Planning a school or amateur Shakespeare production? The best way to experience the plays is to perform them, but getting started can be a challenge because the complete plays are too long and complex, while scene selections or simplified language are too limited. The 30-Minute Shakespeare book series helps teachers and students produce a Shakespeare play in a short amount of time, thus jump-starting the process of discovering the beauty, magic, and fun of the Bard. The 30-Minute Shakespeare gives students and teachers a chance to get up on their feet and act out a Shakespeare play in half an hour using his original language. The emphasis is on key scenes, with narrative bridges between scenes to keep the audience caught up on the action. The stage directions are built into this script so that young actors do not have to stand in one place; they can move and tell the story with their actions as well as their words. The 30-minute edits of Shakespeare's plays, complete with stage directions and character suggestions that can be performed by groups of 15 to 30 young people. And it can all be done in a classroom during class time! The 30-Minute Shakespeare series brings the beauty of Shakespeare's language, the emotion of his characters, and the drama of his stories from the page to the stage, providing teachers and those who work with young people a way to get people up on their feet and performing Shakespeare. Plot, theme, and language reveal themselves through the performance of these half-hour play cuttings, and everybody involved receives the priceless gift of "owning" a piece of Shakespeare.

The result is an experience that is fun and engaging, and one that we can all carry with us as we play out our own lives on the stages of the world. The 30-Minute Shakespeare book series emerged from Nick Newlin's13 years working as a Director-in-Residence in DC Public High Schools under the auspices of the Folger Shakespeare Library. That is where this book was born: not in a research library, a graduate school lecture, a professional stage, or even an after-school drama club. All of the play cuttings in The 30-Minute Shakespeare were first rehearsed in a D.C. public high school English class, and performed successfully at the Folger Shakespeare Library's annual Secondary School Shakespeare Festival. Many of these performances won awards at the Folger Festival. The players were not necessarily "actor types.

" For many of them, this was their first performance in a play. Something almost miraculous happens when students perform Shakespeare. They "get" it. By occupying the characters and speaking the words out loud, students gain a level of understanding and appreciation that is unachievable by simply reading the text. That is the magic of a performance-based method of learning Shakespeare, and this book makes the formerly daunting task of staging a Shakespeare play possible for anybody. The plays can be used in college, high school and even the elementary school levels. Drawing on his Harvard Education, his 30 years as an internationally performing professional jester with The Nicolo Whimsey Show, and his love of Shakespeare, Nick Newlin approaches his texts with the mind of a scholar, the eye of a performer, and the sensibility of a director. Mr.

Newlin has worked with The Kennedy Center, The National Theater, Smithsonian Discovery Theater, and has performed at The White House. Nicolo Whimsey Press believes that William Shakespeare wrote for all of us, and to that end, Mr. Newlin uses his experience, expertise, and love of the Bard to make his great works accessible to young people, and those who work with them. Performance rights are included with the purchase of playscripts. Unlike most other scripts on the market today, The 30-Minute Shakespeare has no separate charge for public performances, making it an exceptional value.