First Folio Shakespeare Festival and its director, Alison C. Vesely, have been awarded a $1,000 Marshall Field’s Project Image grant in support of the festival’s artist-in-residence program.
The program, part of the Clarendon Hills-based Shakespeare company’s educational outreach efforts, is designed to help local high school teachers integrate theater arts into classrooms and overcome students’ perceptions that Shakespeare is dull and irrelevant.
As part of the program, Vesely works with teachers at participating schools over a two-week period to help them develop specific lesson plans for future implementation.
Marshall Field’s Project Image grants are given to schools and community nonprofit organizations active in the fields of child abuse prevention, youth self-sufficiency and education through the arts.
First Folio has staged Shakespeare comedies on the grounds of the Peabody Estate in Oak Brook for the past three summers.
The not-for-profit company also has a touring repertoire of four Shakespeare productions suitable for grade school, middle school and high school audiences.