William Coleman, Theatre Teacher and Director
“There are always certain moments in rehearsals, moments of such wonder that the memory of them serves to further entrap all who witness them.”
—Arthur Miller
I have been joyfully entrapped by the wonder of theatre for many years. I have taught Shakespeare, improvisation, the art of theatre, theatre history, acting, and directing for over fifteen years.
I also have many years of experience in programming and administering educational programs for young people and adults, from Shakespeare workshops to national literary and arts events.
At the same time, I have created and/or directed dozens of shows for casts of young people (from middle school to college) and adults. I have a special interest in classical theatre, especially Shakespeare.
Read William Coleman’s teaching philosophy (pdf)
Improv Can Save The World
In 2019, I was selected to be part of Wichitalks, an annual event sponsored by our local NPR station, KMUW. The program “brings together passionate individuals, high-performers, creative minds, and an audience of active listeners for an evening of diverse presentations and collisions. We look to surface unique perspectives, passion projects, and compelling stories that can add value to our community.”
My presentation,“Improv Can Save the World,” shared my belief in the power of improvisation to transform education, inter-personal relationships, politics, and society. As I have learned as a teacher and as a director in theatre, the tools and sensibilities that animate a great improv scene are the same ones that create constructive relationships and communities.
Student Productions
The Cure at Troy
As part of our drama class in 2016, three students ranging in ages from 14-17 performed The Cure at Troy in the Friendship Garden that our school shared with Friends University. Seamus Heaney's version of Sophocles' Philoctetes, the play is set during the Trojan War and centers on a famed Greek archer. Having been marooned by his community because his illness was a distraction, he must learn how to trust again.
The students designed and created the costumes and the set. Capturing the symbolic nature of island, the students conceived of Lemnos as a kind of bandage, a dressing for a wound.
Madeleine was the chorus, who at the drama's end, becomes the voice of Hercules as a volcano erupts.
Trailing lava, the chorus/god takes away the island Philocetes had come to know through pain and exile. He must finally leave his space of wounding in favor of trust and reconciliation.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In 2015, my drama students and I decided to create and stage a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream as a fundraiser for the Wichita Community Theatre. We raised $1500. The photo above was one of the moments of joyful discovery in rehearsal: we called this "the sadderpillar." It's when the mechanicals enter fearing that Bottom and their company's chance to perform for the Duke have been lost forever.
The students created the props and designed the costumes.
A large measure of the joy that comes of directing young people is to see students of different ages engage in serious play together.
The Northfield Players
The Northfield Players was a community-service drama troupe that I formed and directed for many years at Northfield School. The troupe, composed of students ranging in ages from 11-18, performed Shakespeare, original adaptations of folk tales, and improvisation throughout the local area, including at the Wichita River Festival (on the Floating Stage), in Old Town Square, in nursing homes and in schools throughout the local area, and at the Wichita Public Library (including a performance of an original show for the Wichita Library’s Kansas Day Sesquicentennial Celebration).
Judy Goodpasture, Chair, Wichita Arts Council
“After watching a video of The Northfield Players' performance of ‘The Play's the Thing: Scenes and Monologues from Shakespeare,’ I was impressed and wanted others to see this group. I invited the troupe to perform on a Final Friday at Wichita's City Arts. Our audience was delighted, even enchanted by the troupe's ability to command attention, project without microphones, and enliven famous Shakespearean characters. Through language, gesture, and movement, and with minimal props, this group transformed our bare art gallery into a an impromptu Shakespearean stage.
This troupe has mastered the delivery of Shakespearean monologues and dialogues so beautifully that observers have no difficulty with the Renaissance English and are drawn to the dramtic situations presented. Their mastery of Shakespeare's wit, passion, intrigue, vulnerabilty, and villainy in these most famous dramatic passages is compelling. This young troupe truly brings the bard of Avon to life. We look forward to hosting The Northfield Players again soon at City Arts.”
