The Local Bard’s Players are not your average theater group. With a shared love of performance and arts education, its members adapt and perform abbreviated versions of Shakespeare’s most famous plays for students in the Boston area. Since the group’s founding in 2014, LBP has expanded, with a larger membership and a greater repertoire of plays, but its mission has remained the same: to make Shakespeare’s beloved plays fun and accessible for young audiences.
Senior Nathan Elmer has been a member of the club since the spring of his freshman year. Coming into the group, Elmer was no stranger to Shakespeare, having performed in several plays throughout middle school and high school. However, that’s not always the case for everyone in the group, he says.
“Most people who find LBP find it because they like Shakespeare, but there’s a lot of people who don’t know anything about Shakespeare and join it because they like doing children’s theater or they just like the vibes,” Elmer said. “So we try to be as open as possible to people who have zero Shakespeare experience.”
LBP currently has five Shakespeare adaptations that they perform. This semester, it’s “Romeo and Juliet,” “Much Ado About Nothing” and “Macbeth” (the other two are “Julius Caesar” and “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”). The scripts are passed down from one class to the next, and they’re updated every few years to ensure that the material is fresh. Each show is about 45 minutes long, with a five-person cast.
As you can imagine, dividing up all of the characters in a single play among five actors comes with its challenges, and every “track,” or set of roles played by one actor, is a little different. Some tracks are simple, like the title roles in “Romeo and Juliet,” while others give actors the entertaining challenge of taking on multiple characters in the same show, or even at the same time. One track in “Macbeth” requires an actor to enter the stage with two swords, playing the role of the entire army.
Every semester, LBP holds auditions for new members. Once accepted, new members are encouraged to take risks and make new jokes out of the centuries-old material. Like everything in LBP, the rehearsal process is collaborative, and anyone can sign up to lead a rehearsal. The club’s leadership is entirely horizontal, with no president, and every decision is made democratically.
While all of LBP’s shows are adapted for a younger crowd, the tone of the play depends on the age of the audience, which can range anywhere from 1st grade to 8th grade. According to senior David Palamar, part of adapting the plays requires finding the perfect balance between the original Shakespearean language and modern English.
“We want to make [sure] that Shakespeare is accessible to children,” Palamar said. “The language [of] Shakespeare may be hard to understand, so a lot of what we do is taking part of the original text and then making a bridged translation of it. One of my favorite parts of our scripts is that there’s often a line like, ‘Thou must goeth to that place!,’ and then another character will be like, ‘You mean, you want me to go there?’”
As expected, performing for children comes with its challenges. Many of the 8th graders think they’re too cool for Shakespeare, while the younger audiences often have unexpected reactions to big moments in the play.
“The younger kids, they will go crazy for it. They will talk over the show, which is a little bit disruptive, but in a way that you know they’re paying attention,” Elmer said. “We were doing ‘Macbeth,’ and, it’s a scene where Banquo finds out that his entire family dies, and this kid in the front row goes, ‘Oooh, emotional damage!’ It’s bad theater etiquette, but they’re paying attention.”
More than anything, Elmer and Palamar see LBP as an incredibly welcoming community where they can share their love of performance and children’s education. Whether or not the members choose to pursue careers in theater or education after graduation, they have a community of friends that will last beyond their time on campus.
“[After] joining the club, like, it felt like I just had 15 new friends on campus,” Elmer said. “It’s such a welcoming atmosphere. I’ve made my closest friends in LBP, and it’s by far the best thing I did at Tufts.”
The members of Local Bard's Players are pictured.
Members of Local Bard's Players are pictured.
