Shakespeare the Player

Last night, I sat in on the first preview for Folger Theatre’s new production of Twelfth Night. The romantic, knotty nature of the play was brought out in the production, and I, along with the rest of the very packed house, found myself enjoying the whole play anew. And then Feste (for not many companies cast a Fabian if they don’t have to) uttered one of my favorite lines in this play:

“If this were played upon a stage now, I could 
condemn it as an improbable fiction.”

It’s just such a wonderful, inclusive, self-aware joke. And because I’ve seen him so often in these self-aware parts, Louis Butelli has become my face of Will Shakespeare for the present, and I can almost see him creating that line 400+ years ago.

Mike LoMonico has said, and it’s true, that it’s not necessary to teach a biographical background in order to teach Shakespeare’s plays. You don’t need to know about Elizabethan life or stage practices to enjoy and explore the text, though instances for dropping in facts as they come up do arise. As a sometimes actor, I love finding these moments of player-hood in the text. This line in Twelfth Night, Hamlet’s speech to the tragedians, Henry V‘s apologetic Chorus, and – most especially dear to my heart – all of the mechanicals’ scenes in A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

I’ve made it no secret that these terrible rustic actors are my favorites in the whole canon. Each festival season I fervently pray to see as many renditions of this play-within-a-play as there are schools to perform it. I even tried to get my wedding party to perform Pyramus and Thisbe at my wedding (they talked me down from that ledge). I love these players for throwing themselves whole-heartedly into their art, and committing to it despite lacking talent and means.

Students perform Pyramus and Thisbe during the 2009 Secondary Festival at the Folger

Recently, Carol Ann and I were left in charge of another school visit, and having discussed our mutual appreciation for Quince’s ragtag team, and Mike’s suggestion of dropping in facts as they came up, we decided to test out an activity for the students that combined Shakespeare’s Text with some player background, discussion, and history- to try to paint a larger picture, so to speak, as they came up in the mechanicals’ scenes in Midsummer. After a brief introduction to what an Elizabethan Theatre would have felt like, we used clips from the following scenes:

Act 1, Scene 2

(line 11) Quince tells his assembly what play they will produce: “The most lamentable comedy and most cruel death of Pyramus and Thisbe.” What kind of play does an audience want to see? What does this title make you think of?

(line 20) Quince assigns the roles in the play. Bottom asks if Pyramus is “a lover or a tyrant?” You were likely to see many plays about kings and lovers much of the time. Try to pick out Shakespeare’s plays that aren’t about either subject, how many do you have?

(line 45) Francis Flute protests playing a woman – on the Elizabethan stage, women’s roles were played by young men and boys.

(line 75) Why are the players concerned about the Lion being too frightening? What could happen to you if your play displeased the monarch at the time? The Lord Chamberlain’s Men, Shakespeare’s company, were once in danger of their lives when Queen Elizabeth I saw herself in the deposed monarch in Shakespeare’s play Richard II.

Act 3, Scene 1

(line 9) Bottom is concerned that their play is too violent. Can we relate to that today? Who in the audience is he most concerned about? What solution does he propose?

(line 46) During their rehearsal, Quince says that he hopes to have the moon shining on the night of their performance because “Pyramus and Thisbe meet by moonlight.” Is it actually necessary for the moon to be out for the play to be believable? What devices did Shakespeare have available to him to set the scene (ie: Merchant 5, 1; Midsummer 3, 2, 190)?

(line 61) Quince also points out the need for a wall for the lovers to whisper through. What is their solution. How would you solve this issue?

(line 90) Flute speaks all his lines at once. In the 16th century, actors learned their lines from “sides” – papers that contained their lines only, and maybe a cue or two.

Act 5, Scene 1

(line 134) The mechanicals’ play begins with a Prologue. Where else have you seen a Prologue, and what is its function?

(line 179) “O, grim-looked night!…” the O encompasses all of the emotion of the line (ie: “O, she doth teach the torches to burn bright!”) What emotion is Bottom/Pyramus playing here with all of these many many O’s? This part is especially fun for the best over-actor in the class.

Students perform Pyramus and Thisbe during the 2009 Secondary Festival at the Folger

(line 260) Throughout the play, the married couples add their own comments and interjections. Live theatre includes a live audience with live reactions. In Elizabethan England, nobles attended plays as much to be seen as to see. Sometimes there were seats onstage for them to show off their latest finery, and there’s a legend that Queen Elizabeth I once crossed the stage mid-performance to greet someone. The groundlings had no problem voicing their reactions during the play, either. Have you ever experienced something like that today?

