Students and faculty who traveled to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland, Oregon, last weekend have returned to apply their newfound knowledge of Shakespeare and theater to their classes.

The festival, a repertory theater, performs 11 different plays each season. This year, attendees watched Shakespeare’s “Hamlet,” “Richard II” and “Twelfth Night” and Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations,” along with a 30-minute prologue to each play.

The students and faculty also participated in a workshop about the plays and a behind-the-scenes tour of a new building for rehearsal space.

“We talked a lot about different words and how their meanings have changed over time,” attendee Andrew Tierno (12) said. “We highlighted one scene from ‘Twelfth Night’ where we looked at some words that were nonsensical that Shakespeare just made up on the spot. We also looked at a very striking monologue from ‘Richard II’ and how certain words affect certain emotions.”

Upper school English Department Chair Dr. Pauline Paskali, English teachers Charles Shuttleworth and Dr. Beth Wahl and drama teacher Jeffrey Draper chaperoned the trip.

“The Oregon festival does a particularly good job at making the plays as accessible as possible,” Shuttleworth said. “These are the roles that actors dream of playing. These are the stories that directors want to tell. You want to be part of that. You want to appreciate what’s going on and not be intimidated by that and not find it to be alien.”

Dr. Paskali started the trip in 2009 and has since organized the annual event, which usually takes place the third weekend of September.

“It’s a world-class acting company, and I wanted Shakespeare to come to life for students,” Dr. Paskali said. “I would love for this to be an introduction for them to the world of theater in whatever communities they live in. Hopefully they will be able to enrich their lives by attending their local theaters in the future, and possibly I hope that at least for some of these kids, they’ll make it a tradition and go back to Ashland specifically.”

Seven seniors have also attended the school’s trip to the festival for all four years of their high school career.

“When I was a freshman, I was pretty into Shakespeare. I think literary analysis is really fun,” senior Kathryn Cole, one of those seniors, said. “It’s really cool to see plays that I’ve read on stage, and that’s one thing, but then also just the bus trip and hanging out with people and getting dinner at restaurants around town, it’s really fun. You get to know people. One of my closest friends is someone I hung out with every year on the trip.”

The students and chaperones returned to California on Sunday.

“I had to choose between Shakespeare and Drake,” attendee Shivani Awasthi (12) said. “And Shakespeare won.”