L. Peter Callender brings to text coaching what decades on stage have made undeniable:  Shakespeare's language is not decoration -- it is action.  With 22 Shakespeare plays in performance credits and more than 15 directing credits across the classical canon, Callender works from the inside of the language not above it. 

"The line tells you everything -- where to breathe, where to push, where to surrender.  My job is simply to make that audible."

As longtime Artistic Director of the African-American Shakespeare Company, Artistic Associate at NY Classical Theater, and with 23 years as an Artistic Associate and company member at California Shakespeare Theater, Callender has developed a distinctive approach rooted in physical specificity, tonal precision, and the belief that every actor -- regardless of background -- has an innate right to the full range of classical text.  His coaching strips away the received pronunciation and the received fear, leaving actors with their own voice inside the verse. 

He works on iambic stress without rigidity, on the architecture of arrangement within the speech, and on the irreplaceable relationship between thought and breath.  Equally at home with Hamlet's soliloquies and the savage wit of Much Ado, Callender coaches actors toward ownership, not imitation.

Originally from Trinidad, West Indies, his perspective on Shakespeare is transatlantic, intercultural, and firmly grounded in the conviction that classical text is most alive when it is human.  www.lpetercallender.com