Text & Dialect Coaching

WHAT IS A TEXT COACH?

For the last fifteen years I have often worked as a Text Coach for theatres and Shakespeare Festivals around the Midwest, Utah and California. As a text coach, I work with directors and actors on the language of the playwright, whether it is To Kill a Mockingbird or Hamlet. With directors, I often help them cut the play—especially the plays of Shakespeare, and talk through the language as they develop their vision of the play. For actors, I serve as a teacher—helping with pronunciation, meaning and sometimes dialect of a play. When working with actors, I often have tutorials one on one and sometimes work with two or more actors on a scene or segment of the play.

I have worked most often on Shakespearean text. I like to teach actors and students how to be “Verse Detectives—“ How to look for the clues to meaning and use of heightened language in the text. Once you unlock the door and walk through, Shakespeare is as easy to do as Sarah Ruhl or David Mamet—in fact, easier in many cases. Shakespeare’s characters speak like they think and once you acknowledge the use of rhetoric and language patterns in the plays or poems, you are on your way to speaking the text authentically and well. If, as an actor, you know what your character is thinking, saying, and why they are saying it, then the audience will understand you and you will be a true storyteller.

I relish working on text and have taught classes in both text analysis and rhetoric. Those classes, added to nearly twenty five years of teaching Shakespeare—how to speak and how to act the Bard— have given me a solid foundation to work on nearly any play, whether it is Shakespeare or Paula Vogel.

I am proud to say that of all the plays of Shakespeare, I have worked on twenty-eight of them, some more than once, either as an actor, director, adapter, or text coach. Over the years I have worked at PCPA Theaterfest in Santa Maria, California, Utah Shakespeare Festival, Great River Shakespeare Festival, Great Lakes Shakespeare Festival, Illinois Shakespeare Festival and the Repertory Theatre of St. Louis. Every time I work on a Shakespeare play, I learn something new—I have done Hamlet five times! I find this work to be a joy and always a new adventure!