The Pearl Theatre Company’s commitment to foster a resident acting company is as important as it is rare. Classical theatre as a body of work provides perspective, a humanizing system of thought. The intellectual and emotional experience of the great plays is a rudder that enables the audience to navigate that portion of human history allotted to us here and now. A resident acting company, a cohesive and experienced team of actors, is best equipped to keep vital our rich tradition, and to keep fresh the wisdom, wit, and craft of the classics.

The Pearl wrote a Resident Acting Company into its mission statement in 1984, and, at present, the RAC numbers 13 professional actors, ranging in age from 30 to 84. Two of the 13 have worked with The Pearl for all of its 23-year, 105-production history of classical repertory.

The audience reaps the benefits of this approach. The collective experience of the Resident Acting Company, as well as their ongoing training in speech, movement, style, and dramatic analysis, translates into a consistently high quality of performance at The Pearl, pleasing both the sophisticated and the casual theatre-goer. As a company, The Pearl’s actors have worked closely with a number of noted theatre training experts, among them: 17 seasons with Robert Neff Williams in standard American stage speech, 10 seasons with Rick Sordelet in stage combat, 18 seasons with Alice Teirstein in dance and movement, and 15 seasons with Dale Ramsey in dramatic structure and text analysis. They also have worked with Richard Morse in style and period movement, Tim Monich and Amy Stoller in dialects, Lyn Carroll in period manners and mores—the list is 23 years long.

When not at The Pearl, members of the company work on Broadway, Off-Broadway, in major regional theatres, and on film & TV. Together at The Pearl, they’ve shared 21 Shakespeares, nine Shaws, seven Ibsens, five Sophocles, four each of Molière, Chekhov, and Racine!

The members of The Pearl Theatre Company’s 2006-2007 Resident Acting Company are: Rachel Botchan, Robin Leslie Brown, Joanne Camp, Bradford Cover, Dominic Cuskern, Dan Daily, T J Edwards, Robert Hock, Sean McNall, Anna Minot (in memoriam), Carol Schultz, and Edward Seamon.