Overcoming Shakes-fear

Anne Hosier

Friday, Feb. 20, 1998 | 9:03 a.m.

Passion, betrayal, blood, lust, fighting in the streets.

Shakespeare's plays have it all.

But wading through the Elizabethan vernacular, iambic pentameter and medieval political references to get at the juicy heart of a Shakespeare tale isn't always an easy feat -- especially not for members of the MTV generation who often are soured on the Bard's prose before they've even begun to unravel its meaning.

That's why local teachers have been eagerly awaiting today's return of the Shakespeare on the Road troupe. Each spring, the actors and producers from the Utah Shakespearean Festival take to the road for 10 weeks, stopping at high schools and community centers throughout the Southwest to teach workshops and stage their 90-minute adaptation of a Shakespeare play.

The actors bring life and meaning to Shakespeare's classic tales of unrequited love, divided loyalties, parental pressure and rebellion, says Chrystal Thomas, a seventh-grade reading teacher at Kenny Guinn Middle School, who took students to last year's production of "Hamlet," and plans to take 160 more students to this year's staging of "Romeo and Juliet," Shakespeare's tale of star-crossed lovers.

"If I can find a back door to teaching the classics, I'll use it," she says. "Because with today's kids, the front door is locked."

"In drama you reach souls of kids you don't get in any other way," agrees Tracy Spencer, a seventh-grade English teacher at the Barbara and Hank Greenspun Junior High School in Henderson, who took her students to "Hamlet" last year.

This morning the actors gave a performance at Durango High School before setting out for Pahrump, where they'll play Pahrump Valley High School tonight and Saturday. On Monday, they'll return to Las Vegas, and begin a two-week stint at the Community College of Southern Nevada (CCSN), staging two performances a day for local middle- and high school students, and offering workshops on acting, set design and other Shakespeare-related topics.

The evening shows on March 5 and 6 will be open to the public.

But Wendy Riggs, director of CCSN's Performing Arts Center who created Schoolfest -- the program that is hosting Shakespeare on the Road -- emphasizes that the program's main goal is to reach school-aged kids, especially those who otherwise wouldn't have a chance to see such a production.

(Now in its second year, Schoolfest has been expanded to include performances for kids in kindergarten through sixth grade. "Frog and Toad," a production based on the Caldecott Honor Book by Arnold Lobel, will be offered later this spring.)

"This is a way to expose them to live theater," she says. "With this type of arts education, kids do better in all their disciplines."

Gary Armagnac, the Utah Shakespearean Festival's director of education and artist-in-residence, who directs this year's production of "Romeo and Juliet," also hopes to ignite in these kids a love for Shakespeare.

"Just know there's going to be a scrawny little girl sitting in the 18th row whose life is going to be changed forever by this," Armagnac told his weary group of actors last year during a rehearsal for "Hamlet."

Even, he said, if it's "just one."

Armagnac and his troupe members -- whom he selected from more than 500 actors at auditions in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago and San Francisco -- bring a freshness and sense of passion to their interpretation of Shakespeare that is too often lacking in English classes.

"The actors are young, and many times they'll talk about how they hated Shakespeare when they were in school," Thomas says. "And then, (the kids) begin to see how, even though it's 400 years old, it's still relevant.

"So they do a lot in involving the kids."

During their performances, the actors use their body language and facial expressions to interpret their lines in a way that appeals to modern, young audiences.

"If a production is done well, if the actors are doing their job, it's very, very clear, and very accessible," Armagnac says.

And the kids "just go crazy for it. I think because Shakespeare taps into a universal appeal. He talks about things in the plays that everyone can identify with, and with a very youthful appeal."

In the workshops the actors teach when they're not performing, students explore the basic emotions that drive the characters in the plays.

"You're the king, Hamlet wants to kill you," an actor cast as Polonius explains during one such exercise that was captured on "Shakes: Rattle and Roll," an MTV-style video documentary filmed during last year's "Hamlet" tour.

A student sits blindfolded onstage, holding a paper bat, while another student, as part of the exercise, tries to grab a glove off the floor near the first student's feet without getting swatted. "Nobody every said life was easy," the actor jokes. "But if you get that glove, you'll live, you'll get the revenge." He turns to the watching students. "What is this called?" He pauses, and looks at the students gathered around him.

"Conflict."

Besides exploring the darker side of human nature, Shakespeare's plays offer a venue for learning about virtually any subject, Armagnac says.

One teacher in Canada has even devised an entire second-grade curriculum around the Bard's works. (The teacher lives in Stratford, Ontario, home of a prominent Shakespeare festival, where all the schools are named after Shakespeare's plays.) The teacher, who teaches at "Hamlet School," has her students stage their own production and design their own costumes and sets.

She also uses the study of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," with its references to various types of plants, as an opportunity for the class to explore botany.

"Soup to nuts," Armagnac says."Shakespeare offers everybody a wonderful cross-curriculum tool."

When Armagnac first took over the Shakespeare on the Road program in 1995, the troupe only offered around a dozen performances at schools in the Salt Lake City area.

"It was sort of a pilot program at that point, but suddenly I was getting calls from Arizona, New Mexico and California, all over the place," he says. "So we decided to expand the tour."

In only a few years, the program's bookings have skyrocketed to between 75 and 90 performances during a 10-week tour. "It's really exploded," Armagnac says.

One reason is that live theater is such a rare luxury in many parts -- even though the tradition of traveling Shakespeare troupes dates back to pioneer days.

"Pahrump is one of our favorite places to play," Armagnac says. 'They don't get an awful lot in the way of cultural events touring their neighborhood. It's really a treat to go out there -- the people are just dying for it."

Another reason undoubtedly is the troupe's unique ability to make Shakespeare appealing to kids. After all, "Shakespeare was meant to be seen, not read," says Gary Sessa, theater director for Las Vegas High School.

Initially some kids cringe at the prospect of sitting through a play by the famous playwright. "The language it is formidable," Spencer admits. And the actors understand this: after all they were in high school once themselves.

Armagnac, for one, has bleak memories of high school English class in which students were "taught" Shakespeare by being forced to listen to two actors in "Julius Caesar" warble their lines on a portable record player. At the end of the week, the teacher gave an exam that didn't count. "Everyone in the class thought, obviously this is worth absolutely nothing."

But when he got to college, he found otherwise. "I discovered, 'Oh my gosh, there's something really good here, this could be really exciting.' "

Now, "it's part of my mission in life to help teachers get over what we call 'Shakes-fear,' " he says. "To try to get 'em over that speed bump, that it's not a foreign language and it's not difficult to teach, and when you give kids a few simple tools, they take to it like ducks to water."

In "Shakes: Rattle and Roll," one actor offers this explanation of why he agreed to take to the road in a cramped minivan, live out of a suitcase and eat meals from drive-thru windows to perform before groups of often impassive teenagers.

"I thought I could make a difference ... this could be a gift that lasts a lifetime."

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