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."
Shake the Sphere with Sid
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 and growth of native New Zealand actors, playwrights, and composers. Himself a fine actor and director, he has staged some twenty productions of New Zealand plays. He was also the editor of the Playmarket New Zealand PlaySeries from 2010 to 2023, and was honored with the Mayoral Award for Significant Contribution to the Theatre. David is especially concerned with marginalized artists and has encouraged and staged the works of the Māori, the indigenous Polynesian people of New Zealand (Aotearoa).