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​About Us

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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 a proud 501(c)3 nonprofit, and we rely on the generosity of our donors to continue producing theatre in New Hampshire.

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”.

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