Acting Teacher and Consultant

My passion has always been focused on my love of language.  Command of the structure, poetry, and usage of heightened language is fundamental to mastering the demands of classical performance.  It is this craft that has inspired me in my acting career and been the focus of my training of young actors for over 35 years.  Shakespeare remains my greatest inspiration and my primary source in helping develop this skill in my students.

While helping found and then being a principal player with New York City’s Riverside Shakespeare Company over 35 years ago. I have been an active member of many of America’s Shakespeare Festivals and classical company’s ever since.  My teaching experience covers professional as well as academic training programs and my services as an actor and director continue to feed my actor training program.

 Acting Shakespeare: Will’s Way I

An exploration of the most performed playwright of the English language. This class is designed to provide actors with the skills to take advantage of, what are without question, more acting opportunities than any other.   Using sonnets and verse speeches as the launching point, I remove the intimidation of “doing Shakespeare” and introduce actors to the techniques and demands of performing in plays of heightened language.  Developing breath control and understanding scansion, I’ll teach you how to score a text and deliver a classical speech with confidence and support. Classical acting ability is without a doubt the most marketable skill an actor can possess. Over 30 years of performing and teaching Shakespeare all over the country has taught me the way to make the Bard work for you.  This class is designed for early career actors or those who love and want to explore classical performance.

 Acting Shakespeare: Will’s Way II

A continuing immersion in the fundamentals of Shakespeare performance.

( pre-requisite:  Will’s Way 1 or audition required)

This class is designed as a continuation of WW I, or for those with classical acting experience who want to further develop their skills and technique.  Using Shakespeare and his contemporaries we explore both verse and prose as well as rhyming couplets, soliloquies, phrasing, and explore Shakespeare’s use of rhetoric and irony to help you use and control the language rather that it controlling you.  The class also explores character development and performance techniques through individually chosen scene work as well as a deeper gender-blind exploration of one of Shakespeare’s great works by the entire class every term.  Audition technique is also covered and each student develops 2 audition pieces during the term.

(Discount for on-going students)

     Meisner Technique –The craft of listening

This class is focused on the concept of “moment to moment” acting and developing the skill to listen ‘actively’.  Grounded in the techniques developed by Sanford Meisner and using the repetition exercise as a launching point, this class helps actors develop their powers of observation, the skill to behave truthfully and imaginatively, and do and be in the moment.  Using independent activities and modern texts and improvisational exercises the class is designed to train actors to present themselves in a much more interesting and provocative way then they thought they were capable of.  Because the structure of the class requires time and longer evolving improvisations, class sizes are a bit larger, class sessions are longer and more flexible for the individual needs and schedules of students.  They also encourage actors to work while learning the technique.

*Class Availability and location subject to change