One reporter shares her experience of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival
On Monday and Tuesday of this week, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival came to SCHS to perform a show and hold a couple workshops. I had the opportunity to participate in the School Visit Program with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
For the past 45 years, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has participated in the School Visit Program. The program runs from mid-October to mid-December, and consists of tours through California, Oregon and Washington.
Every year, six teams of two actors are sent out on the tours. At every stop, the actors perform a short play and run workshops with students. At SCHS, the program was titled “Juliet’s Journey” and was a two-person recalling of “Romeo and Juliet” from Juliet’s perspective.
The two actors, Cedric Lamar and Annie Paul, also led two workshops with SCHS’s Theatre 2 class and English 9 Honors freshman students on Shakespeare’s words in his plays.
The School Visit Program was discovered by English teacher Kate Flowers during a teacher workshop at The Oregon Shakespeare Festival over the summer.
“I wanted students to know that Shakespeare is a fun and interactive topic for them,” Flowers said.
I had the chance to attend the performance twice as well as both workshops which was so much fun.
The performance was about 45 minutes and was set in modern times but still used some of the Elizabethan props, such as swords and apothecary bottles. Paul played two characters, Juliet and Tybalt, and Lamar played the other five characters: Romeo, Capulet, Mercutio, Nurse and Friar Lawrence.
The play was mostly the original script, but had added dialogue to help move between scenes. Both actors were amazing and did a wonderful job portraying both the comedy and tragedy of the play. It was definitely worth seeing twice.
The workshop was the same both times but with two different groups of students. In the workshop, we played with Shakespeare’s words and performed some scenes to understand the emotions behind them.
This was definitely my favorite part of the program because I was able to work one-on-one with professional actors. With them, I was able to learn valuable skills to further my acting career. Both Lamar and Paul were incredible teachers and very nice. I would love to be able to see them perform more.
I hope the School Visit Program comes back to SCHS in the future and that all students get the chance to see the Oregon Shakespeare Festival’s work. You don’t wanna miss it.
