ABOUT

About Us

Mended Wing Theatre Co. is a 501(3)(c) organization founded in 2017 by a group of acting and directing students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA).

Our mission is to bring affordable and interactive Shakespeare performances to public schools and public parks across the southeastern United States.

Since 2017, we've toured over 45 schools in Florida, Georgia and North Carolina. After a two-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were thrilled to return to North Carolina with Comedy of Errors for our fifth season.

For our sixth season, beginning in January 2023 we will provide two separate tours, first a winter tour of Eastern NC with Hamlet guest directed by Beth Fletcher, and a spring tour of central NC with The Tempest, guest directed by Tyree Albert.

Our organization is founded on the belief that Shakespeare is for everyone, that theatre is an empathy-building tool, and that art should be easily accessible, and financially viable, to people all across the country – not just to the privileged who live near a "cultural hub."

If you would like to support our mission, considering making a donation to our gofundme for Season Six here.

Our story

"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?

When my classmate Cameron and I decided we were going to take A Midsummer Night’s Dream to public middle and high schools across Georgia in 2017, 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. They have the ability to hold onto ideas they do not fully understand until they get the rest of the information they need.

I fear that as adults, when we see something we don’t immediately comprehend, we tend to dismiss it as unnecessary. As kids, when the world is full of mystery anyway, we are more eager to chase meaning, to find out, to learn what the story is as the story unfolds. This, I think, is the beauty of Shakespeare. His plays are familiar to us by cultural osmosis, and yet they are new and exciting in every iteration due to their ever-changing poetry.

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.

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 about Power, Justice, Love, Gender, Governance, and Mercy. These stories are essential. Perhaps even more so now than they were for the Elizabethans.

So I invite you, young or old, theatre-going or not, to open your heart, expand your mind, and step into the world of Shakespeare with us. Who knows, you might even find that this was your world all along…

– Emmet Temple, artistic director and founder

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.
In their free time Emmet enjoys surfing, sailing, skating, D&D, and playing music.