Shake the Sphere with Sid
“Shake the Sphere with Sid”
Sidney Homan is the author of thirteen books and editor of eight collections of essays on Shakespeare and the modern playwrights, and an actor and director in commercial and university theatres. He has been named the University of Florida’sTeacher/Scholar of the Year. His prize-winning Beckett’s Theatres: Interpretations for Performance emerged from his tour of Florida prisons with a production of Waiting for Godot. In A Fish in the Moonlight, he recounts stories of his youth in South Philly and his experience telling them to children on the hospital’s Pediatric Bone Marrow Unit. Bloomsbury/Methuen has published Comedy Acting for Theatre: The Art and Craft of Performing in Comedies, which he wrote with the New York director Brian Rhinehart. And for Routledge Press his most recent book is Pivotal Lines in Shakespeare and Others: Finding the Heart of the Play. He has also written the libretto for the opera The Golem of Prague, with a score by the composer Paul Richards.
About the Podcast:
Drawing on friends, people I’ve worked with in the theatre and at the university—writers, actors, composers, scholars, teachers—I explore the two halves (hence the word “Sphere" in the podcast title) of their lives. One sphere is: what they do in life and how they came to do it. I get at this by asking them to tell me both a favorite line and then a work that has stayed with them, influenced them all their lives. And the other sphere is: how their work influences the way they see others, how it defines them, shapes them. The podcast series was inspired by a precious undergraduate of mine who said simply, “You are what you do."
Episodes
10 episodes
EP10 - Lawrence Quill
Sid talks with Lawrence Quill, one of the most brilliant and inventive of thinkers, whose inquiries run from the use of nostalgia in politics to governments' recourse to secrecy. Professor of Political Science at San Jose State University...
EP9 - Susan Cerasano
Sid talks with Susan Cerasano, the Edgar W. B. Fairchild Professor of Literature at Colgate University. Now, when Susan “talks” about Shakespeare, or Marlowe--for that matter, the words flow from her like some joyous, fast-moving stream, eager ...
EP8 - Brian Rhinehart
Sid talks with Brian Rhinehart, Professor of Theatre at the Actors Studio Drama School in New York. Old friends for years now, they have been each other’s actor and director (and had great fun doing so), in everything from improv to the ...
EP7 - David O’Donnell
Sid talks with David O’Donnell, now adjunct professor at Victoria University in Wellington. While his natural modesty would prevent him for acknowledging the fact, David has perhaps been the person most responsible for the recognition an...
EP6 - Paul Richards
Sid talks with Paul Richards, Professor of Music and Head of Composition at the University of Florida. When I speak of my colleague’s music as being “all over the place,” I mean this as the ultimate compliment. Richards has written orche...
EP5 - Henry Sussman
Sid talks with Henry Sussman, one of the country’s most eminent scholars and teachers, who has used his study of literature and culture to put in context his political commentary, as in The Great Dismissal: Memoir of the Cultural Dem...
EP4 - Jerry Harp
Sid talks with Jerry Harp, a teacher much in demand at Lewis and Clark College. His four books of poetry reveal an artist of extraordinary sensitivity, and Jerry uses that sensitivity in his study For Us What Music: The Life and Poet...
EP3 - Donna Soto-Morettini
Sid talks with Donna Soto-Morettini, who has done just about everything in the business. Rock and Roll singer in California. Director of Drama for the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Royal Central School in London. She is highly ...