Now Enrolling: The Bernard Shaw Scene Lab
This is a laboratory to train your instrument, heart, mind, body, and soul, and to align with artists who commit to the idea of ensemble.
The company of Henry V (2025), in rehearsal
Wisconsin Classic Stage trains actors the way a musician trains an instrument: daily, physically, together. Our September classes are complete, and registration is now open for a five‑week scene lab built around George Bernard Shaw. And there’s more to come in 2027.
Rhetoric, Wit & the Joy of Language
George Bernard Shaw gives actors something extraordinary: the opportunity to experience intelligence as theatrical pleasure. His characters argue, seduce, provoke, contradict, maneuver, and delight in the sheer pleasure of trying to change another person’s mind. Beneath the elegance of Shaw’s language is an actor’s playground, where thought has velocity, language has consequence, and a brilliantly turned phrase can change the temperature of an entire room.
Rhetoric, Wit & the Joy of Language places the actor inside that world. Working from selected Shaw scenes, Josh Pohja leads actors through the architecture of rhetoric and the discovery of how language becomes action: how an argument shifts, how a question can become an attack, how a joke can establish power, and how a carefully constructed sentence can remain completely spontaneous in performance.
Rather than treating rhetoric as an academic exercise, we approach it as a source of freedom: actors investigate syntax, punctuation, breath, rhythm, articulation, timing, status, interruption, and persuasion while asking the essential theatrical question: what am I trying to make happen to the other person?
That is the pleasure of Shaw, and the pleasure of classical actor training at Wisconsin Classic Stage: rigor in the service of freedom, intelligence in the service of play. Come think. Come argue. Come laugh. Come play with the language.
Led by Josh Pohja, Executive Artistic Producer & Education Director, WCS Actor’s Studio
New classes, returning favorites, and fresh ensemble work are on the way for the new year. Follow along, or email us to hear first when registration opens.
Josh Pohja, Director of Education
Josh Pohja & Anne Bogart, 1998, Saratoga Springs, NY · SITI Company
Josh Pohja is Executive Artistic Producer and Director of Education at Wisconsin Classic Stage, where he leads the Actor’s Studio and its ensemble training. His own training runs directly through the source: a graduate of Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Drama (Class of ’99), he has worked as a professional actor at theaters including The Guthrie Theater, Milwaukee Chamber Theatre, Alley Theatre, the New York Fringe Festival, and The Acting Company, and trained alongside Anne Bogart and the SITI Company, immersed in Viewpoints and Suzuki training in Saratoga Springs.
That lineage is what he brings into the room every Saturday morning, training that treats the actor’s instrument as something built over time, in the company of other committed artists, and passed forward hand to hand.
WCS Actor’s Studio
Calvary Presbyterian Church
628 N. 10th St., Milwaukee, WI 53233
Comfortable clothing you can move freely in, bare or sock feet for floor work, and a water bottle. Come ready to work with your whole instrument.
All levels of ensemble experience are welcome. The work is rigorous and built for joy, and space in each session is limited, so reserve ahead.
Our suggested fees and course costs cover the room, the instructors, and the craft, but they’re never meant to be the reason someone stays outside the door. If you’re able, a gift to our education fund helps us hold scholarship spots for actors who want this training and can’t yet afford it. If you’re the one who needs that seat, reach out. We mean it when we say all are welcome to train.
Thank you to every actor who trained with us this season. These classes have wrapped for 2026, and we can’t wait to bring this work back into the room. There’s more to come in 2027.
Saturdays · Sept 5, 12 & 26
Our flagship ensemble practice: a three‑session laboratory in Space, Shape, Time, Emotion, Movement and Story, physically rigorous and full of embodied joy.
Led by Josh Pohja
Tuesdays · Sept 15 & 22
A two‑week voice intensive in breathwork, projection, endurance and command, built from a career spent learning what makes a voice fill a room.
Taught by Mark Corkins