Madeline Park Shakespeare Festival’s slogan is simple, “Free, Family Friendly, and Fun!” With this in mind, I created an 85-minute adaptation of this Shakespeare comedy and mounted it in a public park in El Paso, Texas. The results exceeded our expectations! With four live performances, we served over a thousand audience members – a quarter of them kids. We raised enough money to pay all contributing artists and never charged admission.

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“Professor Stratton’s response to this challenge was both brilliant and effective. Without cutting any of the major characters, he engineered a performance text that had a very legible plot and that retained many of the major themes in the play. The resulting performance moved very briskly and put some of the play’s themes into better focus.” -Joe Ortiz, UTEP Chair, English Department