All’s Well for Foxcroft and “Shakespeare in the Burg”
by Leonard Shapiro
In a digital age of short-burst writing by tweet and text, Anne Burridge, chair of the English department at Foxcroft School, knows full well the challenges of trying to teach her students to understand and appreciate the far more complicated works of Shakespeare.
For years, she’s always found a way to make that happen. And as her classes now head into spring, Burridge also has the practically perfect teaching aid to reinforce her message that Shakespeare is as relevant today as he was four centuries ago.
This year, she’s helped align the school with the third annual “Shakespeare in the Burg” two-day festival running Saturday and Sunday, April 2-3. The American Shakespeare Center company based in Staunton, Virginia is coming to town to put on two separate plays, Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest” and Shakespeare’s “Henry V,” at the Middleburg Community Center on Saturday, April 2.
The next day, at the same location, there will be an 11 a.m. brunch and a reading of a one-act play written by playwright Lloyd Pace, the winner of a recent competition conducted by the festival. Burridge served on the committee to judge the contest, and a number of local youngsters also participated. Pace’s play is called “Billings” and is described as “Three people. A raging snowstorm. Consequences.”
Some of Burridge’s Foxcroft students recently served as interns for the festival, answering phones, writing copy for the play programs, and many more will attend the plays as well as stagecraft and acting workshops on Friday, April 1, at Foxcroft, Middleburg Academy and Hill School. Those sessions will feature actors from the company, with several of them also sleeping and eating their meals at Foxcroft over that weekend. Later this spring, Foxcroft students will perform in their own production of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night.
“I love Shakespeare,” said Burridge, who has her undergraduate and masters degrees from Middlebury College in Vermont, where she specialized in Medieval and Renaissance literature. Being associated with the third annual Middleburg festival “just seemed like a natural fit to get the girls more involved.
“A lot of our success in teaching Shakespeare is to take the text off the page and onto the stage and let them see what the writer had in mind.”
This year marks the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, and Foxcroft and many other high schools and colleges around the state have joined the Virginia Shakespeare Initiative to mark the occasion. Burridge taught a course in the fall called “Shakespeare and Performance” and was more than pleased with the results.
“I had a student who was upset that the only elective she could take was that class,” Burridge said. “She told me she had never liked Shakespeare very much. But in the end, she said she just loved the course. I try to make it as accessible as possible. They even blog about it.”
Burridge is well aware that her own passion for Shakespeare is not exactly shared in some quarters.
“There’s a whole debate in the English educational community about Shakespeare and should we even have it in the curriculum,” she said. “That really aggravates me. The issues he writes about are so timely, even now—political power, gender relations…His plays have violence. There’s love and hate, revenge, indecision, ambition. And the staging of his plays was ahead of its time, things like theater in the round.”
She’s thrilled that several other local schools are taking an active role in this year’s “Shakespeare in the Burg” festival. Middleburg Charter and Wakefield also will send participants to the Saturday workshops.
And Foxcroft’s production of Twelfth Night from April 22-24 also is particularly appropriate.
“After all,” Burridge said, “you have Viola, one of the main characters, dressing as a boy. That’s just perfect for a girls school, isn’t it?”
Tickets for “The Importance of Being Earnest” (April 2 at 2 p.m.) and “Henry V” (April 2 at 7:30 p.m.) are priced at $40 each. The brunch and one-act play reading April 3 starts at 11 a.m., with tickets priced at $25. For further information, go
to [email protected] or
540-687-3448.