- It should play like sports like you don't know what's gonna happen and you should be engaged in that way, but at the end of a play, everybody wins.

Like nobody in the audience goes home a loser.

No, we all won if we watch this play together.

- The Nashville Shakespeare Festival, summer Shakespeare festival is a 34 year tradition.

It'll be going on every year as long as people will come out and support it.

There's always food trucks and pre-show entertainment.

We have great bands before every show.

- It seems to me that people are perennially intimidated by Shakespeare and I'm not sure why.

He wrote for everybody and we have kept this festival free so that everybody can see Shakespeare.

Great professional actors doing Shakespeare.

- It's different than a normal theater experience because it's outdoors, it's a festival.

You can bring your family.

I brought my children to Shakespeare when they were three and four and five years old and it caught their attention way better than almost anything else, because it's so physical, it's so alive and they aren't worried about if they're understanding every single word.

They're just reacting to it.

It's just another story acted out live so it's really for everybody.

- We really believe that Shakespeare is for everyone so we do all that we can to make sure everyone feels welcome and accommodated.

- We do have things like assisted listening devices.

We have a sign language interpreted performance.

We make sure that every venue that we work in is fully accessible.

- Representation on stage of all kinds of people, all ages, all sizes, all abilities is really important to me.

Anybody can play any role.

I really believe that, having played a lot of kings and murderers in my life.

I'm not a king or a murderer, but it's really important that anybody could feel like I could be Juliet or I could be Macbeth.

- I think if people are afraid of Shakespeare, they shouldn't be.

They need to come on out and experience it and see all it has to offer.

- [Narrator] This NPT arts break is made possible by the generous support of the Martha Rivers Ingram Advised Fund of the Community Foundation of Middle Tennessee.