About Us
Advice To The Players is a unique company of theater professionals, enthusiastic community members and energetic teens that has been performing Shakespeare and offering workshops in New Hampshire’s Lakes and Mountains Region since 1999. Our award-winning productions bring William Shakespeare’s richly passionate plays to life and introduce new generations to live theater and to Shakespeare’s brilliantly rendered portraits of humanity.
Whether at our outdoor Summer performances nestled amidst the mountains, in a merry autumn comedy at the fair, at a raucous on-our-feet reading at a local pub, a daytime matinee for enthralled students, or a deep-winter evening of theater in the heart of our northern towns, we promise an unforgettable experience with some of the greatest stories in the English language.
​Advice To The Players is located in N’dakinna [in-DAH-kee-NAH], which is the ancestral and unceded homeland of the Abenaki, Pennacook and Wabanaki Peoples past and present. We recognize the dispossession, erasure and invisibilization, and resiliency of these and all Indigenous Peoples. We honor their elders, past, present, and emerging, and are grateful to be guests amongst the aki (land), nibi (water), olakwikak (flora), and awaasak (fauna).
Advice To The Players is a proud 501(c)3 nonprofit, and we rely on the generosity of our donors to continue producing theatre in New Hampshire.
Our Mission
​what:
​how:
​why:
To engage students and community to enjoy and benefit from the rich language and passionate action of Shakespeare’s plays as an exploration of our shared humanity.
​
​
By producing live performances and mentorship in a collaborative process that connects performing arts professionals, students and community members.
​​
We believe in the power of the literary and performing arts to connect community, transform individuals and inspire the next generation with the beauty of the English language.​
Advice To The Players employs a diverse company of Union and non-union professionals, as well as community and youth actors, in each production. Advice To The Players is a unique company of theater professionals, enthusiastic community members, and energetic teens that has been performing Shakespeare and offering workshops in New Hampshire's Lakes and Mountains Region since 1999.
​Advice To The Players is committed to providing a healthy and respectful work and creative environment for all employees, contracted artists, volunteers, and community members, taking active measures towards anti-racism, as well as to support the safety of women, non-binary/gender-non-conforming individuals, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, People of the Global Majority, neurodivergent individuals, and people with disabilities.
We are also proud to be in an ongoing relationship with the Association of Mental Health Coordinators as we do our part to shift the standards of accessibility, health, and sustainability in the theater industry.
Our Name
“Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently; for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say, the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance that may give it smoothness.
Be not too tame neither, but let your own discretion be your tutor: suit the action to the word, the word to the action; with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature: for anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is, to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature; to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.”
This speech comes from Hamlet, and it is the inspiration for our company’s name. These are the words of wisdom that Hamlet imparts to a troupe of traveling players who are about to perform their play. Aside from being sound storytelling advice that our company strives to uphold, it could possibly be some insight into how Shakespeare would like his plays to be performed. Our hope is that we succeed in bringing you top-quality performances that are not only fun, but continue this centuries-old tradition of holding “the mirror up to nature”.