Act Out

WORKSHOPS Aug. 23 – 27, 3-6pm

AUDITIONS Sept 3rd, 3-6pm

FIRST REHEARSAL Sept 9th, 3-6pm

Attendance at workshops is not mandatory, but will give students an excellent understanding of how to read and act Shakespeare’s words.

PLEASE PREPARE A 30-SECOND TO ONE-MINUTE MONOLOGUE FOR YOUR AUDITION. CHOOSE YOUR OWN OR ONE FROM PAGES 4 & 5 OF THIS PACKET.

It does not have to be memorized. Extra work is always viewed favorably, but if those details get in the way of performance then they could hurt more than help. For the Auditions, we will ask you to present your monologue, perform some “combat” moves, and do an improvised movement sequence. We will most likely only have to perform 10 to 20 seconds of your monologue, so maybe do a 30-second one that impresses with your memorization.

AS YOU LIKE IT by William Shakespeare SYNOPSIS (from the Royal Shakespeare Company)

As You Like It subverts the traditional rules of romance. Gender roles, nature and politics are confused in a play that reflects on how bewildering yet utterly pleasurable life can be.

EXILE IN THE FOREST OF ARDEN

Duke Senior has been forced into exile from the court by the usurping Duke Frederick. He takes refuge in the Forest of Arden with a band of faithful lords. Rosalind, his daughter, is kept uneasily at court as a companion to her cousin Celia, Frederick’s daughter.

A WRESTLING MATCH

Orlando de Boys, the youngest son of the late Sir Rowland de Boys, has been kept in poverty by his brother Oliver since his father’s death. Orlando decides to wrestle for his fortune at Frederick’s court, where he sees Rosalind and they fall in love.

BANISHMENT

The Duke banishes Rosalind, fearing that she is a threat to his rule. Celia, refusing to be parted from her cousin, goes with Rosalind to
seek Duke Ferdinand in the Forest. For safety
they disguise themselves – Rosalind as the boy

Ganymede and Celia as his sister Aliena – and persuade the fool Touchstone to accompany them.

On hearing of a plot by his brother to kill him, Orlando also flees to the Forest and takes refuge with the exiled Duke. Posting love lyrics through the forest, Orlando encounters Rosalind disguised as Ganymede. She challenges his love-sick state and suggests that he should prove the strength of his love by wooing Ganymede as if he were Rosalind.

LOVE BLOSSOMS IN THE FOREST

Elsewhere in the Forest love also blossoms: the shepherd Silvius suffers unrequited love for Phoebe, who has fallen for Ganymede, while Touchstone is pursuing the goat-herd Audrey.

Oliver, sent into the Forest to hunt down Orlando, has his life saved by his brother, becomes filled with remorse for his past behavior and falls in love with Aliena.

Frustrated by the pain of his love for Rosalind, Orlando is unable to continue wooing Ganymede, so Ganymede promises he will conjure up the real Rosalind and that all the lovers will finally be wed…

AUDITION MONOLOGUES

(You can always choose different ones, but we want to help you all as much as possible)

PHEBE (abridged)

I would not be thy executioner:
I fly thee, for I would not injure thee.
Thou tell’st me there is murder in mine eye:
Now I do frown on thee with all my heart;
And, if mine eyes can wound, now let them kill thee; Now counterfeit to swound; why now fall down;
Or, if thou canst not, O! for shame, for shame,
Lie not, to say mine eyes are murderers.
Now show the wound; but now mine eyes,
Which I have darted at thee, hurt thee not,
Nor, I am sure, there is no force in eyes
That can do hurt.

OLIVER (abridged)

When last the young Orlando parted from you He left a promise to return again
Within an hour;
Lo, what befell! he threw his eye aside,

And mark what object did present itself:
Under an oak, whose boughs were moss’d with age, And high top bald with dry antiquity,
A green and gilded snake had wreath’d itself,
Who with her head nimble in threats approach’d Seeing Orlando, it unlink’d itself,
And with indented glides did slip away
Into a bush; under which bush’s shade
A lioness, with udders all drawn dry,
Lay couching, head on ground, with catlike watch, When that the sleeping man should stir; for ’tis
The royal disposition of that beast
To prey on nothing that doth seem as dead:

ADAM (abridged)

O unhappy youth!
Come not within these doors; within this roof The enemy of all your graces lives.
Your brother,’no, no brother; yet the son,.
Yet not the son, I will not call him son
Of him I was about to call his father,.
Hath heard your praises, and this night he means To burn the lodging where you use to lie,
And you within it: if he fail of that,
He will have other means to cut you off.
I overheard him and his practices.
This is no place; this house is but a butchery: Abhor it, fear it, do not enter it.

ROSALIND

He was to imagine me his love, his mistress; and I set him every day to woo me: at which time would I, being but a moonish youth, grieve, be effeminate, changeable, longing and liking; proud, fantastical, apish, shallow, inconstant, full of tears, full of smiles, for every passion something, and for no passion truly anything, as boys and women are, for the most part, cattle of this colour; would now like him, now loathe him; then entertain him, then forswear him; now weep for him, then spit at him; that I drave my suitor from his mad humour of love to a living humour of madness, which was, to forswear the full stream of the world, and to live in a nook merely monastic. And thus I cured him; and this way will I take upon me to wash your liver as clean as a sound sheep.s heart, that there shall not be one spot of love in’t.

ORLANDO

Hang there, my verse, in witness of my love;
And thou, thrice-crowned Queen of Night, survey With thy chaste eye, from thy pale sphere above, Thy huntress’ name that my full life doth sway.
O Rosalind! these trees shall be my books,
And in their barks my thoughts I’ll character,
That every eye which in this forest looks
Shall see thy virtue witness’d every where.
Run, run, Orlando; carve on every tree,
The fair, the chaste, and unexpressive she.