Elm Shakespeare & A Midsummer Night’s Dream: Decoding Shakespeare’s Poetic Clues

Do you like Shakespeare but don’t always understand it?

Join Artistic Director Rebecca Goodheart and actors from Elm Shakespeare Company on a romping linguistic adventure! Discover the clues embedded in Shakespeare’s poetry that make come alive. Why did he write they way did? How do actors use the sound, rhythms, patterns to bring it to life? Using performance and wit, Goodheart will share her 30 years of experience as a master text teacher and director of Elm’s Shakespeare in the Park to unlock the words and nuance of Shakespeare’s poetry, while giving a sneak peak of this year’s 30th anniversary Bollywood themed production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream!
About Rebecca Goodheart:
Rebecca Goodheart is celebrating her 10th season as Producing Artistic Director of Elm Shakespeare Company, where she has directed Richard III, Love’s Labor’s Lost, Comedy of Errors, and The Tempest, as well as performing Women of Will. She has been a director, actor, and teacher specializing in Shakespeare and Voice for 30 years, who has directed over 30 profes­sional and 50 educational productions, working with a dozen Shakespeare theaters around the world, including tenures as Director of Training at San Francisco Shakespeare Festival, Producing Artistic Director for Maryland Shakespeare Festival (an equity theater she founded in 1999), Artistic Director of the Metawhateverphor Theater in NYC, and Director of Education for Baltimore Shakespeare Festival. She is a designated Linklater Voice and classical text teacher serving on the faculties of Shake­speare & Co., Southern CT State University, and the Hartt School of Theatre. Rebecca serves as the Vice President of Shakespeare Theatre Association and is a fellow at Yale’s Hopper College, along with being a proud member of V.A.S.T.A., Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (SSDC) , and Actor’s Equity Association. She holds a BFA from NYU/Stella Adler Conservatory, a Master of Letters in Shakespeare & Renaissance Liter­ature, and an MFA in Directing (both from the American Shakespeare Center/Mary Baldwin College). Rebecca is a published scholar known for her research into physicalizing Shakespeare’s wit and rhetoric onstage, and is extremely excited to have her first book, Shakespeare’s World: Seeing the plays through Elizabethan Eyes, which she co-Authored with Josh Lubarr and Dennis Krausnick, being published in early 2026 by Bloomsbury.