Associate Professor and Drama Department Chair, Kyle Lemieux, MFA, BA ’98, has been serving students at UDallas as a professor since 2008. This past year, he spent countless hours serving another population of youth: the residents of the Henry Wade Juvenile Detention Center in Dallas, offering his professional expertise on a project called Shakespeare for Incarcerated Youth.
The project, organized by Junior Players and involving eight professional actors, was featured in a documentary by filmmaker Frank Darko titled “Shakespeare With Henry: Behind the Prison Pipeline.” The documentary was shown at the Texas Theater in Dallas in September 2024.
“You could see the transformation in them. It speaks to the power of the arts and specifically the power of theater to transform lives.”
KYLE LEMIEUX
Lemieux played the lead role of Macbeth for the residents and then returned to direct the residents in their own production of the play. The program was aimed at “putting an expectation of excellence on them and seeing them rise up to that,” Lemieux said. In fact, Lemieux was adamant that the original Shakespeare text not be simplified for the residents and instead worked through the challenging language with them.