Beth McGuire, voice and dialect coach and former Yale faculty member, and Fay Simpson, founder of the Lucid Body, intimacy coordinator, and Head of Movement at NYU Grad Acting, will join The Actors Center’s Resident Company this fall for development workshops exploring dialects and high-stakes scene work.
Beth has worked as a vocal/dialect coach both on and off Broadway, in regional theatre, and in film and television for 40 years. She was a Professor in the Practice of Acting and served as the Director of Speech and Dialects at Yale School of Drama for 23 years. She is currently freelancing, teaching and coaching film, television and theatre, and occasionally still gets on the boards.
With colleague Jane Guyer Fujita, she teaches a series of teacher training workshops covering Phonology, Text, Dialects, and production coaching. Her book, African Accents: A Workbook for Actors (Routledge press, November 2015), is the first practical comprehensive analysis of the genre.
Most recent dialect coaching projects include Lady in the Lake with Natalie Portman, Lupita N’yongo in The Wild Robot, Ryan Coogler’s SINNERS with Michael B Jordan, the Marvel action film, Black Panther, and Jordan Peel’s sociopolitical horror flick US. Selected work in theater includes: African Voices Now: 3 One Acts, Almasi Collaborative Arts, Harare, Zimbabwe; He Brought Her Home in a Box by Adrienne Kennedy at Theatre for a New Audience and KISS by Guillermo Calderón at the Yale Repertory Theatre both directed Evan Yionoulis.
Fay Simpson is the Founder of the Lucid Body, a psycho-physical process of introspection, exertion, and mental challenge that empowers actors and dancers to express human complexity and passion with safety and skill. She is Head of Movement at NYU’s Graduate Acting Program, and has been the Artistic Director and co-founder of Impact Theatre since its creation in 1990 (D-Train, Degas’ Little Dancer, Marital Bliss of Francis and Maxine, Kurt’s Wife: A Story of Lotte Lenya, Grey Gone, and most recently, SCOTTY). She is an IPA-certified Intimacy Coordinator and has been a physical acting director and somatic acting coach for more than twenty years.
Fay has also taught at The Yale School of Drama, the New School’s Eugene Lang, Michael Howard Studios, The Studio/NY, Marymount Manhattan College, and The Actors Center. Fay was awarded a Fox Foundation Fellowship to intern with Mark Rylance at the Globe Theater in London in 2000.
Re-balancing the nervous system and energetic body of each actor and between actors after every rehearsal is a priority and the reason she became an intimacy coordinator. She has choreographed intimacy for numerous plays, ballets, and screen projects, with credits that include A Midsummer Night’s Dream with the Classical Theater of Harlem directed by Carl Cofield, Dracula with Ballet Met in Columbus, Ohio, Marys Seacole directed by Machel Ross at the Shubert Theatre, A Song of Songs at El Puente, and the film Gage County, NE, directed by Cecilia Rubino.
She also co-founded a Theatre for Social Change summer program in Tanzania for Yale Drama students, as well as the Veterans Project in New York. She has a two year teacher training program with Lucid Body teachers now working around the world. The 2nd edition of her book, The Lucid Body; A Guide for the Physical Actor was published in 2020 and hailed by Drama Book Shop as “one of the ten most essential books for the actor.” www.lucidbody.com
