I have been working as the playwright/writing mentor  and sometimes program director for Will Power to Youth (WPY) at Shakespeare Center LA since 2005. WPY is a youth employment program. LA teens and young adults are hired to work full-time for 7 weeks to collaboratively create an adaptation of a Shakespeare play. While being mentored in theatre arts, youth also engage in discussions, writing and artistic explorations of topics important to their lives. We make connections between Shakespeare’s words and their own lives and the youth’s words are woven into a re-mixed version of Shakespeare’s play.

The youth work collaboratively to develop a “concept” for the play—a setting, era and style. Then, while retaining much of Shakespeare’s language and story, I incorporate the youth’s writing, discussions and staging concepts into a new adaptation of a Shakespeare play, which we then design, produce and perform.

In the summer of 2014, unable to ignore the sea of media consumption and production that young people are swimming in, we re-designed the WPY curriculum to include critical media literacy and training in multi-media production. The result was #Hamlt2k14, an adaptation of Hamlet, casting the desperate teen as an accidental YouTube star. The production included projections, live feed, and audience participation through social media.

It is the most involved and truly collaborative creative process I have ever engaged in, both in terms of my collaboration with the staff and with the youth participants. By the end of this challenging and exhaustive process, youth participants and adult mentor artists alike share a deep understanding of the play, an ease with Shakespeare’s language, a respect for, and oftentimes deep bond with each other, and an increased confidence in themselves as artists, communicators and scholars.