(line 291) Even more fun – bad rhymes and stage deaths for Pyramus and Thisbe! Did the audience enjoy the play?

All-told, this portion of the activity took about 45 minutes, and we had a wonderful group of 8th grade students acting it out for us! At the end, we asked them to share anything they would take away from this, one student said, “You really had to use your imagination back then – it was all about the words and the actor.”

Not a bad takeaway.

Read Full Post »

Canst Thou Bring Me to the Party?

It’s a very busy week in Folger Education! We’re excited to have so much to offer for Shakespeare’s Birthday, this year, and are excited to be a part of PBS LearningMedia’s celebrations as well!

This month,PBS LearningMedia is celebrating “Much Ado About Shakespeare” with online events and resources for educators. Tonight (April 16) from 8-9pm EDT we’re joining forces for a Twitter Party discussing our favorite resources and tools for bringing Shakespeare to life in the classroom! Join us live and share your stories with us!

PBS LearningMedia is also re-releasing episodes and resources for Shakespeare Uncovered, and will be hosting a free webinar with the executive producers of the series on April 22 from 4-5pm EDT. They’ll review video from each episode and the educational resources created to accompany the series with Folger educators.

As you know, we’re coming up on our Electronic Field Trip next Tuesday and our local Shakespeare’s Birthday celebration at our historic building on Sunday. How will you celebrate?

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare: Gateway Literature

~by Holly Rodgers

The benefit of exposing students to Shakespeare is paramount to establishing strong literary foundations in the classroom, for all learners, regardless of age and academic abilities.  While I could give testimony of the many advantages to be gained by doing so, I would like to focus on one in particular, the ability of Shakespeare to serve as a metaphorical gateway drug to get students addicted to reading. While I had known that allowing my young ELL (English Language Learner) students to participate in performance-based Shakespeare study would improve their developing language skills, and perhaps make them more critical evaluators of what they read; I had underestimated the stepping stone Shakespeare could provide to gain access to other challenging works of literature.

My 5^th and 6^th grade ELL students had spent the first nine-weeks of the school year studying Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  While they were enjoying working with the plays, they also began to complain that they missed reading novels.  They wanted something “hard” to challenge them, but I was struggling to find them something that would segue nicely from Shakespeare.  Due to the extensive fantasy worlds woven into the plays my students had studied, I felt the mythology and adventure of J.R.R. Tolkien would suit them well.

We proceeded to read The Hobbit during the month of December and I soon became aware of how well-prepared my students were for the challenging vocabulary, complex plot lines, and colorful characters, which are all signature trademarks of Shakespeare’s works.  While my students were unconvinced that they would ever find another writer  they would worship at the feet of like Master Will, they quickly grew to love Tolkien and reading about the adventures of Bilbo Baggins and his band of dwarves.  Many of the themes and motifs present in the plays we studied were also found in the fantasy world of Middle-Earth.  My students had no difficulty accepting the existence of fantastical creatures such as dragons, dwarves, hobbits, wizards, and elves when they had already been exposed to fairies, witches, and ghosts in MSND, Macbeth, and Hamlet.  The rhythm of Tolkien’s language also required their ears to acclimate, as was also necessary to establishing the beat of iambic-pentameter.  Challenging vocabulary was not intimidating to them as Shakespeare had taught them to have no fear of unknown words.

While Shakespeare will always be their first love, my students are learning that their relationship with The Bard is not exclusive.  There are many great writers out there worth reading and I believe that Shakespeare has given my students the courage to tackle each one with no trepidation.  Always up for a challenge, my students have now chosen to take on a new literary task.  They are attempting to read the entire Lord of the Rings by the end of the school year.  For those of you who would like to follow along with our progress, we are chronicling our reading adventures on our recently-founded blog Teaching Tolkien.   My students are completely hooked on reading and for that, I am eternally grateful, Master Shakespeare.

Holly Rodgers is an elementary school ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) teacher in Fairfax County, Virginia.  She has been a presenter at the Folger Elementary Educators Conference and has created ELL (English Language Learner) and elementary focused lesson plans for the Folger Education Website. She has spent her varied educational career as both a language and music teacher.  She earned her M Ed in Multilingual/Multicultural Education from George Mason University and her BME in Instrumental Music from Louisiana State University.

