Fall Festival of Shakespeare

The Fall Festival of Shakespeare is a non-competitive region-wide collaboration between Portland Playhouse and area middle and high schools. The Festival is a spectacular theatrical event, in part because student actors connect well with Shakespeare; they understand the passion, the high stakes, and the disaster. High school and middle school are not unlike an Elizabethan Tragedy.

The students are not only performers in the festival, but a large and vocal component of the audience. They are the most active and vibrant theater patrons you will ever encounter. They “oooh” and “ahhh”; call out “Oh no, she didn’t”; scream and laugh. It’s the closest thing to how an Elizabethan audience at Shakespeare’s Globe might have reacted.