Welcome, listeners, to episode 2 of Season 5 of A Teenager’s Take on Shakespeare!

In this episode, I talk with Valerie Clayman Pye about her amazing books, audience engagement and subjectivity, embodied performance, and much, much more. 

Valerie Clayman Pye is an actor, director, author, and academic who specializes in making Shakespeare accessible and training other artists to do the same. She is an Associate Professor of Theatre and Chair of the Department of Theatre, Dance, and Arts Management at LIU Post, where she teaches acting, voice and speech, and Shakespeare in Performance and is Associate Faculty with Theatrical Intimacy Education, a consulting group that specializes in researching, developing, and teaching best practices for staging theatrical intimacy. 

A professional actor and director, Valerie’s work has reached audiences in over twenty countries. Her book, Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Performance and the Globe (Routledge) is the first book to consider how the unique properties of Shakespeare’s theatre can help train actors as well as enliven performances of Shakespeare’s plays. She is the co-editor of Objectives, Obstacles, and Tactics in Practice: Perspectives on Activating the Actor (with Hillary Haft Bucs), and Shakespeare and Tourism (with Robert Ormsby). 

Her essays have appeared in Shakespeare, Teaching Shakespeare, PARtake: The Journal of Performance as Research, New England Theatre Journal, Theatre Topics, and several essay collections. When she isn’t focusing on Shakespeare and devising new work of her own, Valerie has worked extensively on new play development, alongside writers such as Reginald Rose (Twelve Angry Men). A 2018-20 LabWorks Artist at the New Victory Theatre in NYC, Valerie was the lead creative artist on "Shakespeare’s Stars", an immersive, multi-media, multi-sensory performance for babies and their caregivers (Spellbound Theatre), which was featured in The Wall Street Journal and had its Off-Broadway debut at the New Victory Theatre in May 2023. Her most recent book, with Robert Myles, is Innovation & Digital Theatremaking: Rethinking Theatre with ‘The Show Must Go Online’ (Routledge).

You can find Valerie on Twitter at @valerie_pye and on her website ⁠www.valerieclaymanpye.com⁠.

Do check out her books ‘Unearthing Shakespeare: Embodied Shakespeare at the Globe’ and 'Innovation & Digital Theatremaking: Rethinking Theatre with "The Show Must Go Online”’ (a collaboration with Robert Myles)!

Enjoy!