A Mid-Autumn Schoolday’s Dream
In eerie forests stewed in moonlight and full of malevolent witches, fair cities holding deep hereditary rivalries, and across the world, English playwright and poet William Shakespeare has long been regarded as one of the most influential artists in time. Allusions to his work can be excavated from even the most unassuming of sources, his mark being permanently inked onto the pages of history.
But, moving away from the hay-day of the Globe Theatre, non-academic appreciation for his work has seemed to wane in much of the newer generations. Like many of his own characters, Shakespeare has often been rendered an archaic ghost haunting the classics sections of most school libraries.
A specter which Colorado’s ‘Shakespeare in the Parking Lot’ is bent on shocking back to life.
An ‘ensemble in repertoire’, with actors memorizing and playing multiple roles, the program has modernized the practice of Shakespeare in the Park, an age-old theater tradition of hosting his plays within a park setting (largely centered in New York City’s Central Park).
This varied troupe’s main goal is to bring the Bard to the blacktop, tirelessly working to disseminate the figure’s revolutionary work to a highschool audience.
“Shakespeare’s words have rung true for over 400 years, and it’s still produced throughout the world. So it’s kind of an obvious lean and go-to for us to offer for students,” Actor and Program Manager Justin Walvoord said. “It’s also a great opportunity for students to see Shakespeare for the very first time and to hear that language, that heightened language that and have it come to life in a modern feel, even though we haven’t changed the dialogue. A lot of folks are like, ‘Wait, did you rewrite it?’ And it’s like, ‘No, we just condensed the heck out of it.’ Yeah, a lot of juicy stuff out. But we really landed at the core, and we ride the message of the stories and I think it hits the audiences really well,”
While all the performers found their way to school parking lots across the state through different means, one commonality rings true, binding them not only to each other but to the profoundly trail-blazing man whose work they hope to honor: their love of what they do.
“So when I was in high school, my dad’s like, take the dance classes. It’ll help you with your gymnastics and when I did that, I want to say we had a dance concert at the end of the semester and that first time being on stage and like feeling the lights and doing the tech process, I was like wow, like I just got like warm and fuzzies inside,” Actor Jasmyne Pierce said. “I was like this is like the spot I want to be in,”
Connecting with the performance and the stage has become an integral part of many of the lives of these actors. A career and passion built upon walking in the shoes of fae, donkey, and king. A delectable fairy-tale universe which the company hopes to bring to all, regardless of their worldly ties.
“Yeah, it’s like a food truck,” Walvoord said. “A lot of people don’t have the chance to come down to the Denver Center to see a show and schedule the buses and everything. So here we’re bringing the ‘food’, the show, to you here in your parking lot,”
Shakespeare in the Parking Lot was first brought to life in 2015 by the Denver Center for Performing Arts’ Allison Watrous, Executive Director of Education and Community Engagement.
“She [Watrous] wanted to have that whole food truck concept. Come on out,” Walvoord said. “So she built that first team. We did one day with five shows in one day, starting with Romeo and Juliet, and then we added Midsummer’s a year and a half later, and then we added the Scottish play: Macbeth,”
The program’s 8 actors, Shannon Altner, Iliana Barron, Grant Bowman, Landon Tate Boyle, Chloe McLeod, Justin Walvoord, Jasmyne Pierce, and Christian Ray Robinson, whose meticulous dedication of time and talent to every single performance they put on shines brightly through their work, have come together to create a community through collaboration. Their pathways into the Shakespearean project are diverse, but their unity through their positions as actors defines much of their experience.
“So actors are independent contractors,” Pierce said. “So we do the auditions and then our director. She’s the director of education, community development, community engagement. She is the one who kind of ends up picking us and then deciding what roles to put us in based on the need. Yeah, but most of us I think everyone has been on the tour at least two years, the most recent of us, myself, and another actor named Landon, we were the most recent to join but we kind of keep coming back and get to return to the tour,”
Throughout the performance seasons, which last from September to the first two weeks of October and the entirety of April to the first two weeks of May, the troupe truck’s tires are often left very busy, with the team looking at around 18 productions per week. Reaching out to as many as 30 schools every tour, finding gig locations is imperative to the success of the show, and building positive professional relationships is the base building block for this vocation.
“We have wonderful partnerships with all the other programs that we do with in school programming or playwriting or Bobby G program,” Walvoord said. “So that has helped build a pool of communication for us, and this started back in 2015. So it’s now gained momentum, which is awesome. So each season, it’s really about reaching out to our former partners and saying, ‘Hey, do you want us back?’ and then we’ll get a plethora of folks reaching out to see if they can be added to the list,”
Considering the lot’s rigorous schedule and plethora of exhibition locations around the state, many of the extensive technical responsibilities fall upon the capable shoulders of Stuart Barr and Adara Baltazar, Technical Director and Stage Manager and Assistant Stage Manager respectively.
“Before all of us actors get here each day they [Barr and Baltazar] have to go get our van which pulls our truck on the trailer and they kind of get here ahead of time to get to the site and like pre-setup for us,” Pierce said. “And then we come to help kind of do the rest of the setup. But that’s our whole situation right there [the company van] is how we travel school to school. And if you take a look at the truck, what’s cool about our truck is we’ve made some adjustments to it to make it safe for acting and stuff or like you see the trees on there. We’ve done some cool stuff to just you know, make it the set because that’s what the truck serves,”
From the modified truck to the cast and crew, the entire ensemble must function as a unit of their passion for their craft. In celebrating pivotal theater history, they aspire to bring the past onto the stage of the future, spotlighting both their talent and the crucial lessons and artistry still found in the Bard’s ballads to the world.
