Bard — Actors from the Oregon Shakespeare Festival perform, hold workshops as part of new three-year program

As an actor with the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, the language of the legendary bard is a way of life for Keith Leroyal, but he also knows that’s not the case for most people, especially today’s youth.

So if he can help even a few students resist the gradual degradation of language that digital connectivity seems to have unleashed on the next generation, then his teaching efforts have been a success.

After spending last week performing short plays and leading workshops on Shakespearean language at Newberg High School as part of a new three-year OSF school visit program, he can add at least one student, and likely more, to list of people whose perspective he’s broadened.

That’s because one student, during an exercise on puns, spontaneously produced a sentence so profound that the whole class stopped.

“Everyone was impacted by the fact that she said something so beautiful in this little exercise where we’re just playing with poetic devices,” Leroyal said. “It was that moment of the ball dropping, all of a sudden, that if I think about some of these things or even just the way I communicate, then perhaps my life will have a little more vibrancy.”

After taking group of students to the festival for the past 15 or 20 years, theater teacher Drea Ferguson has established a strong relationship with the Ashland-based theater company.

After OSF actors made a one-day visit to NHS last year, Ferguson was encouraged to apply for the three-year program educational program and was approved in March.

After Ferguson and another teacher attended a weeklong workshop over the summer and six or seven English teachers did a one-day training session in October, Leroyal and colleague Eduardo Placer kicked off the program in earnest last week.

“The idea is to make language learning more accessible to all kids, because theater kids know it,” Ferguson said. “You get up and you do something with it and you understand the language.”

Leroyal and Placer performed two 30-minute plays, “Happy Birthday Shakespeare” to celebrate the bard’s 450th and the more contemporary immigrant tale “American Dream,” for numerous classes and held workshops on the language of Shakespeare and the poetic devices he used for several others.

English teacher Gail Grobey was particularly impressed with how the actors handled a wide range of students with various skill levels. For her freshman class, they had a lesson in close reading and understanding how language comes together.

“They’re very energetic, but they also link story with experience and personal experience,” Grobey said. “You might not have an assassination happen in your castle, but that doesn’t mean you don’t know people that have betrayed you.”

In the poetic devices workshop, the actors led Grobey’s AP Literature class through a lesson in which they beat out the rhythm of iambic pentameter, which happens to mirror the heartbeat, on their chests.

“It really opened up how I think about Shakespeare,” senior Evan Bell said. “I’ll definitely read it a lot differently and understand more.”

The workshops were held on the stage in the theater, allowing students to express the words physically in a more authentic context.

“It allowed for a more hands-on type of experience, which you don’t really get with literature and books,” senior Hannah Smith said. “We’re in AP classes. We sit down and write notes.”

Both Bell and Smith said they were jealous of the underclassmen not only because they will reap the benefits of the program for two more years, but because at the end of the program, 50 students will be given a free trip to Ashland to watch two live performances.

Ferguson said it has not yet been determined how those 50 students will be chosen, but hopes to include those who wouldn’t have been able to make the trip otherwise, whether due to the $170 cost or a previous lack of interest.

“I think it’s been a really cool week,” Ferguson said. “I’ll be sad to see them go because they’re really nice guys.”

Written by: Seth Gordon