The Bards of Alberton

Alberton High School students put on an unconventional version of Shakespearean Theater Thursday to a crowd in the elementary school lunchroom.

The school’s drama club presented its version of James Zager’s “The Shakespeare Project” using their own props, costumes and design.

“They’ve worked really hard on this play, and it shows,” Alberton High School science teacher and play director Brita Lien said.

Lien said “The Shakespeare Project” is a contemporized version of many of William Shakespeare’s most well recognized works. While the dialogue remained the same, the way each scene was acted out was modernized. Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene was acted out as a cell phone call between two high school students; the witches from “Macbeth” were bag ladies and Marc Antony’s speech from “Julius Caesar” was a press conference that was videotaped and projected onto a screen on-stage.

While the script for their play was already written, Lien said the club continued to make their own additions to the play until the last few minutes before they went on stage.

“I really encouraged them to make it their own,” Lien said.

Students in the play made their own costumes and props, right down to elaborately painted shields and swords. Lien said the students choreographed their own fight scenes and decided which scenes to cut from the play to make it the right length. Even the video editing done for Marc Antony’s speech was done by the students.

Since Marc Antony’s speech is such a long difficult work to memorize and perform, the students decided it would be best to tape it. James Wemple played Antony and read the speech in front of the camera several different times with different camera angles and the entire speech was edited together from those clips.

“It’s a lot of work, but it’s a lot of fun,” Lien said. “The minute it stops being fun is the minute we’ll stop doing this play.”

Students have been working on “The Shakespeare Project” for around six weeks. Lien said she tries to time the play, which has become an annual event, between fall sports and spring sports seasons, but things inevitably end up overlapping. She said several of her students have been bouncing back and forth between sports practice and play practice.

In past performances, the Alberton High School Drama Club has done renditions of “Aesop’s Fables,” “Alice in Wonderland,” and “The Wizard of Oz.” Lien said she had always wanted to do a more difficult play like Shakespeare, but until this year she had not had enough experienced cast members. She added that the contemporary nature of Zager’s play made it easier for the kids to grasp as well.

“I’m really proud of them, they’ve worked hard,” Lien said.

The cast members presented Lien with a bouquet of flowers at the end of the play to thank her for all of her hard work and encouragement.