Picture a tiny town in the Sierra Foothills. Many families have lost their jobs. Some have lost their homes to fire. And we are doing Shakespeare.
I have written some version of that sentence every summer for more than a decade, and every summer it is still true, and every summer it still surprises people. What we have is a community center with a parking lot and a highway, a large rock and a tall oak. What we have is little kids and teens trying to do big plays. And what people want to know, when they hear that a four-year-old is in A Midsummer Night's Dream, or that a fourteen-year-old is playing Petruchio, is how. How do children speak that language?
The honest answer is that they speak it faster than we do. The difficulty of Shakespeare is mostly an adult difficulty. We come to the plays having been told they are hard, having been made to sit at a desk and parse them, and we read them with our eyes, silently, which is the one way they were never meant to be met. A child who has not yet been told any of that simply hears it. "Over hill, over dale, thorough bush, thorough brier." A seven-year-old does not need to know what thorough means. She knows what it sounds like, and she knows it is a faerie running, and she is already off across the grass.
Shakespeare was written to be spoken aloud, and children are still mostly aloud. That is the whole secret, if there is one.
The water and the forest
Here is how we actually do it. During the school year, the kids come once a week. They put their cell phones in a basket at the door (I know how much I am asking) and for two hours they belong to the play. Then, when school lets out, we rehearse every day, and much of it happens in the water. It is over a hundred degrees here in July. So we get into the pool and we learn our lines there, tossing a beach ball back and forth across the blue water with the verse riding on it: one line, throw; the next line, catch. You cannot be precious about iambic pentameter when you are trying not to drop a beach ball. The meter goes into the body before it goes into the head, which is where it lived in the first place.
Then we move up into the forest above the community center, where the rock and the oak are, and we find out what the play is. The children's voices get lost out there at first, in the trees and under the highway, and so over the years we have hung curtains from poles to make a little theatre in the meadow, so that their voices have somewhere to land. That is what nearly every campaign we have ever run was for: curtains and costumes. Poles and fabric. Somewhere to stand and something to wear, and the words do the rest.
What they teach us
The thing I did not expect, thirty years ago, was how much the traffic runs the other way.
Children are not embarrassed by feeling. A grown actor playing Juliet has to work to get back to the state a thirteen-year-old is simply in. A boy playing Petruchio does not know that the part is supposed to be difficult, so he does the only thing available, which is to mean it. And they are not embarrassed by size. Shakespeare's people speak in enormous sentences about enormous things, and a nine-year-old finds this perfectly reasonable, because his own feelings are enormous and nobody has been letting him say so.
The old jokes land fresh, too. Four-hundred-year-old jokes. The kids find them without being told where they are, because they are listening for the sound of a joke rather than reading for the reference. When our Comedy of Errors played to packed houses one June, with little ones sitting on sheets and blankets in front of the front row, the audience was giggling before anyone had explained a thing.
We are one of the very few activities left that relies on nothing but the kids' voices, minds, and hearts. We are unplugged. They get to see what they can do, free of technology, with only the words and each other. What a gift. And I mean a gift to me.
Partly saved
I used to say, half as a joke, that these kids are "partly saved by doing Shakespeare." We have watched children rise up out of this little town and go to Stanford, to Berkeley, to Princeton, to Vassar, to Cornell. I do not think Shakespeare gets them in. I think something else happens, and the plays are where it happens.
Some years ago, during one of our summer campaigns, a donation came in from a woman who had been our very first Juliet, back in 1998. She is a professor now, and she gave me permission to quote what she wrote:
"I don't think I would have expected this much for myself, in terms of having a fulfilling job and life, without models like you around me as a child. I may have been alright, but I certainly wouldn't have flourished growing up in Oregon House without you and acting. When people ask me how I decided to do what I do, the story always begins with how I grew up doing Shakespeare plays with my friends."
With my friends. That is the part I hold on to. Not with a teacher, not in a class. Shakespeare, spoken aloud by children in a meadow, is a thing children do together, and it turns out that a person who has stood on a rock at ten years old and said "The course of true love never did run smooth" to a hillside full of neighbors has learned something about her own voice that does not come out again.
Sometimes I am paid for my teaching with greens from a parent's garden. It has been this way for many years, and I hope it continues for many more. I can no other answer make but thanks, and thanks, and ever thanks.
Where this came from
Sources drawn on: the campaign stories and updates for Saving Kids With Shakespeare (2012, 2017), Stay Hungry! Stay Foolish! Do Shakespeare! (2018), Comedy of Errors / Romeo and Juliet / Peter Pan (2019), Masked Theatre Warriors (2021), Twelfth Night (2023), Romeo and Juliet (2024), Summer Festival of Light (2025). The Juliet letter is quoted from the June 18, 2018 campaign update, where Mari noted she had permission to share it; confirm that permission extends to the website.