Madeline Park Shakespeare Festival, September 2022
Director, Adapter, and Combat Choreographer, As You Like It
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.
“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