Shakespeare & Company

Lenox, Massachusetts

Founded in 1978, Shakespeare & Company is a classical theater company dedicated to excellence in performance, education, and training. With a core of more than 150 artists, the company produces innovative and accessible Shakespeare performances that hold language at their center. Shakespeare & Company also produces new works of political and social significance, and, in 2008, inaugurated the Elayne P. Bernstein Theatre while simultaneously expanding the performance season to 10 months. With an international reputation for providing original, in-depth, classical theater training, the company combines Linklater voice work, text analysis, Alexander movement, fight, dance, clown, and innovative techniques to offer a unique exploration of the actor/audience relationship. It has been working in classrooms and after-school programs for more than 30 years, reaching teachers and students through year-round performances, workshops, and residencies. Core programming includes an extensive nine-week Fall Festival of Shakespeare and a 15-week New England Tour of Shakespeare. Identified by the President's Committee on the Arts and Humanities, the GE Foundation, and MacArthur Foundation as a “champion of change,” Shakespeare & Company's programs have been recommended by Harvard University's Project Zero for replication across the country. In addition to receiving the prestigious 2005 Commonwealth Award from the state of Massachusetts, the company also received the 2006 Coming Up Taller Award in recognition of its pioneering work with adjudicated juvenile offenders through the Shakespeare in the Courts program.

As part of the Shakespeare for a New Generation, Shakespeare & Company will produce Julius Caesar for its 2010 New England Tour of Shakespeare, reaching students and teachers from nearly 150 schools throughout the Northeast. The tour will involve seven professional actors and is similar to the Elizabethan touring productions that traveled the countryside each time the plague shook London and city officials closed the playhouses. These productions consisted of small casts of players, each of whom played multiple roles, and performed scripts that were adapted accordingly. The New England Tour performances for students will emphasize Shakespeare's language and the relationship between the actors and the audience; each performance will conclude with a post-show forum soliciting students' take on the play and its characters, motives, beliefs, and more. In addition, the actors conduct performance workshops that give students an opportunity to become the actors as they create their own Shakespeare performance. Other educational activities explore the actor/audience relationship, giving students a sense of what it means to rehearse a play and teaching them that there is no “right way” in performance. A study guide will be developed to accompany the play, and addressing curriculum frameworks and standards to help teachers prepare students for the performance.

Educational Residencies for Juvenile Offenders

Shakespeare in the Courts, a collaboration with the Berkshire Juvenile Court, is designed to replicate the renowned work the Company does with students in the Fall festival with at-risk teens. By exploring Shakespeare and his language and experiencing respect, collaboration, and a sense of accomplishment, the program aspires to be a sustained corrective for the destructive aspects of these adolescents’ lives. Their success is earned with great personal investment and courage. A 2006 national Coming Up Taller Award recipient, Shakespeare in the Courts realized a milestone by replicating the program at a second location in 2008, adding a third in 2009. 

Visit them at: www.shakespeare.org