of the 1991 MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship, a 2015 inductee into the Theater Hall of Fame for Lifetime Achievement in the American Theater, the recipient of the 2015 Shakespeare Theatre Company’s William Shakespeare Award for Classical Theatre, and a 2017 Disney Legends Award honoree. In 2016, Ms. Taymor created the Taymor World Theater Fellowship for enterprising American theater directors (ages 21-34) to experience a year-long immersion in theater in Africa, Central and South America, Asia, and/or the Middle East.
6. Designers: Designers are an important and necessary collaborator in theatre production. There are 5 types of designers who have unique and specific responsibilities toward the production. Scenic designers create the play's environment, costume designers create the way each character dresses, makeup designers create the way each character looks, lighting designers create the environment's atmosphere, and sound designers create the play's mood. Designers go through a series of steps to create the unique look of the play. Those steps are reading the play, making notes, researching, sketching, conferencing with the director, and building the designs. Plays have 7 characteristics that designers need to accommodate: genre, period, location, season, time of day, activity, and concept. Designers utilize the 5 elements of design: line, shape, form, color, and texture to influence the audience's reaction to the play. Designers utilize the 5 principles of design to organize and structure the elements of design. Those principles are contrast, balance, ratio and proportion, rhythm and movement, harmony and unity.
Ruth Carter has designed costumes for over 40 films in a career that has spanned four decades. She is the first African-American to win an Oscar for Costume Design, after having been nominated twice for Malcolm X and Amistad, she finally won for Black Panther.
7. Actors: Actors attempt to take on the outer mannerisms and inner life of a character. The first actor was Thespis who during a performance stepped out of the chorus to speak his lines alone. The first actors used masks to create the persona of their characters. 2000+ years later, masks were still being used by commedia del arte troupes in Italy, where all the actors wore them to play the stock characters of the vecchi (old people) and the zanni (servants), but not the inamoratos (the lovers). By the time of Shakespeare, masks were only used for special circumstances. Shakespeare wrote a famous speech that is known as "Hamlet's Advice to the Players" that advocated for a more realistic acting style. Hamlet is the most famous role that great actors long to play. Hamlet is the longest of Shakespeare's plays and the character of Hamlet has the most lines of any of Shakespeare's plays. But it was not until the 19th Century that Shakespeare's advice was headed. A Russian, Constantine Stanislavski, re-defined the approach to acting by inventing "The Method": a more realistic and natural style of acting. Lee Strasberg was responsible for spreading this style of acting to the United States, through his school, The Actor's Studio. Acting styles have evolved radically since the Greeks and actors have different styles too which can radically alter the audience's reaction to the character the actor is portraying. In this module we will examine the differences between US and UK acting training.
Denzel Washington (born December 28, 1954) is an American actor, director, and producer. Known for his performances on the screen and stage, he has been described as an actor who reconfigured "the concept of classic movie stardom". He is also known for his frequent collaborations with directors Spike Lee, Antoine Fuqua, and Tony Scott. Throughout his career spanning over four decades, Washington has received numerous accolades, including a Tony Award, two Academy Awards, and three Golden Globe Awards. In 2016, he received the Cecil B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award, and in 2020, The New York Times named him the greatest actor of the 21st century.
Washington's career began in television on the medical drama St. Elsewhere, which ran for 6 seasons. He won the Tony Award for Best Actor in a Play for his role in the Broadway revival of the August Wilson play Fences in 2010. Washington later directed, produced, and starred in the film adaptation in 2016, which was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Washington. He also produced the film adaptation of Wilson's Ma Rainey's Black Bottom (2020) starring Viola Davis and Chadwick Boseman. His stage credits include appearances in Broadway revivals of Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun in 2014, and Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh in 2018. Washington is one of only five male actors to be nominated for an Academy Award in five different decades, and the only Black actor to have accomplished this.
Besides his philanthropy with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, Denzel is dedicated to bringing all ten plays of August Wilson's Century Cycle to the big screen, with the permission of the Wilson estate. "We're going to do one a year for the next nine years. I'm really excited about that. That that they put it in my hands, the estate, and trust me. That's good enough for me. It doesn't get any better than that." The pandemic pushed his timeline back for a couple of years. The next play, The Piano Lesson, was revived on Broadway in 2022 and the film version, directed by his son Malcolm, was just released on Netflix and stars the original cast members, Samuel L. Jackson as well as Denzel's son, John.
Representation matters
I am aware that racism deeply impacts all the work I do in theatre; It is my job as a teacher to counter the racism inherent in the theatre industry with anti-racist practices through conscious effort to reduce harm, prevent harm, and repair relationships.
I teach this class through an anti-racism lens. Theatre, historically and currently, deals with complex and controversial issues; it is often challenging and at times uncomfortable. It would therefore be impossible to offer a meaningful introduction to theatre that did not engage, at times, with potentially difficult issues including systemic racism, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, and body-shaming.
These Representation Matters presentations are meant to serve as a jumping off point for Discussion Boards in which students are required to participate by posting an original opinion and then replying to another student's post. They are meant to build on each other and must be done in the order listed.
I teach this class through an anti-racism lens. Theatre, historically and currently, deals with complex and controversial issues; it is often challenging and at times uncomfortable. It would therefore be impossible to offer a meaningful introduction to theatre that did not engage, at times, with potentially difficult issues including systemic racism, Antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, misogyny, ableism, and body-shaming.
These Representation Matters presentations are meant to serve as a jumping off point for Discussion Boards in which students are required to participate by posting an original opinion and then replying to another student's post. They are meant to build on each other and must be done in the order listed.
| black_representation_matters.pdf |
| jewish_representation_matters.pdf |
| native_american_representation_matters.pdf |
| latinx_representation_matters.pdf |
| arab_muslim_representation_matters.pdf |
| asian_representation_matters.pdf |
| cultural_misappropriation_2020.pdf |
| female_representation_matters.pdf |
| lgbtqia_representation_matters.pdf |
| physical_disability_representation_matters.pdf |
| invisible_disability_representation_matters.pdf |
| body_positivity_representation_matters.pdf |
| aging_representation_matters_current.pdf |