Northwestern University

Fall Quarter 2025

Voice for Performance

Voice for Shakespeare

Winter Quarter 2026

Voice for Performance

Audio Acting for Podcast – Alice in Wonderland

Spring Quarter 2026

Sabbatical

NU SOC Junior Tutorials

Performing the Language of George Bernard Shaw (2019)
Students explored techniques for performing the language of George Bernard Shaw’s plays in partnership with Robert Scogin, Artistic Director, of Shaw/Chicago and actors Matt Gall and Matt Penn.

Words and Silence: Exploring the Dramatic Language of Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard (2016)
Students explored the language of the works of Tom Stoppard and Harold Pinter, two playwrights with diametrically different approaches to language. Stoppard for his verbal virtuosity and Pinter for his spare language and silence.

Anthem for Doomed Youth, The World War I Poets (2015)
Students adapted poetry, diaries, letters of both American and British men and women who served both as soldiers and nurses in WWI.
(Performed at the Poetry Foundation and Struble Theatre, Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts)

The Blood Jet is Poetry: The Shared Poetic Language of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes (2012)
Students adapted letters, diaries, and poetry written by these two poets to and about each other. Laura Passin, PHD Candidate Dept of English, acted as Dramaturge.
(Performed at the Sylvia Plath Symposium at Indiana University and the Wallis Theatre, Wirtz Center for the Performing Arts)              

Performing the Greek Chorus in Comedy and Tragedy (2009)
The Bacchae, The Eumenides, Lysistrata, Oedipus Rex
Exploring the vocal and physical elements involved in the performance of the Greek chorus in both comedy and tragedy and how they can be conveyed to a contemporary audience using a variety of contemporary approaches such as masks, Butoh, Physical Theatre, African Drumming, Dance, and Choral Speaking.
(Performed at the Andrew Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series Choral Meditations in Greek Drama at Department of Classics, Northwestern University)

Performing The Four Quartets: T.S. Eliot: Poet and Playwright (2008)
Eight acting students used the rehearsal approach to text through tablework and research to present a staged reading of T.S. Eliot’s seminal poems.
(Performed at the Chapel of the Unnamed Faith of the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary and the Chicago Cultural Center at Indian Boundary Park)

Inroads to Character Interpretation Through Language and Voice (2000-2008)
(Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams, David Mamet, Harold Pinter, David Grieg)
Students explored ways for the actor to find the appropriate vocal qualities of a character inherent in the language of the text and how to incorporate those qualities in performance.

Junior Tutorials were originally funded by the Office of the Provost which no longer supports these classes.

Jones Fine and Performing Arts Residential College

Exploring the Language of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Lookingglass (2016)
Students adapted the language of the characters into dialogue and performed the various voices of the characters.  The voices were supported by stick puppets created by one of the students who was interested in becoming a designer.

Performing Fairy Tales and Folk Tales in Verse (2014)
An introduction to literature through the art of oral tradition, exploring the role of the live, immediate performer in this ancient social dynamic. William Butler Yeats, John Keats, Christina Rossetti, Tennyson, Robert Frost, Robert Browning, William Allingham, etc.

2012 Oxford University, UK

Sylvia Plath Interdisciplinary Master Class at Oxford
Finding a Voice: Sylvia Plath’s Poetic Landscapes
Dr. Sally Bayley and Linda Gates taught a Sylvia Plath Interdisciplinary Master Class entitled “Finding a Voice: Sylvia Plath’s Poetic Landscapes” at Rothermere American Institute at Oxford University in England from 2-6 July 2012.