All the world’s a stage, starting in your own back yard

It is a hot afternoon, but you would never know it by the energy in the backyard on South Seventh Avenue. I count roughly 16 children hanging out on a wooden play set, but their attention is focused on the dynamic blonde woman in front of them.

She is going over stage directions, calling out both children’s and character’s names, giving them direction, praising parts of their performances. She checks the time, and asks them if they are ready to move to a new scene. Half of them eagerly shout their assent, a few others groan.

Mary stands with her hands on her hips and says “OK then, break the set down, you’re done for today.” Several little girls run up to her, pleading for more. These are the fairies, some of the youngest members of The New Rude Mechanicals.

The children begin taking down the curtains hanging off the play set and dragging the wings off toward the garage. Mary walks over to the mothers watching the rehearsal to confer with them. The New Rude Mechanicals are named with a wink afters Shakespeare’s amateur (and mostly inept) actors-within-a-play in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” The home-schooled children range in age from six to sixteen years.

 

Mary and her husband are professional actors, and during the summer her husband works at The Yard in Martha’s Vineyard. Mary has booked her young company there for a week this summer, where they will perform on a real stage.

 

“My Dad first presented Shakespeare to me when I was a child,” Mary explains. “He told me it’s not for the scholars, it belongs to the actors and to the audience.” Her initial thought was to present Shakespeare’s work to the kids as something fun to do, but a lot of unintentional learning took place between the time they read their first script and presented their first play.

Shakespeare is all about language -- the Olde English verbiage, the sharp but subtle jokes. Heavy material for grammar school kids. Mary overcame this by giving her charges a script and a month to read through it, underlining and researching words they did not understand, and re-writing the dialogue as they understood it in the margins.

They read through their dialogue and gained understanding of the material. From there everything blossomed. They decided to produce the play and began rehearsals. They designed and built sets, chose costumes, created a program and publicized their play. They had such a great time that they’ve produced three more since then.

 

These plays are truly a community effort by both parents and children. Thanks to Amina’s sewing efforts they have a wardrobe of costumes to choose from, altered to suit each new production. A member of Mary’s church wrote the song for the fairies. Gail and her husband built the sets, painted by Becky in luscious shades of blue, green and purple for a dreamy twilight feeling. Amy manages the sound; Allison manages the stage.

 

That sense of community permeates every square inch of Mary’s home. This is the sort of home people naturally gravitate to, a place of comfort and welcome. As the rehearsal breaks up, the children and parents depart, calling out thanks, offering help with cleanup chores. Mary handles it all with equanimity, a calm island around whom chaos eddies.

 

- Lorri Matusiak-Lindsay

Our press schedule just missed the public performances of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” last week, in the backyard on South Seventh Avenue in Highland Park. Keep an ear out for next year’s production, as the young troupe goes into their fourth year of strutting and fretting their hour upon the stage. There is still time to contribute donations for transportation and boarding costs for the troupe’s debut in Martha’s Vineyard this August.