Orlando Shakes alumni stage ‘Hamlet’ to raise funds for theater education

Friday night will see the culmination of an artistic reunion on an Orlando Shakes stage when The Young Company presents Shakespeare’s “Hamlet.”

For director Keith Traver, it’s a full-circle moment. He was a participant in The Young Company back in 2002.

“Bringing this community from the past 30 years back together has been really cool,” he said.

Traver has organized this one-night-only, pay-what-you-will benefit performance for Orlando Shakes’ education department, which oversees The Young Company, a program that introduces high school actors to the world of professional theater. It’s one of the nonprofit theater’s longest-running programs, established in 1992, and today is run in conjunction with the W. Daniel Mills Apprentice Program. Young people selected for the Mills apprenticeship work on The Young Company’s annual production.

This year’s TYC show, “Two Gentlemen of Verona,” took place in June and was directed by Monica Long Tamborello, a 2024 Orlando Sentinel Critic’s Pick award winner for her directing work. Tamborello has been directing Young Company productions for 14 years, the past eight with Traver as her assistant.

She remembers teaching him when he was in middle school.

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“Yeah, I’m old,” she laughed. “But it’s amazing. I’m just super proud of him. He’s really a credit to the TYC program and what it has always been about.”

For Tamborello and Traver, the program has been as much about community as artistry.

“As a high school student in theater, you’re a little bit awkward, a little bit of an outcast,” said Traver, who was directed by Richard Width in his first Young Company experience. “It was so nice to find a community. It was a really great social and emotional outlet.”

As Tamborello put it: “We try to make it a safe space for young artists to make bold choices.”

That’s how Meaghan Fenner remembers it. She participated from 1999-2001, and has returned to play King Claudius in Friday’s “Hamlet.”

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“There wasn’t anything like it in my school,” said Fenner, recalling the thrill as a student of “getting to work with the text, not in an academic way, but one that focused on play and honesty.”

Fenner has worked onstage with organizations such as Osceola Arts, Central Florida Community Arts, Beth Marshall Presents and others. Other names in the “Hamlet” cast likely familiar to local theatergoers include Megan Borkes, as Horatio, and Ashleigh Ann Gardner, as Guildenstern. Fletcher McDaniel, an acting major at Shenandoah University, will play Hamlet — which Traver likes because Hamlet is also home from college in the play.

The performers, whose day jobs range from administrative assistant to immigration lawyer to engineer, nearly all are rehearsing after their main source of employment. Fenner is among the oldest alumni; the most recent alumnus involved just finished the June production.

Fenner said rehearsals have been like a trip back in time.

“This month has felt like going home,” she said. “Immediately there was a shared understanding that this was a safe space, and it made it easy to do the work.”

Shakespeare’s famous story about something rotten in the state of Denmark has been condensed into two hours, and the production is paying tribute to the original practices of Shakespeare’s times: Actors are responsible for their own costumes, the sets are being created from what’s available — leftovers from “Two Gentlemen of Verona” and Orlando Shakes’ children’s production of “Stuart Little.”

“It’s a nice use of recycling,” said Traver, who for the past year also has been the education coordinator for Orlando Shakes. (“My first question when they offered me the job was, ‘Can I still do The Young Company?’” he recalled.)

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And while 10 college students involved in the production are taking an associated class for credit, the other alumni are volunteering their time to put on the show.

Traver and Tamborello understand why.

“I’m forever grateful to my grandmother who signed me up,” said Traver. “It gave me skills I still use. It set me on a trajectory that brought me right back here.”

“It’s a very special program,” Tamborello said. “We say, ‘once you’re TYC, you’re always TYC.”

Traver shared the longstanding tradition of how each rehearsal ends: “We join hands in a circle and say, ‘May our circle remain unbroken until we’re together again.’”

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‘Hamlet’

• What: A two-hour production of Shakespeare’s play raising funds for Orlando Shakes’ education department, and performed by alumni of The Young Company

• Where: Lowndes Shakespeare Center, 812 E. Rollins St. in Orlando