As befits any actor worth their salt I have a tidy library comprised of the usual suspects such as Ibsen, Aeschylus, Miller, Shaw and Strindberg among many others; I also have 14 of the 38 plays written by England’s national poet, William Shakespeare. However, in the last year if my agent called me with an audition requiring the memorization of a Shakespearean monologue my mind would race in to find an excuse to get out of it. The Bard puts the fear of God in me and I’ve felt like a lesser actor because of it. So for 2011 I made a pledge to myself to focus on mastering the fear of the iambic pentameter. To do this I refused to audition for any Shakespeare until I could walk into a room and throw down with absolute confidence.
Of course life has other plans for us and 24 hours after I touched down in Toronto after being away for 3 months my agent called me with a ‘Romeo and Juliet’ audition to be prepared for the following week. I’d already turned down one Shakespeare audition this year and knew I couldn’t do it again less than one month later so I accepted and panicked.
Well, before you can say deus ex machine I get a special invite from Obsidian Theatre via email the next day to participate in the Stratford hosted ‘Working with Words and Shakespeare’ workshop taking place on April 1 & 2. So, maybe there is something to that book, ‘The Secret’….
