Hello everyone, Kyle here again! We’ve had a bit of a shakeup as far as who is covering which session, so forgive me if this post seems a bit truncated. 

Our first paper of the session came to us from the University of Utah’s Richard Preiss, who illuminated the difficulties of an actor inhabiting two bodies, as in Ben Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass in his paper The Devil is an Ass, or Flatland.

Jeremy Fiebig of Fayetteville State University’s paper “Some persons who have been shipwrecked”: Aesthetic Change and Technical Capacity in the King’s Men’s Shipwrecks compared scenes of shipwreck in various plays produced by the King’s Men and explored some of the potential historical tensions that informed the evolution of these scenes and their technical proficiency.

Sandra Boynton, formerly of Schenectady County Community College, presented What the Provost heard – Using the common man as key to understanding Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, which explored different staging possibilities in the scene in which Angelo discovers his infatuation with Isabella, and the confounding stage directions indicating that the Provost is present.

Kathryn McPherson of Utah Valley University presented “Further” Considerations: Physical Action in Public and Court Performance, which also explored staging possibilities surrounding words like “further” and “farther” in scenes from Hamlet and As You Like It. 

Former ASC actor James Keegan, now teaching at the University of Delaware, capped off the session with “Here’s Sport Indeed! How Heavy Weighs My Lord!”: Staging Antony and Cleopatra 4.15, which naturally deals with the staging difficulties surrounding the monument scene. Keegan detailed two separate experiences where he played Antony and the different solutions that each production came to.