Director’s / Educator’s Note


This three-part video series documents a rehearsal process, an acting experiment, and a pedagogical question: How do we make Shakespeare emotionally accessible—and genuinely playable—for young actors trained outside of classical text?

Working with Hannah Larson (age 15), who entered this process with curiosity and enthusiasm but no formal acting training beyond the classroom, I began with a simple baseline: her first attempt at Helena’s Act 3, Scene 2 monologue from A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This initial performance serves as the foundation of my directing research for THEA 647A: Seminar in History of Theatre and Performance Before 1900 at San Diego State University.

From that starting point, this project set out to explore three central questions:

  • Can Shakespeare be made emotionally accessible to students trained primarily in musical theatre?
  • What happens to comedic Shakespeare when it is grounded in contemporary embodiment practices?
  • Can tools like breath work, kinesthetic exploration, and textual analysis unlock clarity and emotional truth for young actors?

At the center of this process is an original rehearsal technique I developed: “The Doors.”


The Doors: A Rehearsal Technique


Inspired in part by Alexander Leggatt’s writing on thresholds in Shakespearean comedy, The Doors reframes comedic structure through an emotional lens. Shakespeare’s comedies are full of metaphorical doors—barriers to love, friendship, belonging, and identity. Characters are constantly arriving too late, being shut out, or crossing thresholds they cannot uncross.

In rehearsal, The Doors makes these thresholds physical.

In an exercise we called “The Door Run,” Hannah moved through imagined doors tied to specific textual beats. Each door represented a moment of discovery, rupture, or emotional escalation. For example:

  • “Lo, she is one of this confederacy” became not just a line, but a threshold into betrayal.
  • The fracture between Helena and Hermia became a door that, once opened, could not be closed.

The goal was not to create staging, but to build embodied clarity. Like any rehearsal device, the physical structure was temporary. Once the emotional pathway was fully realized, the doors were removed—leaving behind specificity, presence, and internal stakes.

This shifted our central inquiry from: Where is the comedy? to What pain does the comedy help us survive?


Process and Pedagogy


The rehearsal process combined multiple methodologies, including:

  • Patsy Rodenburg’s breath work, treating breath as the engine of thought
  • Verbal Conceits analysis, clarifying the emotional logic embedded in Shakespeare’s language
  • Kinesthetic exploration, including The Doors
  • Presence-based work influenced by Uta Hagen and Rodenburg
  • Reflective homework and journaling, deepening imaginative engagement

These tools were synthesized into what I informally call my “Shakespeare Not Sucking Success List”—a collection of strategies aimed at demystifying the text without diminishing its complexity.


The Outcome


Hannah’s final performance reflects a transformation not just in skill, but in access. She moved from decoding the text intellectually to embodying Helena’s emotional life—her heartbreak, her humor, and her growing disillusionment.

What began as a hesitant first read evolved into a performance grounded in clarity, specificity, and lived emotional stakes. The response from our peers was immediate and telling: many were shocked to learn she was only fifteen.


Why This Matters


This project offers a working answer to its initial questions:

  • Yes, Shakespeare can be emotionally accessible to young actors.
  • Yes, comedic Shakespeare deepens—not diminishes—when rooted in embodiment.
  • And yes, it is entirely possible to make high school Shakespeare not suck.

The Doors serves as both a practical rehearsal tool and a conceptual bridge—connecting textual analysis to physical experience, and classical language to contemporary actors.

This series documents not just a result, but a process: one that invites young performers to step through the doors of Shakespeare’s language and discover what’s waiting on the other side.