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R&J Teacher/Director Guide PDF.
Here is the table of contents, and some acting notes. A whole copy should be printed just for the teacher, and then whatever sheets the students might employ on any day. The R&J guide plots each day, beginning with verbal competitions between the two families, and then the full cast reads aloud whatever they have been assigned the day before. Parts are swapped about, giving everyone some type of go. As we read/play aloud, refine our performances, we experience, and learn from the thoughts and emotions of these complex characters. Since the Nurse and the Friar have been vacuumed so severely, the young people dominate this SOL version. Unabridged, the play is very dense. Vacuumed to 57%, the heart of the story reveals itself clearly, a tale of two astonishingly, creative lovers, their friends and their families.
I constructed this guide, specifically, for grade 9s -18 classes over 6 weeks, but the timing of the process can be adapted to any group or institution. It is filled with hundreds of specific acting suggestions for all the characters; short, nightly reading assignments, regular quizzes, scene-by-scene synopses, vocabulary tests, crosswords, competitions, small Elizabethan stories, blank organizational and grading charts for you, etc. (114 pages) I suggest you just print necessary handouts for the students from the Guide PDF.
What the whole series needs most are teacher/directors who listen well and are kind and encouraging helping the students bring the characters to life with their voices. Words like theme, figurative, comparative, will be set aside for words like thought, purpose, fears, etc. Instead of test scores built on fuzzy, scholarly concepts, you can evaluate your students on how well they play. Your purpose should be to produce, or perhaps record, a decent reading of the play. When it all makes sense, and the young voices are growing with life, you’ll know you are getting somewhere. In professional theatre it is called table-talk - my favourite part of rehearsal. It is when the group develops a mutual understanding about the words and the world those words are spoken in. At Stratford, Robin Phillips would spend 4 of 8 weeks of rehearsal at the table, and once we were on our feet running it, he would often bring us back to the table, for really fine work. Sometimes he would simply tell stories to knit it all together. T’was heaven.
Best wishes,
Rodger