Jason Hayes: Drama Teacher & Coach

Jason Hayes joins the show tonight to talk about their GoFundMe campaign to help raise funds to take students in their program to the UK this summer to perform! Call 323 657-1493 to ask questions or join in the fun!   Jason is the Director of Theatre and Lead Teacher for Arts, Media and Entertainment at James Monroe High School in North Hills, a suburb of Los Angeles. With productions that include, Oedipus the King, Wiley and the Hairy Man, Zombie Prom and School House Rock Live! along with on campus festivals that include Comedia Del Arte, Shakespeare and traditional Folkloric dance, his students have been selected by the American High School Theatre Festival as one of only 40 schools from North America to perform at the Edinburgh Fringe in Scotland this August, 2015. While his students are severely economically disadvantaged and labeled "at risk" for a myriad of reasons, they have honed their energies into theatre arts and created for themselves the opportunity of a lifetime in their performance of Romeo y Julieta at this year's Edinburgh Fringe.  Romeo y Julieta is a bi-lingual Romeo and Juliet translated by the students. Using Shakespeare's language and spoken in Original, Elizabethan Pronunciation along with colloquial Spanish, Monroe Theatre tells the story of "star crossed lovers" from rival Hispanic families living in San Fernando, CA. This is not West Side Story. Romeo y Julieta touches on the, very real, inner-racial tension within the Hispanic community my students deal with daily.