The American Shakespeare Center’s “Actors’ Renaissance Season”: Appropriating Early Modern Performance Documents and Practices

Since 2005, the American Shakespeare Center's resident troupe has produced an "Actors' Renaissance Season" (or Ren Season) in which the actors, after a shortened rehearsal period, stage the plays without a director or design team. In addition, since 2006, and now for the majority of the Ren Season plays, the actors have experimented with memorizing their lines from individual parts, texts that provide the actors with their own lines and cues instead of the entire play. In personal interviews, Ren Season actors discuss the ASC troupe's process of cutting the text and creating actors' parts; rehearsing and performing with actors' parts, scene charts, and individual plots; and blocking the plays for performance. ASC actors' reliance upon and modification of original practices in rehearsals and performances have shaped an alternative rehearsal process that encourages ensemble members to be collaborative and independent as they fuse together early modern rehearsal systems with contemporary ones during the Ren Season.