Our Mission Our mission is to bring powerful, thoughtful, and entertaining Shakespeare performance and education to Charleston, SC. We produce Shakespeare that is both clearly contemporary and still fully committed to its artful language and timeless themes, which have endured on stages around the world for more than four centuries. How we plan to achieve it Our core ensemble of actors and our contribution of expertise, training, and contemporary direction help produce high-quality Shakespeare performance, no matter what the scale of production or size of space. In an ensemble company, a core group of members can build collaborative relationships and carry the lessons and benefits of training forward to future productions, making better performance and education for the entire Charleston community. Through workshops and rehearsals (led by Artistic Director Laura Rose and guest experts in Shakespeare performance, both national and international), HCS offers local actors (professional, student, and amateur) Shakespeare performance training that employs both modern techniques and classical text, voice, and movement work. This combination of approaches revolutionized Shakespeare performance in the UK in the 1960s, and it continues to be used and advanced by some of the best Shakespeare companies in the US and around the world. It is the key to making Shakespeare our own. The traditions we follow embrace the plays’ text—they do not “translate” it like a foreign language nor rely solely on production design to make it accessible. Rather, they find ways into Shakespeare's words for the modern director, actor, and audience. They inspire performances that grow organically from our own experience and, at the same time, heighten our experience of the world as only Shakespeare’s verse can.