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Shakespeare

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5 School Theater Revenue Sources Beyond Ticket Sales

Funding school theater is always a challenge. While a few schools offer an annual budget for school productions, most drama clubs are left with whatever revenue they take in from the previous production. Ticket pricing is a challenge: you want to make the show cheap enough to attract an audience but not so cheap that it seems like a waste of time (students don't have much faith in the quality of a $1 show.) Once you get the ticket price down, there are other revenue streams to consider. Here are a few easy options for adding a couple hundred extra dollars to your next production budget. Concessions Concessions don't have to be a daunting task. If you have absolutely no budget to start with, you can ask parents to bring cupcakes and cookies from home. Parents who don't have time to bake can offer to grab a case of soda and a bag of ice. All you need is a table, a cooler, and a cash box-- oh, and a volunteer parent to run the table. Do you have a little padding in you...

The Personal Monologue Project

A young girl stands on a tiny platform under a spotlight and tearfully tells her classmates about the night that she held hands with her siblings in the bathroom of their home in Syria while the Russians bombed their street. A fourteen year old boy admits a vulnerability hiding under his swagger. A sometimes combative teen with a lot of talent recounts the sensation of her father's car flipping in an accident that took his life on the way to the birth of her sister. Two girls who previously had little interaction connect over similar stories about drug-addicted parents and coming to live with their grandmothers. There are days when my classroom is pretty factual and practical. We learn to make scaled set drawings. We study the differences between Greek and Roman theater. We memorize lines by rote. And then there are the days when my class gets pretty emotional and almost therapeutic. We journal. We build box forts. We reveal something about ourselves like we did that day when we ...

Why Teach Shakespeare?

When I first started teaching theater, as I excitedly told my friends and coworkers what I was planning to do for my fall production, I was met with doubt. Romeo & Juliet? Why would anyone want to direct Shakespeare? Why would anyone want to direct Shakespeare with teenagers ? My decision was threefold. I love Shakespeare. I want to spread my love of Shakespeare. I needed a royalty-free play that I could perform that fall because we were left with $100 in the drama club budget. I had already written a plan for a college directing class, so I had an idea of how to tackle R&J. I also knew that we could put up a Shakespeare play with one minimalist set (set build shown right). I knew that directing epic fight scenes would draw some of the boys back into the theater program, and if there's anything high school theater directors can agree on, it's that it's hard to get boys to audition. But as I was met with incredulous looks, scoffs, and questions, I sta...

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