Detroit Public Theatre's Shakespeare in Prison ensemble gets the text off the page

On September 15, members of Detroit Public Theatre's Shakespeare in Prison ensemble put down their scripts and got on their feet.

The company's own dispatch, posted September 18, opens on a shift: "This week, we continued our exploration of Shakespeare's monologues, but something began to shift." Written in the first person by a workshop facilitator, it documents a session where the ensemble moved from reading the text to performing it, standing, gesturing, and testing how the language lives in the body.

One member worked through Puck's monologue. After digging into the words and the context, the facilitator gave her a specific objective, described in the dispatch as "convince all of us not to ask for our money back."

The change was immediate. "She moved more. She gestured," one member observed. The performer's own take was simpler: "It's cool. It puts more energy into it. It helped me understand what I was saying." Another member told her, "You've come a long way. I'm so proud of you!"

The night ranged across the canon. A performer stood to deliver Phebe's monologue, explaining, "I wanted to bring more emphasis," and afterward naming what she found: "I emphasized her fighting herself." The group worked Romeo with attention to "Shakespeare's use of 'O,'" one more element of the language to play with. For Hermione, one member suggested, "Act as if you have been wrongly accused," and another reflected, "She was pleading her case."

There was honest friction, too. Taking on Macbeth, one member stopped herself: "I can't play a man," she said, then explained, "My voice is too feminine." The facilitator's answer, in the dispatch, was a door left open: "Shakespeare's characters aren't limited by the gender of the person reading them. Anyone can try Macbeth."

For a city that takes its stages seriously, watching people square off with Puck and Macbeth and win is its own kind of Detroit story. That is the whole method in miniature. Get the language into the mouth, then into the body, and the meaning tends to follow.

Detroit Public Theatre publishes these session dispatches on its own website, where anyone can follow the Shakespeare in Prison ensemble's work as it happens.