Utah Shakespearean Festival brings Bard to area students

Kimberley McGee

Friday, Feb. 15, 2002 | 9:48 a.m.

The Bard is back.

And area schoolchildren are lapping up the legendary dramatist's works for the 10th year in a row.

The Utah Shakespearean Festival's annual education tour recently came to Las Vegas to perform for local middle and high school students.

Its 11-day Las Vegas stay culminates with a performance of "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for the general public today and Saturday at the Community College of Southern Nevada's Nicholas J. Horn Theatre.

On a recent afternoon Charlotte Freeman, drama director at Chaparral High School, attended a performance by USF for four area schools at the Horn Theatre.

As members of USF spoke Shakespeare's more than 400-year-old words onstage, the students in the audience bobbed their heads to the cadence of the Bard's signature iambic pentameter, Freeman said.

"(Students) get (Shakespeare) when they see it onstage," Freeman said. "Acting brings all those wonderful words to life. They seem to catch the rhythm of the language when they see it onstage."

The annual education program by USF is important for area students, Freeman said, because for some it is their only introduction to live theater.

"Theater makes them more aware of the beauty around them," Freeman said. "It makes them see joy."

That is the ultimate goal of USF's education outreach program, said Michael Don Bahr, a Utah English teacher and director for USF's Education Tour.

"The tour has the power to change lives," Bahr said. "We show them theater and what all we can do onstage."

After each play actors engage the student audience in a 75-minute question-and-answer session. They offer their insights into a character's motivation and explain the play's deeper meanings.

The text of Shakespeare may seem cumbersome, Bahr said, but children seem to understand the punch of certain phrases and the hidden meaning behind speeches.

For instance, the phrases "cantankerous blossom" or "bunch-backed toad," uttered by Puck in "A Midsummer Night's Dream," describe the object as well as the feeling the character has for that object.

"There is no weak, mealy mouthed, simple verse here," Bahr said. "Shakespeare uses a loaded language. When you say the words, they sound like what they are. There's color in the language."

The actors also conduct 45-minute workshops about how to develop characters through improvisation, stage combat scenes and perform Shakespeare to further pull the students into the playwright's style.

"Shakespeare is fun, frolicky and accessible to all ages," Bahr said. "What's more fun than fairies, forest folk and donkeys?"