Allan Appel Photo
James Jeffrey as Prince Hal and Jamari Linen as Falstaff.
Arguably the most Shakespeare-saturated K‑8 school in the New Haven system is one whose theme is science and technology.
That impression emerged Monday afternoon at the Mauro-Sheridan Interdistrict Magnet School as two dozen of its students put on a rousing performance in the opening dress rehearsal of Henry IV, parts one and two.
Jhenzen Gonzales as King Henry IV.
There are two performances for the older kids in the school, and the school family, Tuesday at 2 p.m. and 6 p.m. The performances are open to the public.
The spirited 40-minute performance adapted by Elm Shakespeare Company actor/director Jeremy Funke is generously peppered with original Shakespeare dialogue and salted with contemporary argot; it wowed 100 little Mauro-Sheridan groundlings. It is the fourth year that the after-school program, which meets at the the school once a week for an hour and a half, has yielded both a fine performance and a kind of buzz school-wide that Shakespeare is the thing to do.
Pablo Quezada came to the school to study science and math and still has that as his focus. He also has now been in all four of the shows that Funke and Jodi Schneider, the school’s literacy coach and the play’s assistant director, have managed to make the talk of Mauro-Sheridan. With roles for 20 fifth- to eighth-grade actors and two stage managers, well more than double that number auditioned, said Funke.
Those first four shows were The Tempest, Macbeth, Julius Caesar, and As You Like It.
Each year the cast has grown, the interest at the school and the inquiries about auditioning have begun earlier, and volunteer help from the kids and staff at the Hopkins School has been generous. This year, as happened last year, a Hopkins crew spent the week before the show working with the Mauro-Sheridan troupe creating the costumes and the set.
The play has musical accompaniment from a quartet of trombone, piano, trumpet, and saxophone.
Funke.
I asked Funke (pictured) why he chose a big play and both parts to work on with the kids — a labor of love that began back in November.
“There’s some nice synergy,” he answered, referring to Prince Hal’s development from self-indulgent pal of fat Jack Falstaff in part one to responsible king in part two.
For Funke that resonated with how many kids, like Quezada and fellow actor Jamari Linen, have developed over the last four years in the plays and are now, as eighth graders, moving on to high school.
“I’m watching them embarking on a new chapter,” he said, and so he chose a play where the protagonist does the same.
Since there is much profanity and carousing in the play, Funke said one of the biggest challenges was to “find appropriate words to characterize inappropriate behavior.”
For example, “you can’t have eighth graders getting drunk in a tavern,” he said.
Instead in the fine run-through, you see them hoisting Poland root beer or shiny tankards and carrying on as Falstaff spins his exaggerated tales. “They’re enjoying each other’s company,” which is the purpose of being in a tavern, said Funke.
Funke urged the kids in opening contextualizing remarks to have fun with the play, which, alongside the serious stuff about growing up, has lots of humor.
Linen as Falstaff made the most of it in declaring in the opening character-setting scene not how much he enjoys “sack,” which is Elizabethan talk for wine, but “how I love French fries.”
The kids in the audience hooted.
As they did when James Jeffrey, as Hal, in a moment of impatience with Falstaff says, declares, “When was the last time you saw your knees?”
To play King Henry IV, Jhensen Gonzales said that, as a girl, she had to learn how to speak and stand with authority. She got the audience very jazzed up with the many times she ordered her courtiers to, well, “shut up.”
As they did when the the king said of Harry Hotspur, “This guy is talking smack about my soldiers.”
The play is so well written by Shakespeare and so well abridged by Funke, that the intense dramatic moments could also be heard and appreciated by the kids. At the end of Part One, Falstaff (albeit faking) lies dead on the ground at the battle of Shrewsbury. Young James Jeffrey’s lament as Hal — “could not all your fat keep in a little life?” — audibly stilled the Mauro Sheridan groundlings.
In the Q and A afterward, a young student asked Funke, as this reporter had, why he chose the play. This time his answer was more personal. “It’s a play about getting older, maturing, growing up,” Funke said.
The Shakespeare will continue; the after-school program is a line item in the school’s budget. Teachers like Schneider, who initiated the company with Funke four years ago, routinely take kids in groups out of regular classes for enrichment. Every year they read three to four Shakespeare plays.
No word yet on what next year’s production will be.