Christmas Show / Spring Show
Each Christmas for the past seventeen years, first at Northfield School and then at The Star-Splitter Academy, I have led high school students in writing and performing an evening of thematically linked poetry, music, dance, and original comic sketches. The show is a celebration of our learning: each moment is inspired by something we studied or by an idea or a joke that we shared in class.
Costumes, props, and artwork are all student creations. The Christmas Show is a performance showcase for our seniors in particular; it is their gift to their families, for their support throughout their education at the school. It is also the school’s gift to the greater community, so that they can share in the joy, curiosity, and wit that we celebrate in our students every day.
Highlights of the 2023 Christmas Show included Henry leading us in Monty Python’s “The Galaxy Song”; Oliver and Juan, as Robot and Costello, performing an original routine entitled “Not’s On First”; a NASA-themed parody of a Singin’ in the Rain classic, “Make ’Em Math!”; Lydia and Hadley’s Houdini-inspired mind-reading act, The Chromatic Clairvoyants; and a comic sketch inspired by a joke made in class: “The Monkey’s Pa(w).”
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Each April, we celebrate the season with a spring show and garden party in the Friendship Garden we share with Friends University. As you can see in the accompanying video, this year students recited their own spring poems, performed original parodies of Chaucer and William Carlos Williams, created new versions of the Chicken Dance, and sang “Here Comes the Sun” and “Comedy Tonight.”
Wichita Fringe Festival
In 2018, my wife and I created The Wichita Fringe Festival, an annual, one-day theatrical event that celebrates the work of local high school playwrights. Working with professional mentors from the Wichita theatre community, playwrights from schools throughout the city take their scripts through the process from stage to page, culminating in a performance of their works by area high school actors.
Student writers are paired with adult professional mentors in the areas of writing, acting, and directing. Students hone their written work, cast their shows from auditions that attract students from throughout the local area, and direct those shows. The plays are then performed for the public.
The venue for the performances changes each year, and has included The Fisch Haus and The Wichita Center for Performing Arts.
Adult Productions
Hamlet
Though set in our time, our production of Hamlet was also set within a cycle of violence that has run through centuries, where one generation's violence creates the conditions for another's, where revenge is expected, where even a dead father retains the power to charge his son to shed another’s blood. It is a culture of violence both overt and casual, where women are objects to be shaped by men’s words and plans, used and then forgotten. (Photographs by Dan Overholt)
Set against the cycle of violence to which Hamlet is heir is the communal, universal, joyful work of the imagination, dramatized by The Players, who entered with a spell-casting three-part a cappella drone that spiraled into hints of Sondheim and Irish folksong.
Then Amy Shelden stopped time with a soaring Portuguese Fado, after which Anna Hetherington sang and scatted "Je Veax" by contemporary French songwriter Zaz, as Amy and Dr. Parker created a climate of joy with their voices, movements, and a simple drum.
We noted in our readings of the text how playful, happy, and even reverent Hamlet becomes when in the presence of the Players. Their songs and scenes allow for an expression of rage and grief and longing that connects people, rather than isolating or injuring them. Arthur Miller once wrote that tragedy arises when we are in the presence of someone who has missed accomplishing their joy. We tried to communicate that idea.
One of the cycles of violence in Hamlet: a dead father commands his son to kill. In our performance, the ghost literally puts the dagger in Hamlet's hands, as though completing a circuit (we had noticed in the text early in rehearsals how the encounter with his father jolts Hamlet with energy). A kind of violence enters him.
Hamlet's powerful imagination, thrust into the cycle of violence, takes physical form in certain moments of our production. Here, he imagines killing Claudius as the latter prays.
The cycle of violence continues its course when Hamlet commands his cohorts to swear allegiance upon the father's dagger.
We also noted in our early close readings of the play how often female characters are isolated, or appear onstage without words, or whose words are reported by men, or whose actions are directed by men. Our production highlighted these power dynamics. Here, Gertrude waits for her son.
