Before a play starts, there’s a certain kind of silence in a school auditorium. It’s not the calm silence of a seasoned theatergoer, but something more raw. Moving around in their seats. Just a few whispers. The worry that comes from not knowing what will happen next. For many students in public schools in New York City, that is their first time seeing a live show. For almost twenty years, Epic Theatre Ensemble has been planning that moment with great care and intention.
Epic isn’t a typical theater company, and it doesn’t try to be one either. It’s a mix of a professional production company and a grassroots education group; at night it puts on original shows Off-Broadway and in the morning it visits classrooms. That having two identities isn’t a mistake. That’s the whole point.
The company’s most popular after-school program, Shakespeare REMIX, puts kids in the most difficult plays by Shakespeare. Not as passive readers, but as people who work together. Someone in Harlem might spend months breaking down Macbeth. They would take the play apart and put it back together using their own neighborhood, their own problems, and their own goals as examples. It’s hard not to notice how quickly the break between “old English text” and “something that matters” becomes less clear.
The interesting thing about Epic that sets it apart from other programs like it is that the artists who teach are also the ones who perform. There is the same teaching artist on stage Wednesday at 10:30 a.m. performing for the same 200 ninth graders on Tuesday morning while leading them through Antigone, a play about a young woman who won’t be quiet. This steady state of things is almost radical. No one else is watching the kids. Someone who already knows their name is watching them.
One of the company’s current shows, a play about Wernher von Braun, a former Nazi SS officer, ran at the Acorn Theatre on Theatre Row, with matinees for students and evening shows for paying customers. The same play, the same actors, and the same script. Epic seems to have a strong belief that kids can handle complicated stories, unclear morals, and important historical events. Most places of business, like schools and theaters, don’t always share this belief.
Epic also has a college prep program for 12th graders that works with them on things like personal statements, finding financial aid, and the general stress of a process that seems designed to be hard for people who don’t have a family plan for it. That doesn’t happen very often in a theater company. But it fits with how Epic sees its role, which is less as an arts organization and more as a long-term part of the lives of young people.
When you spend time with this work, you get the sense that Epic isn’t really making plays or even arts education in the traditional sense. There are first-time viewers. There are kids who don’t know what to expect and kids who leave with a slightly different idea of what they can sit with. That kind of effect is slow and hard to measure. It’s not clear in a report on the box office. Epic has been around for 18 seasons and still finds students who have never been to live theater and gives them a reason to come back.
