San Jose Youth Shakespeare

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San Jose Youth Shakespeare is a theatre company for young people who are interested in performing in high-quality, full-length productions of Shakespeare's plays. Ages of cast members range from 8 to 21. Regardless of their age, our players work toward and maintain a high standard of performance. The group seeks to establish a strong sense of community that is shaped around a creative and intellectual interest in Shakespeare's dramatic poetry. The company is run and sustained by the cast, production crew, and their families.

Our productions benefit audience members of all ages, especially the very young and their families who are experiencing Shakespeare's language for the first time. We have found that young audience members are more readily accepting of the language when they see their peers performing it. Through this philosophy, we have formed a strong company and loyal audience, all of whom are developing a lifelong enjoyment of Shakespeare's works. Over time, both our company and our audience have grown significantly, to the extent that we can now claim to have a real influence on the performing arts community of San Jose and its neighboring cities. Today, a typical Youth Shakespeare production has a cast of 30, a technical crew of about 10, at least 20 parent volunteers, and an audience of over 500 over the course of 5 or 6 performances.

This community represents a cross-section of ages and backgrounds. One of our defining principles is to encourage children of various ages to work together on productions that are in turn presented to people of all ages. We welcome whole families to come and see our shows, offering free tickets to those who are 7 or younger, and we keep our young audience in mind when we are rehearsing. For example, we try to make the storyline very clear, and we tend to tackle the more accessible plays in the Shakespeare canon, avoiding some of the more difficult histories and tragedies. To date, we have produced the following Shakespeare plays:

• As You Like It (2004, 2008)
• Twelfth Night (2005, 2012)
• A Midsummer Night's Dream (2005, 2010)
• The Comedy of Errors (2006, 2011)
• Love's Labour's Lost (2006)
• Macbeth (2007, 2012)
• The Winter's Tale (2008)
• The Tempest (2009, 2014)
• Julius Caesar (2009)
• Much Ado About Nothing (2010)
• Hamlet (2011)
• Romeo and Juliet (2013)
• The Merchant of Venice (2013)

 

We always produce the entire play and cut very little of the text. We do not rewrite any of Shakespeare's language. Instead, we meet the plays "head on" and do what we can to understand the gist of each scene as we act it out and refine it. Our young company studies each play on its own terms. Moreover, our productions have a real ensemble atmosphere because everyone knows one another. Our company offers a trusting and supportive environment in which children of various ages not only work together successfully but thrive socially and creatively.

Part of our mission as a company is to develop new generations of cast, crew, and audience members who are interested in reading, performing, and watching Shakespeare's plays. Each new production brings new participants and new audience members into this community, and the entertainment and education benefits are continuously handed down. Most cast members don't leave the group until they "age out." When they do leave, they go into many different fields of study—it is not our goal to turn out budding actors and actresses. On the other hand, the level of performance that they achieve with the company is very high, and if they are interested in higher education in dramatic art, they have an excellent foundation on which to build.

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