We also highlighted the close bond the text reveals concerning Hamlet and Gertrude.
The fall of Ophelia is a tragedy equal to Hamlet's. We began to dramatize this by showing her joyful, playful spirit we first we meet her. She is arranging the flowers we imagined Hamlet had sent her, humming a light tune and reading the note that accompanied the gift.
She is confident and witty, bantering with her brother.
Soon she will be forced into serving her father's political ends, her identity effaced.
Polonius finds Hamlet's note with the flowers, violating his daughter's privacy. He quickly conceives of the genuine expression of love as evidence he can use.
When he triumphantly presents the note to the king, the second quarto tells us that Ophelia is in the room, though has no lines. She must be a mute witness to her father turning her relationship with Hamlet to his advantage.
When Claudius says that "madness in great ones must not unwatched go," the moment was charged with tragic irony in our production, for there, on the other side of the stage, alone, having been made into a prop in a power play between Hamlet and Claudius and Polonius, was Ophelia, unseen, except by us.
The flower imagery returns in Ophelia's final scenes.
Often productions of Hamlet reduce the gravedigger scene to one actor. When we read the texts, we found a great--and very funny--double-act in the banter between the two diggers.
We utilized a chiaroscuro effect in our lighting design to lend weight to the spareness of our production.
Much Ado About Nothing
Our production of Much Ado About Nothing was performed at the Guild Hall Theatre in 2018. The show was set in the present moment while staying true to the Elizabethan text. We celebrated the joyful exuberance of the play, without backing away from the tragic Hero/Claudio plot that's nested inside the comedy.
The show opened with a musical-theatre style dance number to "Sing, Sing, Sing" (a post-war tune) in order to underscore the excitement the townspeople felt as they gathered to hear the news of Don Pedro's approach. We considered the dance as form of Shakespeare's heightened speech: when emotion breaks the bounds of prosaic life, form is intensified.
We playfully dramatized the rivalry between Don John and Don Pedro in terms of popular culture. When first we see the conquered Don John, he is wearing a Beatles Let it Be t-shirt, just like his brother wears.
When he is finally alone with his henchmen, he reveals his true nature in a monologue, during which he reveals a hidden shirt that he wears beneath his brother's: The Beatles' Let it Be gives way to The Rolling Stones' Let it Bleed.
We cast young adults in many of the main roles, including Benedick and Beatrice, and sought contemporary analogues for moments in the Elizabethan text, such as conceiving of Dogberry and his volunteer band of crime-fighters as members of a neighborhood watch that had been promoted to the status of Prince's Watch...
...or underscoring the watch's wonderfully childlike enthusiasm by having them use a child's flashlight as their lantern....
...or dramatizing Benedick's sudden and full-throated embrace of emotion by having him lip-synch to a Smiths song.
We based the choreography of the masked-ball on that of the classic Muppet Show sketch "At the Dance" (in which couples wheel into the foreground, deliver jokes, then wheel away), after noting how the two scenes bore structural similarities. All of this was set to a live piano-and-bass rendition of the song that plays in the Muppet Show sketch.
"We are the only love gods!"
The actor playing Dogberry noted how many religiously charged words Shakespeare includes in the character's dialogue. This informed his choices in terms of vocal delivery; he often spoke as if he were a wildly confident and inept preacher.
The song "It is Only a Paper Moon" is sung three times in the production, as its theme--the power of artifice and theatricality ("it wouldn't be make-believe if you believed in me")--infuses the plot of Much Ado. This power is used in the gulling scenes to bring Benedick and Beatrice together.
This theme is seen in tragic light in the Claudio and Hero plot. Claudio rejects Hero after being deceived by Borachio's act of artifice and theatricality.
At the end of the play, Hero returns, bearing the bright paper moon from their ruined wedding.
In an act of theatricality, Hero tears away the paper surface of the moon, tears away the artifice.
They can see one another more clearly, and make a vow based on that true sight.
