Collegiate Shakespeare Performances Begin at the Winedale Barn Next Week

College students prepare tirelessly this summer to put on three full-length Shakespearean plays, adding to the long legacy of performers who have participated in Shakespeare at Winedale since 1970.

Over the course of nine weeks, the ensemble of performers practice their lines, learn fight sequences, and build props for their productions, preparing for their fiveshow weekends they perform the last four weeks of the program.

“It’s one of those things where if you’re not on the stage, you’re expected to be in the back making music or working with props,” said Aba Hosseini, one of the performers who recently graduated from UT Austin. “We all have roles in the plays, but more than that, we kind of operate as an entire unit.”

The students live on the Winedale Historical Complex for more than two months, located just northeast of Round Top.

“The Winedale program is extensive and intense,” Director Katie Brokaw said. “There’s no program like it that I know of anywhere in the world where you are bringing this community of students together.”

This year, the program is performing “Romeo and Juliet”, a classic tragedy; “Henry IV Part 1”, a historic comedy; and an original adaptation of “Love’s Labour’s Lost called “1976”, which is a musical.

“Love’s Labor’s Lost depicts the 1976 Round Top Fourth of July parade within the production,” Brokaw said. “The plot is very simple, so for people who don’t think that they like Shakespeare, that might be the one that they would love to see.”

Shakespeare at Winedale is an English class out of the University of Texas at Austin, so not only do the students earn acting experience for their resume, but they also get college credit.

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Eian Johnson, who just graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in Theatre and Dance, previously participated in Shakespeare at Winedale in 2024 and was ready to face the challenge of the intense program for a second time with a different director.

“My previous director was a lot more handy, so we’d be doing a lot of hard labor like picking up boxes and sorting,” Johnson said. “Through that perseverance, I learned a lot more about myself, not only as a person, but as a performer, so whenever I was talking to Katie about returning, I kind of kept that mentality of ‘I was able to do one summer before-I can definitely do again’ and it’s going super well.”

Shakespeare at Winedale is in its 56th season, but regardless of how long it’s been around, each year brings its own uniqueness while still maintaining the original integrity of the program.

“Shakespeare at Winedale, for as long as it has existed, has been this kind of ever changing, but also ever similar thing from year to year,” said Brandt Agosto-Medina, a recent UT graduate. “There were no returners in my class two years ago, so we all had to figure it out at the same time together. This year, we have a number of people who are more familiar with the space and how everything goes, and we know how to avoid them and how to help everybody else a little bit better.”

The program aims to share the art of Shakespearian plays in a way that is accessible to modern audiences.

“The difficulty with putting up Shakespeare at this point in time is that it seems so inaccessible, and it has kind of been relegated to the stuffy academic spaces, and when you think of Shakespeare, you’re thinking of guys with big fluffy collars and everything,” Hosseini said. “In actuality, in Shakespeare’s time, the costumes were effectively t-shirts and jeans, and the people who most enjoyed and benefited from those plays were normal, regular people. I think being able to adapt Shakespeare to where it maintains its textual integrity but also makes it understandable for people who are regular audiences is how Shakespeare lives.”

Performances run every weekend from July 17 to August 10. Tickets are available at https://www.eventbrite. com/o/shakespeare-atwinedale- 28913573095.