Juvenile offenders can pick Bard over community service
Pittsfield, Massachusetts: For some juvenile offenders, their choice is straight out of Hamlet: to act or not to act.
Shakespeare & Company, a theatre company in Lenox, Massachusetts, works with the courts to get youngsters who run afoul of the law sentenced to perform works of Shakespeare onstage as an alternative to community service or juvenile detention.
Juveniles sentenced to Shakespeare read the bard’s works, take on the role of one or more of his characters, come up with ideas for costumes and sets, memorise their lines, rehearse and then act out their roles for an audience of family, friends and court personnel.
The kids almost always hate the idea of performing Shakespeare at first, but by the end of the six-week programme, many say they’ve found new friends and a new sense of accomplishment.
“Honestly, you would never catch me doing this stuff if I didn’t have to, but it’s taught me teamwork and to just chill out and listen,” said one 17-year-old boy who will play Macbeth in a March-22 production that will include scenes and monologues from various Shakespeare plays.
Similar Shakespeare programmes are offered to inmates in prisons around the country as a way of boosting self-confidence and literacy. For the past 17 years, Shakespeare in the Courts has been used to sentence youths accused of a variety of lower-level crimes, including larceny, assault and battery and vandalism. In 2007, the programme won a national “Coming Up Taller” award from the President’s Committee on the Arts and Humanities. The probation officers, teachers and others who work in the programme hope it will help the teens respect the feelings of others, fulfil a commitment and foster a sense of pride.
The programme was started by Paul Perachi, a former high school principal, who recruited the theatre company to work with his students. Years later, after he became a judge, Perachi asked the theatre group to develop a Shakespeare programme for juvenile offenders.