Wednesdays, 4–6pm • February 7, 14, 21, 28
The LAVA Center, 324 Main Street, Greenfield, MA
Theater is, most often, a highly collaborative art. It is beneficial for actors to have experience directing, for directors to have experience acting, and for playwrights to have experience with everything—this makes for a well-rounded theater artist that can better understand where their co-theater-makers are coming from.
Join seasoned theater artist Jan Maher and The LAVA Center for a four-week workshop for writers, actors, and directors that will explore the basics of different aspects of theater artistry. This workshop will, through practice, offer you some experience in other roles in theater.
The workshop is full now. Thanks, everyone, for your interest.
Why this workshop?
- There are skills and tasks unique to each role involved in staging a play, and knowing something of all three is extremely important no matter whether one is a writer, an actor, or a director.
- As writers, we may find ourselves wanting or needing to perform or direct our own work. We may feel a need to communicate to a director what we are hoping for in a way that our concerns and ideas are heard. We may be asked by an actor for insight into the character(s) we’ve created. We may wonder how to make our intentions/purpose clear in our written script that anticipates the possibility of various interpretations. We may welcome that, we may prefer our script in performance be solely the realization of our own interpretation.
- As actors, we may want to write something for performance. We may want to be the one who performs it. We may want to help a director or writer understand more about what we need in order to be of best service to the play we’re working on with them. We may want the skill to shift out of our own character point of view to understand more about the overall impact of our work in the context of the play. We may want to learn more about how to “play well with others” as co-actors.
- As directors, we may feel a need to flexibly communicate to actors what we hope they can do, and to help each of them discover how to do it in the way that works best or them. We understand that though each character (and therefore each actor) has their own point of view, we are responsible for how they all fit together into a unified whole for the writer and the audience. We understand that what works as technique for one actor may not serve another, so knowing a variety of techniques and approaches is important.
- This is not meant to be an exhaustive catalogue of reasons to learn a bit about each other’s roles, but to get participants started to think about these questions.
The workshop leader:
Jan Maher has been involved in theater work for whoa! A very long time! (Coming up on 60 years, or even longer if you count my performance in a Dutch Dance in kindergarten, longer still if you count my solo improvisation as a toddler bewailing being left behind when I was deemed “not old enough” to make a family trip to Chicago. But seriously, I’ve done a lot of different sorts of things over these many decades including writing plays, directing plays (my own and others’), acting in plays (my own and others’), teaching playwrighting, teaching acting, teaching acting for teachers, and assisting my mentor Joseph Chaikin in a master workshop for directors.
My influences in theater, aside from Joe, are The Open Theater, Peter Brooks, Vaclav Havel, Tom Stoppard, Sophocles, Arthur Miller, Suzan-Lori Parks, and Maria Irene Fornes.
I’m looking forward to working with a small, dedicated group of theater artists who would like to learn more in a mutually supportive environment.
