Education & Youth | Educational Center for the Arts | Elm Shakespeare Company | Arts & Culture | New Haven Public Schools | Waterbury | Common Ground | New Haven Academy
Top: Max Hoffman, a senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School and a member of Elm Shakespeare's Teen Troupe, as Duncan. Bottom: Emma Kreidler and Glow Torres. Lucy Gellman Photos.
The king was dead, but the porter didn’t know that yet, and the knocking all seemed like a bit much this early in the morning. On stage, actor Max Hoffman glided towards a door frame, with a kind of campy air that brought Chappell Roan to Inverness. He sighed, exasperated, and the sound was enough to break the suspense.
“Here's a knocking indeed!” he said. “If a man were porter of hell-gate, he should have old turning the key.” He turned back to the audience, a glint in his eye. “Knock, knock, knock!” A beat, then a few hesitant giggles. He smiled tightly, then tried it again.
“Knock knock?”
“Who’s there!” five dozen voices shouted back, and he raised his chin at the exchange. “I, the name of Beelzebub?” In the audience, the laughter became more pronounced, expectant even.
Friday night and again on Saturday, that spirited back-and-forth embodied the third annual Youth Festival of Shakespeare, a love letter to New Haven youth, sixteenth-century prose, and the enduring spirit of the Bard from Elm Shakespeare Company and several teaching artists across New Haven. A collaboration with New Haven Academy, Common Ground High School, the ACES Educational Center for the Arts and Elm Shakespeare’s Teen Troupe, it showed the transformation that can happen when students suspend judgement, stop competing, and celebrate each other instead.
All performances took place at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury. In total, 65 students participated, with an additional seven from Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School who came out to watch, and several Naugatuck Valley students and Southern Connecticut State University (SCSU) alumni who helped run tech.
Top: Elm Shakespeare Education Director Sarah Bowles, who dreamed the festival into being after experiencing a similar one at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass. Bottom: Aleeki Shortridge as Aegeon and Na’Miah Williams as Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus in Common Ground High School's The Comedy of Errors.
“Students are consistently in competition to have the best grades, to get into the best college, to have the most Instagram followers … we just have enough of that in this town,” said Sarah Bowles, director of education at Elm Shakespeare, as she made the 45-minute drive from New Haven to Waterbury Friday. “I think it’s a revolutionary act to truly celebrate someone else’s success. Our success does not depend on someone else’s failure.”
The festival’s growth has been years in the making. Like Producing Artistic Director Rebecca Goodheart, who has led Elm Shakespeare since 2015, Bowles previously worked at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., under the mentorship of Education Director Kevin G. Coleman. Coleman, a founding member of that company, has led a youth Shakespeare festival for years; it currently reaches 10 schools and hundreds of students in Massachusetts.
When Bowles left Shakespeare & Company for New Haven in 2017, she knew she wanted to recreate the program. Coleman, who is all about Shakespeare being performed instead of presented as dust-covered, history-drenched literature, gave it his blessing. So when a grant from the Seedlings Foundation allowed Elm to expand its footprint in the schools a few years ago, that vision suddenly became possible.
“I was hoping that it would catch,” and it did, said Bowles, the emotion audible in her voice. After the festival’s first year, New Haven Academy joined a roster that included Common Ground, ACES ECA and Elm’s Teen Troupe. Next year, the organization is hoping to bring on four more high schools. “It’s the most meaningful thing to me that I do for my job. I take the festival with me in everything I do.”
So, it seems, do the dozens of young people and educators who are now part of its merry and poetic (and sometimes macabre) scaffolding. As they piled into vans behind the John Lyman Center for the Performing Arts on Friday afternoon, a few students chatted with each other, trading anecdotes as they shook off pre-performance jitters and prepared to slip into character.
