The Frostburg Shakespeare Festival

(Students from Beall High School performing Romeo and Juliet during the 2007 festival, image taken from Cumberland Times News)

                William Shakespeare: Everyone knows William Shakespeare.  His works are read around the world – even in the far east, the cultured will recognize a Shakespeare reference.  Meanwhile, in the United States, it has become an educational staple, with most high schools featuring his works as required reading at some point.  Of course, not all such Shakespeare lessons are so mandatory: there has been a growing movement of “Shakespeare Festivals” in high schools across the country, where high school students are trained on how to read Shakespeare and perform scenes from these works.  While these have become fairly common, a small college town in Western Maryland has developed their own unique twist on the Shakespeare Festival.

                Created by Doctor Rochelle Smith, the Frostburg Shakespeare Festival has been an annual staple of the end-of-semester festivities for spring.  Every reading day (the day of study between the last day of classes and the first day of exams for Frostburg State University), a handful of college students and over two hundred high school students, their teachers, and often their families and friends gather at the Pealer Performing to watch the students perform their scenes and have fun with Shakespeare themed fun and games.  It is, as far as Dr. Smith knows, unique: this is the only Shakespeare Festival that teaches the high school students using the passion and expertise of interested college students trained in the subject matter.

                The FSU students are English or Drama students who have already passed one of Frostburg’s other high-level Shakespeare classes and are invited by Professor Smith.  The students go to join with high school students once a week, and together they work on a single scene from a play.  The scenes are chosen based on the class – some high school teachers might want to do Romeo and Juliet, for instance, but have a group consisting of all boys.  “Obviously, they aren’t going to do one of the love scenes,” Doctor Smith comments.  “They’re going to do a fight scene.” 

The groups read through the scenes, not just for the language but to figure out all the deeper meaning they’ll need to perform the scene effectively: What are the character’s motivations?  What are they really saying behind this over the top prose?  Why are they doing what they are doing?  These are all questions that need to be answered to perform the scene. 

                Once the scenes are understood, the classes move on to learning to perform it.  The college students teach the high schoolers how to stage a scene effectively, how to block properly, and advise on inflecting and projecting.  They also get appropriate set dressings, props, and – if the scene calls for it – music. 

                Breanna Liddy, a college student in the class, comments on the experience overall: “I think it is definitely a challenge and takes a lot of patience, but it builds character.  It isn’t easy to jump into a high school class and try to explain Shakespeare, which is already a difficult read at first, but the more they learn the more it shows through their interpretations and the students are also able to take control of the stage and shine through.”

                Though the performances must keep the language of the play unchanged, they can change the scene to another setting that make sense.  It can’t just be some arbitrary setting, but the students have had some creative choices come up.  Retelling Macbeth as the tale of a Mafia boss’s rise to power is a cool retelling.  Romeo and Juliet has plenty of variations, usually boiling down to which factions are being used to replace the Montagues and the Capulets:  one class utilized the common high school scene of jocks versus geeks, but one of the seemingly most popular versions had the two families flying the flags of Fort Hill and Allegany High – the two rival high schools in the area.

                The excitement is high on the day of the festival itself.  The high school students get shown around the Frostburg campus, and even get to eat at the Chesapeake dining hall.  “My students always think its strange how much the high schoolers love our dining hall,” Dr. Smith comments, “but that’s just because they’ve forgotten how bad high school cafeterias were!”

                Eventually the crowd packs into the theater to watch everyone’s performances.  Each group brings their own props, interpretations, and creativity to the scenes, so even if two groups are performing the same scene, the end results can be wildly different.  This is an especially fun for the festival commentators like the retired professor Mary Ann Chapman, who have the job of watching the performances, looking for what creativity and understanding they brought about in their performance, and saying “I see what you were doing!”

                “The ones I’ve enjoyed the most are the ones that show both creativity and humor” Chapman comments – though, she adds, “it helps that some of the students are really good actors.”  It can be a proud moment for her as well, as some of the high school teachers were, in fact, her own students, and she gets to see her student’s students performing.

                Dr. Smith adds “I’m always so amazed at how creative the students are, and I’m amazed at the understanding they show of the scene.”

                The performances are punctuated with Shakespeare related fun and games, including a Shakespeare quizbowl and games like “how much like Hamlet are you?” – you can always tell which students have been reading Shakespeare on their own when they can answer questions that weren’t in the required readings.  The whole event is usually finished off with a visit from the Savage Mountain Stage Combat Club, who detail the sorts of weapons used in Shakespeare’s plays, as well as perform a few fight scenes. 

                The festival has been so successful its astonishing to think that the catalyst for it all was, in fact, an accident, when the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, D.C., mistakenly sent Dr. Smith an invitation email to their local high school festival.  Dr. Smith decided to check it out anyway, and ended up thinking “Wow, we could do that here!” 

For Frostburg students, the festival not only provides an excellent opportunity for learning but also is a great learning experience and resume addition.  However, the effect it has on high school students might be even better: “It’s a very good recruiting program” Dr. Smith explains.  The high schoolers are always have a great time visiting our campus, and in the classes they get to meet and work with some of Frostburg’s best students.  She does admit, it is a bit intimidating being responsible for over 200 highschool students when they come up to visit, but they’ve always been well behaved.  “We haven’t had any disasters yet!”

The Frostburg Shakespeare Festival is funded by the Frostburg State University Foundation Opportunity Grant and by the Presidential Experiential Learning Enhancement Program.

Doctor Rochel Smith: