Education & Youth | Elm Shakespeare Company | Arts & Culture | Theater | Youth Arts Journalism Initiative
The company with Director Sarah Bowles (in the sparkly shoes at the front). Claire Armstrong Photo.
In the darker corners of the Kendall Drama Lab, actors entered and waited. Gentle piano drifted over the stage as the young prince Mamillius came running on, catching snow on his tongue and making snow angels on the ground. There was a golden circlet atop his head, the ribbon of his nation tied round his neck and fitted with a bright brooch. Beside him, the queen’s lady in waiting Emilia entered, her hair tied up in a tight bun. She looked on with amusement and exasperation.
Together they played in the snow. From all sides, actors entered to marvel along with them.
Welcome to a fully transportive performance of Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, every seat in the house taken as Elm Shakespeare Company’s Teen Troupe brought the show to Southern Connecticut State University on a recent Friday evening. Directed by Sarah Bowles, director of education at Elm Shakespeare, the work tapped into something fully magical, a testament to both the actors and the creative team that brought it to fruition.
“With six graduating seniors and very talented younger actors, this group had the skill and generosity, they were brave and bold,” said Bowles, who performed in the play her senior year of college, and credits it for helping her understand the Bard. “I could see them in these roles, Fiona [Donahue] as the clown, Willow [Oliveira] as Hermoione, and Glow [Torres] as Leontes. It was staring me in the face, and if I didn’t do it I would be holding back this play because of my fear.”
That starts and ends with the play itself, which tells a story of both loss and immense redemption. Set in a far-away kingdom (although the actors make it feel very close), The Winter’s Tale follows King Leontes of Sicilia (Glow Torres), whose jealousy leads him to believe that his wife, Queen Hermione (Willow Oliveira), has been unfaithful to him with his friend, Polixenes (Sebastian Bianchine). Polixenes, fearing for his life, flees, leaving Hermione with her son, Mamillius (Anna Oppenheimer), and soon her infant daughter, Perdita (Maia Detrani).
With Polixenes’ exit, things don’t go well: his counselor Paulina (Emma Kreidler) tries to reason with the king, but he won’t have any of it. Mamillius collapses and dies of shock, and Hermione soon follows him. Leontes, meanwhile, sends Lord Antigonus (L Rosenthal) into exile with his tiny daughter. When he dies in the angry maw of a bear, a shepherd (also Anna Oppenheimer) and his son (Fiona Donahue) find the infant Perdita and take her in, and the play rolls forward, jumping through time as Leontes tries to find redemption for what he has done.
At left: Emma Kreidler played Paulina, Counselor to Leontes, confidant of Hermione. Middle: Miriam Perry, Anna Oppenheimer, and L Rosenthal. Right: Willow Oliveira and Sebastian Bianchine. Claire Armstrong Photos.
At SCSU, and in Bowles able hands, The Winter’s Tale became filled with all sorts of magic moments, from a tragic trial leading to the death of the queen and her son to the audience chanting Autolycus’ name, clapping on beat, before he ventured into "hiding" in the audience. Unlike many of the shows in the drama lab, this particular performance was done in the round, meaning the audience was seated on all sides of the stage. It gave both audience and actors a sense of being fully there and speaking to everyone in the room—even as they delivered a tale that was centuries old.
From the beginning of the show, actors made it their work to pull members of the audience—and each other—into the story. Actors paced beside the audience, close enough to reach out and touch. When they addressed each other, it seemed as though they might also be talking to the first rows of attendees. When, at one point, Autolycus began to sing, he brought viewers right into the performance, telling one side of the audience to say Autoly-, and the other to say -cus. At another, he used sharp, audible whispers to inform the audience of his inner thoughts, laying his trickery bare.
Many of those choices resonated with the actors, some of whom have been working with Elm Shakespeare since middle school.
“People make you feel welcomed at Elm Shakespeare, you feel like you’re one of them from the beginning,” said Sound School freshman Edie Stoehr, who played Camillo, counselor to Leontes. “Everyone is just so talented. At first I didn’t understand the appeal of The Winter's Tale, but now I understand how the actors bring life to it!”
“I like playing characters that I relate to, it may seem like we don’t have similarities, but really I experience it as the character and the character experiences it as me,” Stoehr added.
At the center (in vest) is Keldan Aronsen, with two audience members who greatly enjoyed his performance and asked for a photo. “My favorite part about Elm Shakespeare is working with those who I have deemed my family, working with people I care about and love to make happy," he said.
That enthusiasm was, it turned out, contagious. Kreidler, who played Paulina, has been with Elm Shakespeare for three years, and performed in five shows in that time. “The Winter's Tale has been one of my favorite shows, and it feels like an honor because it was Sarah's favorite,” Kreidler said.
