To present 'As You Like It' to 4th graders
SHELTON - Valley Shakespeare Festival, in cooperation with the Shelton Board of Education in May.
The three-year old, Shelton-based, non-profit theater company is known around the Valley for its free and low cost productions of classic literary works.
Most notable among them are its free summer outdoor productions of “The Comedy of Errors” (2013) and “Much Ado About Nothing” (2014) which were presented at Shelton’s Veterans Memorial-Riverwalk Park.
Also popular are its free holiday productions of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” (at the Shelton History Center in 2013 and at Shelton’s Plumb Memorial Library in 2014) and Shakespeare’s “Romeo and Juliet” at the Derby Neck Library this past Valentine’s Day.
This summer they will present four free performances of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” outdoors at the Park at 8 p.m. July 9-12.
The company’s Education Initiative Program is the brainchild of its Executive and Artistic Director and Shelton native, Tom Simonetti.
It’s constructed in strict accordance with Shelton’s adopted Common Core Standards and is aimed at renewing students’ interest in, and appreciation for, classic literature through live performance.
The work he has chosen to present to inaugurate the program is Shakespeare’s “As You Like It,” a comedy in which four sets of young couples “discover” themselves and their places in a society during their exile in the Forest of Arden.
The program will be presented by a touring cast of eight professional actors. Before viewing the actual performance of the play, students will participate in workshops with these actors who “live and breathe the texts,” as Simonetti puts it.
“The workshops are extremely important to the experience because these actors know how to present the material in a way which will inspire and instruct the students to not only understand the play and its themes and language, but to learn how to interpret other classical texts and documents by using language and context clues.” He said he is delighted to bring this fairy tale to life for Shelton’s fourth-graders, but added that, while on the surface it seems a light-hearted story, it deals with very serious and timeless issues which still resonate with young people today.
“The transformation of these characters from the self-absorbed, selfish, and entitled people they are at court to the mature, self-aware and tolerant individuals they become in the forest is extremely timely in a culture in which “selfie” is a word in the Webster dictionary,” Simonetti said.
“Ironically, it is through a jumble of deceptions and disguises that their true selves finally emerge and allow them all to find their happy endings.”
Simonetti has also enlisted the talents of local band member Benny Mikula of “The Alpaca Gnomes,” to compose an original score to accompany the performances, as this is the most musical of all of Shakespeare’s works.
The program will begin its run at the schools the week of May 4, with a free preview for the local community May 2 at the Shelton Community Center gym, 41 Church St.
The preview will begin at 1:30 p.m with the workshop; the play will follow at 2 p.m. Community members can reserve space for the free preview by visiting VSF’s website at www.vsfestival.org or by calling 203-513-9446.
Valley Shakespeare Festival is excited and grateful to the Shelton Board of Education to be the first district in the Valley to embrace this program and hopes that, in the coming years, it will be expanded throughout all grade levels in the system and be adopted by all districts Valley-wide.
This is a press release from Valley Shakespeare Festival, a federally tax-exempt, non-profit theater company dedicated to bringing free Shakespeare to the Lower Naugatuck Valley.
No comments:
Post a Comment