The Teachings of Shakespeare
By Anastasia Stanmeyer
FALL FESTIVAL OF SHAKESPEARE, NOW IN ITS 35TH YEAR, IS AS MUCH ABOUT THE PROCESS AS IT IS THE PERFORMANCES
Monument Mountain students just before performing Henry V
The Fall Festival of Shakespeare may very well be one of the greatest achievements of Shakespeare & Company. This year marks the 35th year of the festival in which 11 schools perform Shakespeare plays for all to enjoy. During the course of ten weeks, preparations and rehearsals build up to a roaring weekend of the Bard by our talented youth as they take the stage, school by school, at the Lenox home of Shakespeare & Company.
Posters already can be found in the schools, morning announcements are being made, even a one-minute video clip of a documentary is being shown of the Fall Festival of Shakespeare program to excite and entice students. (A full-length documentary, Speak What We Feel, was screened at the Berkshire International Film Festival a few years ago and will be released to a wider audience at a later date.) Perhaps the biggest push comes from the upperclassmen who talk about the program, encouraging their peers to check it out and join the fun. They visit classes ranging from English, drama, history, even AP calculus, as well as make their case at student assemblies.
Shakespeare & Company Education Programs Manager Megan Marchione sits with Director of Education Kevin G. Coleman.
The schools taking part in the Fall Festival of Shakespeare include Mount Everett Regional School in Sheffield, Monument Mountain Regional High School in Great Barrington, Berkshire Waldorf High School in Stockbridge, Lee Middle and High School, Lenox Memorial Middle & High School, Taconic High School in Pittsfield, Mount Greylock Regional School in Williamstown, Pittsfield High School, Springfield Central High School, Chatham High School, and Taconic Hills Jr./Sr. High School in Craryville, New York. Phew!
The ambitious and highly successful project starts with 22 directors in training for a week beginning September 12, as well as in-school meetings with school liaisons and administrators. They then fan out in pairs to each of the schools and get to know the students who have signed up for the festival. They pick a play they think would interest the students, and then the directors cast it as quick as they can. Rehearsals follow, and then the plays are staged in the schools the week of November 6 before moving on to the “big stage” at Shakespeare & Company. It’s intense and fun; it’s a whirlwind and a memorable experience all around.
On any given year, between 400 and 500 students make up a Fall Festival of Shakespeare. During the “festival proper,” they’ll have a three-hour tech at the Tina Packer Playhouse at Shakespeare & Company. That’s when the students get to walk the space and experience what it’s like there. They will go through any music, dance calls, or stage fights, for safety reasons, and then they’ll have another rehearsal in their school before the curtains go up for the Fall Festival Weekend Performances from November 16–19.
Any student can do the festival, says Shakespeare & Company Director of Education Kevin Coleman. They don’t have to be an honor student. They don’t have to be the most athletic or artistic or cutest in their class. They don’t have to be great at anything or perceive themselves as being great at anything. “You don’t have to be anything; you just be yourself,” he says. “And if you don’t know who you are yet, then sometimes that starts to become apparent when you work on a program like this. Students are invited into the group as they are.”
Some might think the language of the plays can be challenging. Not so. The students are given the skills to tackle that— and eventually, they are wanting more. Perhaps the bigger challenge is shaking off the urge to be competitive. This is a cooperative, collaborative model of putting on a Shakespeare play, and what the students realize is that instead of pitting themselves against each other, they just work hard and play even harder.
“Be not afraid of greatness …. Some men are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them.” (Twelfth Night.) The “greatness” of the Fall Festival of Shakespeare is its impact. “Teachers have seen how it benefits students and how it even changes the culture of the school,” says Coleman. Students invite their teachers, their parents, and their school custodians to sit in on the rehearsals and come to the shows. “They’re not like ‘Don’t come in here while we’re rehearsing.’ It’s more like, ‘Come on in, come on in and see what we’re doing.’ It’s much more different than the typical drama club model.”
Coleman is the instigator of the Fall Festival. By the time he graduated from NYU’s intensive acting program, he had never done any Shakespeare. “I could do Sam Shepard standing on my head,” he recalls. Then he was invited to play Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox. “I think the top of my head blew off when I was working on that role,” he says in true low-key form. “I discovered there was so much more going on in a Shakespeare play than there was in the modern or contemporary plays I was working on. I wanted more and more of this experience, so I stayed here, trained here in rhetoric, in text work, in stage combat, even in clown.”
Coleman is one of the company’s founding members; first he was an actor and then a teacher and director. “I knew that the company had this umbrella over three ambitious projects: performance, training, and education, but no one is doing anything with education except running matinees where kids got bused in, or going into classroom to talk about whatever play the students were reading,” he says. “I thought that if kids started doing Shakespeare, like what I had done, if they started doing it instead of reading it and writing papers and taking tests, they would get really excited.”
