Early Modern Collab

Upcoming Events:

Please join The Private Theater's Early Modern Collab on Saturday October 4th (2-6PM) & Sunday October 5th (4-8PM) at Manhattan Theater Club (MTC Studio 4 @ 311 W 43rd St) for an open-to-observation, two-day, classical masterclass exploring scenes from The Sea Voyage, taught by gifted actors Annabel Capper and John Douglas Thompson. Don't miss this intimate glimpse into the work of acting! We welcome scholars, students, and the interested public to come and watch a talented class of actors explore world building and group dynamics in scenes from this underperformed response to Shakespeare’s Tempest. There will be opportunities for observers to ask questions and offer dramaturgical support. Please sign up here for Saturday's class with Annabel Capper, and here for Sunday's class with John Douglas Thompson. Your donations support future Early Modern Collab classes, workshops, and readings exploring classic plays.

John Fletcher and Philip Massinger’s 1622 island romance The Sea Voyage opens with a shipwreck in which a reformed French pirate Albert, his young female captive-turned-beloved Aminta, and a motley crew of his countrymen land on the shore of a barren island. As they will soon learn, this island is inhabited by two Portuguese men, Sebastian and Nicusa, and an adjacent island turns out to be the fertile home to a group of Portuguese women who live like Amazons. We’ll investigate a scene each day of the workshop: on Saturday, 1.3 in which Aminta finds herself shipwrecked on a desert island with desperate men; and on Sunday 2.2 in which Arthur washes up nearby on more habitable shores in the hands of women. 

Scholars Hillary Eklund (Grinnell College) and Debapriya Sarkar (University of Connecticut), proposers of this exploration, invite us all to consider how the wet spaces of this play—including shores, lakes, rivers, and fens— offer a kind of proving ground for visions of mastering a world increasingly understood through its watery expanses. How can we render the dynamism of waterways (shores, seas, wetlands, and rivers) in performance? How can staging help us understand water's mediating role in relations between humans and more-than-human spaces, resources, and things, and relations of gender, nationality, and race? 

John Douglas Thompson is an English-American actor. He is a Tony Award nominee and the recipient of two Drama Desk Awards, three Obie Awards, an Outer Critics Circle Award, and a Lucille Lortel Award.

Broadway: King Lear, Becker in August Wilson’s Jitney (Tony nomination), Carousel, A Time To Kill, Cyrano de Bergerac, Julius Caesar. International: Othello, Henry IV, Royal Shakespeare Company; The Merchant of Venice, Royal Lyceum Theater. Off-Broadway: Endgame at Irish Rep (Obie Award); The Merchant of Venice at Theater For A New Audience; Hamlet (Obie and AUDELCO Awards), Julius Caesar, King Lear at Public Theater; The Iceman Cometh at BAM (Obie and Drama Desk Awards); Tamburlaine (Obie, Drama Desk and AUDELCO Awards), Macbeth (title role), Othello (Obie Award, Lucille Lortel Award, Joe A. Callaway Award), A Doll’s House, The Father, Oroonoko at TFANA; Satchmo At The Waldorf (Drama Desk, Outer Critics Circle, NAACP Awards) at the Westside Theater; The Forest at Classic Stage Company; The Emperor Jones at Irish Rep (Joe A. Callaway Award and Lucille Lortel, Drama League and Drama Desk nominations); Hedda Gabler at New York Theatre Workshop. Regional: Inherit The Wind at Pasadena Playhouse; The Tempest at Commonwealth Shakespeare (Elliot Norton Award); Man In The Ring at Huntington Theater (Elliot Norton Award); Joe Turner’s Come and Gone at Mark Taper Forum (Ovation Award); Hamlet (title role) at ACT; Antony and Cleopatra at Hartford Stage; Red Velvet, Othello, Richard III, King Lear, and Mother Courage at Shakespeare & Co; Jesus Hopped the ‘A’ Train at the Wilma Theater (Barrymore Award); and productions at Shakespeare Theatre Company, Williamstown Theatre Festival, Trinity Repertory Company, American Repertory Theater, Chicago Shakespeare, and Yale Repertory Theatre. Television and Film: Highest 2 Lowest, The Gilded Age, Mare of Easttown, Till, For Life, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Wolves, Bull, Person of Interest, Madam Secretary, Law & Order, Conviction, 355, Let Them All Talk, Bourne Legacy, Glass Chin, Michael Clayton, Malcolm X. Additional Awards: John is a Fox Fellow recipient, and has received the Samuel H. Scripps Award, the Robert Brustein Award for sustained excellence in American theater, the William Shakespeare Award For Classical Theatre, the Eugene O’Neill Medallion Award, the Matador Award, and the AAFCA Award for Distinguished Achievement.

Annabel Capper, born and raised in London, Annabel is an actor and director living in New York City. Annabel has worked extensively in theatre, TV, and film since graduating from the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art (LAMDA). For 8 years, Annabel directed and acted in Shakespeare workshops in high security prisons across the UK. The workshops garnered great interest and acclaim, filmed by the BBC. John Barton- co founder of the Royal Shakespeare Company- mentored Annabel for a year in 2007. Annabel is the director of Annabel Capper Presents ….and is a company member of Bedlam.

Favorite credits include: New York: Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Gene Frankel Theatre, director, and producer), Persuasion, Pygmalion (Bedlam). The Convent, (A.R.T/ NY), Hamlet (Kraine Theater), Passion Play (Lincoln Center). Regional: Twelfth Night (Shakespeare on The Sound), Mrs. Packard (Bridge Repertory, Boston), Macbeth (Philadelphia Shakespeare Company). London: The Price (Apollo Theatre, West End), One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Lost Theatre), Much Ado About Nothing (Hazlitt Theatre), Melancholy Play (Old Vic Studio), Two Women for One Ghost(Regent’s Park), Stitching (Judi Dench Theatre), Making the Sound of Loneliness (Arcola). TV: New Amsterdam (NBC), For Life (ABC), EastEnders, Sensitive Skin, Operation Mincemeat (BBC). Radio: Cymbeline, Troilus and Cressida (BBC). Director: Reunion (Bedlam Veteran Outreach Program), This Time (Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research), Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Gene Frankel Theatre), Skylight, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and Meghan O Leary’s Multitudes’ (Playhouse Creatures Theatre Company, NYC), Let's Get Weird (Colin Waitt, A.R.T NY), The Importance of Being Earnest, The Price and Entertaining Mr. Sloane (Bedlam's Do More Reading Series 2020)

Past EventS

The Private Theatre invites you to a pay-what-you-can, feminist, scene study class with Annabel Capper, exploring John Fletcher’s hilarious and filthy 1611 play, The Tamer Tamed: or, The Woman’s Prize, a sequel to Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew, in which Petruchio gets beaten by his clever second wife at his own game of domestic domination. This feminist scene study workshop has the same basic goals as any acting class: to create full human beings navigating social circumstances with stakes. This class is feminist simply in the open recognition that sometimes—whether because of the gaps and clichés in a script, the dynamics in a rehearsal room, or our own internalized habits (such as generalized pleasantness) that limit our range of expression— sometimes, we need to more strategically apply the skills of our craft to create full human women and gender queer people in classical plays.

The Private Theatre hopes to offer a series of these feminist scene study classes, building to a benefit reading of The Tamer Tamed for Planned Parenthood next Spring, with a cast drawn from past students and instructors. This pay-what-you-can workshop is open to actors of all gender expressions, and all levels of training. The venue is wheelchair accessible.

We also warmly invite early modern theater scholars and students! Please come observe our process; and learn how to offer actors playable strategies for feminist performance.