THE MISSION OF THE CONNECTICUT SHAKESPEARE FESTIVAL FOCUSES ON THREE MAIN COMPONENTS: COMMUNITY, INCLUSIVITY, AND EDUCATION
Connecticut Shakespeare Festival’s mission is to make Shakespeare’s words accessible and engaging to all audience members through thought-provoking, inspiring, inclusive, transformative, and enlightening productions. Audience members will be challenged to explore unfamiliar worlds, and will be educated and entertained through programming, which reveals our collective humanity.
We are committed to holding ourselves to the highest artistic standard that audiences have grown to love through Playhouse Theatre Group’s work at Playhouse on Park, working alongside the area’s professional theatre artists, fostering the future of emerging performers and to provide audience members outstanding and lasting learning experiences that fulfill the need to feed the soul. We believe artistic excellence is achieved through theatre that transports audiences to a new world, when feelings and reactions are shared, and the same passion and enthusiasm felt by the artists is met equally by the audience.
We encourage and celebrate inclusion of all cultures, perspectives, and ideas that enrich our work and the lives of our audience members. We will consistently strive to be a gathering place where people of all ages and backgrounds feel welcome to experience the arts. We will offer programs and services that are diverse, accessible, and affordable. The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival will be a staple to Connecticut; one of our goals is to make Connecticut a destination for the arts and simultaneously benefit the residents and visitors to the state, regardless of their income levels.
The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival aims to incur new knowledge and understanding to its audiences, as well as educational and hands-on employment opportunities with high schools, colleges, and community organizations. We will create access points through a wide array of programming for audiences, such as Theatre for Young Audience productions, informational talkbacks featuring artists, scholars, and others well versed on the material both virtually and in-person. Pre-show festivities will include weekly CT guest artists from performing arts groups, performances from local high schools, community artists and craftsmen selling their products and promoting their businesses, and partnerships with area restaurants, bookstores, and businesses.
This year, the Connecticut Shakespeare Festival will offer a variety of employment opportunities and real-world experiences to its interns, volunteers, and student workers. Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. is offering internships in 2021 to fourteen students that attend CT colleges and universities or are a college student who resides in CT. Six interns will be focused on education and/or administrative tasks (development, marketing, finance, company management), and eight will be focused on production (performance, stagemanagement, theatre tech). Students from Auerfarm’s resident Intensive Education Academy and Farmington Valley Transition Academy will be placed with positions that match their skills sets in order to gain real-world experience as they approach graduation. Finally, Playhouse Theatre Group has been selected by the Conference of Churches/Hartford Foundation for Public Giving (HFPG) to participate in the newly formed Black Artists Fellowship Program. Our first Fellow will be involved in the festival pending their specific field of interest (i.e. acting, directing, designing etc.).
The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival stage will also be an exciting addition to Auerfarm’s regular summer camp’s end-of-camp performances. Students from both Auerfarm’s camps and the Playhouse Theatre Academy’s programs and summer collaboration with The Miracle League of CT will also be provided complimentary tickets to see the Theatre for Young Audiences performances or a sensory friendly performance of Snow White.
The Connecticut Shakespeare Festival is a subsidiary of Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. (Playhouse on Park, Playhouse Theatre Academy, stop/time dance theater)
Playhouse Theatre Group, Inc. (PTG) was founded in 2009 by Tracy Flater, Darlene Zoller, and Sean Harris. Since its beginnings, through its programming at Playhouse on Park, PTG has established itself as a recognized professional theatre company attracting award-winning directors from New York City and regional theatres, as well as professional actors, playwrights, and designers. PTG has a mission to deliver professional, high-quality theatre performances at an affordable cost to as broad an audience as possible, to embrace and provide opportunity for professional, emerging, and community artists, and to offer educational and outreach opportunities through visiting and/or resident artists and educators for, with, and in the Greater Hartford community and beyond.