We wanted the show to be as densely layered with bits and jokes as possible. For example, the letters that are brought out at the end to reveal Benedick and Beatrice's secret feelings for each other were imagined in our production to be two white boards, upon which each lover has composed one half of Shakespeare's sonnet 18.
Much Ado About Nothing
The Calling of the Watch
We created this film to introduce Dogberry, Verges, Hugh Oatcake, and George Seacole in a way that was contemporary yet in keeping with how the characters are portrayed in the text. At the moment the members of the Prince's Watch open the doors at the end of the film, the actors threw open the doors of the theatre and sprinted to the stage to start their scene. (Written by Madeleine Coleman; directed and edited by Dan Overholt; co-written by William Coleman, Dan Overholt, Jill Herbert, and Louise Brinegar)
Death of a Salesman
ARTHUR MILLER: After I’d done “All My Sons,” which was, of course, in a straightforward, realistic form, I got the feeling that I could start to tread new territory, that here was a kind of play which would allow me to treat time concurrently. I think we all think on two, three, or four different levels at the same time.... I thought, Wouldn’t it be marvellous to be able to do a play where somebody is in two or three different places concurrently." (Photographs by Dan Overholt)
"The play, I think, is suffused, oddly enough, with hope. Everybody's full of hope! All the time. As well as dread." --Arthur Miller, on Death of a Salesman
Macbeth
Our goal was to create a truly unsettling production Macbeth, one that did justice to the dark rhythms of the text. We also sought to foreground a second tragedy within the story: the dissolution of a marriage. Our reading of the text revealed the close, nearly supernatural link Lady Macbeth and Macbeth share when the play begins.
The play opens on a blood-soaked battlefield, which the witches peel back to reveal a dark circle.
While on the battlefield, Macbeth had told the stars to "hide your fires." When first we see Lady Macbeth, she unconsciously echoes her husband's imagery, wanting heaven not to "peep through the blanket of the dark." As though summoned, her husband appears before her, returned from war.
Over the course of the play, Macbeth spirals closer and closer to the dark heart of the circle. When he reaches it, he dies.
Special Events
Shakespeare in the Modern World
The Wichita Center for the Performing Arts, 2018. Featured Event, The Big Read, Wichita (Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven) An original hour-long show, employing a cast of eight actors, that tethers Shaesperean scenes and monologues to characters and events in the novel.
When Love Speaks
When Love Speaks, an evening of thematically linked Shakespearean scenes and monologues chosen and edited by William Coleman and Sanda Moore Coleman, was performed in 2012 at The Scottish Rite Signature Theatre.
The show opened with beloved local theatre legend Dick Welsbacher delivering Hamlet's advice to the players on an empty stage.
The show brought together generations of local talent. In this scene, local theatre veteran Danette Baker shows student performers "how sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank."
After Henry V rallies his troops for war, a mother questions the war's justice.
Beatrice and Benedick read each other's notes.
First Love
In February 2020, I created and curated an event in which artists from many disciplines talked about and presented their first loves in their respective art forms.
A final rehearsal of the show's closing number: "Carolina in My Mind"
Jazz vocalist Anna (Hetherington) Christensen told the story of coming to love vocal music and the art of improvisation before singing a joyful and inventive version of "The Way You Look Tonight."
Actor Quinn Warren talked about being drawn to theatre in high school by The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail and then discussed the life he found in Shakespeare's language, and its ability to transcend time.
"'You're like Nick Drake, except on piano!' my friend told me. I wasn't sure what that meant!" --Singer/songwriter Justin Meyer on a song that opened his world: Nick Drake's "From the Morning." He then played a beautiful piano arrangement of Drake's classic Pink Moon track
"My dad had three songs that weren't classical. The Sultans of Swing by Dire Straits. Bohemian Rhapsody by Queen, and Blackbird." --Musician Dan Overholt on finding the song that bridged the gap between classical music and pop: Paul McCartney's "Blackbird." Dan then played and sang a hauntingly legato version of the song on the cello.
