The Alabama Shakespeare Project (ASP) is first and foremost a research collective. As detailed in our mission, ASP operates as a performance-based laboratory using the raw materials and specialized skills of applied theatre to make new discoveries into the ways in which sixteenth- and seventeenth-century plays were produced, performed, and received. While certainly part of the joy of this work is getting to share plays by William Shakespeare and his contemporaries with our community in Tuscaloosa-Northport, Alabama, our research is primarily undertaken in advance of these final performances during the phases of development and rehearsal.

What are we searching for?

Each season (or cluster of seasons) is organized around a central research question focusing on a particular performance practice. For example, how did players hold, use, and work from their physical parts? (For more, see our IRB materials on playing with parts.) What did this Renaissance teleprompter enable? What did it constrain?

Sometimes, when the season dramaturg is a doctoral candidate with the Strode Program, we stage plays explicitly drawn from their dissertation project. For example, in our 2023-24 season, “Prop-aganda,” we focused on the materiality of crowns, drawing from a dissertation exploring the relationship between kingship and masculinity onstage. When is the crown a prop and when is it a costume? Are there similarities in discussions of the crown across these plays? What happens when the crown is worn by someone other than the rightful king?

Our current performance home, the grand gallery of the Alabama Museum of Natural History, affords very loosely some of the features of early modern playing venues—although truly no two theatres, indoors or out, were the same in Shakespeare’s time—including but not limited to being:

• made of wood primarily, including old growth floors working as natural resonators.
• ringed with large windows and a glass ceiling facilitating natural light.
• twice as long as it is wide not unlike the still-standing court venue, the Banqueting House at Whitehall.
• book-ended by columns, evoking the stage posts of the Rose and Globe theatres that encourage invisible hallways for movement and blocking.
• ringed with a second-level gallery or balcony affording horizontal and vertical experimentation.
• able to accommodate modular, moveable, and unassigned seating flexible to playgoer needs.

What kinds of data do we work with?

The ASP team works with a range of materials at all stages of the production process, from material archives to human subjects research survey instruments, such as:

• consulting sixteenth- and seventeenth-century documents of performance in rare books and manuscripts archives—including our own Hoole Special Collections at UA—to develop our performance texts, including songs, backstage plots, printed plays, and playbook manuscripts.
• collecting survey data from players before and after each performance, as well as conducting individual interviews with each participant during the rehearsal process.
• documenting rehearsal discoveries via photography and videography, as well as through informal written testimonials.
• collecting survey data from playgoers at each public performance.

Who else is doing this kind of work?

ASP is informed by a range of practitioners and scholars in different aspects of our performance process and research designs. A sampling of these methodological influences include:

• Read Not Dead — staging plays in repertory yields discoveries about theatre practice, while single experiments yields revelations about text-as-drama.
• R/18 Collective — cultivating reciprocal relationships between scholars and artists to make use of the great riches already embedded in premodern theatre.
• York Plays 2025 — articulating a style of play—loud, physical, porous, visual—that is equally that challenges all the norms with which we have become acculturated after the Victorian period.
• Bread + Puppet — in ethics and aesthetics “cheap art,” free and open to the public, because it is a nourishing art form, and one that feels personal because it is art made from people.
• Diversifying the Classics — conceiving of Renaissance theatre as a multi-national and multi-lingual experience, so that plays in translation are as useful as plays in English.

Want to learn more about our research?

In addition to our blog, Tiring House, there are several other ways you can learn more about our work.

• Get details about upcoming presentations, the latest publications, and other scholarship from the ASP team.
• Browse abstracts of recent work in premodern performance-based research (PbR) methodology and criticism in our evolving annotated bibliography, updated regularly by ASP research assistants.
• Join our mailing list to get updates about auditions, performance, special events, blog posts and publications.

We hope you’ll join us on our journey!