Meet Tom!

I am really looking forward to working with Tom. From moment one when he walked into the audition room, this guy was smiling, relaxed, and absolutely hilarious. One of my favorite things about doing a season full of comedies is that the auditions were so. much. fun. We had group after group reading terrific, funny scenes -- and Tom's group in particular had us nearly falling over with laughter. So get ready to laugh your faces off this summer: Tom is playing Bottom (one of the roles to have) in A Midsummer Night's Dream and the "Daniel" track of roles in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged). I just know we're gonna love having him around this summer.

Expect a follow-up post this weekend, as we embark on the construction of the Ass Head. Tom will be joining me and Patrick, putting himself in our hands to let us take a crazy cast of his face. We'll then construct the mask to fit him perfectly for his fairy transformation in the forest. I will post next week with the beginning of this process in a series of posts on Creating the Ass Head. For supporters of ADK Shakes, we are planning a Queen's Tea Season Benefit in early July, and we will be silent-auctioning off a replica of the Bottom Mask. Cool, right?

Tom Morin

TOM MORIN
(MID: Bottom; WKS: Tom, or the "Daniel" track)

Tom is excited to be a part of ADK Shakes's 2011 Summer Season! New York Credits: Isle of Shoals; Lucky in Bryan Williams's Lighthouse; MadCAP CollecTIVE (Sir Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night). Other professional credits: Victory Gardens Theater (workshop reading of Dana Lynn Formby's The Small of Her Back); Monomoy Theatre (Master Page in The Merry Wives of Windsor, Ottavio in Scapino!, and Benny Southstreet in Guys and Dolls), and Hackmatack Playhouse (Simon Stimson in Our Town, Lord Evelyn Oakleigh in Anything Goes! and Neville in The Mystery of Edwin Drood). Film: Wiggah (Best Comedy, American National Film Festival).  Selected M.F.A. Credits: King Ferdinand in Love's Labour's Lost, Lenny in Marisol, Old Man in The Chairs. Training: B.A. in Theatre and Political Science, College of the Holy Cross; M.F.A. in Acting, Ohio University. For more information, please visit http://trmorin.weebly.com.

If you would like to support Tom's work with ADK Shakes this summer, please consider adopting him or his sure-to-be brilliant Bottom in Midsummer!

Share this blog post with your friends! Or follow via email, Google Reader, or Networked Blogs. I am a total nerd and *love* seeing the Followers numbers go up. Thank you for your virtual support, and feel free to send comments of what you'd like to know more about as we progress through our summer preparation.

Meet Ross!

Ross Hamman

We loved working with Ross during the Bookend Project this past spring. He is always willing to jump in and lend a hand with whatever needs doing -- which is pretty much the best attitude you can get in the RAW process. In addition to his wonderful acting abilities, he also plays the didgeridoo (which we think is so cool) and has just about the sweetest mom in the world (several moms compete for this title at ADK Shakes).


ROSS HAMMAN
(MID: Snug, Cobweb; WKS: Ross, or the "Adam" track)

Ross moved to NYC four years ago and has been performing onstage for ten years. He studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts and The Michael Howard Studios, as well as workshops at LAMDA with John Barton and Brian Stirner. He is incredibly excited to be performing again with the Adirondack Shakespeare Company in The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) and A Midsummer Night's Dream!!! Selected NY Theatre: Antonio in The Tempest (ADK Shakes), Marcus in Titus Andronicus (ADK Shakes), Antipholus of Syracuse in The Comedy of Errors (Michael Howard Studios), Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing (Oxford Shakespeare Co.), Oliver in As You Like It (Sink or Swim Rep), Thanks for Traveling (CMT Productions), Etch-a-Sketch Comedy Group (Comix Comedy Club).

If Ross is your season favorite, you can adopt him here. Or support his bashful lion by adopting all the mechanicals in A Midsummer Night's Dream!

Meet Lesley!

Meet the 2011 Summer Festival Company! I am excited to begin this series of posts to introduce you to our company. This is an extraordinary group of actors, and I just know you're going to love them. There will be thirteen actors involved this summer, one stage manager, and one fabulous intern working on a total of four productions, which run over a period of five weeks.

