We make Shakespeare come alive for everyone, through performances and educational programs that are essentially play-ful. We play around with the sounds or rhythm to find ways the language might be communicating beyond the dictionary definition of the words. We play with how it makes us feel to say a line, or "physicalize" the language in other ways to see if the text is giving us clues on how to perform it.

In our lecture/demonstrations, we perform scenes, but also take the audience "behind the scenes" to show some of the rehearsal techniques actors use. The focus is on giving students ways to read the texts to make them more engaging, regardless of their familiarity with Shakespeare, reading ability, or vocabulary.

Try this example of how we might play with the words in a scene from our lecture/demonstration on Romeo & Juliet. Get a partner, and play around with the following lines from Act Iv the way we did in rehearsal.

I. Say Romeo's lines, but just Juliet's first line. What word(s) does she repeat that he just used?

Did you hear her repeat "pilgrim" and "hand"?

Continue saying Juliet's lines. Listen for which word she "plays with" (repeats the most).

The word Juliet is into is "hand". Count the number of times she repeats "hand" or words that have to do with "hand" like "palm" or "touch."

Now go back and say the whole conversation, adding your sense of touch (the sense connected to "hand"). Each time Romeo or Juliet says a "hand" word (we've made them bold), touch the other's hand. If it's plural, touch both.

Did you put your palms up against the other person's palms on that last line? Did you put your palms on top of theirs? Whichever—you're doing an Elizabethean dance move!

Which makes perfect sense: Romeo and Juliet are probably dancing while they speak. Imagine, Romeo wants to get close to this girl who teaches "the torches to shine bright", but he must do so without drawing attention to himself. (Remember, he crashed the party at her parents' house). What better way to make his move than to work his way onto the dance floor and dance with her, hidden among the other dancers?

As they dance, it is natural for their words to come off of what they are doing; as actors creating the characters, we've gone the opposite direction—used the words to reveal what they are doing.

That gives you an idea of what we do: the way we play with a text, using all our senses to make sense of what Shakespeare wrote, finding ways lines communicate feeling, emotion, character and action, beyond the dictionary definition of the words.

In our workshops and residencies, Chicspeare's actors coach participants in creating a performance themselves. We get them playing around with the text and teach them stagecraft techniques to use in playing his characters.

With our productions, we serve an audience which parallels the one for which Shakespeare wrote, in ways similar to the ways our Chicago parallels his London. The parallels are many: his London was a city of immigrants, whose economy was shifting form a local market town to an international mercantile center. It was struggling to provide continuity in governance, negotiating the competing claims of established and new constitutencies. Contemporary Chicago is also a city of immigrants, trying to find continuity as its neighborhoods change and economy shifts.

Shakespeare's London was reflected on his stage: as Richard III limped, Bottom strutted, or the people of Verona watched the streetfights on stage, members of Court in the box seats, merchants in the stalls, and those who could afford no more than a penny-ticket to stand at the edge of the stage saw characters like themselves, echoing their accents—French or Welsh or even Moorish—on stage. We stage the plays so that they are accessible to an equally diverse audience, making sure what happens on stage reflects our contemporaries, by drawing on images from the city's culture and history as well as Shakespeare's text to illuminate the story on stage.

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