Schools
Mineola Students Hold Shakespeare Festival
Middle school students perform Shakespeare classics in Memorial Park.
Under the sweltering Wednesday afternoon sun and wearing bright costumes, drama students from gathered in front of the gazebo in to display the acting skills they had aquired in the past year.
The annual two-day “Shakespeare in the Park” festival features English Language Arts (ELA) students in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades performing abbreviated versions of the Bard’s various works. Each class is assigned a different play, studies it throughout the school year and chooses how to perform the piece.
“It’s really been growing,” eighth grade an eighth grade ELA teacher Drew Smith said. “It started out very small, in front of that bench in the park, and it’s really grown.”
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The festival began 14 years ago as a way of making Shakespeare a fun learning experience for the students, gradually increasing over time.
“We wanted kids not to be afraid of Shakespeare,” Smith said. “When kids study Shakespeare later, we want them to say ‘oh, I remember that’.”
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This year the classes tackled the comedy “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” while seventh graders performed “Much Ado About Nothing” and the sixth grade acted out “Twelfth Night.”
The sixth grade classes also performed several scenes from “Romeo and Juliet” as a way of introducing them to a play they will soon be studying.
Performances began as soon as first period, continuing until the end of the school day. During each period, two classes were on stage while other students filtered in and out of the park, watching their friends and classmates perform.
The festival has employed so many students that Smith has even run into festival alumni.
“A former student came to watch her brother perform,” he said. “She was so excited, she came up afterwards and said ‘I remember my lines’.”
In between plays, Smith quizzed the children on Shakespearian trivia, including which modern movie “Twelfth Night” was based upon. The answer as one student correctly guessed, was “She’s the Man.”
The “Shakespeare in the Park” festival continues throughout the school day on Thursday with more middle school students scheduled to perform Shakespeare’s comedies in their own unique and creative ways.
