The Gift Theatre Company

The Gift is pleased to announce our Fall and Winter classes. Please contact Lynda Newton, Director of giftED. at: l.newton@thegifttheatre.org

Acting for Non-Actors I
Instructor: Taught by ensemble
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Weeknights 7-9PM
Course description: In this class, students who have never acted before will experience a supportive learning environment free from the pressures of “performing.” Students will be introduced to fun and simple acting exercises and games that reinforce our motto of: “Everyone has something to say, and there’s no right way to say it.”

Acting I
Instructor: Taught by ensemble
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Weeknights 7 - 9PM
Course description: Acting I lays the groundwork leading to the core values of The Gift Theatre Company: honesty, simplicity, and openness. In this class, habits are broken and made, and through short scenes and a myriad of acting techniques, students experience the foundations for effective ensemble acting.

Red Rock Scene Study
Instructor: Michael Patrick Thornton
Cost: $300
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Prerequisites: Audition
Time: Saturdays 1 – 4PM
Course description: In this rigorous intensive, students will strongly focus on the three core values of The Gift—honesty, simplicity, and openness—through the use of one scene. Closer to a rehearsal than an acting class, Red Rock Scene Study deepens the acting experience to a depth where technique seemingly disappears . In this class, through both text and select acting exercises, students will begin to experience what it means to “give a gift of yourself.”

giftED. Young Playwright’s Festival
Instructors: William Nedved, Michael Patrick Thornton
Cost: $20 application fee.
Class length: 3 weeks (Summer 2007)
Prerequisites: Play submission with application fee.
Time: Full schedule to be announced in June.
Course description: The giftED. Young Playwright’s Festival will annually select five scripts by Chicago High School students to be workshopped and developed over the course of three summer weeks at The Gift Theatre. Each playwright will be teamed with a director, stage manager, design team, and cast in order to further develop the play in a professional workshop environment, culminating in a staged reading of each play in front of an audience. An invaluable experience to see what takes a play from the page to the stage by a theatre company with a history of producing new scripts with critical and commercial success. In addition to having a public performance of their “finished” work, each playwright will receive a U.S. savings bond for $100.

Performing Shakespeare
Instructor: Benjamin Montague
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Saturdays 10-1PM
Course description: No matter what your experience with Shakespeare, the task of performing the world’s greatest playwright never ceases to place special demands on the actor. Through attentive script analysis and Folio Technique, this class provides the tools that allow balance between naturalistic speech and heightened language, thereby unlocking the scenes, speeches, and sonnets of the Bard.

Beginning Improv
Instructor: John Connolly
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Weeknights 7 – 9PM
Course description: Beginning Improv provides a supportive environment in which students will learn the basic tools of improvisation from Second City alum John Connolly. Jam packed with fun theatre games and exercises from Viola Spolin and others which teach the power of saying “Yes!,” Beginning Improv stresses the motto of The Gift’s Improv program: “It is more important to have fun than to be funny.”

Playwriting
Instructor: William Nedved
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Tuesday evenings. 7 – 9PM
Course description: An introductory course for those with a story to tell. No writing or stage experience necessary. We’ll explore the basics of dramatic structure and read texts for the stage. The class will culminate in the writing of a complete story for the stage, read by ensemble members of The Gift.

Slam School
Instructor: Mary Fons
Cost: $200
Class length: 8 weeks (Fall 2007)
Time: Weeknights 7 - 9PM
Course description: In this workshop, students will become familiar with the popular Chicago-based art form of performance poetry, or "slam." Students will
spend the first half of the workshop working on their own short poems,
exploring rhythm, rhyme and imagery. The second half of the class will
concentrate on creating an effective performance of their piece,
concentrating on focus, volume, emotion and nuance. Students will be encouraged to find their own, unique voice through both writing and delivery.
"Slam School" cumulates in a performance for family and friends.

Recent Event
In June of 2004, giftED. was asked to help put the finishing touches on an end-of-the school-year production of "Pecos Bill" at Shubert School on Chicago's Northwest Side. What began as a one-hour consultation thankfully evolved into a full week's re-imaging of the play with Ms. Jeanne Andersen's 5th grade class, featuring mini-workshops in Imagination, Physicality, Script Analysis, Voice and, quite simply, the magic of putting a play together. It was the first outreach of its kind for The Gift's educational program, giftED., and the lessons learned were invaluable. For those wonderful students, they learned that making a play involves respect, imagination, self-lessness, and preparation. In many ways, they taught us those same lessons.

Ensemble member John Kelley Connolly helps students from Schubert school anticipate an entrance.

Ensemble members Benjamin Montague, Maggie Andersen, Michael Patrick Thornton and Paul D'Addario after a successful show with some of the cast and their teacher, Ms. Jeanne Andersen.

The Bandana Bandits hope and search for rain in the bone-dry
desert of "Pecos Bill."

The audience watches as a tornado swirls around the rocks (milk crates) and horse-drawn wagons (lunchroom dollies) of southwest Texas.