One Wednesday last month more than 500 people streamed into the main auditorium of the Chicago Shakespeare Theater to watch the company’s sold-out performance of Julius Caesar. Audiences had been filling the Navy Pier house for almost two months, but this one was different–it was made up of high school students from several local public schools.
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Halperin estimates that since the program started ten years ago it’s brought Shakespeare to more than half a million students. At least eight matinees of every main-stage production are now reserved for high school students, who pay only $15 for a ticket that normally costs $58. The theater raises money specifically to subsidize the student shows.
Each year the company also does about 40 shows featuring abridged versions of Shakespeare plays for junior high and high school students from both the city and the suburbs. This year they’re offering a 75-minute version of Romeo and Juliet. The theater will also take the abridged shows to any school with a suitable stage and lighting and sound systems. “The abridged show goes on tour to 31 schools and a couple of presenting houses, like the Beverly Arts Center, a year,” says Halperin. “Many of the actors in our main-stage shows are also in the abridgment shows. Lisa Dodson, for example, was Cleopatra in our production here at Navy Pier. She’s also Lady Capulet in the current abridged production of Romeo and Juliet.”
“Of course this is not a problem with only Bush or Daley or Israelis or Palestinians,” Gaines went on. “This goes back 2,000 years. This play goes back into a time when the first cavemen chased the other cavemen out of the cave. This is an old story that proves H.L. Mencken was right when he said, ‘The only thing we learn about history is nothing.’”
Hamman and other actors say they enjoy the student shows. Parkinson says, “I think that the big difference between playing for adults and playing for the students is that the students are generally less willing to censor their reactions to what they’re seeing. Oftentimes this allows for a more electric interplay between actors and spectators. They won’t keep themselves contained if something is amusing to them or if something shocks them.”
At the end of the matinee Halperin, Parkinson, and Kimberly Hebert-Gregory, who plays Brutus’s wife, came onstage to answer questions. At one point another Prosser student confessed that he was baffled by the final scene between Cassius and Brutus. “First they were going to fight,” he said, “then they were going to kill each other, then they were hugging and making up–man, I didn’t know what was going on.”
