Theater Training in Phoenix: Scene Study and the Masterclass

Theater or film? Stage or camera? Poll a room of actors and some will answer instantly and the rest will tell you they love both, and most of them work in both whether they meant to or not. To do that well you have to train for both. The principles of acting cross over completely. The technique doesn’t. So what’s the best theater training in Phoenix? My vote, twenty years in, is scene study, and here’s why.

Where Phoenix actors work on stage

Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and Mesa have more working stages than people outside the valley expect: the Herberger Theater Center, Phoenix Theatre Company, Arizona Broadway Theatre, the Hale Centre Theatre, Fountain Hills Theater, and companies like Southwest Shakespeare, Theater Works and Arizona Theatre Company. There’s a real community of stage actors here, and they audition for each other’s shows all year. The question is how they train.

What the stage demands

An actor has to be real regardless of the medium. But on stage there are no retakes and nobody calls cut. There’s no microphone catching your whisper, and the back row can’t see the small thing you did with your hand. And yet you have to feel and think and be exactly as naturally as you would on camera, larger, but never more exaggerated. That gap, natural but big, is the whole craft of stage acting, and it takes a room, a director and other actors to learn it. You can’t get there alone with a monologue in the mirror.

Why scene study

Scene study is two actors, one scene from a great play, and weeks of building it under direction until it’s a piece of work rather than an exercise. It is the deepest training an actor can do, because it demands everything at once: the words cold, a thought life under them, a relationship with a partner who is changing every night, and the physical life that carries all of it to the back of a house. Every other class we teach is preparation for it.

The Masterclass

At our studio that work lives in the Masterclass. Ages 17 and up, offered quarterly. Two days of performance, built over months of coaching: extended scenes from Pulitzer Prize-winning plays, cast with care, rehearsed outside class and directed inside it, and performed in front of a live studio audience. Actors watch their own scenes and each other’s turn into something they didn’t think they had in them, and then their families and the community watch too.

You don’t sign up for Masterclass. You earn your way in, through the weekly adult classes and an application, because the work only holds up when everyone in it has done the preparation. Our instructors have trained for the stage, directed for it, and worked with theater companies in and out of state, which is the qualification that matters when the scene is from Albee or Miller and the audience is real.

If you want to learn to use your voice, your body, your emotions and the stage all at once, that’s the room. We always act, and teach, with passion.