Some, like ECA’s Rowan Simonelli, weren’t performing that night at all, but had come to support their peers before their own time in the spotlight. Others, like Common Ground’s Tiffany Scott and Leila Breland-Shinn, tried to get into the zone. That’s part of the festival’s code of honor: you show up for other students, just as they show up for you. Breland-Shinn, a freshman who played Aemilia and Dr. Pinch in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, later said that the role helped her learn “how to be quick on my feet,” and make the mental switch from one character to another quickly.
“I think it’s a nice idea,” Scott chimed in of the festival. “You can, like, make new friends without getting judged. I’m nervous, but kind of not nervous too.”
Elsewhere, actors worked together to problem solve as castmate Wesley Bianchine called out at the 11th hour, incapacitated not by stage combat or witchy predictions, but by cold and flu season. From her seat, 12-year-old Anna Oppenheimer—already playing Fléance and one of the witches in Macbeth—ran the lines for Macduff's son, a minor but endearing character who lays bare the sheer cruelty of Macbeth’s quest for the throne.
By the time she stepped onstage two hours later, she was off book, with an understanding of the child’s chirping, sweet-voiced reasoning that made it seem like she’d been cast for the role weeks before. In the play, it is the murder of Macduff’s family that sets into motion the long-awaited undoing of Macbeth, who has gone on a power-hungry rampage from which no one is spared.
“It kind of taught me to be more confident in myself,” Oppenheimer said after the show. “I was really stressed out but I did it.”
“It was insane, and it was incredible,” chimed in Hoffman, a senior at Cooperative Arts & Humanities High School, who watched Oppenheimer take on the character in under two hours.
Top: Cast members in The Comedy of Errors. Bottom: Students including Emely Lebron made the trek out to Waterbury for both nights of the festival. Here, they warm up with theater games from ECA teacher, director and actor Ben Curns, who Saturday directed students from ECA in As You Like It.
That was fully on display for all of Friday evening, with back-to-back homages to the Bard that kept audiences out well past 10 p.m. As Macbeth’s opening hour drew closer, students streamed into the lobby of the college’s Fine Arts Center, nibbling on pizza as Bowles announced each group, and students burst into undulating, thunderous drumrolls for each other. As over 120 hands eagerly beat the tables, the sound bloomed into cheers and applause.
As Macbeth’s cast slipped backstage to get into costume, other students formed a long, misshapen oval in the lobby and began by passing around the word “Forsooth!” like a verbal wave. As they gradually added more commands (credit to educator, actor and director Ben Curns, who teaches at ECA) the circle became a space of giddy laughter, students bouncing back and forth as they got to know their neighbors from other schools.
“It’s like an awesome and weird space,” said Glow Torres, a senior at Common Ground who joined Teen Troupe after doing Much Ado About Nothing at school last year. By the end of the night, Torres had appeared in two shows, stepping in for an actor who was sick in Common Ground’s Comedy of Errors. “It’s a place for me to get away from reality. I get to step into the shoes of another person, and I’ve learned a lot of team building.”
“I think it’s [the festival] a wonderful thing,” they added. “It seems to be an extra welcoming space. It feels like a family reunion.”
That translated to the stage—and the audience—where students laughed, shrieked, gasped, and talked back to their peers for the next three hours, most of them sitting shoulder-to-shoulder in rows at the front of the house. As the Teen Troupe kicked off the evening with Macbeth, the cast took a moment to introduce itself with no words at all, stepping toward the lip of the stage as actors’ faces caught in the light.
Top: Isonnette O’Brien as Lady Macbeth. Bottom: Anna Oppenheimer and Sebastian Bianchine.
Hoffman-as-Duncan, chin up at a slight angle, seemed to foreshadow his own imminent misfortune. Half cloaked in shadow behind him, Banquo (Sebastian Bianchine) got into the zone, ready to deliver a performance that was as sharp and punchy as it was poetic. The witches, getting spooky somewhere in the wings, waited to creep and cackle onstage and set the play into motion.
