I have been rehearsing a play, called the Caucasian Chalk Circle, at the Austin Riggs Center in Stockbridge, MA. This is a recovery/therapeutic center that helps individuals struggling to live productive lives in our society. Patients live in an open community and share their difficult life experiences, and work together for solutions. Two times a year Kevin Coleman (see Meet Kevin) is hired to direct a play with them and he asked me to get involved when one of the patients needed to drop out. Continue reading
Category Archives: Education
Shakespeare on their tongues…
I am awash in a dream. I have spent this weekend with a gaggle of high school kids hooting, hissing, yelling, pounding fists in the air, leaping up, cheering and shouting at the top of their lungs. Sounds like I am at a basketball game, right? No, this is all happening here at Shakespeare & Company during the Fall Festival. Ten high schools from the area have descended and each perform one of 37 Shakespearian plays that they have been creating with directors in a residency program that started 9 weeks ago. Continue reading
On Benedict Pond
If Thoreau could have a pond, so can I.
I have been going out to the Bear State Forest about 25 minutes from Lenox and it has become my refuge. It is beautiful, solitary, and I’m watching the seasonal changes happen before my eyes. I have only had time to go once a week on my one day off, so it is my church, my sanity, my communion with nature and myself. I need it and crave it. Continue reading
Out of the dark into the fall….
Right after I wrote my last blog post I was inundated with negative events. This was just after I received the go ahead to be a teacher trainee here at Shakespeare and Company and do what I could to get a festival going for taking Shakespeare into high schools in the Lenox area next spring. I met with people who didn’t want to have anything to do with helping me get the information I needed, people resentful of the idea of having more work to do, I upset the apple cart and unknowingly offended people, hurt people’s feelings and ended up in tears thinking I had made a HUGE mistake in taking all of this on. My identity that I joyously found in my travels across the United States was all of a sudden bombarded, and tested, with large personalities taking up my space, sharing my bathroom, and helping me to feel insignificant. Continue reading
meanderest 