ABOUT

Serious Play Theatre Ensemble believes in the power of socially engaged artists to participate meaningfully in creating a more just, equitable, sustainable, and compassionate future. We know this means that artists must take time and care to develop relationships built on mutual trust, within our workshops and within our ensemble. We welcome collaborative work with diverse non-arts partners and communities. Our workshops welcome actors and non-actors alike, as we learn and explore together, creating and sharing our creative process.  

The SERIOUS PLAY INTENSIVE THEATRE TRAINING WORKSHOP is a challenging sampling of physical actor training techniques in a collaborative ensemble setting. Identify and sculpt your strengths as a creator/performer working with the demanding physical acting exercises of Japanese director Tadashi Suzuki, and the movement vocabulary, Viewpoints from director Anne Bogart, toward the development of improvisational composition work in groups. Begin to feel the impact of total physical expressiveness onstage as we incorporate other exercises drawn from various physical acting disciplines including those of: Grotowski, Chaikin, Laban, Lecoq, Zapporah, and Wangh. Participate in a S.P.I.T.T. Workshop and dissolve the nightmare of failure and speak of fortitude, connection, risk-taking and courage. Realize the power of honest full body listening and responding, that heightens the communication between performers, and with an audience.

Goals for Serious Play Intensive Theatre Training Workshops:

TO create a process where participants are encouraged to experiment without expectations of results, but rather with an expectancy of discovery

TO train in physical theatre because the body serves as a pathway into a performer’s rich emotional life.

TO free the performers' abilities to experience and to artfully express their passions through the body and voice in response to the world around them

TO encourage performers to explore, take risks, and collaborate in a safe space, toward the discovery of vital communication in an ensemble setting

Suzuki training, developed by Tadashi Suzuki & the SCOT Company, Toga, Japan, and shared with Serious Play through SITI Company NYC, is a coherent set of physical exercises which address speed, space, rhythm, and the integration of physical and mental focus which creates a body-mind relationship. An actor absorbs the flow and shape of the movements such as: stomp, walks, sitting and standing statues, and discovers how to center herself within these. The external form is fixed, but the freedom of the actor's imaginative focus is not. This training develops an awareness of engagement with an audience.

 Mary Overlie’s Viewpoints developed for Dance, and later expanded to Anne Bogart’s Viewpoints for Actors, is a philosophy translated into a vocabulary for: training performers, building ensemble and creating movement for performance. It is a set of names given to certain principles of movement through time and space, that constitute a language for all artists to talk about what happens on stage. The physical viewpoints include, those within time: tempo, duration, kinesthetic response, repetition, and those within space: shape, gesture, architecture and more. 

During adolescence, Serious Play profoundly shaped me as an actor, thinker, and person.  My experiences with Serious Play and these powerhouse women still continue to inspire and inform my work, oh so many years later…Ensemble theater was a breath of fresh air for me, a more complete way of expression, and collaboration. I was hooked.  I then went on to be one of the original ensemble members of Serious Play.  Mad props to the O.G. ensemble, Sheryl, Robin, Lisa, and the Woo Loo Moo Loo Cuddle! While most teens were taking Drivers Ed. and hanging out in the McDonalds parking lot, I was eagerly heading to rehearsal to train in Suzuki, Shakespeare, and Viewpoints, on the third floor of Thornes Marketplace A.P.E., and I wouldn’t have it any other way.  If you are in this room right now, you know how truly fortunate we all were and are to have experienced training so different from the typical, surface theatrical training offered.  Serious Play demanded us to think like artists, not just adolescents, and inspired us to dedicate ourselves to our art and to each other.  We created thought-provoking, powerful, and gripping theater that made a difference.  It is heart-warming and inspiring to know that you are still creating this kind of theater, Sheryl, continuing to change the lives of those who get the gift of collaborating with you, and your audiences who get to experience your beautiful work. 

I am now the owner of The Theater School, an educational theater company in Northern California. Sheryl inspired me so fully as a teenager, that I now call upon her teachings and example to inform my own work as a director and teacher.  As an actor, I still seek to collaborate with companies that value ensemble training and learning.  I feel fortunate to have experienced such unique, high caliber theatrical training, at such a young age, and hold my work with Serious Play in the highest regard.  I am who I am, because of Serious Play!  To all my dear friends, past collaborators, and Serious Play family, I’m giving you all the biggest hug right now.  Though it’s been forever since we’ve all Suzuki slow walked together, I honestly love you all, and cherish the incredible moments we all shared together. Sheryl, your work is more important than ever, here in 2018, and I feel happy knowing that Serious Play’s message, teaching and art will continue being crafted and shared with the world.  I hope you all as we said in SPITT, “have fun and learn a lot!”

—Libby Kelly Oberlin, Director of Education & Owner, The Theater School