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Rehearsal Playground

Week #6: Minerva's Ransom

Happy Saturday, friends. Welcome to EA’s Rehearsal Playground. Each week we’ll celebrate our Mainstage material and capture graveyard echoes emanating from EA’s Spoon River.

Paid members have an ALL NEW Weekly Character Challenge + April’s Monthly Mainstage Rehearsal Project waiting below!



Graveyard Echoes

The Spoon River Anthology (Edgar Lee Masters)

Minerva Jones

I am Minerva, the village poetess,
Hooted at, jeered at by the Yahoos of the street
For my heavy body, cock-eye, and rolling walk,
And all the more when “Butch” Weldy
Captured me after a brutal hunt.
He left me to my fate with Doctor Meyers;
And I sank into death, growing numb from the feet up,
Like one stepping deeper and deeper into a stream of ice.
Will some one go to the village newspaper,
And gather into a book the verses I wrote?—
I thirsted so for love
I hungered so for life!


Ready to quench Minerva’s thirst for life?

Become A Member Today


Cinema Elysium Presents

The Ransom of Red Chief (1952)

Directed by: Howard Hawks
Run Time: 26 minutes

READ THE SHORT STORY BY O. HENRY


Weekly Character Challenges

How It Works

The first three Saturdays of each month deliver weekly character rehearsal challenges straight to your inbox. Something dynamic, something experimental, something transformational.

Something to push the boundaries of truth in character.

The last Saturday of the month features a live video rehearsal (also later available on-demand) where we … well, we go a little nuts. We set free our solo work in exciting, experimental ways - evolving, enhancing, and challenging our work.

March - July: EA’s Spoon River
August - November: Anton Chekhov’s Plays

Monthly Mainstage Rehearsal Project

How It Works

On the first Saturday of the month, our MainStage rehearsal project gets posted exclusively for members to play with all month long. Your posted material always receives feedback taking your creative work further.

Each project builds out an array of rehearsal tools, applying them to work you’ll remember forever. The stuff that makes acting worth investing in. Worth believing in.

The monthly projects are tailored to move at your pace - and are available anytime you’d like to revisit them. The work is timeless. Apply your discoveries to any new character, any new world that finds you in your training and professional life.

March - May: O. Henry
June - August: Oz
September - November: Stravinsky’s A Soldier’s Tale

It’s about your creative potential taking you where no one has gone before. Ready to roar?

Become A Member Today


Getting Started.

  1. Discover + Choose a Spoon River Character (click here).

  2. Email me your selection (click here) and I’ll reply confirming your choice.

  3. Game On! Begin investing in your exclusive character with weekly character challenges + receive feedback to your work on Discord.


ALL NEW: Weekly Character Challenge

What is an Etude?

Knowing comes from experience.

From having been there.

When you’ve sat on the edge of the pier and you’re asked what it was like … you can speak from the contours, the subtleties, the harmonies of the experience.

There isn’t a Daily Body urge to describe it “right.”

You simply get to speak from what you know.

Etudes are a decision, a mentality, to spend time completely in character. Whatever the world around you tastes like, surprises you with - you are “all-in.”

This month, we’re going to apply the power of the Etude to our growing development of your Spoon River character.

Up next, The Body Etude.

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Acting Class Daily
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Easy access to all our 2023 character challenges and mainstage projects.
Authors
Aaron Ganz