ABOUT

About Us: The Company

"Think but this, and all is mended…"

What if Shakespeare was accessible to kids?
What if art wasn’t just for the economic and social elite?
What if theatre was for everyone?

Mended Wing Theatre Co. is a grass-roots theatre company that tours small-cast productions of Shakespeare’s plays to schools, parks and other venues in the Southeast. We are a registered 501(3)(c) organization with a home base in Ocracoke, NC. We travel across the entirety of the Southeast and parts of Appalachia to perform with actors, directors, and other production help coming to us from all over the US. We have been lucky to perform for close to 10,000 students so far and have no plans of slowing down anytime soon.

Mended Wing was founded on the belief that the works of Shakespeare should be able to be enjoyed by all. Because Shakespeare occupies such a dominant space in the literary and dramatic canon, his works should be made as salient and accessible as possible to all students in a format that captures the energy of performance. We use theatre as an empathy-building tool, believe art should be easily accessible and financially viable to all people, and hope to make the world a more beautiful place, one line of iambic-pentameter at a time.

During the beginning stages of creating Mended Wing, we were met with a truly inspiring amount of support which enabled us to make our dream a reality. We were also, however, met with a fair amount of well-intentioned skepticism. “We love the idea,” folks would say, “but these kids aren’t really going to be able to get Shakespeare are they?”

At the time we had only our gut conviction that, yes, in fact, they would. It was our hope that children who had not yet been told that they could not understand Shakespeare simply would. And they did. I’m not saying that they knew what every single word meant—that would be a challenge even to a scholar—but children have a wonderful openness to story, that allows them to hold ideas they do not fully understand, until they get the rest of the information they need.

Shakespeare offers us, all of us, the chance to be immersed in compelling stories. Stories that even after more than 400 years are asking questions of Power, Justice, Love, Gender, Governance, and Mercy, that are as essential— perhaps even more so—now as they were for the Elizabethans.

So I invite you, at whatever stage of life you may be, to open your heart, expand your mind, and step into the world of Shakespeare with us. Who knows, you might even find that it was your world all along…

About Us: The People

Emmet Temple (they/them) is a theatre artist born and raised on Ocracoke Island, North Carolina, and is a 2017 graduate of the UNCSA Drama Program.
Emmet co-founded Mended Wing in 2017 and has been Artistic Director since, directing A Midsummer Night's Dream, Two Gentlemen of Verona, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, and Comedy of Errors, and appearing in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Twelfth Night, and Hamlet.
Emmet was the 2017-18 Kenan Directing Fellow at ACT in Seattle, where they directed Measure for Measure, and has worked as an Acting and Shakespeare teacher at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts Drama Summer Intensive in 2019 and 2020.
Currently, Emmet is pursuing a Master of Letters in Shakespeare and a Master of Fine Arts with a concentration in Directing at Mary Baldwin University.
In their free time Emmet enjoys surfing, sailing, skating, D&D, and playing music.

"I think a large part of why many people think they can’t understand Shakespeare is due to years of being told how very complicated it is, how high a form of art it represents, how respected a place in literature it holds. While all of these things are true, we can’t have fun with Shakespeare while he’s up on his pedestal and we’re bowing at his feet. Shakespeare is fun – the most fun, in my biased opinion – and when we allow him to come down and play in the dirt with us, he is very fun indeed."