Josh Gladstone and Kate Mueth met in the acting conservancy at Broadway's Circle on the Square Theatre and School in 1993. They did their first scene there together, and 30 years later the actor-director-producers, now married, are still working together.
"We had a passion for this work, it's where we came up," Mr. Gladstone said during a conversation at Jack's Stir Brew Coffee in Amagansett. The methodologies they trained with at the conservatory will provide the foundation for "Introduction to Stage Acting," a free five-session class they will conduct at the Montauk Library beginning on Sunday afternoon.
Among those techniques is the Linklater Voice Method, "a great way to connect an actor's voice, their emotions, their breathing," said Mr. Gladstone. The classes, for ages 16 and up, will also include improvisation exercises, theater games, movement work, and scene or monologue development.
"The stuff we're doing is vital to any experience level, any age," Mr. Gladstone continued. "It's like an actor's gym. You get to work out your instrument, tune up your instrument, and work on material." During the fifth and final session, students will be able to present their scenes or monologues to friends and the public.
Their son, August, is 22 now, and working with the 3 Arts management and production company in Los Angeles, "So it's an empty nest," said his father. "Do we follow the kid? Not yet."
Both have multiple irons in the fire here. Ms. Mueth is artistic director of the Neo-Political Cowgirls, the dance-theater troupe she founded in 2007 to celebrate the female voice. The group is already working on its next major production, "A Midsummer Night's Dream (As Seen Through the Sleepy Eyes of a Young Girl)," which will open in April at the HERE Arts Center in Manhattan, an incubator for groundbreaking multidisciplinary work.
"We are renaming it 'The Dream,' " said Ms. Mueth, "because we're centering it around the view of a 12-year-old girl. It's her dream, the night before she becomes a woman, and we're looking at the dream as an indicator of the societal impressions being made upon a young girl in today's age."
The group is working from the Globe version of the play, which has been shortened. "It's a wonderful text," she said, "and it keeps the action going. But we can add in our music, devising and putting in another scene, adding a character." Full rehearsals will start in Manhattan in mid-March.
Mr. Gladstone, who retired in 2021 as Guild Hall's artistic director after 21 years there, is now working as an associate producer at LTV Studios in Wainscott. "They're trying to expand the use of Studio Three, which is a 175-seat space," he said, adding that Michael Clark, the executive director, has opened up the studio for more performing arts events.
After Mr. Gladstone approached the Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center, Helen Harrison, its director, offered to bring an Indian tabla master to the studio for a concert in July. "Jackson and Lee were huge fans and friends of some Indian musicians, and that's what they would listen to when they were painting," Mr. Gladstone explained.
Another initiative will bring back to LTV the Playwrights Theater of East Hampton, a series of readings founded 35 years ago by Perry and Mitzi Pazer that included such notables as Ed Asner, Jack Klugman, Charles Durning, and Harris Yulin. Mr. Gladstone will produce the series.
There are also plans for a hip-hop musical there in July.
The Hamptons Festival of Music, which launched in September at LTV, will return this year. When the festival needed production help, Mr. Gladstone was called on. "I jumped in three weeks before they were scheduled to open," he said. "I didn't think the space would be that good acoustically, but I was blown away. It's really live."
He has been hired as the festival's associate producer for this year's programs. In addition to the three-day festival in September at LTV, 13 of the orchestra's musicians will perform Aaron Copeland's "Appalachia" at the Southampton Arts Center over the July Fourth weekend.
The festival will also partner with LongHouse Reserve for a concert of Astor Piazzolla's "The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires," and with the Hamptons International Film Festival for a summer program in Herrick Park.
Speaking of the film festival, Ms. Mueth, who has partnered with it on many programs, is now its education director.
Mr. Gladstone and Ms. Mueth have both worked over the years with Carolyn Balducci, director of programming at the Montauk Library. When an acting class the couple had planned for Third House Nature Center in Montauk fell through, Ms. Balducci and Denise DiPaolo, the library's director, invited them to bring it there instead. "It's a pilot program," Ms. Mueth noted.
Of theater and the arts in general, she said, "It's really important to listen to the community first, what's being asked for, what's needed, and what does it mean to be in community with artists, with organizations. Collaboration really is where things are right now in terms of the community."
"Introduction to Stage Acting" will meet from 1 to 3 p.m. on Sundays through March 19, with the final public session set for March 25, a Saturday, at 2:30 p.m.
