Ezra Barnes

Private Coaching

One to One: Whether you are preparing for an audition, working on a role you’re rehearsing, or just beginning to explore the world of acting, private coaching is a valuable way for you to learn about your instrument. Working together, we will find ways for you to access potential and power.

Training Programs: If you’re applying for undergraduate BFA or graduate MFA programs, you must satisfy rigorous and diverse audition requirements. Together we’ll find monologues that work for you and work to prepare your auditions. I also coach singers, and my musical background as a trained pianist helps me to understand the demands placed on a sung audition.

Young Actors Workshop

Since 2003, Young Actors Workshop has taught young actors at various locations in Brooklyn. We have put on plays, done improvs, played theater games, and explored monologues and scenes. Students often return year after year as they mature, even after college when they are embarking on careers in the performing arts.  The process-oriented classes are less about “being a star” and more about the collaborative nature of theater.

Some Observations

It is a special joy to help an actor discover a path to a character, and expand their range and sense of what is possible. Practice makes perfect, and actors need a place to practice. My experience as director, actor, artistic director and producer gives me a range of perspectives into the acting process. I have no strict approach to acting technique.  My mentors, Douglas Campbell, Morris Carnovsky and Richard Edelman among them, were pragmatic practitioners who knew there was no single approach to living truthfully onstage.

It comes down to this: each playwright has their own sense of dramatic truth. The job of the actor is to discover how to use the words given them by the writer to allow that truth to emerge.

“Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance: that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature.”

About

Ezra Barnes is an actor, award-winning director, producer and teacher. His numerous Off-Broadway appearances include the hit Breakfast With Mugabe, a critic’s pick of the New York Times and Best New Play nominee for the Off-Broadway Alliance Awards. He received the Outstanding Director Award from the Connecticut Critics Circle for his production of The Diary of Anne Frank. A Shakespearean expert, he founded Connecticut’s Shakespeare on the Sound, considered one of the premier outdoor classical theaters in the area, and served as its Artistic Director for 14 years, directing and playing in many of the Bard’s plays. TV appearances include featured roles on Orange is The New Black, Jessica Jones, Blue Bloods, Law & Order, SVU, Bored to Death, and As the World Turns. Film appearance include The Last Day, Motherless Brooklyn, Noah, and Joshua. A longtime Brooklyn resident and parent, Ezra has taught theater for young people at Saint Ann’s School, the Brooklyn Conservatory of Music, Poly Prep, the Harvey Milk School and Piper Theatre.