Mission:
Founded in 2000 by Dandelion Productions, Connecticut Free Shakespeare (CFS) we are a professional, nonprofit theater company, with a mission to produce free-to-the-public professional works of classical theater in an accessible, skillful, imaginative American style that honors the playwright's language and intentions and that crafts these plays with a 21st century sensibility.
We are committed to mounting productions designed to reach a broad range of audience members, including those not familiar with Shakespeare's work,without jeopardizing artistic integrity.
Our educational programs provide high-quality, intensive artistic experiences to students who might otherwise lack this opportunity. The programs provide a point of entry into the theatrical process to students of all ages, backgrounds and life experiences. Connecticut Free Shakespeare youth programs give students the opportunity to grasp theater firsthand - with professional actors and technical staff - not just by passively sitting back and watching, but by actively doing.
About Us:
In 1989, Dandelion's founders, Bertram Garskof and Ellen Lieberman, created a theatrical approach to social issue education. This approach featured audience interaction and improvisation. It proved to be both theatrically powerful and powerfully able to affect student audiences. Shows were produced about HIV/AIDS prevention and education, diversity education, drug and alcohol abuse, date rape and sexual harassment prevention, non-violent conflict resolution and empathy. From 1989 to 1995 Dandelion Productions presented social issue educational theater in over 700 schools to a combined audience in excess of 500,000 people. These performances were seen throughout the Northeast.
In addition, Dandelion Productions has produced forty-four full productions for national tours in association with National Theater for Arts and Education. Many of these shows were bilingual adaptations of the classics, while others were adapted from contemporary reading lists or with a focus on science and math. These entertaining and educational shows toured to schools across the country (from Maine to Florida to California) for over ten years, to a combined audience of well over a million students.
Dandelion also produced radio shows in association with The Shubert Theater, The Long Wharf Theater, Quinnipiac University and the Museum of Radio and Television in New York City and produced a staged reading of "The Odd Couple," with Jack Klugman and Tony Randall at the Shubert Theater in New Haven.
Since 2000, Dandelion Productions has proudly produced Connecticut Free Shakespeare at Connecticut's Beardsley Zoo. In 2006, Connecticut Free Shakespeare expanded to an additional performance venue on the Historic Guilford Green - sponsored by The Shoreline Arts Alliance. In 2010, with the generous and kind support of The Norma Terris and Albert Firestone Foundation, a third venue was added in Old Saybrook on the town hall green, adjacent to the Katharine Hepburn Performing Arts Center.