As they did, a change came over the theater, as if a person could hear attendees holding their breath, and scooting forward to the edges of their seats. For a moment, audience members may have thought they were seeing double: Goodheart cast the show with two Macbeths (Keldon Aronsen and Emma Kreidler) and two Lady Macs (Isonnette O’Brien and Fiona Donahue), in a move that has become common in Elm’s work with youth.
It made Shakespeare’s language, for which there is almost always a mental on-ramp, feel accessible, crisp and suffused with more emotion that Elm’s professional actors sometimes bring to the stage. As the Weïrd Sisters appeared from the mist (at turns Edie Stoehr, Miriam Perry, Anna Oppenheimer, Ana Miller Elliott and Glow Torres), Aronsen and Bianchine stood back-to-back, easing into the language until lines like “What are these/So withered, and so wild in their attire!” sounded simply like “Hey, who are these freaky ladies?”
As the action unfolded onstage, the play became a call-and-response with the audience, stripping the capital H from history to make Shakespeare feel very much alive. Switching in and out—and sometimes on stage at the same time—Aronsen and Kreidler played two different sides of the same character, imposing and bombastic in one moment, and eerily calm and focused in the next. Beside them, O’Brien and Donahue made a worthy match, tapping into a kind of emotional fortitude and shrewdness that the character demands.
Top: Emma Kreidler and Glow Torres. Bottom: New Haven Academy freshman Molly Davis who played one of four Hamlets in the eponymously named play.
When Donahue announced of her own progeny that “I would, while it was smiling in my face,/Have pluck’d my nipple from his boneless gums,/And dash’d the brains out,” she made so clear her focus on claiming the Scottish throne that she might as well have said “We’ve already made this plan, like hell we are quitting!” So too when minutes later, Kreidler announced “I go, and it is done,” and the cool quietude of her action, the calm and stillness in her body, was the scariest thing of all.
“Because they’ve all been working on a Shakespeare play all semester, their ears are open to it,” Bowles said. And they were: when students caught on to Hoffman-as-Porter’s “Knock knock?” it seemed to loosen up the audience. When, beneath a blood red light, Banquo met his untimely end, students began to shout, with blood-curdling cries of “No!” that filled the house.
When Torres-as-Murderer showed up at the door of Macduff’s home, his wife and children snug inside, there was a collective gasp in the audience, followed by the rising screams of students who could not believe what they were seeing.
Onstage, mercenaries dunked Macduff’s young son (Oppenheimer) in and out of a bucket of water, and New Haven Academy’s Semaj Battle-Reed shouted “Ne-ver!” from somewhere in the second or third row. When his little, listless body laid out across the floor, the screams grew louder. When, fearing for her life, Lady Macduff (Lia Gersick-Seward) clutched a baby ever closer, they crested, because the audience both knew what was about to happen, and still could not fathom its cruelty.
Actors, too, fed off the energy from the audience. Aronson, who started the show with the fury and vibrato of a football coach, seemed to recalibrate midway through, and grew so somber that he wept after the deaths of Macduff’s family, slain in their home at his command. The Weïrd Sisters, who seemed to multiply, gave themselves over to a sort of dark revelry, fully embracing a Strega Nona vibe (but make it evil) each time they reappeared onstage.
But it was O’Brien’s Lady Macbeth, perhaps, who gave back everything her audience seemed to demand. As she glided out across the stage in a nightgown and white cotton socks, a shell of the calculating powerhouse she had been, she knelt in a pool of light, and let out a cry shrill and sharp enough to stop time and space. It was the cry of someone, part-human and part-animal, who understands the cost of everything she has done; that in taking a life, part of her has died, too.
In between shows, ECA student Leon Jones (“like [Much Ado About Nothing’s] Leonato,” he said matter-of-factly) praised the festival, which will mark his eighth Shakespeare play since middle school. After seeing Ice The Beef’s Romeo & Juliet five years ago, he was hooked, and hasn’t stopped floating on the poetry and power of the Bard’s language since.
