Performing Shakespeare isn’t just a summer activity in Winona.

For the past two weeks two actors from the Great River Shakespeare Festival, Stephanie Lambourn and Brian White, worked with students in Mr. Costello’s AP Literature and Composition classes, training them in techniques of reading and performing Shakespeare.

After reading Macbeth students chose scenes, edited them, did read-throughs with the actors, then blocked out the actions and rehearsed the scenes in preparation for

performing the scenes in front of their peers.

One of the goals for the GRSF is to connect with the community and introduce younger students to Shakespeare, and based on the students’ reactions, they are achieving their mission.

“When you’re reading the book, you don’t think so much about what it would be like to act it out, but when you do it becomes more entertaining. I have never acted, so learning the lines was hard, but they made the text easier to understand, Brian was a fun and cool guy. He gave us things to do while acting and made it come alive for us,” said Matt Schrupp.

“Working with the actors helped me learn how to pronounce the vocabulary and know what the lines meant.  I began to feel the part more, and gain an understanding of the text better,” said Daniel Parlin.

 “Stephanie taught me how to get involved and become the character, she helped me understand the scene at a much deeper level, ” said Robert Rivers.  “There is a lot of language in my scene, which involves Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after they murder the king, and Stephanie helped us see the emotion in the lines.”

“Stephanie was intense and really knows what she is doing, she taught us simple theater terms like “upstage” and helped us plot our actions and get us to think about how to incorporate our actions to engage  the audience into the scene without the benefit of special effects,” said Hannah Kosel.

“Brian and Stephanie truly helped get us out of our comfort zones.  Performing Shakespeare is difficult, so they were great resources for us.,” added Casy Modjeski.

“They were very helpful, energetic, and engaging.  You could tell that performing Shakespeare and helping others perform, is something they love,  said Jake Kiese.

“Brian gave us many suggestions as to how to make our fight scene look as real as possible and gave us postive support and encouraged us to come up with our own ideas for the scene,” said Katie Nachtigal.”

The students will perform the scenes on March 12 & 13,  look for video links on this site after those dates to see the performances.