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By Tatiana Zarnowski, December 19, 2004

Last updated: Sunday, December 19, 2004 11:40 AM EST

The college students could barely keep a straight face as they hurled eloquent insults at each other.

"Vile worm, thou wast overlooked even in thy birth," one young woman snarled, quoting William Shakespeare's "The Merry Wives of Windsor."

Reciting and acting out the Elizabethan insults helps high school students relieve stress and expend energy, says Susan Biondo-Hench, an English teacher at Carlisle High School.

"When you have kids who really need to get up and get physical, this really works," she told a group of about 20 future teachers who got a course in teaching Shakespeare to teens last month at the high school.

Emotional insults

Biondo-Hench led the Shippensburg University and Dickinson College students in putting emotion into the insults, and then handed them "silent scenes" from some of Shakespeare's famous plays.

A group of five SU students acted out a scene from "Macbeth" where three witches predict the future for Macbeth and Banquo. As the women mimed the scene with exaggerated hand motions and facial expressions, they busted up laughing.

"That is hysterical," said Kenna Butanis.

Urges performance

Biondo-Hench urged the education students to use performance in their classrooms. Although some teachers are intimidated by the Bard, "More and more teachers all the time are doing performance-related exercises with the kids," she said.

"Try to think about the play as a script as opposed to a text."

The student teachers may use the techniques when they spread out to local public schools next semester.

Several students said they plan to use performance in their classrooms. "Shakespeare is regarded by so many academics as the greatest playwright of all time," said Dave Emerick, a Dickinson student who has a student teaching assignment at Cumberland Valley High School next semester.

There, he'll be expected to teach "Romeo and Juliet" to freshmen.

The techniques reduce the "daunting task of teaching Shakespeare" to something manageable, he said.

"Page to Stage"

At Carlisle, Biondo-Hench teaches "Shakespeare Page to Stage" to a class of seven juniors and seniors.

The students performed one of Shakespeare's sonnets for the college group. "Just know your kids and have fun with it and allow it to sort of evolve," Biondo-Hench advised the college students afterward.

"Sometimes the kids who are the most reluctant ... really are dying to try some of this stuff."

Biondo-Hench acknowledged that teachers can't always fit a lot of acting into their class time. "You can't perform the entire play, given the constraints of your curriculum."

But students can perform scenes from the play, she said.

Biondo-Hench says she taught Shakespeare in a "really traditional way" before attending a National Endowment for the Humanities seminar at the Folger Library in Washington, D.C., in 1984.

Now she uses performance whenever she can.

"I hope (students) find themselves in it, because I think Shakespeare understood human heart and mind and soul," she said.

Students create promotional 'trailer'

The class of seven high school students wanted to undertake a project that would make William Shakespeare come alive for their peers.

"We know the acting; we've done that for years. We know the text," says senior Nathan Cecco, a student in Sue Biondo-Hench's "Shakespeare Page to Stage" class.

They needed a new twist.

So the group created a "trailer" to promote the Shakespeare Troupe festival staged in November, incorporating on-the-spot acting, computer editing, music, writing and even a little psychology.

Students filmed the trailer in familiar places around Carlisle High School's campus and dressed every performer in blue jeans to help their classmates relate.

"They're comfortable to wear and you see them all the time," says senior Omeca Flohr, director and editor of the trailer.

The trailer-as-promotion was a first for the high school Shakespeare Troupe, senior Lauren Shufelt said. "We'd never looked at it as pitching it to the entire student body."

The group "turned it into something that just grasped your attention right when you watch it," he says.

The class worked on the trailer for about two weeks, with two days of filming by film student Kennon Fleisher. "The kids in this were put on the spot right away," Flohr says. "We said 'action' and they just did it and it was wonderful."

Editing the couple hours of film down to the trailer took careful monitoring on a "story board" posted in Biondo-Hench's classroom under student Tony Piccolo's charge.

"Each square represents one second," Flohr says. "It's almost as if you were doing an animated movie."

Flohr spent 143 hours editing the trailer project, and Sarah Hamilton was assistant editor and director.

"Those of us who are here from the staff are speechless," said high school Co-Principal Gary Worley at a premiere of the trailer for administrators last month.

Flohr's attention to the trailer was a far cry from his first introduction to Shakespeare in a fourth-grade school assembly, he admits. "I can tell you this. I really wasn't paying attention."

The smallness of the "Page to Stage" class makes it more flexible for students, Reed says. "One of the things that's so great about this class is that it's so small we can see professional performances."

They caught live performances of "The Tempest" and "Twelfth Night."