Keep the conversation going with Holly on Twitter @hmrodgers

Read Full Post »

Play, Play, Play

~by Kevin J. Costa

Sometimes I wonder if the performance-based approach to teaching Shakespeare, which we promote at the Folger, is seen only as an “entry-level” tool for students and teachers intimidated by Shakespeare. For sure, this is a major audience. But performance-based work on Shakespeare doesn’t have to stop there. In fact, I think it shouldn’t. What does a performance-based approach do for that (growing) group of students who are already in “the choir,” so-to-speak?

Two students of mine at McDonogh School offer an example. We’ve been studying Twelfth Night for some time, and we are preparing for a night of one-act performances from the play. These students are playing Orsino and Viola/Cesario in Act 2, Scene 4 — the moment when, for the first time, Orsino seems to take interest in someone other than himself. From the start of the play, Orsino tends to hold court, sharing his convictions about how the world of love works — an armchair expert, but, because he’s the Duke, the one with the bully pulpit. Cesario, however, has a knack of throwing people off their game whether emotionally, rhetorically, or both. “How dost thou like this tune?” asks Orsino in Act 2, Scene 4, and Cesario responds, “It gives a very echo to the seat / Where love is throned” (2.4.23-25). Orsino responds,

Thou dost speak masterly.
My life upon’t, young though thou art, thine eye
Hath stayed upon some favor that it loves.
Hath it not, boy? (2.4.25-28)

Orsino’s interest in Cesario, noted by Valentine at the outset of Act 1, Scene 4, only deepens here. Yes, Orsino still characteristically holds forth with declarations about the truths of love, but we see an increase in the number of questions he asks Cesario — a suggestion that he, for once, isn’t only thinking of himself:

Twelfth night, act 1, scene 4 by H. Thomas Maybank. Folger Shakespeare Library.

ORSINO
Make no compare
Between that love a woman can bear me
And that I owe Olivia.

VIOLA
Ay, but I know –

ORSINO
What dost thou know?

VIOLA
Too well what love women to men may owe.
In faith, they are as true of heart as we.
My father had a daughter loved a man
As it might be, perhaps, were I a woman,
I should your Lordship.

ORSINO
And what’s her history?

VIOLA
A blank, my lord. She never told her love [. . .]

ORSINO
But died thy sister of her love, my boy?

VIOLA
I am all the daughters of my father’s house,
And all the brothers, too — and yet I know not.
Sir, shall I to this lady?

ORSINO
Ay, that’s the theme.
To her in haste. Give her this jewel. Say
My love can give no place, bide no denay. (2.4.111-122, 131-37)

It’s refreshing to see Orsino concerned about someone else who might be in love. Sure, love is his occupation and so it’s no surprise that he’d take interest, but this is one of the first times he seems to realize that other people might know what it is to have such strong feelings.

At the end of a recent class, my two students stopped me with a question about these final lines. “Mr. Costa,” they said, “does Orsino want to give a ring to the sister of Cesario?” They were confused, of course, because they know that person doesn’t exist in the play. Still, they thought that Orsino (who, unlike the audience, doesn’t know this) wanted to give the ring to Cesario’s sister. I said we should look closely at the text again, and we discussed how Cesario’s line, “Sir, shall I to this lady?” redirects the moment to the “theme” at hand:  i.e., Olivia. And then one of my students said, “Well, should we change the word ‘lady’ to ‘Olivia’ so that the audience gets it?” I told them I didn’t think it at all necessary; in performance, I insisted, the redirect would be quite clear if the person playing Cesario shakes him/herself out of the increasingly intimate dialogue he/she has with Orsino and gets back to the original business at hand.

Students perform Twelfth Night in the 2011 Secondary Schools Festival. Photo by Duy Tran.

This experience confirmed something in a very concrete way for me about how playing Shakespeare is the most rigorous, specific work a person can do with these texts.  What my students experienced as “confusion” in this extraordinary moment in Twelfth Night was actually the discovery of something at the heart of this play — ambiguity: the ambiguity of language, the ambiguity of feelings, the ambiguity of sexual identity. Who, indeed, is this lady to whom Cesario and Orsino refer? Well, sure it’s Olivia. But the reference to “this lady” by Cesario followed two lines later by Orsino’s, “to her in haste” occurs so quickly that we might well be confused by the referent of these two pronouns. And, one might really wonder, at this moment, who really is the object of Orsino’s emotional energy. Olivia seems to have fallen off his radar, if just for a moment, only to be replaced by the image of Cesario’s “sister” with whom he grows increasingly interested. And if Cesario, as we’ll see, is mistaken as her twin, Sebastian, later in the play, then that means Cesario’s “sister” is, in a strangely logical way — you guessed it — Viola. And we all know who Orsino ends up with at the end of this play!

