Q&A: Cynthia Mazzant, executive director of Tempest Productions

Twenty years ago, Cynthia Mazzant, along with Jo Wadsworth and Chuck Caudill, started Tempest Productions as a way to introduce young people to live theater through workshops and interactive events.

The organization, which started in New Jersey, has found a home in Bellefonte. On August 20, Tempest Productions will hold its annual The Bard in Bellefonte in Talleyrand Park. Mazzant took time to talk about Tempest Productions and Shakespeare in the modern day.

T&G: How did you come up with Tempest Productions?

Mazzant: [The other two founders] and I had been working together on and off at a couple different companies. We really wanted to create a small nonprofit professional company that focused on classical theater but also had a strong tie to the community and a strong arts and education link.

T&G: What do you believe is unique about Tempest Productions?

Mazzant: We’re more geared toward the process than the product. I don’t mean to suggest that we aren’t looking to create strong productions, but the idea is that we want to take something and really work it with workshops and processes. We do a lot of poetry and verse play. We did a Chekhov, The Three Sisters, as our premiere production. It took three months because we hired someone to look at translations for us to go back to the original text. It’s not just taking a script, going to rehearsal, and doing a show. We’ve really enjoyed playing with the concepts of how to make the shows more accessible to a wide range of audiences. We also like to do workshops with the audiences prior to and after the productions.

T&G: Why do you think it’s important that children learn about Shakespeare?

Mazzant: People are scared of Shakespeare because of the language. The language is so foreign, and our goal is to make it less so. This is just the way he wrote and just the way people spoke. It’s like all of a sudden you’re going to drop into another art form, like classical music or jazz, there’s a language that comes with that and a culture. So our goal is to make people understand that all Shakespeare has relatable themes. Look at Romeo and Juliet — it’s about teenage love, it’s about sex, it’s about teenage rebellion, and its about discrimination because we’ve got families who hate each other. How is that not relatable?

T&G: What do you personally love about Shakespeare?

Mazzant: I love the bawdiness of it. I love the humor! Even in the strong tragedies, there’s a lot of humor. I think that we’ve placed Shakespeare on such a high pedestal, we consider him highbrow, and he’s not highbrow, he’s lowbrow. He really was the pop TV of the time. That’s what I love about him — everything is so relevant and everything is so political. I think there’s so much there to explore beyond what we have to teach in schools.

The Bard in Bellefonte is from 1 to 4  p.m. August 20 at Talleyrand Park in Bellefonte. For more information, visit tempestproductions.org.