About Stage It: Making Shakespeare Come Alive in Schools
About Stage It
Children ages 9 - 12 love to act for developmental reasons. So why not give them a platform to do just that?
Stage It is a comprehensive guide to directing school plays for students at these ages. The book was written to help classroom teachers successfully produce plays, even if they have no prior theater experience.
Directing a school play can feel overwhelming. Teachers must manage rehearsals, help students learn lines, build confidence, and prepare for a performance — all while continuing regular teaching responsibilities.
Stage It breaks this process into clear, manageable steps.
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 many of which involved the broader school community.
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.
With funding from over forty institutional funders, Stages of Learning provided collaborative drama instruction to thousands of students across its lifecycle. Stage It synthesizes the best and most transferrable of this work.
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.
In 2026, Stage It was a finalist in the Music & Drama Education Awards in the Outstanding Drama Education Resource Category.
About Floyd Rumohr
Floyd is the creator of Stage It: Making Shakespeare Come Alive in Schools and founder of Stages of Learning and its critically acclaimed off- and off-off-Broadway Chekhov Theatre Ensemble* (1994-2010), a nonprofit organization upon which Stage It is based and described by Mayor Michael Bloomberg as “one of New York City’s most effective arts education programs”. He is a former master teaching artist for dozens of schools, has directed several plays off- and off-off-Broadway, was an adjunct professor of education at the Long Island University Graduate School of Education, and consulted on the NYC Department of Education's Blueprint for Teaching and Learning in the Arts Theater Grades PreK-12. As associate education director for Theatre for A New Audience, he focused on bringing world-class Shakespeare programs to urban youth. Floyd was the first among his peers to receive a university merit fellowship in the M.F.A. acting program of Temple University and received a B.F.A. in theatre from Wayne State University with several merit scholarships.
He currently resides in Porto, Portugal with his husband, Paco, and dog, Gaia.
* The Chekhov Theatre Ensemble’s (named for Michael not Anton) purpose was to provide professional development for the teaching artists involved in the Stages of Learning program.
Photo: Victor Giganti