‘Performing Shakespeare,’ March 23
Ralph Alan Cohen, assisted by two actors from the American Shakespeare Center (ASC), will address the topic of “Performing Shakespeare” at 4:30 p.m., Wednesday, March 23, in Gailor Auditorium, on the University of the South campus.
Cohen, a Founding Director of the American Shakespeare Center, is the Gonder Professor of Shakespeare at Mary Baldwin University, where he established the graduate program in Shakespeare and Performance. He served as project director for the building of the Blackfriars Playhouse in Staunton, Va., (the world’s only re-creation of Shakespeare’s indoor theatre) and has directed 30 productions of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries. He has directed four summer institutes on Shakespeare and staging sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is the author of “ShakesFear and How to Cure It: The Complete Handbook for Teaching Shakespeare.”
Cohen has received numerous awards and fellowships, including the (Virginia) Governor’s Arts Award with ASC Co-founder Jim Warren (2008), the Theo Crosby Fellowship at Shakespeare’s Globe in London (2009), the Folger Shakespeare Library’s Shakespeare Steward Award (2013), and the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker award (2014); he was the first American to receive this last honor. He earned his undergraduate degree at Dartmouth College and his doctorate at Duke University, where he received the outstanding alumni award in 2016. In 2022, the Shakespeare Theatre Association recognized him with its Douglas N. Cook Lifetime Achievement Award.
This presentation is sponsored by Sewanee’s Department of English and the Shakespeare Studies Minor, as well as Sewanee’s participation in a Leadership Consortium relationship with the ASC. Free and open to the public, the event promises to invite at least a few actors “in the rough” onto the stage.