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This workshop approaches practice-as-research from an actor’s perspective. Whereas much PAR asks actors to execute readings proposed by historians of early modern theater and culture, we will instead make actorly “skilled vision” the starting point of historicist inquiry, bringing to bear the questions working actors routinely ask of scripts to investigate new interpretive possibilities. Together we will examine scenes from Thomas Heywood’s 1602 How a Man May Choose a Good Wife from a Bad using techniques of script analysis drawn from a range of modern acting schools. This tablework makes available to us a living archive of social experience. By exploring the moment-to-moment performance choices available to actors in Heywood’s script we recover female agency in a play often dismissed as a didactic celebration of a doormat housewife. More broadly, we will discuss the methodological challenges, as well as the value, of using modern acting techniques to analyze early modern scripts.

Seating is limited. RSVP to Jolie Griffin at griffinjo@reed.edu.

Bio: Dr. Musa Gurnis (PhD Columbia) is a theater scholar and practitioner. She is the author of Mixed Faith and Shared Feeling: Theater in Post-Reformation London, co-published by the University of Pennsylvania Press and the Folger Shakespeare Library (2018). She is a co-editor of Publicity and the Early Modern Stage: People Made Public (Palgrave 2021). Musa’s articles appear in academic journals such as Shakespeare, Shakespeare Studies, and, most recently, in the Arden Shakespeare’s essay collection The Changeling: State of Play (2022). She has held fellowships from the Andrew C. Mellon Foundation, the Huntington Library, and the Folger Shakespeare Library; and taught early modern English drama extensively while an Assistant Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. Musa has dramaturged projects such as the devised piece Shakespeare Is A White Supremacist (Fractal Theater Collective, DC); nude performances of Hamlet and The Rover in Prospect Park (Torn Out Theater, NY); Romeo and Juliet (Gate Theatre, Dublin); and As You Like It (Abbey National Theatre, Dublin). For Bedlam Theatre (NY), Musa has dramaturged the The Crucible, King Lear, and The Winter’s Tale. The company has a production of her new adaptation of Jane Eyre in development. As an actor, Musa has trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art (London), The Shakespeare Theatre Company (DC), The Red Bull Theater (NY), and HB Studios (NY). In the Shakespeare mash-up webseries BEDLAM, which she co-wrote with Eric Tucker, she plays Regan.

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