Adult Acting Registration
New adult acting classes announced for Winter/Spring 2025. Register below!
All classes are held at RPAA inside the Dominion Energy Arts Center in downtown Richmond, VA.
Questions? Email Laine Satterfield, Cadence Director of Education at lainesatterfield7@gmail.com.
Monologue Intensive with Denise Simone
Tuesdays & Wednesdays 7-9pm: 1/14, 1/15, 1/21, 1/22
Ages: 18+
Cost: $200
This workshop offers practical tools for preparing contemporary audition monologues. Class work concentrates on tools to relax you and help you to focus. Whether you are re-working a monologue or learning to stay in the moment, this workshop can help. Each actor will leave with two audition ready monologues: one contemporary comedic and one dramatic or one “out of the box.” Students will select and bring in their own memorized material to work on, as well as receive suggestions from the instructor.
Practical Acting with Morrie Piersol
Wednesdays 7-9pm: 2/5, 2/12, 2/19, 2/26, 3/5, 3/12, 3/19, 3/26
Ages 18+
Cost: $400
Practical Acting is a simple and effective approach to acting that Morrie has developed over the years that uses as its foundation, the basic, but crucial, skill of listening and responding truthfully on the stage as championed and taught by the legendary acting teacher, Sanford Meisner. Additionally, this approach incorporates the major tenets of Practical Aesthetics, a technique developed by The Atlantic Theatre Company and its co-founder, David Mamet where the actor learns to identify and implement the character’s actions and intentions as derived from the text (linear actions).
Personal Narrative as Monologue with Denise Simone
Tuesdays 7-9pm: 4/1, 4/8, 4/15, 4/22
Ages: 18+
Cost: $200
As actors we work to inhabit the lives of others. In this four-session workshop we will look to our own lives and stories. We will explore, together, how to uncover the stories that hold power for us and use them as the basis for creating our own monologues.
Directing for the Stage: An Organic Approach with Rusty Wilson
Wednesdays 7-9pm: 4/9, 4/16, 4/23, 4/30
Ages: 18+
Cost: $200
This class introduces students and aspiring directors to an organic approach to directing for the stage. Using a selected text, participants will learn how to analyze a play script, explore the casting and rehearsal process, create a rehearsal schedule, and understand the role of the director as leader of the rehearsal and production process. Time permitting, participants may also be asked to lead actors in a hands-on rehearsal of a scene from their chosen play.
Instructors
Rusty Wilson
Rusty Wilson (he/him) is a freelance theatre artist based in Richmond, VA. Since moving to Richmond in 2005 he has directed a number of critically acclaimed productions including Cadence Theatre’s John, (RTCC Best Director, 2017), Sight Unseen, and In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play). Other Richmond directing credits include Firehouse Theatre’s Death of a Salesman, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (RTCC Best Director, 2011), Sarah Ruhl’s Eurydice (RTCC Best Director, 2009), and Noah Haidle’s Mr. Marmalade. Rusty also directed Virginia Rep’s To Kill A Mockingbird, and Richmond Triangle Players’ Cloud 9. Prior to moving to Richmond, Rusty spent ten years serving as the Founding Artistic Director for Company of Fools, an award winning theatre company located in Sun Valley, Idaho. Favorite directing credits there include Uncle Vanya, James Joyce’s The Dead, Waiting for Godot, How I Learned to Drive, The Tempest, Death and the Maiden, Buried Child, and Other Desert Cities. Rusty has been a guest director and teacher at various colleges and universities around the country, received a fellowship in directing in 2003, and was featured in the March 2002 issue of American Theatre Magazine. From 2005 to 2022, Rusty served as the Arts Department Chair and Ampersand Director for St. Christopher’s School. He currently serves as an Associate Artist for Cadence.
Denise Simone
Denise Simone (she/her) has pursued a life in the professional theatre for the past 40 years as an actor, director, teacher, administrator and consultant. While her work as an actor has informed and fed all other aspects of her life in the theatre, it was her 1996 move to Hailey, Idaho, with the award-winning Company of Fools (COF, of which she was a founding member) that led to the richest and most rewarding chapter (thus far) of her career. Between 1996 and 2016, Simone served as COF’s Co-Producing Artistic Director and led the Company to becoming one of the pre-eminent arts organizations in Idaho. Some of her favorite acting roles with COF include Barbara in August: Osage County, Veronica in God of Carnage, Masha in Vanya & Sonia & Masha & Spike, Margie in Good People, Polly in Other Dessert Cities, the one-woman shows The Syringa Tree and Shirley Valentine, May in Fool for Love starring Bruce Willis and Roberta in Danny and the Deep Blue Sea. She has also appeared in VaRep’s POTUS, Boise Contemporary Theatre’s productions of The Roommate, The Clean House and Slow. Directing credits include Cry It Out, Proof; Constellations; Almost, Maine; Doubt; Dead Man’s Cell Phone; Distracted; Collected Stories; The Laramie Project; and The Belle of Amherst. Simone has taught theatre and creative writing in Virginia and Idaho and helped create and implement COF’s innovative in-school Stages of Wonder program. Simone served as a commissioner for the Idaho Commission on the Arts for ten years and as a panelist for the National Endowment for the Arts. She is currently an advisory board member for the Sun Valley Playwrights Residency as well as a member of Actors’ Equity Association and Screen Actors’ Guild. For her work in the theatre Denise was awarded the Idaho Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.
Morrie Piersol
Morrie Piersol is the Acting Artistic Director of 5th Wall Theatre who has acted and directed in Richmond for twenty-five years. Morrie is retired from the Appomattox Regional Governor’s School where he served as Theatre Arts Instructor and main stage director. Prior to moving to Richmond, Morrie was active in theatre in New York where his acting credits included work at Playwright’s Horizons, The Actor’s Studio, and a role in the long-running Broadway production of The Runner Stumbles. He was also co-founder, producing director, and company member of Force 13 Theatre, an award winning Off-Off Broadway Theatre Company.
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