Shakespeare in Performance

Shakespeare in Performance was founded by Professor Travis Curtright in 2012.

He began with shows in a classroom at a university without a drama department. As each production continued to amaze and delight audiences, the call for a theater grew. The university’s administration and donors agreed. To provide Professor Curtright’s students and program a home, the Donahue Family Black Box Theater was designed and completed in 2018.

The productions of Shakespeare in Performance eschew sets, keep the house lights up, and actors directly address audience members. Students are trained in voice, movement, early modern stagecraft, and especially Shakespeare’s language and rhetoric. Professor Curtright also modernizes the plays by reimagining conventional ideas about characters, scenes, or the delivery of monologues; and by adding contemporary pop music and forms of dance or music theater; and with improvisations that involve audience participation.

A skilled acting coach and award-winning teacher, Dr. Curtright invites students of any major or career path to encounter Shakespeare’s art through performance. He presents the craft of acting as a sincere gift of self, combining the practice of acting techniques with St. John Paul II’s vision of the human person. Friendship, too, should be part of the experience that theater provides, especially during the college years, so that young or new actors find encouragement. Students rehearse in a safe environment that encourages growth in self-knowledge, creative risk-taking, and ensemble work. Students and graduates report that acting under Dr. Curtright’s direction was a “life-changing experience.”

Learn more about the program, here.