Coleman was onto something. This former Jesuit teacher was inspired by Shakespeare & Company’s professional training program in which actors from all over the world came to train. (Many have gone on to start their own Shakespeare companies worldwide.) Coleman was motivated to educate the younger population because of the difference it made to him.
“I think we started out making about every mistake one could make,” Coleman jokes, “and then made variations on those mistakes until we finally learned, oh, this is how we can do it.”
They started with Lenox Memorial Middle & High School in 1988 and then added Mount Greylock the next year. Lenox performed The Taming of the Shrew, and Greylock did Romeo and Juliet. The kids asked if they could come together to see each others’ plays.
“They were so proud of their shows,” Coleman recalls. “And just as important, they were such receptive audiences for the other school. They cheered for each other. I thought we could raise the status of the performance by coming together in a third space, a theater space, and then open it to the public, not just friends and family. The stakes went way up, and the whole energy around it went way up. We thought, let’s keep inviting high schools to be a part of this. And then the next year there were four schools. And then six schools and then it went to 10, and now 11.”
One year, they did almost all the histories in a festival. There’s often two Romeo and Juliets or two Hamlets. Another year, they had three Midsummers spread throughout the festival week.
Why only perform Shakespeare? “Because Shakespeare is the best,’” says Coleman. “The breadth of the stories, the depth of how human nature is presented on stage, what he does with language, the insights into human nature. He’s the most-produced playwright in the world every year, 400 years later. If you think of just one of the plays he wrote—Hamlet or Macbeth or Julius Caesar or Romeo and Juliet or Twelfth Night or Midsummer—his reputation as a playwright would be secure for all time.
“There’s something for each person in almost every character, because Shakespeare is that humane. He’s expansive; he’s welcoming. I think it’s because Shakespeare spent his life being an actor. Every day, he was on stage. Every day, he was in rehearsal or performance. And Shakespeare played the little characters; the minor characters got some of the best lines, the most memorable lines. He was no dummy. He was a theater person; he knew what worked. In addition to being a playwright, he spent his time as a poet, trying to take the deepest dive into revealing human nature.”
Some might say that Shakespeare is a challenge for students. “But these students are far more mature than I am,” says Education Programs Manager Megan Marchione, who works alongside Coleman to produce the Fall Festival. “There is a character for every student. There is a story. There was a student who played a villain, and he said he couldn’t relate to him because he’s not that type of person. And then he says, ‘Well, okay, maybe he’s a little bit like me.’ Through our character work and through the lack of competition and just meeting them at their level, we really break down characters and get to the humanity of these people. Through that process, we’re also learning about ourselves.”
Some of the Shakespeare & Company Fall Festival directors have been doing this for two decades; others will be brand-new this year. Marchione has been working full-time at Shakespeare & Company since 2017. She started much earlier than that with the company—25 years ago as a Fall Festival student beginning in seventh grade at Mount Everett. And she was even younger when she saw her first Shakespeare performance at seven years old, when her older siblings were in the Fall Festival. The director of Mount Everett at the time was Andrew Borthwick-Leslie, who currently works with the training department at Shakespeare & Company. He would invite her to watch rehearsals, making her feel very much a part of the productions. “They were huge into talking with the audience. They’d break that fourth wall. There were people on stage who were rehearsing and speaking to me, and that was really moving,” says Marchione.
The crew of a Shakespeare play includes not only the actors; technicians are equally important. For example, Berkshire Waldorf had a dozen actors last year and 20 students as stage managers; tech, set, and sound designers; and working on props and costumes.
The Fall Festival can costume up to 30 actors per school. That adds up to roughly 300 pairs of shoes, 200 pants, and 100 dresses. The number of cast members varies, with as few as 12 students on stage—which is more than enough—or as many as 40. Shakespeare plays can be done with six or seven actors. “That’s what the Elizabethans did,” says Coleman. “We think they closed the theaters in the winter or because of the plague. They could send out traveling companies that had six or seven actors playing multiple parts.” At Springfield Central, there was a whopping 90 students involved in last year’s production.They nudged the number of performers up to 36 or 37 actors that year.
For schools with middle school students in the mix (Mount Greylock, Mount Everett, and Lee), they’re usually dressed in street clothes and involved in what’s called a “dumb show,” or a pre-show. (For instance, they might do The Mouse Trap before the high schoolers do Hamlet.) A few years ago, Lee had a huge group of seventh graders. What did they do? The students were all a part of the chorus and were responsible for the elaborate scene changes.
