For a university that is sometimes criticized for a poor town-gown relationship, DePauw's Spring Shakespeare Spectacle is one of several emerging annual events that unite both the community and DePauw.
Tonight and tomorrow night, students from all over the Putnam County area will flock to DePauw University's Moore Theatre, not be entertained, but to do the entertaining.
The Spring Spectacle of Shakespeare was started on DePauw's campus three years ago and is a collaboration between Shakespeare and Company, DePauw University and all eight county high school and middle schools, including Cloverdale, South Putnam County, North Putnam County and Greencastle.
Each spring semester, students can sign up for this class, labeled on e-services as "Shakespeare Festival." The students in the class are then divided into groups of two and three, and will spend every Monday, Wednesday and Friday of their semester working with kids from their assigned school.
This combined program and class has grown exponentially since its inception.
"Our first year, we just had Greencastle high school and middle school," Amy Hayes, director of the program and part-time professor of communication and theatre, said.
By the second year, five schools were involved, and this year marks the first time all eight county high schools and middle schools are involved.
"The idea behind it is that adolescents are sort of the perfect hands to put Shakespeare in," Hayes said.
Hayes believes that this program can help kids avoid the negative experience many have when they first read Shakespeare. The DePauw students help local adolescents experience Shakespeare as he was meant to be experienced: through watching and acting, not reading.
"Doing it the way we do it, is meeting Shakespeare on his terms. They're plays, they were written to be played," Hayes said.
Though the plays are cut down from their original lengths so that they all run for around 90 minutes each, in keeping with the true Shakespeare experience, none of the language itself is changed.
"We like to say we're not doing Shakespeare for young people, we're doing Shakespeare with young people," Hayes explained.
Though, according to Hayes and a few of the DePauw student directors, the kids often find the language difficult to understand at first, there is almost always a break through moment.
"The best part is when they actually understand what's happening," sophomore Grace Lazarz, director for Cloverdale's production of "The Tempest," said.
Often, these breakthroughs in the language of the scripts lead to a deeper connection with the plays themselves.
"I had one girl this year say, 'Oh wow, my character is exactly like me,'" Lazarz said. "Those kinds of moments are I think what makes it rewarding, that they can find connections with these characters that they completely did not associate themselves with before."
But of course, the twelve-week long program doesn't start out with breakthroughs and epiphanies; it begins where all productions do: with casting.
"We don't really technically audition kids," senior Lisa Sutherland, another director for Cloverdale's "The Tempest," said.
"We just took a week to recruit, and we went in and asked them to play games with us for a week, and that's literally what we did."
The games began as large group activities, and then students were broken up into smaller and smaller groups so that they could be more closely observed.
"It's as simple as, 'oh, this kid's running around trying to get other kids to laugh-let's put him in a clown role,'" Lazarz said.
The actual assignment of roles, however, can be a lot more complicated.
"We split up the characters to give more roles, so instead of one man, it's like a man and a woman," freshman Kristen Lang, a director for Greencastle's, "Much Ado About Nothing," said.
This means that more than one student can portray the same character. To better explain this technique, Hayes described an instance last year, where three different students acted in the role of Lady Macbeth.
"Sometimes they were all onstage at the same time, and one of them was the speaking Lady Macbeth and the others were sort of her shadow selves. Other times, they would assign this scene to this Lady Macbeth and this scene to another."
At all times the actors were dressed alike, so that the audience would realize they were three different actors all playing the same part.
Once roles were assigned, rehearsals themselves could begin.
"The time commitment is big, it's probably bigger than any other class," Hayes said.
And that's just for the DePauw students. The Putnam County students are also pushed to their limits. They are expected to attend three rehearsals a week aside from activities they should complete on their own time, like memorizing lines.
Luckily, both sets of students seem willing to commit themselves to the productions, and all feel the experience has been well worth the time and effort.
Olivia Boler, a seventh grader from South Putnam Middle School, said that the experience has helped her grown as an actor.
"I had my first play a couple of months ago, and I've learned to act a lot better since then," Boler said. "I mean, I was a dog in my last play so I didn't really have to do a lot of acting."
On the other end of the age spectrum is Brianna Bryant, a 12th grader from South Putnam high school.
"I still get stage fright, so that makes it a challenge," Bryant said.
Even with stage fright, Bryant feels the experience has been well worth it.
"It's definitely fun working with DePauw students. You learn more than what you do with high school plays."
DePauw students, too, feel that that have benefitted immensely from this experience, some more than others.
"It's awesome to see them go through this transformation and build up their self-confidence," Lang said.
Lazarz was so struck by her experience last year with the Shakespeare Spring Spectacle that it caused her to rethink her earlier decision to transfer schools.
"I didn't transfer because of this. I realized I wouldn't have had this experience without DePauw," she said.
Hayes feels that this program is the perfect opportunity for any kind of student, DePauw or Putnam County, 7th grader of 12th grader, smart or athletic. She believes it teaches more than just Shakespeare.
"It's really a way to make something together, and there's a place in this for every kind of kid."