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The weeks and days leading up to the final performance can be a bit stressful. One fear that teachers often have is that the performance will not be understood by the audience, which is usually made up of parents and younger siblings. These are folks who haven’t had the long acclimation period of getting to know Shakespeare’s language (except what they’ve heard being practiced at home).

Our recommendations, when you have concerns about the students or audience being lost in the language, are these:

1. When first setting up the class project, choose a smaller section of text and edit it carefully, trimming where you need to but allowing for a natural flow when possible. Don’t allow yourself to get trapped into including long scenes where students who are unprepared for the work are stuck with long verse speeches – that can turn into “Deadly Theater” and kill the experience for everyone involved! If you start small, you can always add later as students get a handle on the use of the language.
2. Emphasize group scenes wherever you can. Share the load. Have students tag-team roles, or have two or three of a character – twin Pucks, for example, side by side. The best scenes are when somehow you manage to have the entire class on stage – as fairy spirits, or sailors in The Tempest shipwreck, or as citizens of Athens. You can take speeches of main characters and redistribute them to “Citizen 1,” “Citzen 2,” or “Fairy 1,” “Fairy 2,” etc. Everyone is involved, the “ball” keeps being tossed from one student to another, and the variety makes it fun for the audience.
3. Use playful introductions before the performance to tell the story. For example, you can have a narrator bring the actual “characters” on stage to do a “dumbshow,” as it was called in Shakespeare’s time – a silent-movie version of the scene played out in double-time, a preview of the upcoming main attraction. The characters can even address the audience directly. Hermia: “I wish my dad would let me marry Lysander. Raise your hands if you’re on my side!” Egeus: “Hey, how many of you parents understand how I feel here? Would you want this goofball Lysander marrying YOUR daughter?”
4. Include a summary of the scene and a description of the action in a program or on a summary sheet for the audience. Ask students to write these as a writing extension.
5. Focus on crisp delivery of the text and clear action in the scenes. When working with the students, emphasize the question: “If someone were watching this scene and spoke no English, how would they figure out what was going on?” The answer is: gesture, emotion, and intonation. So you can train the students to make such elements “bigger” and more visible: “How would you do this for an audience of second graders, so they could see the emotions of each character?”
6. Be ahead of schedule, so you can perform a few “dress performances” for smaller invited audiences. Build the students’ confidence so that they are raring to go for their big performance, and can go out there and hit it out of the park. Much of the audience’s experience, to be honest, is based on perception: If they perceive that the kids know what they are saying, and are saying it with full energy and authority, they will truly enjoy the performance. If the students are tentative and apologetic on stage, the audience will watch politely but mostly out of a sense of duty.