Our key for the summer production titles is:
A Midsummer Night's Dream = MID
The Merchant of Venice = VEN
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) = WKS
Theseus and the Minotaur = KIDS

Lesley Berkowitz (MID: Puck, Hippolyta; WKS: "Jess")

LESLEY BERKOWITZ
(MID: Puck, Hippolyta; WKS: Lesley, or the "Jess" track)
Lesley is pleased as punch to be returning to Schroon Lake this season. With ADK Shakes, Lesley has performed in 3 Henry VI (Warwick), As You Like It (Touchstone), Romeo and Juliet (Tybalt), and Macbeth (Malcolm). She received her BA from Muhlenberg College and has a certificate in Physical Theatre from Dell'Arte International. This past year, Lesley has created pieces in Cedar Falls, Iowa; Portland, Oregon; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and Denver, Colorado ranging from puppet plays, performance art, and traditional staged works. Favorites include the Narrator in Robin Hood at Northwest Children's Theatre Company, Adolf in an all-female production of Strindberg's Creditors, Bob Acres in a drag production of The Rivals with To The Wall Productions, the Boy in Grotowski inspired by Grimm with Vagabond Acting Troupe, and Chicklet in Psycho Beach Party.

If you love Lesley as much as we do, you can adopt her this season! Or you can also adopt her mischievous character, Puck and all the fairies of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Lesley Berkowitz as Tybalt, Romeo and Juliet (2010)

Lesley Berkowitz as Simon Catling, Romeo and Juliet (2010

Lesley Berkowitz as Touchstone, As You Like It (2010)

Semester Reflections

Semester Spring 2011 has come to an eventful close. Yesterday felt like one big sigh of relief. I turned in the last of three final papers. In the last week, I wrote over 50 pages on "Sybil Vane and Aesthetic Self-Destruction in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray," "The Fluidity of Associations Within and Across Joyce's Ulysses and the Fellow who Writes Like Synge's Hamlet," and "Kingship, Kinship, and Otherness in the Alliterative Morte Arthure." Up next, I have a few weeks to finalize my article for publication (AAAHHH!!!) and then I can focus full-time on ADK Shakes stuff for this summer and for our 2012 season. Yep, already.

Before moving on to projects which have been sitting on the back burner, I want to take a little time to reflect on this year. My first academic year since 2003-2004. The intervening years went so quickly, and it felt surprisingly comfortable to get back into the swing of homework, reading, response papers, seminar papers. Of course, it was just a lot more of everything than in undergrad. But I flatter myself that I handled everything pretty gracefully. (I'm pretty sure that my karmic lesson this time around is grace.) Here's a recap of some of the things I've done in my first year as a Doctoral Fellow in English:

• started this blog
• researched the nature of Authenticity
• wrote a 28-page seminar paper on "The Economics of Language in Titus Andronicus and The Tempest"
• compiled this website outlining my work on The Bookend Project
• read five of George Eliot's novels
• opened my mind about hegemony
• presented with an amazing panel on Digital Literacy at the NEWCA conference at Southern New Hampshire University
• compiled scripts for Titus Andronicus and The Tempest
• directed a dual RAW production of Titus Andronicus and The Tempest, my very first experience as director.
• logged many hours at a terrific Writing Center as a one-on-one Writing Consultant
• had an article accepted for publication
• presented one of my George Eliot papers on "Speaking with Dorothea's Voice: Languages of Art, Architecture, and Textuality in George Eliot's Middlemarch" at the St. John's Graduate Conference
• had my ass kicked reading James Joyce's Ulysses, an incredibly humbling experience
• solidified my love for the nineteenth-century British novel
• got sick of the weight I'd gained over the last few years and lost 14.5 pounds in the spring semester

Some totals which blow my mind:

• Number of books read: 31
• Number of pages read: I can't bring myself to actually figure this out, but I will estimate this figure at over 8,000 -- between novels, books on theory, secondary readings for class, and additional research for papers. Maybe I'll actually figure this out at some point and update.
• Number of pages written: 182 
• Estimated ounces of coffee consumed: 1,450

Many thanks to my fellow students, inspiring professors, and colleagues at the Writing Center for welcoming me into the St. John's community this year. I am incredibly grateful to have the opportunity to work with you. Although I am really ready for a break right now, I know by the time the fall semester begins, it will feel too long to have been away.

