Mace Perlman on the Commedia dell'Arte

Mace Perlman is an actor, teacher, director, and translator whose theatrical training began with two years under Marcel Marceau at his International School of Mimodrama in Paris. Following studies at Stanford University (BA in Humanities Special Programs: Baroque Studies, MA in Humanities), Mace trained and worked for six years at the Piccolo Teatro in Milan under the master director, Giorgio Strehler. Since returning to his native Greenwich, CT he has taught acting in the Conservatory of Theatre Arts and Film at SUNY-Purchase and at the Stella Adler Conservatory in New York, and has taught and performed at many schools, including Williams College, Harvard, UVA, and Middlebury. His theatrical translations from the French and Italian classical repertoire include plays by Goldoni and Marivaux; and his comparative study of the commedia dell'arte mask-characters and their Shakespearean counterparts was published as "Reading Shakespeare, Reading the Masks of the Italian Commedia: Fixed Forms and the Breath of Life" in Transnational Exchange in Early Modern Theatre, Robert Henke and Eric Nicholson, ed., (Ashgate, 2008). He is currently working to create an Academy of Renaissance Theatre --- a professional company of players together with a school of theatre, language, and Renaissance culture.