First Youth Shakespeare Fest Marks Dramatic Success

Cast members of Elm Shakespeare Teen Troupe’s production of Henry V burst onto the stage in a rush of sound and energy. ​“O, for a muse of fire that would ascend / The brightest heaven of invention! / A kingdom for a stage, princes to act, / And monarchs to behold the swelling scene!” they cried out together. 

The famous introduction to probably Shakespeare’s most famous war play, the players reminded those seated in the risers at Educational Center for Arts’ theater, isn’t about war; it’s about imagination, creativity, and the collective act of actors, crew, and audience creating a world together inside a theater. 

It was an altogether fitting sentiment to open Elm Shakespeare Company’s first Youth Festival of Shakespeare on Saturday afternoon. During the festival, Elm Shakespeare’s Teen Troupe and theater programs at Metropolitan Business Academy, Common Ground High School, and ECA presented, respectively, productions of Henry V, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Macbeth, and The Winter’s Tale, in a celebration of the bard and of what people can accomplish when they work together. 

The plays, performed back to back throughout Saturday afternoon into the evening, were also a chance for students to see each other’s work and understand themselves as part of a larger and — if Elm Shakespeare’s future plans come to fruition — growing community.

Rebecca Goodheart, producing artistic director at Elm Shakespeare, and Sarah Bowles, director of education, began the festival by welcoming everyone to ECA’s theater at 55 Audubon St. ​“This is the first annual Elm Shakespeare youth festival,” she announced to loud applause. ​“You will have bragging rights for the next 30 years,” she said. ​“We hope this will grow and grow, because we believe that every young person in New Haven deserves to have a personal and impactful relationship with these words and these plays. We believe this is how we change the world. We’re so glad that you are with us for the start of this journey.”

Before coming to Elm Shakespeare, both Bowles and Goodheart had worked at Shakespeare & Company in Lenox, Mass., which has been doing a youth festival for decades. ​“That is, in many ways, how we became the artists that we are and the educators that we are,” Goodheart said. ​“They helped us know how to do this.” 

Elm Shakespeare has been working with groups in schools and community groups for years, Bowles pointed out, from Mauro-Sheridan to Common Ground to Ice the Beef. But the schools’ individual productions happened at different times of the year. Bowles, who has wanted to create something like Shakespeare & Company’s festival in New Haven since joining Elm Shakespeare in 2017, worked to coordinate each of the programs, and bring more schools into the fold, in order to make a day-long festival possible.

The festival was months in the planning, and a ​“community-infused process,” Goodheart said. ECA, with its own black box theater, agreed to host. In addition to the support Elm Shakespeare receives from numerous donors, a grant from the Seedlings Foundation and support from Technolutions — ​“our angels this year,” Goodheart said — has allowed Bowles’s education program to expand to include more schools. Bowles and Goodheart are already expecting to include more schools in next year’s festival (and have openings for collaboration if particular schools in the area would like to reach out).

“The most important thing to me about this festival is that it is not a competition between schools. This is a celebration of everybody’s work,” Bowles said. She noted that ​“young people are pitted against each other in so many ways,” socially, academically, and athletically. She described the animosity she sometimes encounters between schools in New Haven as well. 

By contrast, ​“this festival is a vacation from competing,” she said. ​“You are invited to let go of all of that, because the truth is that all of you have been undertaking an extraordinary challenge this fall,” working on these ​“extraordinary tales” with ​“ecstatic highs and devastating lows. And I think that often mirrors adolescence in a really profound way.” As a result, ​“young people really connect with this stuff — and they’re really good at it, which you’ll see today.”

“All of you,” she continued, addressing the casts of the productions, ​“have not only worked extraordinarily hard, but you all have something in common. You were doing it at the same time. And now today we come together and celebrate all of our victories.” Because ​“the thing that is profound to me — that we don’t focus on very much, as adults or young people — is that our own success does not depend on somebody else’s failure. We can be successful and so can they.” This opened up the possibility for collaboration and connection. ​“My hope, my dream, is for all of you festival participants to meet, to mingle, to make fast friends, and to celebrate each other’s work. To cheer wildly for each other’s shows.”

That happened from the start as the cast of Henry V stormed the stage. Directors Elizabeth Daingerfield and Benjamin Curns had introduced the play with a few words. ​“On the surface, if you look at this play, it’s seems like it’s a play about war, but I think if we really pay attention, if we listen to this language, you’ll see that it’s really a play about imagination, about collaboration, and about cooperation,” Curns had said. In the Teen Troupe version of Henry V, edited for length, it also became more of a play about community. 

Henry V in its entirety tends to focus on (surprise, surprise) the titular character, as it tells the story of a military campaign in France that solidifies his position as a strong ruler. It is in some sense the culmination of three plays — beginning with Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry IV, Part 2 — in which the audience gets to see Henry first as Prince Hal, a young man full of ambition and cunning but also a sense of waywardness, who slowly comes into his own as the heir apparent and finally claimant of the throne of England. In the process, he learns, he must break some of his bonds with the people he knew as a young man, and forge new alliances. Taken as a whole, they can be understood partly as a rich character study about the price of ambition, and what must be sacrificed to get what you want.

But the plays are also full of rich secondary characters who have their own complete dramatic arcs. Filmmaker and actor Orson Welles understood this when he made Chimes at Midnight, a film stringing together scenes from five different Shakespeare plays to tell the complete story of Sir John Falstaff, a larger-than-life character who is first very close to Henry and is, in time, pushed farther away. 

For the Teen Troupe, Daingerfield and Curns pulled a similar maneuver. They divided Henry’s role between two actors and cut down on his presence in the play. The result was a shift in focus to all the characters around him, and to the French that Henry is at war with. In short, the Teen Troupe made Henry V into an ensemble piece.

And what an ensemble piece it turned out to be. The cast — Keldan Aronson, Oliver Barber, Marcus Bartoo, Sebastian Bianchine, Finn Crumlish, Fiona Donahue, Max Hoffman-Blustjan, Charlotte James, Charles Jeffery, Salem Jones, Alice McGill, Willow Oliveira, Rowan Simonelli — switched out roles and became the chorus with speed, dash, and often humor, finding humanizing moments in just a few lines. 

Thus the audience was treated to heated debates among the war-weary English troops as well as moments of mirth. We got political machinations among the French and some truly funny scenes of a French princess struggling to learn English in the event that her side lost and a marriage to Henry became a political necessity (as Shakespeare’s audience almost certainly knew would happen). And we still got Henry’s own political moments cementing his status as a cunning and charismatic leader, both his rousing speeches and his subterfuge among his own troops to gauge how they really felt about the tests they were being put to. 

All throughout, the Teen Troupe showed what Bowles had argued: that Shakespeare’s plays are works of big highs and lows, and teenagers are particularly good at acting in them. The thunderous applause at the end suggested that the audience — fellow actors and spectators alike — agreed.