William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
Shakespeare & Company’s latest School Residency culminates with Lenox Middle School’s production of William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night on Friday, January 23rd at 7pm. The Residency is led by Meg O’Connor, longtime member of S&Co.’s Education Program. Tickets are available at the door, and are $10 for adults, $5 for students and complimentary for children and seniors.The final performance for each Residency is a celebration of the students’ hard work, with leading roles shared by many students. O’Connor has been working with students after school for the past five weeks, with students participating as actors or technical crew according to their preference. School Residencies have long been a lynchpin of S&Co.’s nationally acclaimed Education Program, with Residencies at the Lenox Memorial Middle and High School for almost the entirety of the Company’s 31-year history. A product of Shakespeare & Company’s Education Program herself, O’Connor participated in the first Fall Festival of Shakespeare as a student at Mt. Greylock High School, and this fall directed Monument Mountain Regional High School’s Fall Festival production.
Twelfth Night is a romantic comedy complete with mistaken identities, unwelcome houseguests, and an ever-more complicated predicament that resolves beautifully in the end, in true Shakespearean fashion. Written in 1604, Twelfth Night unfolds in Illyria, a land of idle noblemen, wandering clowns, and enchanting music, where a shipwreck separates a twin brother and sister (Viola and Sebastian), delivering young Viola onto Illyria’s shores.
There, the love-sick Duke Orsino pines away for his object of desire, the unattainable Countess Olivia. Thinking her brother dead and seeking employment with Orsino, Viola disguises herself as a man and promptly becomes Orsino’s servant. The only part she had not planned on was her falling passionately in love with him. Or with the Countess Olivia, thinking her to be a man, falling in love with her equally hard. Meanwhile, in a hilarious subplot, the servants and houseguests of the Countess engage in a crafty prank to cut her pompous head servant down to size.
The Company’s award-winning Education Program is one of the most extensive theatre-in-education programs in the Northeast, and has reached over a million students since 1978 with innovative performances, workshops, and residencies including The New England Tour of Shakespeare, the Fall Festival of Shakespeare, Shakespeare & Young Company, Riotous Youth, the Shakespeare in the Courts (with the Berkshire Juvenile Court), Shakespeare in our Schools: Workshops for Teachers and Actors, and the National Instituted on Teaching Shakespeare.
Guided by Education Director Kevin G. Coleman and Associate Director of Education Jenna Ware, education artists and teachers, educators continue to develop and fine-tune their programs to enhance and complement curricular activities in elementary, middle, and high schools across the country. The Education Program received the prestigious 2006 Coming Up Taller Award presented by First Lady Laura Bush at the White House in January 2007, and in 2005 it also received the Commonwealth Award, the highest award for excellence in the arts, sciences and humanities given by the state of Massachusetts. It was also the subject of an in-depth, two-year study by Harvard University’s Project Zero which recommended national replication. The Education Program has been identified by the Arts Education Partnership and the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities as a Champion of Change.
The Education Program is focused on bringing Shakespeare alive and into the lives of as many students and teachers as possible through the active exploration and performance of Shakespeare’s plays The Program is also focused on bringing Shakespeare alive and into the lives of as many students and teachers as possible through the active exploration and performance of Shakespeare’s plays. Shakespeare & Company arts-in-education programs receive major support from The National Endowment for the Arts, The National Endowment for the Humanities, Berkshire Bank Foundation, Bank of America, Greylock Federal Bank, the Massachusetts Cultural Council and its local cultural councils, Country Curtains and The Red Lion Inn, and many other local corporations, private foundations, and individuals.