Confusing? Complicated? Ambiguous? Yes to all of the above. We wrapped up our conversation with a thought: yes, this ambiguity might be apparent to the student sitting at her desk reading quietly, but I can’t imagine that it would have caused us to debate this complex emotional and linguistic tangle in such a lively, enthusiastic, and very rigorous way if they weren’t playing it. What’s more, I had precious little to do with this big question that they had formed – it was their discovery. I just jumped into a problem that had already captured their intellect and imagination and became a partner in their work.

To tell you the truth, I’m not sure I’d have alighted on the ambiguity of these pronouns if I were just lecturing because, for better or for worse, I’m too familiar with the play. Fresh eyes, however, can discover so much that routine ignores. I guess the point is that playing Shakespeare isn’t just a gimmick to lure the frightened; it is, rather, a profound tool that sharpens one’s critical acumen further with each successive use.

Kevin J. Costa is a TSI 2010 Alumni. In addition to being an English teacher at McDonogh School, he is Director of the school’s Institute for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, Head of the Drama Department, and Director of Fine & Performing Arts. He also serves as the Director of Education for the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and is former Chair of the Shakespeare Theater Association’s Education Committee.

Read Full Post »

Osmotically Speaking: Shakespeare as Writing Teacher

On more than one occasion, students in my Shakespeare class have told me that studying Shakespeare has made them better writers. That thought pleases and intrigues me, and it also inspired me to offer my students a writing challenge. I asked each one to write in a genre of his/her own choosing and to allow Shakespeare—somehow—to be a part of the piece. And then I went looking for Shakespeare, both inside and outside of their lines.

One of my students, a promising young writer, quickly picked up the challenge and shared the following poem. I think the results are stunning, and I wanted to introduce both the poem and the poet, Emily Shue, to you.

You are the downfall to my stage romance.
Prince charming gone bad—
curly locks shorn with the same blade you held to my wrist,
blue eyes burned out and dull,
illustrious color faded into a smoky abyss.
You are a maiden’s handkerchief, fluttering in the wind of my ragged breath—
Othello as he sat atop his golden haired bride
and pushed air from her lungs with a feather pillow,
blood pounding in his head.
Or Romeo, parrying and thrusting silver throated song through the thick summer night
as his blade sliced Mercutio’s stomach,
spilling from his gaping wound scorpions that scuttled up along black letters
and stung the reader’s tear ducts.
You are both houses sitting silent and somber on the hilltop as mourning comes—
the kind with a “u.”
You are cardboard boxes peeling apart in the pouring rain—
Claudio at his own wedding,
ripping spiderlegs of lace from his bride’s dress and beating hate into her heart.
Lady Macbeth in the cold dungeon of her mind
where is the candle out out candle blood blood candle blood
while waxen figures and crimson kings sashayed and kicked
and wiggled their fingers,
dancing along her throat until she tied up a rope and went sailing in the rafters.

Several years ago, I attended a lecture by Stephen Greenblatt at Elizabethtown College in Pennsylvania. At the conclusion of his lecture, one of the students asked Dr. Greenblatt if he thought that Shakespeare expected people to continue to read his plays and sonnets hundreds of years later. Greenblatt immediately replied, “Yes, but not in the way you might think.” According to Greenblatt, Shakespeare probably expected people to borrow from his works just as Shakespeare had borrowed from other sources. I believe that Emily has honored that expectation in her poem, but now I am left with something new to ponder. Did Shakespeare expect people to consider him their writing teacher as well?

Sue Biondo-Hench is a teacher at Carlisle High School in Pennsylvania. She helped establish the Central Pennsylvania Shakespeare Festival, and founded the Carlisle Shakespeare Troupe. Sue edited the Romeo and Juliet unit of Shakespeare Set Free: Volume 1.   Her lesson plans have been used by secondary school English teachers around the world. She is one of Folger’s Master Teachers, leading curriculum sessions at the Teaching Shakespeare Institute, and presenting performance-based Shakespeare teaching workshops at many National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) conventions and English Speaking Union of the United States offices across the country.

Emily Shue was awarded both a Silver and a Gold Key from the Scholastic Writing Awards for her poetry submissions.

