Jason Cooper is a Junior in Interpersonal Communication/Public Relations. His most current role is Feste/Fool/Clown in Twelfth Night.

Soon after auditions, the cast of Twelfth Night had the opportunity to participate in a Shakespeare workshop with Patrick Tansor of Children's Theatre of Charlotte. Jason gives his account of the workshop:

“THE RICHER THE LANGUAGE, THE RICHER THE YOU!”

-Patrick Tansor, Actor & Teacher

While many other college students were out spending their Friday night with friends at the movie theater, cookout, nightclub, or friend’s house- the cast of Twelfth Night was learning more about Shakespeare!

A three hour workshop at Thompson Theater on Friday night was led by Patrick Tansor, a Carnegie Mellon colleague of Allison Bergman (UT’s Assistant Director) He first began by complementing University Theater on the “conservatory” space that is provided to the students. “Guys, you have a state-of-the-art teaching, performance, & rehearsal space that is pretty much a conservatory for your theater program!” said Patrick Tansor. What an honor to have someone that knows the theater world so well & is even a member of the Actors Equity Association to appreciate our “home”!

Currently a theater teacher at a Children’s Theatre of Charlotte, Patrick has been in a myriad of Shakespeare works throughout his acting career. Oddly enough, Patrick has never worked on Twelfth Night. I’m sure you are now wondering why Patrick is giving a workshop to us! Patrick’s purpose was to not direct the show, but to help us understand how to better understand & read Shakespeare material. He shared with us an awesome quote that one of his greatest mentors, Lori Orion, said to him once: “I don’t care what you ‘think’ you should sound like…I want to hear who you are”. When people think Shakespeare, they suddenly begin speaking in a British accent & start sounding really proper. The problem is that this language is not spoken these days & many actors fear to touch Shakespeare. Patrick was there to help us see that every character has his own story & that character can be completely different from any other person that has ever played that role. Shakespeare “ain’t easy”, but he was so glad to see that we are tackling it!

Patrick brought so many materials to share with us from books on Shakespeare to packets of information that he had prepared himself. We did not even touch the scripts during the first hour; we instead went back to the basics of hearing & speaking Shakespeare. We learned rhythms, meanings of punctuations in a line, short lines, split lines, quarks, what is in a verse, dramatic pauses & so much more. When an actor knows that a comma means a drop in or a colon means you are listing something, it truly helps the actor’s line read.

We then got up on our feet to do a series of exercises that the cast found to be a lot of fun! These exercises helped us control our breathing and learn to really listen to one another on stage. It is funny how just by listening to your scene partner you will know how to reply. I was able to witness scenes that sounded like people had no idea what they were saying, turn into something that could potentially be seen by an audience! Some of us did not have much time to analyze our scripts prior to the workshop, but we realized listening is the key to making a scene work.

The cast of Twelfth Night & I truly benefited from Patrick’s workshop. He helped UT take this show to another level. This workshop helped us all see something that we all ‘thought’ we were doing, listening to each other. Not only can we use these lessons in this show, but we can take the things we learned into every other show we do.

Thanks to NCSU University Theater, I am proud to say that I have a totally new respect for Shakespeare!

The quality of the resources that we have here at NCSU are unlike many others. Some theater schools do not even get the type of training & experiences that we have! I have grown so much from working with everyone here! The thing I love most about UT is that we are not a bunch of theater kids whose lives ARE theater. We all have plenty of other things that we could be doing, but theater is something that we all enjoy & carry within us. We come here to get away from that long day in the classroom. We come here to have fun! Here, you do not have to be afraid to make a fool of yourself & be judged. Here, you do not have to be in a show to be a part of the program. Here, you will explore yourself & all the aspects of the theater world! JOIN US!

I encourage all of you to come out & enjoy our Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night!

Performances:

September 30 - October 3 @ 7:30pm

October 3 & 4 @ 2:30pm

919.515.1100 for tickets or ncsu.edu/ticketcentral