| Project Discovery Plus Brings Twelfth Night Into The Classroom |
Trinity Rep resident actors, teaching artists bring the Bard to 21 local schoolsTrinity Rep's Education Department will continue to offer its popular "Project Discovery Plus” program which presents eight student matinees to local middle and high school students, as well as complimentary in-school workshops taught by cast members from the production. This year, an estimated 100 workshops planned around Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare will be presented in 21 schools in Barrington, Cranston, East Greenwich, Lincoln, Portsmouth, Providence and Scituate in RI; Barnstable, Douglas, Foxboro, Franklin, Millis, New Bedford, Osterville and Seekonk in MA; and Danielson in CT. Project Discovery Plus began five years ago as part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, a national theater initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest. The program is a three-part experience, beginning with three in-class workshops held prior to the students attending the play, in order to prepare them for the production. The schools then attend one of the weekday Project Discovery student matinees at Trinity Rep. In the weeks following the performance, actors will once again visit their classrooms for three workshops in order to work with the students to reflect and build on what they've seen. The workshops can take a number of different forms, from an "Inside the Actors Studio" format to writing and performing their own adaptation of the play. Education Director Caroline Azano states: "The impact on the students is immediate and powerful – they become engaged with the material, and their understanding of the text deepens exponentially as they see it performed, and as they, in turn, perform scenes from the play themselves." Twelfth Night is Shakespeare’s tangled tale of romance amidst the revelry of the Twelfth Night festival on the stormy isle of Illyria. Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Actor Cherie Corinne Rice (’10) takes on the dual roles of Viola and her twin brother Sebastian, both of whose affections are in high demand. Mistaken identities are just the beginning of this topsy-turvy mess. Award-winning actor and director Brian McEleney (Hamlet, Our Town, A Raisin in the Sun) will direct and star in an ensemble that includes resident actors Stephen Berenson, Mauro Hantman, Anne Scurria, Fred Sullivan Jr., Stephen Thorne and Joe Wilson Jr. Education programs surrounding Twelfth Night are part of Shakespeare for a New Generation, a national initiative sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in cooperation with Arts Midwest. Trinity Rep's production of Twelfth Night is supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts.
Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs actor Annie Worden (second from left) ('10) plays improv games with 12th graders at Cranston High School East as part of a Project Discovery Plus workshop. Photo by Mark Turek
http://www.trinityrep.com/DownloadDocs/Cranston2.jpg Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs actor Annie Worden (far right, foreground) ('10) plays improv games with 12th graders at Cranston High School East as part of a Project Discovery Plus workshop. Photo by Mark Turek http://www.trinityrep.com/DownloadDocs/Cranston3.jpg Brown/Trinity Rep MFA Programs actor Annie Worden (far right, foreground) ('10) plays improv games with 12th graders at Cranston High School East as part of a Project Discovery Plus workshop. Photo by Mark Turek |
