Booking
Information
To have The Gospel According to
Matthew at your theater, university, college or church, please contact us at
booking@matthewfrancis.net or call (917) 304-7569.
In addition to performing
his plays, Matthew teaches a playwriting/performance workshop that is available
for booking. It can be tailored for a day-long intensive to a 6-week-long
class. A description of the workshop is below. It is best suited
for groups of 20 or less. For further information write an email to
booking@matthewfrancis.net.
Documentary
Theater: the Actor as Author
This performance workshop
will teach a methodology for creating and performing original work in the form
of documentary theater. Combining aspects of journalism, anthropology, theater
and performance, documentary theater seeks to represent real people on stage
using their own words. Drawing from the works of actors, writers and playwrights
such as Bertolt Brecht, Anna Deavere Smith, Studs Turkel and Danny Hoch, we will
explore issues of representation and how to represent multiple perspectives on
stage. Some questions that will be explored during the workshop include: Do we
have to identify with the people we perform? What responsibility do we have to
the people we portray? What distance from the subject should we have (if any)?
As actors, do we become the character? Do they become us? How do we represent
multiple points of view? Who has the right to speak for whom? What place does
Brecht's epic theater have into today's political polemic? The first two weeks
will focus on interview techniques through in-class demonstrations and
assignments which will help us identify performative moments within interviews.
In the following weeks, students will be asked to interview people on a topic of
their choice outside of class and then perform verbatim text from the interviews
in class. The course will culminate in students' performances of some of the
material they have collected, in some cases inviting the people they have
interviewed to see themselves performed.