Nashville Shakespeare Festival

The mission of the Nashville Shakespeare Festival is to educate and entertain the Mid-South community through professional Shakespearean experiences.

The Nashville Shakespeare Festival started as the political theatre group Theatrevolution.

Theatrevolution was started by theatre director Chambers Stevens, community organizer Ty Brown, Brenda Fowinkle. and Donald Capparella, (who is still on the board today) as a way to raise awareness of current political issues. After their first production of The Normal Heart by Larry Kramer, which dealt with the AIDS crisis, the company started to work with the State of Tennessee, dramatizing social issues for the judicial system.

Anxious to get back to their theatrical roots, in 1988 Theatrevolution decided to produce a free Shakespeare play in Centennial Park in Nashville, Tennessee. Chambers Stevens, Chuck Guy, Ty Brown and Brenda Fowinkle founded and incorporated the Nashville Shakespeare Festival, whose first production was As You Like It by William Shakespeare and opened in the rain on August 5, 1988. Clara Hieronymus, the critic for the Tennessean gave the production a rave review after watching the entire show holding an umbrella. That summer, more than 1,000 audience members attended the six performances, and the Nashville Shakespeare Festival was born. Each summer 10,000 to 15,000 audience members attend the Festival’s annual Shakespeare in the Park production at Centennial Park (Nashville), which is designed to be accessible to people from all cultural and socio-economic backgrounds. Since 1988, 200,000 people have attended Shakespeare in the Park. These fully staged, professional productions are presented free of charge to the public.

In 1992, in response to the need for an arts-in-education program in the Metropolitan Nashville public schools, the Nashville Shakespeare Festival developed a series of fifty-minute versions of Shakespeare’s best-known works as “Shakespeare Samplers.” These abridged productions toured to middle and high schools throughout the state as well as regional colleges and universities. Over 150,000 students – many of whom have never experienced live theatre before – have been introduced to Shakespeare. These tours have led to partnerships with the Nashville Institute for the Arts and the Tennessee Performing Arts Center's Humanities Outreach in Tennessee, which assisted the Festival in producing other classics such as The Belle of Amherst, The Little Prince, and Rip Van Winkle to supplement the company’s Shakespearean offerings.

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