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This is the front cover of a booklet that Parker brings out every year to be passed around. It is a collection of photographs, newspaper clippings, and students’ reflections on their times at Summer Shakes. It has pictures from the very first production of Macbeth in 1987 in Kenosha and ends with 2006’s Hamlet at Appleton North.
In its pages can be found three different Romeo and Juliets.
To give some perspective, I wasn’t born until five years after these photos were taken.
These are from 1998.
I’ll be honest, I am amazed by this set. I can see in it echoes of a few of the ideas we are using in our own design, but I can also see what Parker is doing differently. I’m floored every year by what Summer Shakes can create with no real budget to speak of.
Many of the students in the play are just above ten years 
older than I am, but it looks as if nothing has really changed. I feel a connection to them as I read their names and wonder what high school was like for them.
They are there, in a few of the same costumes, doing exactly 
what my friends and I did, and what my students do now. They stood under the hot lights, they raised their swords in affected fury, they memorized their lines, built their set, begged for money, and shared the frustrations, ecstasies, comradery, triumphs, and heartbreaks that every student in this program has experienced.
Like us, they goofed off, and then worked harder than they ever had before. I don’t recognize their names, but I know that they loved Parker and this program as much as this cast does now. So much has changed since then, and yet Summer Shakespeare endures.
It is funny how no cast really thinks about previous years. Sure, the vets of the program may reminisce about three years ago, but no one really tries to imagine what it would have been like twenty years ago.
When Parker talks about some of the first productions, it seems unreal, as if it were just a story. It is hard to image the high school experiences of someone now in their forties.
But then you see the behind-the-scenes photographs. Those faces, frozen in time, remind you that the program, and Parker, don’t belong just to you and your experiences. He has invested his energy, creativity, and love in the lives of over one thousand students over the years, and yet he still treats each production as if it were the most important he has ever done.
It never feels worn out or tired (even though Parker must feel that way sometimes), each student feels that Summer Shakespeare is theirs, and so gives their time and love to it, just as Parker does.
Perhaps that is one reason that the program has succeeded for twenty-seven years–every cast is inspired with a sense of ownership for their production. They learn to find a part of their academic identity in understanding Shakespeare’s plays intimately, in a way that few high schoolers have the opportunity to discover.
This summer is not Parker’s first cast. It isn’t even the first time that Parker has directed this play. But that will not stop Parker or this cast from treating this story–which has been told countless times–as if it were new.
Just as, I am sure, the casts pictured here did.
Summer with the Bard 