“We really work with the students that we have,” says Marchione, “and the directors are so wonderful at coming up with ways to include them.” That is the most important aspect of the Fall Festival, and many students are changed from the experience. Marchione definitely was. “I went into theater stage management because of my experience in the Fall Festival, where there is a system in which we can actually all work together toward the same goal and still retain our individuality,” she says.
For instance, a student might not speak at all during the entire rehearsal process, and then their parent later tells the directors that their child came home talking nonstop about how much they love this program. “We have parents coming up to us in tears saying, ‘You saved my daughter. My daughter had completely withdrawn and just stayed in her room,’” says Coleman. “One of the directors saw that student in the hallway and just happened to ask her if she wanted to be in a play. She came and kind of stuck her toe in it, then later walked into the room, stayed in the back of the auditorium, and just watched. The next day, she came and sat a little closer to the stage. And the next day, she came and sat even closer. The director asked, ‘Can you be in the scene?’ Bit by bit, she got involved. And because of the ethic of how we work, the other students really welcomed her. She just blossomed.”
Lesson to be learned: “You don’t need to train for years as a professional actor to have an authentic experience of this art form,” says Coleman. “You’re not performing a feeling; you’re having the feeling and speaking out of it. Here, the students have a space, and they’re so hungry for it. This is a place where they not only can talk about how they feel, it’s valued, it’s appreciated, it’s celebrated. Does this change them? How can it not? We’re really clear: We’re just going there to do a play. We’re not there to bring them enlightenment, to raise their consciousness, to be their therapist or counselor. We’re there to do a play. Let Shakespeare do that work. Let working on a play do that work.”
Come on, what is really the goal of the Fall Festival?
“Honestly, I just want them to do a play, and all these other benefits start emerging,” Coleman says. “Their emotional intelligence increases. Their social skills wildly increase. Their care for each other increases. It changes the atmosphere, the culture of a school. It’s startling. They speak up in class more than they ever had because of this experience. They meet kids from other schools and they’re not afraid of them or not competing with them and needing to be better than they are. They get interested in them. They’re more interested in meeting others, in welcoming others, because of this experience.”
Adds Marchione: ”When they don’t have an opportunity to be bigger than themselves, to be more outgoing, to be more courageous, a little bit more cooperative with others, to be more creative thinking and imaginative, those things just don’t develop. You don’t learn to be outgoing unless you have an opportunity to practice being outgoing to other people. They’ve had the experience of working in a healthy way in an ensemble. They’ve had an experience of leaving the space better than they found it.”
Does it ever get old? Are you kidding? Yes, the staff at Shakespeare & Company works 90 hours the week of the Fall Festival. Yes, they stay every night until midnight changing over, cleaning up, getting ready for the next day. No, they don’t get enough sleep. Nor enough food. Nor enough of anything. But yes, it’s the highlight of their year. “It doesn’t matter how exhausted we are,” says Marchione, “we come in here, and we are just as delighted.”
Shakespeare & Company is arguably the first theater company to widely implement this non-competitive model of Shakespeare as an educational tool. Through years of experience, they have become much more skillful at teaching and directing, at uncovering the layers of Shakespeare plays and understanding adolescent psychology. “We have our own language. We have our own approach. We have our own years of aesthetic and philosophy,” says Coleman. He has traveled extensively to train teachers throughout the country to begin their own fall festivals, like in Atlanta; Portland, Oregon; Portland, Maine; the middle of Indiana where four high schools did a festival at a university there.
Monument Mountain Regional High School performs Henry V. PHOTOGRAPHED BY JIMMY iENNER, JR. / POST-PRODUCTION BY OLD MILL ROAD MEDIA
Coleman and Marchione’s focus is right here in the Berkshires from now until Thanksgiving. They have reached their maximum of 11 schools for the Fall Festival with the addition of Pittsfield High last year. The plays have been shortened to 75 to 90 minutes in length to fit them all in a weekend, and they don’t want them to go any shorter.
“We have to get one show out, another show in, and it’s quite the operation,” says Marchione, who does all the coordinating. She has the schedule down to 15-minute increments for Shakespeare & Company’s 22 directors, six costumers, five tech people, and the volunteers over a seven-day period. Add to that the students, the buses, and the parents.
“The parents are wonderful,” says Marchione. “This is an incredibly generous community.” And Shakespeare is teaching that, too. The performances might very well be the highlight of the 10-week program, but the process is what is so enriching all around. ■
The public is invited to the Fall Festival of Shakespeare at Shakespeare & Company from Thursday, November 16, to Sunday, November 19. The shows also will be live-streamed on CTSB TV. For more information and for tickets, go to shakespeare.org.