Students Experience Shakespeare

Because of a grant from AEF (and the school’s Dads Club), all the students at Maya Lin Elementary were able to see a professional, age-appropriate production of Shakespeare’s play Julius Ceasar, performed by SF Shakes, a San Francisco-based theater company. Thus, every Maya Lin student, regardless of their family’s ability to pay for theater tickets, had a front-row seat to a world-class cultural experience!

Beware the Ides of March!

SF Shakes goes to great efforts to encourage BIPOC, LGBTQiA+, gender non-conforming and folks of all abilities to audition for their casts, and is deeply committed to inclusive, empowering, and color-conscious casting. Their annual Shakespeare in the Park productions reflect the diversity of the Bay Area.

Maya Lin is an arts-focused school, although it has limited options for students to experience theater. So it was thrilling for the students to be able to dive deep into this play using a live ‘text’to analyze leadership, power, and persuasion. Students also witnessed the power of language through famous speeches (e.g., Mark Antony’s funeral oration), helping them understand how tone, word choice, and delivery can influence an audience. They discussed what makes a ‘good’ leader and the difference between personal ambition and the common good, and they could draw parallels between the historical Roman setting and modern-day concepts of justice and community.

Watching this play on campus helped remove the intimidation factor of classical literature, building ‘academic courage’ that students will carry into middle school.