If you ask most people at OPRF about Shakespeare Team, they’ll probably respond with, “we have a Shakespeare team?” OPRF does, in fact, have such a team, doing what coach James Bell says is “playing with Shakespeare.”

The club meets weekly at varying times and places. Emery Brandhorst, a senior on the Shakespeare team, says they have a flexible meeting schedule. “Last week we met Sunday night and had a backyard bonfire,” they say.

During meetings, members do anything from cutting down a scene from a play to rehearsing to filming.

They don’t get to pick the scene, however. That job goes to the Chicago Shakespeare Theater.

The Chicago Shakespeare Theater picks a play and assigns each team in the greater Chicago area a scene to perform. Each team is then in charge of making the scene shorter and performing it. In past years, they competed but because of COVID-19, that has changed.

There’s the option of creating the scene over Zoom, but Bell says that “they wanted this to be as much of an in-person experience as it could.”

Senior Brigid Barrette, a team member, is glad it’s not a competitive club. “I don’t think theater or art is something that can or should be competitive,” she says.

Shakespeare Team is mainly student-led. Bell says he “tries to stay out of it as much as I can … it is their scene that they’re doing.” Bell lets students pick when and where to meet. The only major part of the process Bell interferes with is casting. “That’s a harder thing to do when you’re in it,” he says.

Currently, the OPRF Shakespeare team is working on a scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” Specifically, act two, scene two, where “the wrong people are chasing after the wrong people,” because of love potions, says Bell. He describes it as “love chaos.”

Right now, Brandhorst says students are “working on language work for our lines, and starting to film.”

Barrette says they are “starting to develop our characters and making acting choices.”

They also filmed a piece of a monologue given to them by the Chicago Shakespeare Theater. Barrette says they “felt the monologue had a children’s storytelling element, and we wanted to emphasize that,” so they filmed it around a campfire. The full version of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” as well as the monologue, should be completed by February.

Brandhorst says they joined this year because they “wanted to pursue my interest in Shakespeare outside of class.” They say their favorite part is “getting to know other people who share my love for Shakespeare.”

Barrette says she joined this year because “I have been really interested in trying to understand the language Shakespeare uses and I’ve done theater for a really long time,” she says. “Being able to combine those two … is really interesting to me.”

While this is everybody on the team’s first year, they haven’t let that stop them. They participate because they love it, and it shows in the dedication they put into creating this scene.

Shakespeare Team may be small, but it’s mighty. “This year,” said Bell, “this group has been totally on it.”