Shade Murray's directing credits include work at Steppenwolf Theatre Company, A Red Orchid Theatre, Writers' Theatre, Second City, The Inconvenience, Wildclaw, Next Theatre, Strawdog Theatre, Roadworks, the MCA, Shattered Globe, About Face Theatre and Chicago Moving Company. Shade has collaborated on the workshop and development of new work with playwrights Marisa Wegyrzyn, Carlos Murillo, Joel Drake Johnston, Brett Neveu, John Fournier, Janine Nabers and Scott Barsotti. Shade is an MFA candidate in directing at Northwestern University, an associate artist with A Red Orchid and has taught at Northwestern University, DePaul University, Act One Studios, National Louis University, National High School Institute, Piven Workshop and the Actor's Gym.
Shade Murray
Courses
TAPS 10200 Acting Fundamentals
This course introduces fundamental concepts of performance in the theater with emphasis on the development of creative faculties and techniques of observation, as well as vocal and physical interpretation. Concepts are introduced through directed reading, improvisation, and scene study.
TAPS 10300 Text and Performance
This course offers an introduction to a number of significant dramatic works and seminal figures in the theorization of theater and performance. But the course's aspirations go much further: we will be concentrating upon the intersection of interpretation and enactment, asking how these pieces appear on stage and why. This will not be merely descriptive work, but crucially it will be interpretive and physical work. Students will prepare and present applied interpretations-that is, interpretations that enable conceptual insights to take artistic form. Throughout, we will be searching for that elusive combination of philological rigor, theoretical sophistication, and creative inspiration-probing the theoretical stakes of creativity and testing the creative implications of analytic insights.
TAPS 23000 Introduction to Directing
This course employs a practice in the fundamental theory of play direction and the role of the director in collaboration with the development of textual analysis. By examining five diversely different texts using three different approaches to play analysis (Aristotle, Stanislavski, Ball) students begin developing a method of directing for the stage in support of the written text. In alternating weeks, students implement textual analysis in building an understanding of directorial concept, theme, imagery and staging through rehearsal and in-class presentations of three-minute excerpts from the play analysis the previous week. The culmination is a final five-minute scene combining the tools of direction with a method of analysis devised over the entire course.
TAPS 26410 The Drama of Doing Business: Plays About Economics in the 20th and 21st Centuries
Can theatre be a legitimate forum for people across the ideological spectrum to consider practices in business and commerce? Or do most plays serve as agitprop, exploiting inherent biases and prejudices against financial institutions, practices and structures?
In this class we will read a survey of plays, from 1910 to the present day. We will attempt to identify the central economic problem each play is attempting to address. We will consider how these problems were manifest at the time of the play's creation, and if they still exist today. We will consider each play's social utility then, and now. Students will be asked to read/watch plays, research eras and write reflection papers. The survey of works may include: The Return of the Prodigal, Waiting For Lefty, Good Soul of Szechuan, All My Sons, The Water Engine, In The Blood, Chinglish, Enron, Sweat and The Lehman Trilogy.