In the play, Paulina delivers the king’s newborn daughter, cautiously hopeful that “he may soften at the sight of the child.” For the actor, it was a jump into reality, a reminder of what it feels like to be navigating the unknown and hungry for change all at once.
As she took the stage, Kreidler gave a commanding and fierce aura to Paulina, unwilling to bow to a corrupt King. With an unwavering voice, she insisted that Hermione was faithful, that the child belonged to the King regardless of what he believed, and despite his requests to be left alone. It felt natural, this woman casting herself as equal to the King in every way.
In working with Teen Troupe, Kreidler has also developed an interest in education and giving back through the arts, just as Bowles has with Elm Shakespeare for years. “I would love to be a part of something that helps the youth,” she said.
Several actors said they learned through their characters. As Leontes, Torres (pictured at left) had to master how to wear the mask of a loving husband turned cruel tyrant turned repentant father. For Torres, it was a role he was excited and nervous to take on. Two years ago, he was part of a performance of Much Ado About Nothing that Elm Shakespeare and Common Ground High School produced in 2024. He's been excited about theater since.
“It was a way to escape my reality stepping into someone else’s shoes, reality can be too serious, and it’s so easy to mess up, but in acting whatever I say isn’t really me, it’s all a part of the script, and no one gets hurt,” he said.
“I’m still learning things even now,” especially with The Winter’s Tale, Torres continued. “It was just such an honor because it meant so much to Sarah, but when I got King Leontes, I was like ‘Me?!’ I didn’t think I could do it, it was such a difficult role, but Sarah said that no one else could play him, and she believed in me so I believed in her as a director.”
Back on stage, time was bending before the audience’s eyes. In Bohemia and Sicilia alike, 16 years had passed, and characters—the embodiment of time, which members of Elm’s Teen Troupe sort of are in real life, too—moved through the space anew, goddess-like and ready to dance.
Lest the audience have gotten lost, three narrators explained that Perdita had grown up as a daughter of a shepherd, and fallen in love with the young Prince of Bohemia, Florizel (Miriam Perry). As if meeting the words themselves, Detrani and Perry rushed back and forth across the stage trying to reach each other, until they met in the middle and shared an embrace. Simultaneously, a forlorn Leontes and Paulina appeared, laying white flowers on a grave year after year.
“Everyone has so much potential, the younger actors were so talented and dedicated,” said Willow Oliveira, a high school senior who has been with Elm Shakespeare for four years now and done 11 shows. During her time at Elm, she noticed and appreciated that all students are treated equally: members who have been a part of the company longer aren’t expected to do more, and simultaneously the culture of equanimity inspires them to mentor and lead by example.
“When I first started at Elm Shakespeare I didn’t know who I wanted to be or what I wanted to do, but this place was always a comfort and community I could rely on,” she said. It helped her feel more comfortable reaching out to and communicating with people. “When you get to the point where you pretend to be a fairy pretending to be a donkey in front of thousands of people, you begin to think you can do anything.”
“Realistically theater is what made me who I am today,” said Keldan Aronsen, who played Autolycus, echoing that sentiment. “I used to be this small, weak kid who knew nothing of the world or how it worked, and during my time with this company I grew into someone strong, confident and so genuinely Keldan.”
By stepping on stage, coming back again and again, Keldan grew into the person he is today, and wishes to continue acting going forward, whether that’s with Elm Shakespeare or not. Strength is knowing when you don’t know something”
This, of course, was and is the actual, deepest magic of Shakespeare and of the Teen Troupe. Students learn to be storytellers, carrying centuries of language and history with them. They spin tales of springtime, of rebirth and possibility, of life in all its messiness and complexity, into existence in a black box theater that was empty and stark before they arrived. They learn that theater doesn’t fit into one genre, just as life doesn’t. That it’s okay to be sad and grateful at the same time.
But offstage, after the lights have gone down, they also carry those lessons into their classrooms, their conversations, and as they graduate, their colleges and universities. They learn to be fuller people, to connect with each other and to try again, because they’ve done it onstage.
“I’ve told them before but this is a really special group, I wouldn’t have done this play if it wasn’t this group” Bowles said. She added that she waited 23 years to direct this play before finding a cast that was capable of taking on the full script. “It was a joy, a privilege and an honor”
“I hope the audience had fun, eventually. I know the first half can be kind of dark. I hope they took away a sense of magic and wonder and amazement. I hope they took away the tale. Sometimes the world looks so astonishingly beautiful, it seems so super natural. I hope they could see a glimpse of that in our production.”
Claire Armstrong is a senior at Common Ground High School and a graduate of the Arts Council's 2025 Youth Arts Journalism Initiative.