Tickets are available through Emmy Miller at emiller@shipleyschool.org.

King Lear is the ninth production put on by the Shipley Shakespeareans since the program began four years ago. For students who entered the Shakespeare program as freshmen, King Lear will be the culmination of four years of hard work and growth.  Students who have been with the program from the beginning are seniors Dan Blank, Will Foster, Justin Komisarof, Meredith Martindale, David Nguyen, Lucy Seyfarth, Claire Staples, Brad Strange, Will Strasser and Tom Wilcox. They, along with their senior peers (Tina Haas, Alex Hammershaimb, Tess Hart, David Knapp and Vinod Stalam) and many gifted underclassmen have played nearly all of Shakespeare’s choicest and most complex roles.

Shipley’s Shakespeare Program is unique to High School theater. Running from October through May, the program puts on two to three full-length productions a year with casts of over 40 students. With a strong focus on language and characterization, the actors work on understanding every line before rehearsal even begins. Through intensive work with the directors, Shipley’s student-actors learn to perform Shakespeare with a fluency that makes their productions accessible, understandable, and entertaining to a wide general audience.  Students from the program were recently awarded the prizes for Best Scene, Best Actor, and Best Comedic Monologue at the West Chester University Drama Competition.

King Lear is a darkly comic tragedy that portrays family dysfunction on an epic scale. In it, Shakespeare intimately explores two families and the rifts, reconciliations, and resentments that occur between parents and children. The play begins when King Lear announces that he will divide his kingdom among his three daughters. He asks each of the daughters to declare her love for him individually, in order to determine “which of you doth love us most.”  When his youngest daughter, Cordelia, refuses to participate in the rivalry, he disowns her, a rash act that eventually precipitates his own downfall. Shakespeare explores not only the despair, but the comic absurdity of Lear's situation Amid the pathos of his increasing madness.

Spring shows are performed on an outdoor stage, and have included Julius Caesar, Troilus and Cressida, Antony and Cleopatra, Midsummer Night’s Dream and now King Lear.  Autumn productions consist of scene compilations carefully chosen to challenge and showcase student-actors. These have included scenes and storylines from nearly all of Shakespeare’s works, including Othello, Twelfth Night, A Winter’s Tale, Much Ado About Nothing, Taming of the Shrew, Hamlet, Henry IV, V and VI, Two Noble Kinsmen, Measure for Measure, Macbeth, Cymbeline, Two Gentleman of Verona, Love’s Labours Lost, Midsummer and more. 

The Shakespeare Program is directed by Emmy Miller and Jonah Cohen. In addition to the Program, they teach Latin/Greek and Drama, respectively, and offer intensive courses in Shakespearean Text and Performance during the summer months. This summer, they are working with The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, a critically acclaimed professional Shakespeare theater located in downtown Philadelphia. They will be directing adult actors for The Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival’s newly founded Young Professional Company in its inaugural production, Twelfth Night. 

The Shipley Shakespeare Program has been founded and directed with the aid and support of Shipley’s longtime beloved Head of Theater Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies, Dr. Tony Morinelli, PhD.  Tony has written numerous dramatic works geared towards high-school age actors, that have been read and performed by schools and theater companies all over the world.  He also directs and produces Shipley’s main-stage shows, most recently Berlin to Broadway, a review of the works of Kurt Weill, The Elephant Man, and Sins of the Mother, an original one-act written by Morinelli himself.

Twelfth Night, directed by Miller and Cohen for the Philadelphia Shakespeare Festival, will open on August 4th.