Notes from the Director of Autumn Garden, Susan Coromel discussing the process and development of a workshop production...

A workshop production is an excellent way for actor’s to concentrate on
the process of acting by working on a complete text. The foundation of
the work covered in the acting curriculum strengthens skills necessary for actors, such as concentration, imagination, and physicalization and script analysis. Traditionally in an advanced acting class, students solidify these skills by using a series of scenes from various areas of dramatic literature. When student actors work on scenes, they are usually focused on a character’s most extreme moments. In this workshop production students have the opportunity to work on the full character. This experience in a classroom setting adds more depth to the acting process.


In foundation classes students learn to free their instincts, with the goal to be fully present, available and immediately responsive, spontaneous and passionate. The students in this project have taken the first level of Meisner actor training, a training developed by Sanford Meisner with a specific step by step series of exercises to reinforce the foundation of acting. That foundation is “the realty of doing.”

Once actors begin to work in this more authentic way the next step is to add text, the play itself. The first encounter with text is very general, actors are given a script with simple relationships and they work from the scene without considering the whole play. Isolating the text in this way
helps to simply the techniques of working on text. The text is a
blueprint for the performance, students learn how to read a play as an
actor, to look for the clues that will define and create character.
They learn to read the script in a deeper and more specific way and become sensitized to the characters in the play, how they respond to each other
and how the characters relate to the world around them. They learn what
the pivotal circumstances are that the characters find themselves in and how the characters react to these circumstances, which defines the specific point of view of each character.


Working on a text in a workshop performance also requires that everything needed to bring the play to life, set pieces, costumes and props has to be found by the acting company. In this production the actor’s have chosen their costumes and most have found props that will only represent the world of the play, in some cases they are from the period the play is set, 1949.