For Five Years, Shakespeare Everywhere Has Brought the Bard's Best to the People

"All the world's a stage," William Shakespeare wrote in As You Like It, and the co-founders of the Shakespeare Everywhere theater company take that literally.

For five years now, the company co-founded by by Marcus Stimac and Brian Wilson has taken the Bard's works out of the hallowed halls of the so-called legitimate theater and into the unlikely spaces of Klyde Warren Park, Lola's in Fort Worth, The Wild Detectives in Oak Cliff and, on Monday night, Deep Ellum Art Co., where the company will wrap its fifth- anniversary year with a performance of The Winter's Tale.

"We wanted to increase people's interest in seeing and doing Shakespeare," Stimac says. "Our whole goal is to elevate the quality of the storytelling to the highest level ... even if our sheep are inflatable and the props are made of cardboard and we have six rehearsals together."

Preparing such a play in such a space with such limited resources requires an acting company that is flexible enough to perform and dedicated enough to put in the study and preparation needed to pull a play together with just a handful of rehearsals as a group.

In many ways, the company pays homage to Shakespeare and his original playing company, the Lord Chamberlain's Men, and its first performance space at the Globe Theatre. There, set designs and props would have been limited and the audience would be anything but the social elite.

"There's a lot that resonates with that vision," Stimac says. "The live music, the proximity of the audience, or 'groundlings,' being involved in the storytelling. The logistics of where we may be performing isn't as relevant to us as the stories we're telling, and that has a lot to do with the flexibility of the Shakespearean troops who could pick up plays in a short amount of time because they've had so much experience in the Shakespearean medium."

However, as old as the tradition of a smaller-scale Shakespeare may be, Shakespeare Everywhere does make use of contemporary theatrical elements for the storytelling and for the fun of it.

"I think people appreciate some of the color and the expressiveness of our prop work," Stimac says. "There's a significant amount of props in [The Winter's Tale]. I was driving around with my car full of inflatable sheep. ... If you're doing Romeo and Juliet, you may have a lot of swords that you have to make out of plungers. But we know what we're getting into when we read a play.

"If the prop can identify its relevance in the story, that is its key function. But if it has some character to it, I appreciate that stagecraft. We like to have some of the thunder sheets or Foley art and rustic elements because it also helps distance people from the idea that you need a certain amount of elegance or high-end props and costumes to tell a period play."

The Winter's Tale is certainly one of Shakespeare's more outlandish plays with its time travel, bear attacks, dancing, seders, lost babies and jealous kings. But Stimac has seen how even these complicated elements resonate with the audience if the right stagecraft is used. Having Poppy Xander of Helium Queens and Polyphonic Spree doing the music doesn't hurt, either.

"She's incredible," Stimac says.

"We've had a great response from a lot of people being their first time seeing a version of a play or seeing a play and understanding it for the first time because of how you communicate the language," Stimac says. "After a short amount of time, the verse and meter becomes more like a code for human behavior, and people can pick it up. Our actors perform in a way that has a high level of technique, but it is very accessible in understanding how the plot develops or the emotions change. And I think how clear our work has been is why we've been able to have so many fresh audiences who are new to Shakespeare."

After the conclusion of its fifth-year anniversary celebration, Shakespeare Everywhere will begin casting an all-male Twelfth Night and an all-female Taming of the Shrew, both to be performed in a single night.

"We had our first general audition this year to cast new actors, and we had over 70 new actors apply," Stimac says. "We're overwhelmed by the support of the community and the audiences who keep coming to our performances, which make it all possible. But we're really excited for that double billing on gender identity and romance politics. We'll have two great casts in that one."

No word yet on who will host the double billing (though Deep Ellum Art Co. is a likely candidate), but when the world is a stage, you really can take Shakespeare everywhere.

Shakespeare Everywhere presents The Winter’s Tale at 8 p.m. on Monday, Dec. 9, at Deep Ellum Art Co. Tickets are $20 and are available at ticketleap.com