San Jose Youth Shakespeare

About Us

Our theatre group was founded in late 2003 and incorporated as a non-profit organization in 2005 under the name “San Jose Youth Shakespeare.”

About the Director

Bob Rumsby is a technical writer at ParAccel (a software startup) in Cupertino. Bob has worked as an editor, writer, and trainer in the South Bay since 1990.

In 1978, Bob was a member of the National Youth Theatre of Great Britain, and appeared in Julius Caesar at the Shaw Theatre in London. He went on to study drama at the University of Birmingham in England and at UC Davis here in California, where he graduated with an MFA. In 1984, he was a member of the Young Company at the Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas. During the early 80s, he appeared in a wide range of classical and modern plays and worked closely with several professional directors, including Frank Hauser, William Gaskill, Stuart Burge, and Marshall Mason.

Our group tries to provide the community with an educational experience that is inspired by Mr. Rumsby’s own education. In late 2003, given their children’s interest in Shakespeare and the growing interest in classical education around the Bay Area (especially among homeschoolers), the Rumsbys and a few other families decided to bring their children together and try to produce a full-length Shakespeare play. The result was As You Like It in April of 2004. Since then, we have produced more comedies, Macbeth, The Winter's Tale, and our own adaptation of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. Our rehearsals take place mostly on Saturdays and usually extend over a three-month period.

About the Cast

Our young actors and actresses range from 8 years old to college age. Some have had no other theatre experience, and some have acted with other local groups or in school productions. Many of the company have acted in three or four of our productions, and some have acted in all of them. Many of our members come from homeschooling families but others attend public and private schools. The cast for most of our productions includes one or more college students.

What have they all learned from this experience? We hope they have learned more from performing in these Shakespeare plays than they could typically learn from academic study. We always produce the whole play and cut very little, if any, of the text. We do not rewrite any of Shakespeare’s language. Instead, we meet the plays “head on” and do what we can to understand the gist of each scene as we act it out and refine it. This approach, in itself, is a challenge to the cast, but it is one that they can meet.

Too many academic programs start with the assumption that classic works of literature and drama are unapproachable in their original form. This style of teaching deprives students of the ingredients (the dramatic structure and the poetry) that make these works worth studying in the first place. Our young company studies each play on its own terms.