Read Full Post »

Audio Shakespeare

We’ve been thinking a lot about the benefit of having students listen to Shakespeare’s language.  With the recent release of the digital edition of Othello, we are in the process of producing an audio recording of the play that follows the Folger edition.  The goal is to enable students to read and hear the text at the same time.  Our current production of Henry V is going to give us the opportunity to do an audio recording of the Chorus speeches, and we’re thinking this might be helpful for students to have available to listen to, as well.  In the middle of considering all of this, it occured to us that it might be helpful to blog about it and see what kinds of responses we’d get to asking about how teachers use audio recordings of plays in their classrooms.  We’re not talking about passive listening. Rather, actively engaging students through a guided listening exercise or activity, for example.  So, do you use audio recordings of Shakespeare’s plays, or of any plays, in your classrooms? How do you use them?  Do you find the option to be a valuable one, based on your own classroom use?

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare Uncovered

Last summer, the BBC aired a six-part series exploring Shakespeare’s plays with interviews from actors, directors, and scholars interspersed with clips from movies and recorded stage performances of the plays being discussed. On this side of the pond, at least, those of us without higher-listed cable waited patiently for either a DVD of the series or for its American airing.

The latter, at least, is here!

PBS will air all six episodes on Fridays starting January 25th in two-hour segments:

January 25th, 9-11pm EST: ‘Macbeth’ and ‘The Comedies’ hosted by Ethan Hawke and Jolie Richardson.

February 1, 9-11pm EST: ‘Richard II,’ ‘Henry IV,’ and ‘Henry V’ with Derek Jacobi and Jeremy Irons.

February 8, 9-11pm EST: ‘Hamlet’ and ‘The Tempest’ hosted by David Tennant and Trevor Nunn.

What’s especially exciting about this series is that far from being a definitive account of what these plays are or mean, the hosts discuss their passion for the play, and consider the plays’ many interpretations and long histories. Hopefully these hours can stimulate discussions about the plays, and give new perspectives for approaching the texts from different points of view.

The DVD set will be available by April, and can be pre-ordered from PBS, if you’re interested in that.

Read Full Post »

Is Shakespeare Literature?

~ By Kevin J Costa

Late this fall, at McDonogh School where I teach drama and run the Institute for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, my Institute students and I were talking about AP exams. And then one junior asked, “would it be acceptable to write about Shakespeare on an English AP exam?”

You just smiled while reading that question, right?

The rest of my class and I did, too, when we heard it. “Of course,” I said, quite surprised at the notion that Shakespeare might be off limits. But then it struck me, although she beat me to the punch, saying, “well, I just think of Shakespeare as theatre.”

The joke, in other words, was on the rest of us. I mean, isn’t this the whole point? If we teach Shakespeare through performance, we do so in order that students will have a deeper, more personal relationship with his work. Yes, we want students to read closely, to think in “literary” ways about Shakespeare — to meet, in other words, the objectives of an ELA classroom — but, I guess, it’s more important that we understand that goal. The beauty of learning Shakespeare through performance is that it provides students a deeply rigorous interaction with a complex text at the same time that it stimulates their creativity and their ability to problem-solve collaboratively. Oh, and yes — it’s a ton of fun.Think about it: this is the kind of thing kids will do on their own time — the school play, football, chess club. It’s real work, but compelling work because it puts them at the center of their learning.

It’s understandable that, for teachers new to this approach, this can be somewhat uncomfortable territory. “If I’m not talking all the time,” a teacher may say, “am I really doing my job?” And what about quizzes, passage identifications, and critical analyses? After all, these are more objective assessments than grading a group of students performing a scene. This is true. But the simple point is this: what do you want your students to learn (and not just what someone thinks they should know)? If it’s a deep appreciation for language, for an understanding of why Shakespeare helps us to comprehend ourselves, and a respect for collaboration (and yes, to meet Common Core objectives), then performance-based learning is the very best way to meet these goals.

You don’t act or direct yourself? No worries — you don’t need this experience. Print the Folger’s one-page handout, “How To Stage A Scene,” move the desks out of the way, and you and your students are good to go. You don’t want to grade the performance? That’s fine. Have them write an essay on what they discovered by staging a scene, and you can work on their writing with them. I think you’ll find a more authoritative, confident voice in that kind of writing than a traditional analysis, for students will have first-hand experience doing Shakespeare. In other words, they’ll be talking about how they made meaning with Shakespeare texts rather than thinking they need to find hidden meaning in them.

