Hi. My name is Abigail Carroll. And this summer, I was an acting apprentice with the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey in Madison. So when I was looking for summer internship, I knew that I wanted to find something close to home with a well-respected theater company that also provided me the opportunity to act. But the thing is, acting internships aren't really a thing. And I was already looking for something super specific, so I knew I was going to have a hard time finding something that appealed to me. 

Luckily for me, though, I grew up one town over from the Shakespeare Theatre of New Jersey and have been through their educational program during the summers when I was in high school. One of 25 professional theaters in the state and one of the leading Shakespeare theaters in the country, it's New Jersey's only professional theater company dedicated to Shakespeare's canon and other classic works. 

The Apprentice Company is a part of the Summer Professional Training Program, which offers training in all theatrical disciplines for early-career theater artists. At the beginning of the program, we were split up into two groups of 14, and we had daily classes in acting, voice, stage combat, and viewpoints. We also had the opportunity to work in the scene, costume, and prop shop for our crew calls, which involved helping build sets, costumes, and props for the main stage shows that were going on while we were there. 

Over the course of 10 weeks, we put together four different projects, which we presented in what we call the Late Night Series. We worked project for a span of about three weeks or so, and then presented them at night after the main stage shows were over. Our first late night performance was our epic scene night for which group performed a roughly 20 minute cut of an epic piece. My group did a retelling of the Fall of Troy, which was a beautiful and emotional piece with excerpts from Euripides, the Trojan women, well as original text written by our director. 

Our next scene night was put together by the directing intern, which was a group of four who handpicked a handful of scenes ranging from classics to contemporary plays. The night lasted about 40 minutes, with each scene running about two to three minutes each. I was in this scene from the play Old Times by Harold Pinter, which is about a married couple, Kate and Deeley, and Kate's old friend, Anna, who's come to visit, which inspires a fairly absurd and enthralling play, personally in my opinion, I think. 

Our next scene night was our Shakespeare scene night, for which our acting professor directed us in various scenes from plays such as Twelfth Night, Henry V, and As You Like It. Similar to the director scene night, we performed scenes back to back, but we got to flesh these scenes out even further because we had fewer scenes to get through and more time to work on them. 

I was in the scene from the history Henry V, which closes one of Shakespeare's tetralogies with the invasion and defeat of France by Henry V. Our last performance was the final project, which is an hour long cut of a lesser-known Shakespeare play. In previous years, they had done plays such as The Winter's Tale [INAUDIBLE]. 

But this year, we went even further down the rabbit hole and did a play called The Two Noble Kinsmen, one that [INAUDIBLE] has never done before, and with good reason. 

[LAUGHTER] 

It's the retelling of the story from Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales. And it follows, as you could probably guess, two noble kinsmen who are taken prisoner after a war, and then fall in love with the same woman. To be honest, it's not a well-written play in the slightest. And it was a really stressful process putting together an hour long show with two weeks of rehearsal. But it ended up being a lot of fun. And what was great was, three days before our final performance, our director decided to turn it into sort of pseudo-musical. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So that was really fun trying to work around. Going into this program, I knew I was going to learn a lot. I expected to learn a lot, but I didn't really know what was going to be. For example, I picked up a lot of practical skills such as basic sewing and painting techniques, how to work with dry ice and flash paper, basic backstage skills that can help me find theater employment when I can't find acting work. 

I also learned a lot about acting and technique. I learned better methods of approaching Shakespeare and other classical texts. Now, I'm someone who wants to just dive right in and how something performance-ready right off the bat, but that's just not possible and it makes the process a lot harder than it has to be. 

So probably one of the most important technical things I learned this summer was how to slow down and take my time with texts. One of my acting professors gave us these six steps for taking our time working with classical texts. And moving forward, these are things that I can use to take my time and really settle into my work. In my stage combat class, we learned some basic hand-to-hand combat as well as how to use single swords, which I learned is not the same thing as fencing. You're not actually supposed to hit the person. 

[LAUGHTER] 

So I had to really fight with myself to get out of that mindset and really focus on stage combat from the acting perspective. Now, viewpoints is really weird to explain because it's not something you get, really, until you do it. You work with things like architecture of the space and [INAUDIBLE] response, repetition, tempo, duration-- things that you don't consider when you're acting. But I actually found them all to be really beneficial because this class really encouraged me to kind of let myself go, and let go of insecurities, and to stop worrying about what other people think of me. 

It took a lot of time to get there. It wasn't until about week six of 10 that it kind of fell into place for me. Because I've always had a really difficult time just letting myself go, and being confident, and making big and bold choices, especially in front of a large group. But this class kind of helped me get to place where I felt comfortable doing so. And that's something I can hold onto and work on while I'm still here at school moving forward in my career. 

I also ended up learning a lot about myself as a person. For example, I now know that something I really need to work on, especially if I want to make a career out of acting, is putting myself out there. I'm 100% an introvert, and that's not something I really can or want to change. But I need to work on being better socially and being more open, as opposed to staying in and doing things that don't necessarily involve interacting with other people. 

Because in this career, it doesn't necessarily always matter how good you are in the room and what your work is like if you're not someone that other people want to work with. And I think probably one of the most important things I've learned that's super easy for everyone to forget is that I'm not the only one who's terrified to fail. I'm not the only one who thinks that everyone else is better than me and, oh my god, how am I going to get a job when I'm just terrible? 

Most actors, especially early-career actors, feel exactly the same way. And it's easy to forget that I'm not the only one who's in that boat, and everyone else is just as terrified as I am. And in a weird way, it's kind of really comforting to know that, and that we're all just terrified together. 

Art Garfunkel said that everything worth doing starts with being scared. And I think that goes for just about anything anyone could want to do. I've been lucky enough to have found something that I love with all my heart and that scares the crap out of me every single day. But that's not something that I would change for the world. 

And so something I encourage all of you to do is find something that you're passionate about, something that really involved that also scares you. Because it can be hard to be challenging yourself constantly over and over again and to really break out of your comfort zone. But if you find something that encourages you to do that, it just might be one of the most rewarding things you do. And that's not something that you want to miss out on. 

[APPLAUSE]