Romeo and Juliet Teacher Handbook 2016-17
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Lady Capulet Barbara Gaines Artistic Director Carl and Marilynn Table of Contents Thoma Endowed Chair Preface . .1 . Art That Lives . .2 . Bard’s Bio . 3. Criss Henderson The First Folio . .3 Executive Director Shakespeare’s England . 4. The English Renaissance Theater . 5 Chicago Shakespeare Theater is Chicago’s professional theater The Courtyard-style Theater . 7. A Brief History of Touring Shakespeare . .8 . dedicated to the works of William Shakespeare. Founded as Shakespeare Timelines . 11 Repertory in 1986, the company moved to its seven-story home on Navy Pier in 1999. In its Elizabethan-style courtyard theater, 500 seats on three levels wrap around a deep thrust stage—with only nine rows separating Shakespeare’s the farthest seat from the stage. Chicago Shakespeare also features a flexible 180-seat black box studio theater, a Teacher Resource Center, Romeo and Juliet and a Shakespeare specialty bookstall. In 2016, construction began on Dramatis Personae . .13 . a. new, innovative performance venue, The Yard at Chicago Shakespeare. Families and Feuds Relationship Web . 13. The year-round, flexible venue can be configured in a variety of shapes The Story . 14 and sizes with audience capacities ranging from 150 to 850, defining the Act by Act Synopsis . 14. S omething Borrowed, Something New: audience–artist relationship to best serve each production. Shakespeare’s Sources . 16 Now in its thirtieth season, the Theater has produced nearly the entire T o Have and To Hold: Shakespeare canon: All’s Well That Ends Well, Antony and Cleopatra, As Elizabethans and their Bonds of Marriage . .17 . Shakespeare, Tragedy, and Us. 19 You Like It, The Comedy of Errors, Cymbeline, Edward III, Hamlet, Henry IV Parts 1 and 2, Henry V, Henry VI Parts 1, 2 and 3, Henry VIII, Julius Caesar, King John, King Lear, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Macbeth, Measure Scholars’ Perspectives for Measure, The Merchant of Venice, The Merry Wives of Windsor, A The Timeless Tragedy . 20. .Midsummer Night’s Dream, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Pericles, Love in a Harsh World . 21. .Richard II, Richard III, Romeo and Juliet, The Taming of the Shrew, The What the Critics Say . 22. Tempest. , Timon of Athens, Troilus and Cressida, Twelfth Night, The Two Gentlemen of Verona, The Two Noble Kinsmen, and The Winter’s Tale. Chicago Shakespeare Theater was the 2008 recipient of the Regional A Play Comes to Life Theatre Tony Award. Chicago’s Jeff Awards year after year have honored A Look Back at Romeo and Juliet in Production. 33 A Conversation with the Director . 37. the Theater, including repeated awards for Best Production and Best Director, the two highest honors in Chicago theater. Since Chicago Shakespeare’s founding, its programming for young Classroom Activities audiences has been an essential element in the realization of its mission. Before You Read the Play . 40 Team Shakespeare supports education in our schools, where Shakespeare Q uiz: Which Character are You is part of every required curriculum. As a theater within a multicultural city, in Romeo and Juliet? . 49 As You Read the Play . 50. .we are committed to bringing Shakespeare to a young and ethnically After You’ve Read the Play . 64. diverse audience of 40,000 students each year. Team Shakespeare’s The Performance: Preparing and Reflecting. 70 programming includes free teacher workshops, student matinees of main T eaching Romeo and Juliet with stage shows, post-performance discussions, comprehensive teacher Graphic Novels. 75 handbooks, and an abridged, original production each year of one of Using Audiobooks to Read Shakespeare . .79 . Strategies for Using Film to Teach Shakespeare. 81 the “curriculum plays.” Team Shakespeare offers a region-wide forum for Romeo and Juliet Film Finder . 86 new vision and enthusiasm for teaching Shakespeare in our schools. In A “Read and View” Teaching Strategy . 90. 2012, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, honored that Classroom Warm-ups and Community Builders . .94 . vision with the prestigious Shakespeare Steward Award. The 2016-2017 Techno-Shakespeare . .100 . Season offers a student matinee series for three of Chicago Shakespeare Suggested Readings. 104 Appendices . 