One of my juniors wrote the following about a scene she performed in class: “The fact that I needed to make my own choices prompted me to look deeper into the text to determine the best ways to say each phrase to make the story clear to the audience and look for any clues in the text where Shakespeare might have indicated a stage direction.” Not only do good actors and English students do this, good thinkers do this. The world will always welcome better thinkers!

I’m proud to say that the English department at McDonogh School, where Macbeth is taught to the tenth grade, all engage in performance-based teaching. When that unit is on, it’s no surprise to find groups of students all over the school clutching at daggers, sleepwalking, or shouting at a bloody Banquo. It’s a thrill to see.

And yes — some of them even write about the play on their AP exams!

Kevin J. Costa is a TSI 2010 Alumni. In addition to being an English teacher at McDonogh School, he is Director of the school’s Institute for Shakespeare and Renaissance Studies, Head of the Drama Department, and Director of Fine & Performing Arts. He also serves as the Director of Education for the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and is former Chair of the Shakespeare Theater Association’s Education Committee.

Read Full Post »

Living Language

“A play is acting.” (Elementary school student, grade 2)

“For all my reign hath been but as a scene/Acting that argument.” (2 Henry IV, IV.5)

Last week, I had the fortunate opportunity to meet with high school students participating in Folger’s High School Fellowship Program. I was especially fortunately because our guest instructor was Caleen Sinette Jennings, Professor of Theatre at American University. Through an afternoon working with Caleen, I learned several important things about Shakespeare and his language.

1. Each word can be a physical experience. Think about the way little children tell stories. They use their entire bodies to tell the tale. It’s like they can’t help but move and shake and wiggle and engage all of themselves because they are so excited. They act out the story. Shakespeare’s language invites us to do the same. The words are so packed with meaning they burst out of us. If we get up on our feet, it’s almost impossible not to find yourself moving as you say the words out loud. The words are parts of a play—a living thing. They are a series of physical experiences.

2. The behavior of the words provides us with clues into the state of mind of the speaker. Look at a phrase from Shakespeare. In this class, the students acted out Hamlet’s “To be or not to be” speech. These words are so well known, it’s tempting to just run your eyes over them thinking “yeah, I know this.” Instead, act each word out. Pay attention to words and phrases: nobler in the mind, slings and arrows, outrageous fortune, perchance to dream. Give over to the motions the body associates with the words. You’ll begin to understand Hamlet as you give motion to his words.

3. Sometimes the words fight with each other. Characters try to hold different “truths” in their minds at the same time. Characters deceive each other. Characters struggle to find meaning in experience. All this is expressed in words that are at odds with each other. Let the words fight. Give the words expression with your body that lets them fight. Character’s inner turmoil becomes evident as their words do battle.

4. Shakespeare is not hard to understand when you physicalize it. I’ve seen the light in young people’s eyes as they recognize they do understand the language. They get the meaning. The words make sense. Once they are up on their feet, putting the words into action, it’s not difficult to understand. In fact, it’s very much what they are experiencing in their lives.

Thanks to Caleen and these great students, I literally saw Shakespeare come to life, right before my eyes.

Read Full Post »

Shakespeare in Las Vegas

I have been thinking about Las Vegas.  This year’s National Council of Teachers of English convention will take place there in November. However, what prompted thoughts of Vegas wasn’t the convention or the slots, but a recent article on broadway world.com about that noted the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company’s announcement that it would be undertaking a capital campaign to fund the renovation of the historic Reed Whipple Cultural Center.  What fascinated me was the fact that the theater company won a unanimous vote from the Las Vegas City Council last September to lease the building.  According to the article, the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company (LVSC) has been “producing and performing world-class theatre plays and musicals since 2008 … [and] by early 2014, LVSC will continue bringing the Bard to high school students across Clark County through its Shakespeare in the Schools program and staging the beloved Shakespeare-In-The-Park and spring children’s musical for the City of Henderson.”  The mission of the LVSC is to “create a vibrant professional resident theater and cultural arts institution to help promote a better quality of life for all residents of Nevada.”  It sounds like Las Vegas has much more to offer than gambling.  It also sounds like the city council understands the importance of the arts — and Shakespeare — to its community.  Are there any other city councils helping to pave the way for arts development in their communities? 

If you’re headed to Vegas for the NCTE convention this November, it might be a good idea to check out what the Las Vegas Shakespeare Company has in production when you’re there.  And, if you are attending the convention, be sure to visit us in the exhibition hall, and plan to attend one of our sessions.

Read Full Post »