The McElroy Lecture: Centering the Audience in Shakespeare

Nathan Allen (Adjunct Instructor, Loyola University Chicago, Theatre) is one of Chicago’s most innovative theatre artists and educators. As founder and Artistic Director of The House Theatre of Chicago, he developed and produced over forty original plays in a theatrically playful style that placed the audience at the center of the storytelling. As a co-founder of the Chicago Performance Lab at The University of Chicago he combined new play development with the university’s deep dramaturgical resources and brought its tradition of experimentation to explorations of stagecraft and theatrical design. As an educator, he has taught acting, ensemble, playwrighting, and yes, Shakespeare to students at universities and theatres across the country. In fact, he credits his successes in new work and with new audiences to techniques learned through rigorous classical training. In this lecture, Nathan Allen will show how Shakespeare's characters express awareness of their audience. How they are motivated by their status in that relationship. How they think and act in direct conversation with the audience — and how recovering that relationship with the audience is the key to unlocking the full theatrical power, not only of Shakespeare’s plays, but of the artform itself. With Loyola students performing scenes and speeches from the canon, Allen will demonstrate how actors can acknowledge, address, and even implicate the audience as a dramatic force within a scene — shifting the spirit of a moment in ways our contemporary fourth-wall habits too often obscure. The lecture will leave participants with a practical, embodied understanding of how the audience is centered in Shakespeare’s plays, and with dramaturgical strategies for bringing these and other classical texts to life. Once you see the audience in Shakespeare’s texts, you will never see the plays the same way again.