106. Theater’s. full-length productions: in the fall, King Charles III, a new play by Mike Bartlett; in the winter, Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost; and in the spring, Shakespeare in Love, a new adaptation by Lee Hall of the Acknowledgments film by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. Also this winter, a 75-minute This Teacher Handbook grew out of a team effort of abridged version of Romeo and Juliet will be performed at the Theater teachers past and present, Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier and will tour to schools and theaters across the region. We artists, interns, educators, and scholars. Interns Courtney hope that you and your students will enjoy our work—and Shakespeare’s Quinn revised an earlier edition of the Romeo and Juliet creative genius brought to life on stage. handbook for this production, with additional contributions by Jessica Andrews and Bex Ehrmann. Chicago Shakespeare Marilyn J. Halperin Director of Education and Communications Theater gratefully acknowledges the groundbreaking and indelible work of Dr. Rex Gibson and the Cambridge School Ray and Judy McCaskey Endowed Chair Shakespeare Series, and The Folger Shakespeare Institute, Roxanna Conner Education Associate whose contributions to the field of teaching have helped Jason Harrington Education Outreach Manager shape our own work through the years. Molly Truglia Learning Programs Manager ©2017, Chicago Shakespeare Theater S h a k e s p e a r e ’s Romeo & Julieto One city, two families, and a hatred so old that no one can remember its cause. Romeo, a Montague, and Juliet, a Capulet, fall in love. Shakespeare sets his story of young love in a city of old hatreds. Violence is woven into their world and death is on every mind. This is a story that tells of the power of passions and words to sever and to destroy, to bridge and to bind. Words express—and ignite—passions. When words can no longer be uttered, silence and swords take their place. More than four hundred years after Shakespeare wrote his Romeo and Juliet, we still see in his characters and their story ourselves and our world. Shakespeare’s characters are faced with choices. What is it they want—that we want—in the face of a violent world? And will it be words or weapons that we choose to steer the course of our lives? Introduction p Art That Lives How can you help us give you rama is a living art. It is written the best performance we can? to be performed live before a group of people who form Please, no talking during the performance. Dan audience and experience it It distracts the actors as well as the people together, just as you will here at sitting nearby. the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Respond naturally to our play. Emotions are part This tradition of performance and of drama. We hope that you'll laugh, cry and even observance, of drama as communication, is an historically gasp—but as a natural response to the story, and not rich and complex one that reaches far back in time. Textual in order to distract attention from the stage. evidence from Egypt and Mesopotamia—even art like cave Please leave all “noisemakers”—food, gum, paintings depicting men disguised as animals—reveals that cell phones, iPods, etc.—back at school or on the since ancient times, impersonation and imitation have been bus. In a quiet theater, wrappers, munching—and used not only ritualistically but also as a means of expression even a phone’s vibration—are heard by all, the and communication, a way to impart the knowledge of actors included. the community. No photographs of any kind, please. Flashbulbs The beginnings of Western drama further developed in the can make the actors lose their focus and can be religious ritual and festivals of the ancient Greeks, while dangerous. Digital cameras, along with all other their theater also took on new emphasis as a sophisticated kinds of recording devices, are prohibited, as is mode of storytelling, especially as a way of communicating text-messaging. the history of a culture and imagining new heroic tales. The drama of Europe’s Middle Ages was closely tied to forms of religious observance, but the medievals also used theater A live performance depends upon its audience. In the theater, to teach biblical stories, present the lives of saints, and the audience hears and sees the actors, just as the actors creatively communicate the moral ideals of the community. hear and see the audience. When the actors experience a It is this long and varied tradition of community engagement responsive, interested audience, their work is at its best—full of and communication through drama that Shakespeare and the animation and energy. When the actors sense disinterest, they Renaissance playwrights inherited—and from which they would too are distracted, and the play they create is less interesting. both borrow and imagine new possibilities. One actor described the experience of live performance as a story told by the actors and audience together. In this sense, Drama not only depicts human communication, it is human you are also a storyteller when you experience live theater. communication. But in the theater, unlike television or film, a We hope you’ll enjoy your role—and will help us to give you a two-way communication occurs between the actors and their dramatic experience that you’ll always remember. audience. When you experience theatrical storytelling, you are not simply on the receiving end of this communicative process: [Theatrical performance] is essentially a the audience, as a community, is also a participant.