UPPER EAST SIDE — Britain's famed Royal Shakespeare Company has been playing to sold-out audiences of avid New York theatergoers since kicking off its six-week residency at the Park Avenue Armory on July 6.
But the actors — who came across the pond with 47 40-foot containers containing a replica of the stage from their Stratford-upon-Avon home — have also been reaching out to another group that perhaps visits the theater less often.
The internationally renowned company has been staging abridged versions of "Hamlet" and "The Comedy of Errors" for 800 New York City kids, ages 8 to 14, from underserved neighborhoods.
"It's wonderful to watch the children as they sit on the floor get completely into the action and really go away understanding a Shakespeare play," said Rebecca Robertson, the Park Avenue Armory's president and executive director.
"Many of them have probably never seen a play, much less a Shakespeare play."
She has enjoyed watching the kids come to understand Shakespeare's often-difficult language with the help of an "accessible" high-energy performance full of music and movement. The physical comedy aspects help the kids understand the play, as do the Armory's teaching artists, who work with the students before the show, Roberstson said.
"For people coming the first time to see some Shakespeare, we're trying to make it not gentle but quite boisterous, but also as easy as it might be," said Royal Shakespeare Company actor James Tucker, who plays Antipholus of Ephesus in the kids' performances of Shakespeare's "The Comedy of Errors."
Just as the main stage in the Armory has recreated the intimate space of a three-sided Elizabethan theater, where the audience feels closer to the action on the stage, the actors set up in another Armory room where they invite the kids closer to the performers.
"There's water being thrown, there's people running through the audiences, there's hats being given over," Tucker said. "It's as much fun as we can possibly make it."
He hoped the students would become lifelong Shakespeare enthusiasts by getting their first exposure through seeing the play rather than reading it, which can often be a challenge, he said.
A group of children from P.S. 64 in the Bronx, participating in the New Settlement Apartments' summer program, arrived at the Armory on Wednesday primed for an hour-and-a-half version of "The Comedy of Errors." They had already had an introductory workshop led by the Armory's teaching artists introducing the Bard's language and the theater of his day.
"It's active. You get to move a lot. It's funny," said Nataliyah Delts, 9, who said she enjoys theater more than movies now. "I think a play is more fun because you get to see it in real life."
Luis Caruso, 10, already seemed to be an expert on the Bard.
"I think Shakespeare is very artistic," he said. "This play, in particular, is supposed to be funny. The word 'comedy' is in its title. It's funny how the whole town goes topsy-turvy," he said of the town of Ephesus, where two sets of twins with the same name cause confusion.
Caruso already has his career picked out. "I'm thinking of becoming an actor," he said.
