Canarsie 5th & 6th Graders to Present SHAKESPEARE EXPO Today

Theatre for a New Audience has been partnering for 15 years with P.S. 235 in Canarsie, Brooklyn, with an annual 13-week program that combines the experience of seeing a great Shakespearean play with in-depth classroom work. P.S. 235 is a Pre-K to Grade 8 school which attracts gifted and talented students, largely of Caribbean descent, from all over Brooklyn.

This year, on Wednesday, May 29 at 5:00pm, the 5th and 6th graders of P.S. 235 will celebrate their newly-formed love of Shakespeare with their first annual Shakespeare Expo, an interactive exploration of student artwork and performance. The Shakespeare Expo takes place all over Canarsie's P.S. 235, 755 East 100th Street (entrance on East. 101st Street and Flatlands Avenue), with performances and exhibitions in the cafeteria, gym, and auditorium.

"Shakespeare Expo includes student art work, costume and set designs, and character portraits, as well as student actors performing short scenes and monologues both from Much Ado About Nothing, recently presented Off Broadway by Theatre for a New Audience, and original pieces the students created inspired by the play," said Jeffrey Horowitz, Founding Artistic Director of Theatre for a New Audience. "There will also be exhibits featuring William Shakespeare and his Globe Theatre in addition to the Black History Month/Theatre award-winning student projects."

Theatre for a New Audience has brought Shakespeare to NYC public schools for several decades through its "World Theatre Project." This program sends Theatre for a New Audience-trained teaching artists into NYC public schools, and as part of the program, students see the Theatre's Shakespeare performances. This year, the "World Theatre Project" centered around Theatre for a New Audience's Much Ado About Nothing starring Maggie Siff and Jonathan Cake.

The theatre's connection with Brooklyn will deepen when it opens its first home in the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural District this fall.

Founded in 1979 by Jeffrey Horowitz, Theatre for a New Audience's mission is to develop and vitalize the performance and study of Shakespeare and classic drama and to produce Shakespeare alongside other classic and contemporary plays by authors such as Harley Granville Barker, Edward Bond, Adrienne Kennedy and now Wallace Shawn.

This, Theatre for a New Audience's 33rd season and the last before moving to its first home adjacent to BAM in the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural District, features boldly diverse works from William Shakespeare, Franz Kafka in a theatrical adaptation by Colin Teevan and Samuel Beckett and now The Wallace Shaw-André Gregory Project.

In 2001, Theatre for a New Audience became the first American theatre invited to bring a production of Shakespeare to the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), Stratford-upon-Avon. Cymbeline, directed by Bartlett Sher, premiered at the RSC; in 2007, Theatre for a New Audience was invited to return to the RSC with The Merchant of Venice starring F. Murray Abraham. In 2011, Mr. Abraham reprised his role as Shylock for a national tour.

The Theatre's productions have been honored with Tony, OBIE, Drama Desk, Drama League, Callaway, Lortel and Audelco awards and nominations and reach an audience diverse in age, economics and cultural background.

The Theatre created and runs the largest in-depth program in the New York City Public Schools to introduce students to Shakespeare, and has served more than 125,000 students since the program began in 1984. With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in 2011 it launched a summer Shakespeare Institute at Columbia University. TFANA Talks, a discussion series about the plays we produce is free and open to the public. Theatre for a New Audience is committed to economically accessible tickets for all audiences. In June 2011, Theatre for a New Audience celebrated the groundbreaking for its first home, a center for Shakespeare and classic drama in the Downtown Brooklyn Cultural District. The Theatre will open in the fall of 2013 with a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, directed by Julie Taymor with original music by Elliot Goldenthal.