Our Mission
Actors’ Shakespeare Project, founded in 2004, is an award-winning professional theater company with a Resident Artist Company and extensive education, youth, and community programs.
ASP performs and works in found spaces, schools, theaters and neighborhoods to present and explore robust language, resonant stories, and deeply human characters.
Our work is ensemble-based and focused on intimacy, storytelling, language, relationships, voice, risk and artistry within and throughout the Boston area.
Actors’ Shakespeare Project deploys the creative energy of theatre artists and the power of language and stories to create shared experiences for our community. Our artistic productions and education programs challenge and interrogate long-held expectations about Shakespeare and classic work; build bridges between diverse viewpoints; and empower people to more deeply empathize with each other.
- Our theatre artists include the Resident Artist Company, local theatre professionals, teaching artists, and artists in training in our productions and education programs.
- Our language and stories consist of narratives that invite invention, exploration, and risk taking.
- Our shared experiences are built on theatre work that challenges, deconstructs, and reimagines, accomplished in equal measure by our artistic productions and education programs.
- Our community includes Greater Boston’s current and future theatre artists, audiences, and students, particularly those thathave been excluded from the theatrical experience.
Actors’ Shakespeare Project envisions that our work contributes toward:
- A more unified Greater Boston that can embrace differences.
- An inclusive community where theatre artists of all ages and identities are empowered to express themselves.
- A theatre landscape that offers audiences exposure to a wide range of powerful writing in intimate, accessible settings.
- A more sustainable, diverse, and inclusive space for our community, with clear pathways for theatre artists to advance their careers.
Actors’ Shakespeare Project believes that:
- Language and storytelling, in their many and varied forms, are building blocks for debate, communication, collaboration, understanding, and empathy.
- Shakespeare’s plays are one powerful trove of language and storytelling that everyone should be able to question, own, and enjoy.
- We must also highlight other playwrights whose voices need to be amplified, and shift the focus of the narratives we share, so that underrepresented people and stories have equitable presence in our work.
As we carry out our mission, Actors’ Shakespeare Project strives to:
- Be actively anti-racist and decolonize Shakespeare to the best of our ability.
- Interrogate, reinterpret, and reimagine Shakespeare.
- Advance respectful dialogue between: fresh ideas/experience, audience/artist, student/teacher, tradition/experimentation.
- Build a human-centered community in our staff, ensembles, and classes that is both generous in spirit and accountable to our shared commitments.
- Compensate the labor of our artists and staff fairly.
- Steward our financial resources responsibly.