Actors' Shakespeare Project

Cambridge, Massachusetts

Actors' Shakespeare Project believes Shakespeare's words are urgently relevant to current times. Working as an ensemble of resident company members, they bring their words into the voices, bodies, and imaginations of their actors, audiences, and neighborhoods. The company performs these resonant, relevant plays in unconventional neighborhood spaces throughout Boston and Cambridge–courtrooms, meeting houses, cathedrals, and garages–none of them seating more than 200 people. Each production serves as the centerpiece of a much larger project: a multi-layered community outreach built around the play, in order to crack it open and create new relationships and meaning for audiences. These projects inspire civic dialogue, build relationships between people, strengthen communities, and reveal something about what it means to be human, here and now. Actors' Shakespeare Project's goal is to make Shakespeare not just accessible to modern audiences, but essential to them. Shakespeare's plays are not pageants or costume dramas; they are intimate struggles among very human people for love, influence, and power. Stripped of elaborate concepts and technical wizardry, what remains is sheer, rough magic–the power of the language, the acting, and the story. Shakespeare is an education, and education is essential to Actors' Shakespeare Project's mission. Education Director Lori Taylor creates the many outreach efforts constructed around each play. This work is brought to life, in schools and out, by a strong corps of actors who are also renowned teaching artists at Boston 's universities and conservatories. The company's in-the-schools programs include artistic residencies, workshops, artist visits, open rehearsals, courthouse performances, matinees, and talkbacks centered around four main stage productions each year. In 2008–2009, Actors' Shakespeare Project's in-the-schools programs will reach approximately 2,700 students from roughly 55 schools across Eastern Massachusetts.

Actors' Shakespeare Project's Shakespeare for a New Generation project will serve 350 students from 12 schools that are underserved economically, programmatically, or geographically in Boston, Cambridge, Cape Cod and the Islands, rural Middlesex County, and adolescents in the custody of the Massachusetts Department of Youth Services. Project activities will be oriented around the fall 2008 production of The Merchant of Venice and the spring 2009 production of Much Ado About Nothing, and will include lesson plans designed by an English and history curriculum specialist; school-based artist visits from a team of teaching artists to prepare for the students' trip to the play, focusing on exploring the text, understanding the play, and getting the words off the page; open rehearsals, including a company meet-and-greet and an introduction by the play's director; tickets and transportation to a student matinee performance of either or both productions; actor talkbacks following the play; and post-show multi-school workshops including acting, Shakespeare's language, and movement and fight, using acting exercises and games to further illuminate the play and characters and relate them to the students' lives.

Visit them at: www.actorsshakespeareproject.org