Will Power to Youth
Shakespeare Festival/LA

Valeria Paniagua as Isabella pleads with Jorge Siguenza as Angelo in The World Beneath.

Photo: Michael Lamont

Since 1993, Shakespeare Festival/LA, a non-profit theater organization, has run a community arts, educational outreach, employment, and gang diversion program that trains and motivates young people by engaging them in producing their own versions of Shakespeare's plays. Will Power to Youth provides artistic training, accredited academic enrichment, employment, and experiences that build life skills to 30 adolescents in each of its seven-week sessions held during school vacations or "off-track" periods during the school year.

Guided by professional theater artists, teens adapt, rehearse, and present a play based on one of Shakespeare's texts. Special emphasis is placed on exploring the language, themes, and literary values of the selected play under the guidance of a dramaturge, a professional human relations facilitator, and an accredited school district teacher. Students also participate in seminars on movement, music, and acting techniques. They expand their experience through writing, set design and construction, and costuming. Using all of their new-found skills, they transform a Shakespearean play into one that addresses their life experiences in East, Central, and South Central Los Angeles. For instance, one youth production adapted scenes from Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice that reflect on issues of race, religion, and power, topics still relevant today. At the end of each session, the program culminates in a week of performances of the student production at Shakespeare Festival/LA's permanent theater space.

In addition to receiving an hourly wage for their participation in the program, enrollees are given five academic credits and a grade for their work. Both the compensation and the academic evaluations promote their sense of responsibility to the program and to other participants and provide them with a concrete measure of accomplishment.

Although the program provides instruction in the theater arts and opportunities for job shadowing in careers related to the stage, participants also learn more broadly applicable skills, such as how to manage time, interview for a job, or prepare for a test. "Will Power to Youth is not intended to be a workshop for aspiring actors," asserts Ben Donenberg, Shakespeare Festival/LA's producing artistic director. "It is a creative, comprehensive personal development program that uses theater in an employment and training context to give young people the skills and experience they need to go on in school and beyond school to a meaningful job." And they are: Will Power has achieved an 85 percent success rate at improving graduates' school attendance, literacy, and academic performance.