Oh Rose of May

On the ADK Shakes Facebook page, I recently posed two questions to our friends. What are your top five favorite plays by Shakespeare? and What would your top five greatest Shakespeare roles be? Perhaps it is not too surprising that the winner of both of these polls was Hamlet. I won't lie; he was in both of my top fives, too.


I've been thinking about Hamlet a bunch lately, and I suspect I'll be thinking about it all today. I am writing a paper for my Epic & Allegory class on Stephen Dedalus's "Hamlet Theory." Today is going to be my big Ulysses day, but let's face it, I will be thinking more about Hamlet. I just like it better. But with Hamlet so much on the brain and it being the first of May (how did that happen?), I wanted to share one of my favorite moments in the play. And I want to share both the modern type setting and then the First Folio setting:

O heat, dry up my brains! tears seven times salt,
Burn out the sense and virtue of mine eye!
By heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight,
Till our scale turn the beam. O rose of May!
Dear maid, kind sister, sweet Ophelia!
O heavens! is't possible, a young maid's wits
Should be as mortal as an old man's life?
Nature is fine in love, and where 'tis fine,
It sends some precious instance of itself
After the thing it loves.

Oh heate drie vp my Braines, teares seuen times salt,

Burne out the Sence and Vertue of mine eye.

 By Heauen, thy madnesse shall be payed by waight, 

Till our Scale turnes the beame. Oh Rose of May, 

Deere Maid, kinde Sister, sweet Ophelia: 

Oh Heauens, is't possible, a yong Maids wits, 

Should be as mortall as an old mans life? 

Nature is fine in Loue, and where 'tis fine, 

It sends some precious instance of it selfe 

After the thing it loues. 

When we compile scripts for ADK Shakes production, we work primarily from the First Folio and not from modern editions. For one thing, I hate exclamation points. They bug me. When you use five of them in six lines, they seem to lose their punch. Exclamation points do appear in the First Folio, but not nearly so often as they do in modern texts. When I do see one, boy is it gutting. As an actor, I love using the punctuation as a guide, and the FF gives me more food for thought. We also preserve the capitalizations in our scripts. Sometimes the word "Love" is capitalized, sometimes not. I find it helpful to think about those choices and emphases. We do update the spelling (u vs. v, for example) to make it easier on our actors. And we will often make choices between Quarto and Folio settings where variations occur. Our scripts basically take an awfully long time to put together ... So: one more time with this passage. Here is what it would look like in an ADK Shakes format:

Oh heat dry up my Brains, tears seven times salt, 

Burn out the Sense and Virtue of mine eye. 

By Heaven, thy madness shall be paid by weight, 

Till our Scale turns the beam. Oh Rose of May, 

Dear Maid, kind Sister, sweet Ophelia:  

Oh Heavens, is't possible, a young Maid's wits, 

Should be as mortal as an old man's life? 

Nature is fine in Love, and where 'tis fine, 

It sends some precious instance of it self 

After the thing it loves.

I want to end with a shameless plug for two of our wonderful company members, Aaron White and Christine Demuth. Last summer, Aaron headlined as Romeo with us and Christine played Lady Macbeth. I wish I had some video to post of these performances, but I do have these photos, which absolutely do not do them justice:

Aaron White as Romeo, Laura Montes as Juliet

Christine Demuth as Lady Macbeth 

I am not a gusher. I have the most exacting, obnoxiously high standards when it comes to theatre, so it's a big deal when I tell you: These two actors are phenomenal, and have performed some of the most moving, genuine, incredible moments of theatre I have seen. Ever. And I have seen a lot of theatre. If you are anywhere in the vicinity of Williamsburg, VA this summer, you will not want to miss Aaron White as Hamlet and Christine Demuth as Ophelia at the Virginia Shakespeare Festival. They will be incredible. If you're not in the vicinity of Williamsburg, I promise you they will be worth the trip.