Unlike traditional theater productions, there was no red curtain, special lighting, microphone feedback or elaborate stage makeup at Shakespeare in Yosemite.
Instead, squirrels scurried across the stone stage and among the audience members’ feet. Birds cawed in the nearby trees, as the last of the winter leaves fell between the wooden bench seats of Lower River Amphitheater near Yosemite Falls.
It really feels like you’re a world away, but that’s the goal.
William Shakespeare’s plays are meant to be enjoyed by a live, theater audience and there is no better place to experience The Bard than Yosemite National Park.
For the third year, UC Merced is bringing Shakespeare’s wit and wisdom to audiences in a natural setting, similar to the forest that inspired the playwright’s own writings. Yosemite National Park will be transformed into the Forest of Arden where students, faculty, park rangers and community members will perform “As You Like It” -- one of Shakespeare’s pastoral comedies -- with a twist.
“April ... hath put a spirit of youth in everything,” Shakespeare wrote in Sonnet 98. He might as well have been writing about this year’s Shakespeare in Yosemite production.
With Friday’s premiere — attended by high school students from Mariposa and several children of park employees and El Portal residents and performed by a troupe of players ranging from those experienced and trained in Shakespeare to brand-new actors — the 420-year-old “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” seemed new again.
Desperate lovers, a fairy king and queen, a woman with a donkey’s head and a scamp with Cupid’s arrow in flower form are taking over Yosemite National Park on Earth Day weekend.
Highlighting UC Merced’s special partnership with Yosemite, Shakespeare in Yosemite enters its second year with “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” adapted and directed by UC Merced Professor Katherine Steele Brokaw and Professor Paul Prescott from the University of Warwick in Coventry, U.K.
What if nature were to become a polluter, discharging millions of tons of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere in much the same way as diesel-fueled trucks or coal-fired power plants?
The works of Shakespeare, perhaps more so than any in the western canon, have been subject to reinterpretation and reappraisal by generations of artists, scholars and laypeople.
Some, like Verdi’s opera “Otello,” are considered masterpieces in their own right. Others, most notably Thomas Bowdler’s much maligned, puritanical expurgation of Shakespeare’s works, have been roundly scorned and derided.
What if nature were to become a polluter, discharging millions of tons of planet-warming carbon into the atmosphere in much the same way as diesel-fueled trucks or coal-fired power plants?
In partnership with the National Park Service and the University of Warwick (U.K.), the University of California, 
