by Hayley Wood

When Benjamin Evett founded the Actors' Shakespeare Project in 2004, he knew he wanted its productions to rely on actors' bodies and voices with a minimum of pageantry, scenery and props. He knew he wanted to mount performances in different venues throughout Boston, and he knew that he wanted to fully engage with his venues' neighborhoods. The resident company of actors that he assembled from his favorite actor colleagues agreed. The result has been a remarkable set of community engagement projects with Shakespeare's plays at their center.

The company strives to engage both adults and youth. It reaches youth audiences with residencies at schools, after-school programs, residencies at youth lock-up facilities (“Incarcerated Youth at Play”), special educational guest performances, teacher trainings, and other formats.

Incarcerated Youth at Play (IYAP) takes a collaborative approach at its sites: two teachers, who are usually also actors, take the lead. Several guest artists visit the classes to teach speci c performance-related skills, such as movement, stage combat, and indepth scene development. It is anything but a top-down approach to education—the artist teachers, often also in rehearsal, gain character insights and new readings of Shakespeare's “old school words,” a phrase coined by one IYAP student.

Weeks of instruction and specialized workshops for IYAP students culminate in the performance of a selection of rehearsed scenes. Preparing for any performance opens doors to a host of creative ideas—especially when the audience consists of peers, caseworkers, actors, clinicians, teachers, administrators, and group care workers. Evan Gentler, an English teacher at Eliot Treatment Center for Boys, observed in a recent piece posted in the ASP blog about his students' work on scenes from Othello, that the “student voice this year guided script edits, fight choreography, blocking, and live sound.”

Another program for youth participants, Shakespeare on the Out, is held after school hours at St. Paul on the Common. It was created for underserved girls in Boston, including youth in transition out of Department of Youth Services and Department of Social Services treatment facilities. Student participants, under the guidance of ASP teaching artist Magda Spasiano, form ensembles and explore Shakespeare through theatre games, acting, text, and movement workshops, and through the rehearsal and performance of Shakespeare plays.

The array of partnerships that ASP builds and maintains is dizzying. The  rst of their projects to be funded in part by a Mass Humanities grant was a collaborative effort with Discovering Justice, a court-education program that utilizes drama to teach the history and ethics of jurisprudence to Boston-area students. Mass Humanities has since funded many ASP projects, including a teacher institute at Emerson College, community conversations with scholars and veterans using scenes from Henry V, a Roxbury educational residency centered on Much Ado About Nothing, and a series of events related to the upcoming production of Timon of Athens, which will be performed at Midway Studios in Fort Point Channel this May.

The classic ASP ingredients are in place for Timon of Athens. Typically imaginative collaborations have been tapped to bring in new audiences who may connect to the play's major theme: wealth, friendship, and the loss of both. The director of the production, Bill Barclay, saw a rare performance of the play this past summer at London's Globe Theatre. He wrote to his ASP colleagues: “I think with this economy, this piece could be surprisingly topical. The ‘market', which in the play is Timon himself, falls as far as a hero, or a market, can fall—from the top of the heap to a dirty cave outside his own city.” This interpretation served as the kernel for inviting partnerships with groups including the Boston Fiduciary Trust, The Boston Athenaeum, and the artist community at Midway Studios. These groups will host “Timon Talks,” which will explore the themes of the play and their connection to contemporary life.

It hardly needs to be emphasized to readers of Mass Humanities that Shakespeare continues to have something to say to us—and much to say about our current problems. It may well require a leap of faith, however, for a teenager with unsatisfying school experiences to embrace the words of the Bard, to delve into a universally respected canon and expect to emerge with relevant insights. The many talented actor teachers of ASP—not to mention all of the committed professionals who work behind the scenes to make things happen—are proving that the power of words, movement, and voice can create magic for all kinds of participants. Their sustained and disciplined focus on neighborhood collaborations and matching plays with unusual spaces in diverse neighborhoods can reorient our notions of the value of literature and theater. May heaven prosper their sport.