For Photos and much more: N.Y. Homeschoolers' Julius Caesar Homepage
August 29, 1998
I just got home from our wonderful homeschool group's second and final performance of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar.
The kids have done a Shakespeare play every summer for three years now and every summer they stun me with their accomplishments.
Nominally I am the director, but I'm very hands-off--I pass out scripts and negotiate with the kids about who'll take what role and I answer questions (or encourage them to ask each other questions) about what their lines mean and I asked Alison to create a website where castmembers could get more info about the play, costumes, etc.
I feel like those soldiers in the folk tale Stone Soup--it is absolutely amazing to me to see what 24 kids, ages 6 to 14, managed to pull off in the space of a summer. The main thing I did was to cheerlead--really just to hold up a mirror and report the amazing progress I saw from rehearsal to rehearsal.
When we had the first read-through at the end of June, only three of the kids (who happened to have spent some time studying it before) had the foggiest idea of what in the world was going on in the complex and convoluted conspiracy/civil war story.
At first we met once a week, then twice a week, then three times a week--things really snowballed in the last few weeks.
Most of our actors were homeschoolers, but we also recruited some public, private, and parochial school friends to fill out the cast. It was interesting talking to their parents afterwards--they were amazed at what their kids could do, even more amazed than the homeschool parents (and that's pretty amazed!)
The passion and the energy and the confidence and the magic and the chemistry and the poise which came together on the little wooden stage at the playground tonight were amazing.
But for me, the true test of the success of the enterprise was not the excellence of the performance, but the fact that the kids all came up to me afterwards, already eager to do this again next summer.
That, and the fact that all of us, parents and kids alike, enjoyed learning a lot more about Shakespeare and Julius Caesar's time in the course of the play.
And, I now know that there are at least 24 different ways to wrap a toga!
Mary O'Keefe mary_okeeffe@post.harvard.edu
The librarian's daughter from DC
now learning to live gently and joyfully in upstate NY
with Ross, Alison (4/30/86) and Catherine (2/18/90)
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