For him, Friday was all about supporting his peers, just as he knew they would do for him the following night.
“Shakespeare has taught me how to healthily express my emotions by either doing what my character does or not doing what my character does,” he said, smiling as he remembered some of his favorite roles. “Either you learn from your character’s successes or mistakes.”
That momentum carried through to Common Ground’s take on The Comedy of Errors, performed with a sort of 1960s, blues- and jazz-flecked twist on antiquity that got attendees dancing in their seats by the end of the show. As junior Tatianna Scott prepared to slip into character during a long intermission, classmate Tiffany Scott made sure they both were ready, stopping by her side for a moment.
“Lock in, okay?” Tiffany said.
In the play, which Elm Shakespeare mounted in full in the summer of 2019, a set of twin brothers (Tatianna Scott and Imani Gayle as Antipholus of Ephesus and Antipholus of Syracuse) and their twin servants (Nevaeh Mack and Cye Gonzales as Dromio of Ephesus and Dromio of Syracuse) are separated as children, thanks to a shipwreck that also split their mother and father into two worlds. Years later, they both end up in Ephesus—without knowing that the other set of twins still exists.
As far as Shakespearean shenanigans go, this one is high on the list (tldr, be more cautious the next time you’re steering a ship): there are messy and unintended love triangles, pissed off wives and monarchs, a storyteller who fears for his life (Aleeki Shortridge as Aegeon, in for Demetria Spaulding) and enough missed connections and rudely locked doors for a performance of Noises Off. As Solinus, the Duke of Ephesus (Na’Miah Williams), threatened Aegeon with death, he began to unspool that narrative, and a proper farce took shape.
From the jump, students rose to the challenge, with an understanding and familiarity with the language that is a credit to Bowles and Shortridge’s co-direction. When Adriana (Aaliyah Jones), wife of Antipholus of Ephesus, swept onstage looking for her husband, she carried herself with a gravitas that worked despite the farce baked into the show. By the time she declared “He is deformèd, crooked, old, and sere,/Ill-faced, worse-bodied, shapeless everywhere,” half-spitting the words, students were cheering her on. When she finished, storming off the stage, a whoop of “Woah!” went up from the audience.
Around her, characters took on that fullness one by one. As Mack and Gonzales scurried to and fro across the stage, planting discord as they missed each other again and again, Syracuse became a bustling port, with half a dozen subplots woven into its streets. When Luciana (Ash Hortas Colon) announced that “Men are masters of women, and lords to their ladies,” a chorus of Mmmm and Oh! bubbled up from the front rows. When she added “For those reasons, let yourself be ruled by men's wishes,” there was a ripple of understanding.
When, later in the show, Antipholus and Dromio of Syracuse spoke of her body as a map of the world, ripples of laughter made their way through the audience, none as loud as those that came from Aronsen.
“Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?” asked Gayle as Antipholus of Syracuse, already accustomed to the fast back-and-forth of the language.
“O, sir! I did not look so low!” Gonzales-as-Dromio of Syracuse shot back, shocked and exasperated, and the room exploded into a cacophony of laughter. By the time the show closed out over Bill Withers’ “Lovely Day,” it felt as though there was a delighted smile on every face in the house.
Tatianna Scott, still floating on the show as she zipped up her coat and prepared to take on subzero temperatures outside, said that she was thrilled to have been part of the festival. By the time she’d left the building for the vans that would ferry students home, she was forming a pitch for why she should be part of Elm’s Teen Troupe by next year.
“It feels great!” she said.
Sound School senior Alejandra Reyes, who played Malcolm’s son Duncan in Macbeth, agreed. If the performance felt bittersweet, it was ultimately more sweet than bitter, in part because Reyes got to stay and cheer her peers on.
“I think it’s like going to see a show,” Reyes said. “I am watching someone’s hard work and performance. Instead of thinking, ‘Oh, they messed up a line, we got one up on ‘em,’ it builds community.”