Acorn Productions Receives Grants To Support Naked Shakespeare

Acorn Productions announces that the company has received grants from the Maine Arts Commission and the Sam L. Cohen Foundation to underwrite performances by the Acorn Shakespeare Ensemble next season. The Sam L. Cohen Foundation has awarded the Westbrook-based artist collaborative $5,000 to allow the company to offer free performance of the troupe's one-hour, four-actor adaptation of Shakespeare's classic tragedy Macbeth at the following local high schools: Bonny Eagle, Casco Bay, Gorham, Massabesic, Portland, Scarborough, South Portland, and Westbrook. Additionally, the Maine Arts Commission is providing $7,500 through its Artists in Maine Communities grant program to assist Naked Shakespeare in creating a site-specific performance walkthrough event at Battery Steele, a historic WWII gun battery on Peaks Island's back shore. This installation will utilize the unique architecture of the space as the backdrop for a performance mingling scenes from Cymbeline and Shakespeare's other late romances, including snippets from Double Falsehood, a play recently attributed to Shakespeare by scholars.

Acorn has been touring its adaptation of Macbeth to area schools since 2006, and it has been seen by over 2,000 high school students in that time. The performance includes all the most famous text selections, as well as nearly complete versions of the scenes between Lady Macbeth and Macbeth, portrayed by company members Paul Haley and Karen Ball. Last year, Acorn's Producing Director Michael Levine re-directed the piece to include two additional company members, Nate and Johnny Speckman, and a new "soundscape" created by the actors during the performance. Acorn's edited text focuses on the essential journey of Macbeth from war hero to tyrant, examining the causes of his downward spiral. Schools will also have the chance to included a pre-show text workshop in order to assist actors in speaking the text, an essential tool to build understanding of Shakespeare's language.

Acorn Productions plans an environmentally-staged performance piece at Battery Steele on Peaks Island the weekends of May 14/15 and 21/22 of 2011. The essence of the performance would be a greatly abridged version of Cymbeline, a vice-filled play that takes place in Britain during the time of the Roman conquest. This primitive era in British history would lend itself well to the stark concrete monolithic nature of the Battery Steele structure. Acorn's Producing Director Michael Levine will also adapt and/or excerpt several of other Shakespeare's Romance plays, including Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Pericles, Winter's Tale, Two Noble Kinsman and Double Falsehood, a play recently attributed to Shakespeare. Battery Steele is an old WWII-era gun emplacement that was listed on the National Register of historic places in 2005 and has become known for the annual Sacred and Profane art installation every October. For this performance, Levine plans to divide the Naked Shakespeare company of actors into small groups of between 1 and 4 actors, each of which will be stationed in one of the rooms off the main tunnel connecting the two main gun positions. The actors in each room would present 15 to 20 minutes of scenes and speeches from the included plays. The actors would perform their material 3 or 4 times to span a total of 2 hours during which the Battery would be open for the audience to wander through. Each room would have its own environmental installation that would echo the themes of the text being performed in each location. The audience would be provided the opportunity to take a program guide to the rooms or just wander through to experience the work in any order they prefer.

The Acorn Shakespeare Ensemble was founded by Michael Levine and Michael Howard in the fall of 2004 in order to provide an opportunity for local professional actors to forge a long-term working relationship designed to deepen their ability to interpret classical text. The company's mission to is to educate its audience about the meaning behind Shakespeare's text by using acting to simply demonstrate the broad range of intricate emotion, theme and language. The company offers a series of "Naked Shakespeare" performances at venues throughout Greater Portland not typically used as performance space for live theater, creating the world of the play in the imagination of the audience by minimizing the use of sets, lights and costumes. These productions feature environmentally-staged events that break the "fourth wall" between the actors and audience, allowing for a more intimate and casual connection that serves to make the text more accessible to the listeners.

Acorn Productions was founded in 1998 and currently makes its home in the Dana Warp Mill in Westbrook. The company's mission is to invigorate the community of performing artists in Southern Maine. Acorn seeks to nurture new performance pieces, develop artist collaborations, train new talent, and make the arts accessible to a wide spectrum of the general public. Acorn accomplishes these goals by mounting annual festivals that are open to a variety of artists as well as presenting professional performances by local actors in both traditional and non-traditional venues. Ticket prices for these performances are maintained at an affordable level in order to lower economic barriers for potential audience members. Acorn also offers educational programs, including acting classes and workshops, and offers fiscal sponsorships to grassroots organizations or individual artists seeking to become more active members of the performing arts community.

Call Acorn Productions at 854-0065 or visit www.acorn-productions.org for more information about Naked Shakespeare or any other programs offered by Acorn Productions.