Jordan Coughtry
Playwriting
Urbana, IL
Hi, I`m Jordan - an actor, songwriter and educator. I’m a (relatively) recent graduate of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign’s MFA Acting program, and I will be joining Principia College’s Theatre Department faculty as Assistant Professor of Acting in the fall. As an actor I’ve worked at theatres all over the country, including many productions with my wife and collaborator, Nisi Sturgis. Along the way, we joined an Artistic Collective formed originally at the Arkansas Shakespeare Theatre, which has since broadened into a collection of artists in conversation about Shakespeare in performance and production, nation-wide.
Almost a decade ago, I was asked to write songs for a production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night, which started me on a path of adapting and writing music for Shakespeare’s plays. During our Ragdale residency, Nisi and I, in conversation with members of the Artistic Collective, will be developing a project we’re calling The Verona Plays - a long-form theatrical experience which fuses Shakespeare’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona and Romeo and Juliet. The project uses Shakespeare’s texts to explore themes of forgiveness, the endurance of old wounds, and generational grief patterning.
I will be using much of this residency to write, select, and devise lyrics, and set them to melodies with some structural musical arrangement to create songs. The style of music is evocatively eclectic, sitting somewhere between classical and contemporary folk and musical theatre. The songs are designed to invigorate and support classical texts that propel the narrative and our treatment of it, to offer populist entertainment with intellectual depth to a contemporary audience, and to play a metatheatrical role in the realizing and fictionalizing of time and space against the real and unreal backdrop of Shakespeare’s version of Verona.