Young Shakespeare Players

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Founded by Richard DiPrima in 1980, The Young Shakespeare Players (YSP) in its early years produced a single, annual backyard summer production involving about 20 actors. It is directed by Richard and Anne DiPrima. Since then the program has grown into a year-round company with its own building and more than 300 annual participants, aged 7-18, who perform full-length versions of works by William Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw and more recently, performed David Edgar's ambitious RSC 10-hour adaptation of Charles Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby in 2007. A 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, YSP currently produces four full-length Shakespeare plays per year; two Shaw plays; two workshops with complete scenes from Shakespeare’s plays; and six brief, text-based workshops focused on specific issues key to understanding or performing Shakespeare’s work. Fourteen of Shakespeare’s thirty-seven plays appear in the theater’s regular repertoire; another fourteen are represented in part in the workshops.

YSP seeks to engage and to challenge the young people who participate. Plays are performed full-length and unaltered. No auditions occur, and no one is rejected based on experience, gender, race, or ability to pay. YSP fully incorporates each participant in every phase of production: casting, rehearsing, directing, memorizing, providing technical support like make-up and stage management, performing, and cleaning.

YSP challenges the minds of young people and their families, offers an affordable cultural and creative experience to participants and audience members, furthers the emotional development of young people, and provides them a community in which service and volunteerism, from the actors and their families who donate thousands of hours each year to YSP, is essential to the organization’s viability.

The program is designed to show its young participants (and their families and the community) that the plays of William Shakespeare are not "dull" or "above" them, but delightful, accessible, and fun. The actors perform in Shakespeare's words and quickly learn to appreciate the poetic beauty, as well as the drama, of what Shakespeare wrote. It is the only program of its kind in which youngsters regularly master and perform the works of Shakespeare in their original, uncut form.

YSP is a non-profit, community-supported organization. The actors' tuitions cover only a portion of the costs of the program. Tax-exempt contributions are sincerely appreciated.

The Young Shakespeare Players also support The Shakespeare Circle, a group of Madison adults dedicated to studying and performing full-length scenes or complete plays of Shakespeare in an informal atmosphere. Membership is open to all.