director. educator. storyteller.
Hello and Welcome to
The Southern Prosody Project: Resounding Shakespeare in the American South
The Southern Prosody Project: Resounding Shakespeare in the American South is a canon-wide performance-research initiative that re-sounds the plays of William Shakespeare through the living speech, music, and material culture of the American South. Grounded in prosody (the rhythm, stress, and phrasing that shape Shakespeare’s verse) we test how regional dialects can align with, or productively resist, the iambic line without compromising sense or rigor. In parallel, we craft a visual and sonic grammar from Southern worlds: porch architecture, tin and clapboard, red clay, hymn and string-band textures, so that Hamlet in the Delta, Macbeth in the Appalachians, or Much Ado along the Gulf Coast can sound and look like the communities that gather to hear them. The aim is not pastiche but precision: to honor the architecture of the text while revealing it through local vernaculars, thus offering audiences Shakespeare that is both classical and native, scholarly in method, and unmistakably of this place.
Why Southern Shakespeare?
Shakespeare has been staged in every style imaginable, yet access and identification remain uneven, especially in regions where the plays are perceived as lofty or foreign to local speech and life. The Southern Prosody Project treats the American South not as a novelty frame but as a serious site of verse practice. By aligning regional dialects with Shakespeare’s meter, we invite designers, actors, and musicians to build the work from their own cultural ground. Think porch architecture and hymn tunes, and more importantly the music of the line as it is spoken here.
This approach answers two pressures at once. First, at a moment when Shakespeare’s place on stages and syllabi is contested, we choose renewal rather than removal. We offer productions that keep the architecture of the text intact while letting it sound and look like the communities who gather to hear it. Second, the South’s vernacular is not an obstacle to iambic pentameter. Its stress patterns, vowel length, and phrasing often sit naturally inside the beat. Where dialect and meter diverge, that friction yields expressive choices about status, urgency, and tenderness rather than compromise.
In short, a Southern Shakespeare is both classical and native. It is rigorous in scansion, rooted in place, and built to welcome audiences who have too often been told the canon is not for them.
Phase 1: Romeo and Juliet
This project re-sounds Shakespeare’s tragedy through the language, music, and material culture of the rural American South. Rooted in careful prosody (the rhythm and phrasing of verse), actors align Southern dialect with Shakespeare’s iambic pentameter so the poetry rings true in a local tongue. The feud becomes a community rivalry drawn from Southern history; razors and knives replace rapiers; live musicians shape the soundscape with fiddle, banjo, and hymn-tinged textures. Weathered clapboard, red clay, and porch light form the visual world. The aim is simple and serious: to honor the play’s architecture while letting it speak natively—so audiences hear Romeo and Juliet not as a museum piece, but as a living story of family, pride, and the high cost of love.