Intermediate / Advanced Scene Study: Harold Pinter and Edward Albee

This six-week class will center on the works of renowned absurdist playwrights Harold Pinter and Edward Albee. Throughout the course, students will engage with a variety of scenes from their plays and examine how culture and class shape the delivery of lines and influence performance. Pinter and Albee are provocative writers who employ language as a weapon, transforming dialogue into a covert battlefield. Actors will learn to harness the power of vitriolic pauses and weighted silences, moving beyond mere conversation to embody the tension and subtext that drives the dramatic tension. Finally, this class will also focus on the unique “Pinteresque” style and dialect, which disrupts conventional patterns and signature sounds.

Instructor: Deborah Eubanks is in her 18th year at Berkeley Repertory Theatre and has been teaching directing and creating performance pieces for over three decades. She trained in theatre arts and communications in the UK at the University of East Anglia in Harold Pinter studios and is a San Francisco Diva Fest Playwright. Deb has been a director, writer-in-residence, and instructor at American Conservatory Theater, Sonoma State University, San Jose State University, and UC Berkeley. She is in her 17th year serving faculty at San Francisco Academy of Art University. She created and ran workshops with Stephen Hawking’s company at Covent Garden Arts Center, and teaches voice, acting technique, and the power of story. She leads corporate coaching workshops with clients including Meta, Tinder, The Times India, Great Place to Work, and the Holocaust Education Research Center. She specializes in DEI and vocal transitioning. She was a BBC guest to Ralph Fienne’s dialect coach, and Google Women’s summit guest speaker during the pandemic. Deb is a qualified registered nursing instructor, as well as a certified Myers Briggs and DISC facilitator, and she has taken on many acting roles during her career.

• Wed 7–9:30pm
  7/1, 7/8, 7/15, 7/22, 7/29, 8/5
  $295