Elm Shakespeare Company offers romantic heroines as pen pals to keep in touch with community

Haven’t heard lately from Beatrice about how she’s getting along with Benedick, or how other characters in the William Shakespeare universe are faring? New Haven’s Elm Shakespeare Company wants to keep you in touch via a monthly handwritten letter allegedly penned by the heroines of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Henry VI” and “Much Ado About Nothing.”

“You pay for a subscription, you pick a character, and once a month you get a letter from that character,” said Alice-Anne Harwood, who conceived of the epistolary plan. “It’s a letter from an old friend talking about what’s going on in their world.”

That doesn’t necessarily mean Shakespeare’s world, as in 16th-century London. It means that if a character is in a play set in the 14th century or in an enchanted forest, that’s where they are writing from.

A new ‘Tempest’ and a new stage launch the Elm Shakespeare Company’s return to Edgerton Park

The monthly letter subscription project offers a choice of three Shakespearean heroines they can get letters from:

— Beatrice, whose alternately romantic and argumentative banter with Benedick livens up “Much Ado About Nothing.”

— Titania, the benevolent queen of the fairies in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

— Margaret of Anjou, the real-life monarch who appears in four of the bard’s history plays: “Henry VI” Parts One, Two and Three and “Richard III.”

The subscriptions each cost $150 per year and can be considered in part as tax-deductible donations to the theater. They are only being offered through Dec. 31.

“It’s a crazy idea from my head,” Harwood said of the project, which was thought just a couple of weeks ago and was immediately set into motion.

In January, Harwood, a longtime booster of Elm Shakespeare Company and a diehard supporter of New Haven area non-profit arts organizations, will begin her new role as the company’s managing director. The position involves making sure the company is financially stable and also that it is clear on its role in the community. She will work closely with ESC artistic director Rebecca Goodheart, who is enthusiastic about the monthly letter idea.

Harwood wants the letters not just to have an authentic voice but to look authentic as well. “Our goal is to use letter-locking folding techniques from the periods the plays are from,” she said.

As for the writing, she said the company is asking “What’s the arc of the story we want to tell with these characters?”

“Our vision is to make this a one-to-one personalized experience,” Harwood said. She consulted with Goodheart on which three characters to begin with. Also involved is Harwood’s husband Aaron, who is ESC’s new webmaster and designed the appealing graphics being used to market the monthly letter project. “He and I sat down and talked about the images which would best reflect the characters. We wrote out pieces about the characters — their environments, their mood — then generated images around that.”

Harwood hopes that the project will continue with three new characters each year.

It’s too early to measure the success of the plan, which launched just a few days ago, but Harwood said it “caused a huge spike on our website” when first announced. “Parents of students in our youth troupe say they’re purchasing subscriptions for their kids.”

Elm Shakespeare is the largest, and nearly the oldest, of the many Connecticut theaters offering outdoor summer productions of Shakespeare plays. Elm Shakespeare was founded 30 years ago and performs to tens of thousands of people every summer in Edgerton Park on the New Haven/Hamden line. The company also offers performances, discussions and other events throughout the year and serves as the resident theater company at Southern Connecticut State University.

In the spring, the company will announce the title of the Shakespeare play they’ll be producing for the 2024 summer. Are the characters in the letter-writing project any sort of hint of which show might be chosen? Harwood said it’s not impossible that one of them “may reflect an upcoming show” but added that the characters were selected because “those were the stories we want to explore in the letters.”

“These are three very different personalities,” she added. “With Margaret, in those plays, we see her whole life from a young woman through her later years.”

Through the letter-writing project, Harwood said she hopes to bolster Elm Shakespeare’s presence as a year-round company and also provide direct community outreach.

“I heard loud and clear from Rebecca that the goal of Elm Shakespeare is to bring people together,” Harwood said. “I thought ‘How do I find a fun, creative, interesting way into that purpose?’ These are new pen pals who happen to be members of the Elm Shakespeare Company. We feel that affinity, feel that synergy.”

For more information on the monthly letter subscriptions, go to elmshakespeare.org/monthly-letters-subscription.