“Dear Dawn Monique Williams, It is my pleasure to inform you that your thesis ““What Country Friends Is This?”: Creating Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night Onstage, A Director’s Journey” has been accepted into Masters Theses of ScholarWorks@UMass Amherst, and you have been cleared for graduation. Your transcripts will now show that you have your degree. Congratulations!”
I finished grad school in May, but with the fellowship starting right away, I was unable to defend my thesis until August. Then the Grad School has to scour the thing to make sure the formatting and such is all in order, so while school has been out for a while, I’ve been waiting for the official #gurlyoudonegetajob email. And this morning it came. Over the moon about it.
So me & Hartford Stage: we are at the end of week two and I feel like we are moving at a great pace. Davis has staged the whole show (he calls it a first draft) and on Sunday we ended the week with an AWESOME stumble thru of Act I.
I find myself obsessed with the dramaturgy of this play. Our discussions in the hall about storytelling and structure are so exciting for me; Quiara making sentence level edits, and Davis “drafting” versions of the scene to show her is all so new for me as my specialty is classics and published plays. New plays have scared me because having the writer in the room has always seemed so intimidating. But this process isn’t scary or intimidating at all. Quiara is open and receptive and she and Davis have an incredible trust and rapport. I think I need more playwright friends.
Quiara’s writing is so rich and each character so intriguing. I am incredibly moved by the depth of these relationships, and when you see the play (which you will *hint *hint *nudge *nudge) you’ll understand how gifted a writer she is to craft such moving stories about people who by in large communicate through a chat room.
Ok. I will leave you with a few gems from the rehearsal hall:
“Then it becomes some bad grad school acting exercise”
“That’s a little to artsy dancie”
“If this were my MFA thesis, I’d have a lot of explaining to do”
"Acting Faces" collage from my thesis production of 12th Night
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