About Stage It

It all began with one idea

That idea is that all children ages 9 - 12 love to act out. So why not give them a platform to do just that?

Using acting techniques field tested with about 40,000 students in New York City classrooms, students embody characters from Hamlet, Henry V, Julius Caesar, or Othello in an Act as short as 6-8 minutes or as long as the whole 40-minute adaptation. Student scripts are 100% Shakespeare’s texts with footnotes for new vocabulary and pronunciations.

The principles and practices of Stage It: Making Shakespeare Come Alive in Schools have been in the works since the mid-1980s when the author first began experimenting with many of the ideas presented in the book and its support resources. Those ideas became institutionalized through Stages of Learning (1994-2010), a New York City-based nonprofit arts education organization founded by the author and described by Mayor Bloomberg as “one of the most effective arts education programs” serving the City. The organization’s primary purpose involved partnerships between classroom teachers and teaching artists who collaborated on play-making activities that culminated in performances as short as five minutes and as long as fifty depending on educational aims and resources.

PS 6 fifth-grade students in the Stages of Learning program perform a scene in Carl Schurz Park in New York City in 2008. Identities of the students have been blurred to protect their identities.

While Stages of Learning relied on a collaborative process between teaching artists and classroom teachers, Stage It is intended for use by a singular teacher (or a cluster of teachers across a whole grade) with limited resources and little to no experience in theater. The underlying assumption is that resources for drama instruction are scarce to nonexistent in most schools. It is offered as a low-cost solution where even a teaching artist residency is out of the question.

With funding from over forty additional institutional funders, Stages of Learning provided collaborative drama instruction to about 3,000 students annually and 40,000 through its lifecycle. Stage It synthesizes the best and most transferrable of this work.