Shakespeare as an artistic colleague: A playwright's journey

Folger Shakespeare Library: Not many 16-year-olds have a bookshelf with the complete works of Shakespeare. How did this happen to me, you ask? Today I’m a professional playwright, but back then I wasn’t even a theatre nerd. Back in the mid-2000s, I attended a not-so-artsy high school, but we had a healthy extracurricular drama department and student-run Shakespeare troupe. Sitting in the darkened theater during the Folger’s annual Secondary School Shakespeare Festival, I watched an actress sporting an enormous hat and petticoats drawing numbers from a raffle.