Three area theaters among 7 California organizations to receive NEA Shakespeare grants
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Friends, Romans, countrymen, get off the Bluetooth and lend us your ears already: Merrily we come with news that three area theaters are among the seven California organizations to receive the 2009-2010 Shakespeare for a New Generation (SNG) Grants from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Nationwide, 37 nonprofit professional theaters will receive grants of $25,000 each to support performances and educational activities by each theater for at least 10 middle and high schools. The program, which runs from June 1 through May 31, 2010, is part of the NEA’s Shakespeare in American Communities Initiative, launched in 2003.
Glendale’s A Noise Within, Shakespeare Festival/LA and the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum of Topanga all made this year’s list. The other California theaters receiving SNG grants are the African-American Shakespeare Company (San Francisco); California Shakespeare Theater a.k.a. Cal Shakes (Berkeley); San Francisco Shakespeare Festival and Sonoma County Repertory Theater (Sebastopol).
Under a partnership with the U.S. Department of Justice, six theaters nationwide, including Cal Shakes and San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, will receive additional grants ranging from $10,000 to $20,000 to bring programs to youth involved in the juvenile justice system.
Elizabeth Tobias, school programs director for Will Geer, called the annual grants ‘an incredible boon’ to theater education and said the organization uses the money to fund field trips to the Topanga theater campus for students to take part in workshops and see a professional Shakespeare production. This year, the theater also will take a production of ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ to area schools.
Julia Rodriguez Elliott, co-artistic director of A Noise Within, said the grant will enable students to see plays at the theater, along with bus transportation, study guides, post-show discussions and in-school workshops with resident artists.
Shakespeare Festival/LA artistic director Ben Donenberg said the grant will fund its program Will Power to Schools, which provides workshop guidance and materials to LAUSD schools and this year will bring artists into the schools to involve kids in a production of ‘Romeo and Juliet,’ set in the Boyle Heights/East L.A. area in the 1930s.
‘What is kind of astonishing is that it is possible for a person to be certified to teach secondary school English in the state of California having never taken a class in Shakespeare,’ Donenberg said. ‘You should have seen the look on the mayor’s face when I told him that.’
-- Diane Haithman
Image provided by the National Endowment for the Arts