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We rely on the generous support of people like you to sustain our tradition of artistic excellence, and secure a bright future for our Company.
Center For Actor Training
The very heart of Shakespeare & Company is its professional actor training. The aesthetic of the Company was created within the training devised by Tina Packer and the Master Teachers, and it is through these programs that the aesthetic is continually investigated, redefined, and reinvigorated.
Through the Center for Actor Training, Shakespeare & Company’s performance artists, education artists, and artist-managers develop a common artistic vocabulary and coherent approach to performing Shakespeare that provides a solid foundation for their work. Actors, directors, writers, and teachers from all over the world come to work with the Company’s faculty to train not only their voices and their bodies with a daily regimen of demanding classes, but also to delve deeply into their own imaginations, intellects, and emotional lives.
Shakespeare & Company’s curriculum is internationally recognized as a deeply effective training experience for actors who aspire to bring their talent, intuition, and spirit to a higher level.
Donate To DKFF
The Dennis Krausnick Fellowship Fund (DKFF) provides financial assistance for artists of color to participate in our professional training programs.
Actor Training Programs
2022 Summer Shakespeare Intensive
Modeled after our internationally acclaimed Month-long Intensive, the Summer Shakespeare Intensive (formerly the Summer Training Institute) provides young actors the opportunity to immerse themselves in Shakespeare six days a week for four weeks during our summer performance season. The Summer Shakespeare Intensive is geared towards undergraduate theater students, recent graduates, and early career acting professionals, but it is open to open to a wide-ranging audience of theatre performers and practitioners. Scroll down for more information!
2023 Month-long Intensive
Create a new relationship with Shakespeare’s text, with yourself as an actor, and with your place in the world of theatre.
Weekend Intensive
Designed to meet the needs of professional actors and theater students who seek an introduction to Shakespeare & Company's training methods as well as alumni who wish to refresh and reconnect with the work, the Weekend Intensive integrates voice, movement, and monologue work. Participants explore ways to unlock the emotional and intellectual content inherent in Shakespeare's language, yielding a direct relationship between actor and text.
In-Person Specialized Workshops
The Center for Actor Training typically offers a variety of specialized workshops throughout the year exploring a full range of disciplines including rhetoric, wit, clown, fight, voice, movement, public speaking, and more. Go to the ONLINE CLASSES AND WORKSHOPS page (click above) for details on our online programming. PLEASE NOTE: For all in-person workshops, all participants and workshop staff are required to have completed a COVID-19 vaccine regimen (including a booster shot) and will be tested on-site for COVID-19.
Online Classes and Workshops
The Center for Actor Training now offers a variety of workshops and classes online, providing the opportunity for theater professionals around the world to study with our distinguished faculty.
Meet the Faculty
Mary Mayo
Mary is a Designated Linklater teacher with many years experience acting and teaching voice, acting and improvisation in universities and professional theatre training programs all over the United States including Shakespeare & Company, University of Maryland, NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, University of Mississippi, Virginia Commonwealth University, and Syracuse University. She has an M.Litt/MFA in Shakespeare and Renaissance Literature in Performance from Mary Baldwin College and the American Shakespeare Center. Mary has coached voice and dialects at Arena Stage, Roundhouse Theater, Ford’s Theater, Signature Theatre, and Chesapeake Bay Shakespeare. She has performed with Nelson County Shakespeare Festival, Hamner Theater, Kristin Linklater’s Company of Women, Ensemble Studio Theater, the Open Eye and Shakespeare & Company. Directing credits include The Waiting Room (at UMD), A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Richard II, As You Like It, and Taming of the Shrew. Mary is Shakespeare consultant to the Nelson County Public Schools and, with Betty Tabony, has written a manual for teaching Shakespeare to middle school students and edited a young people’s edition of King Lear for Swan Books. She currently lives in Washington, DC.
From the Alumni
Jenna Hoff
All of the vocal and physical training we did enabled me to see how much freedom and availability are possible, which raised my expectations of myself. But for the first time I felt that I had the tools to move forward with those expectations. I can hone, clarify and broaden my Shakespeare monologues (and other pieces, too!), and I gained more
Lulu Fogarty
My experience at the 2007 Summer Training Institute was absolutely priceless….I learned to bring a sense of play to everything I do. Play might be the most important tool for an actor but it’s surprising how quickly we forget to play because we try to be ‘right.’ There is no such thing as ‘right.’ To me, this is what the more
Seth Rue
Shakespeare & Company is a very special organization; one that has a long history, and carefully refined training techniques that have evolved and developed over the past 40 years. But it is the people at Shakespeare & Company that make it what it is. The staff and faculty are among the most compassionate, sincere, and knowledgeable an actor will encounter, more
Maura Matarese
I attend at least one workshop at Shakespeare & Company each year as it always allows me an opportunity to grow as actor, to continue to free my actor’s instrument, to meet exciting new artists from around the world, and to spend time in an environment I love, with a faculty whom I deeply respect. more
Halima Henderson
I’ve kept busy over the past year, and I have to say that weekend intensive has proven to be very effective! Everyone always asks about it when they see it on my resume and I love waxing poetically about it! Not only that, friendships that I made during my weekend have been long-lasting, I love running into folks at auditions more
Teresa Spencer
The most important thing I’ve taken from the Conservatory has been a sense of professionalism. I used to consistently walk into auditions feeling the terror of unpreparedness: even if I’d rehearsed my monologue or sides forwards and backwards, I would arrive at an audition and suddenly feel overtaken with a sense of not knowing what the hell I was doing, more
Shakespeare & Company is a professional live theatre company in the heart of the Berkshires, presenting a vibrant summer performance season featuring the works of Shakespeare in repertory with classic and contemporary plays. The Company offers one of the most extensive actor training programs by a regional theatre in the country, and is also home to an award-winning and nationally recognized theatre-in-education program.